Kim Coleman Foote, COLEMAN HILL
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[1:03]Kim Coleman-Fut is the author of the novel Coleman Hill, inspired by her family's experience
[1:08]of the great migration from Alabama and Florida to Vosehall, New Jersey, circa 1916 to 1980s.
[1:14]An award-winning writer of fiction and memoir, Kim's work has appeared most recently in
[1:18]the Best American Short Stories 2022, Iron Horse Literary Review, Echo Tone, and The Rumpus.
[1:24]Major honors include writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York
[1:27]Foundation for the Arts, Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, Phillips Exeter Academy Center
[1:31]for Fiction, Yatto, McDowell, and Hedgebrook.
[1:35]Kim grew up in New Jersey, where she started writing at the age of seven-ish.
[1:38]Her work focuses on marginalized histories, relationships between Africa and its diaspora,
[1:43]and gender in class.
[1:44]Currently in progress is Saltwater Sister, a novel about Ghana and the Transatlantic Slave
[1:48]Trade, which we used to stories of three young women in the 18th century and present day.
[1:53]Other honors include writing residencies from the Anderson Center, Hambridge, and Vermont
[1:57]Studio Center, Kim Villio Fiction Fellowship, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for
[2:02]Creative Nonfiction.
[2:03]Kim also received a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research about the slave trade in Ghana,
[2:07]where she inadvertently wrote a memoir about her experiences, an avid music lover and dancer.
[2:13]Kim created an online radio show dedicated to Congolese and African pop music.
[2:17]She can be found blogging and singing there as her alter ego, Kimi Kimmiana.
[2:23]Kim received an MFA in Creative Writing from Chicago State University, and a VA in
[2:27]Sociology and Anthropology, concentration in black studies from Swarthmore College.
[2:31]Welcome, Kim.
[2:32]Thank you so much for coming on Moms.
[2:33]Don't have time to read books, discuss Coleman Hill, a novel.
[2:38]Thank you for having me.
[2:39]It's my pleasure.
[2:40]So, a novel, we can just start with that, because let's talk about the form of the book
[2:47]and is it a novel, is it you would talk a whole lot in the back auto fiction, and talk
[2:52]about that to start, because this is a family story.
[2:55]Yeah, so it wasn't a novel at the beginning.
[2:58]It basically started with me as a little girl in the 1980s in New Jersey, which is where
[3:02]I grew up, and hearing my mother and her siblings and her aunt's tell stories about
[3:08]their childhood in Vauxhall, New Jersey.
[3:10]So much that I thought I was an honorary member of the town itself, but I used to hear
[3:16]things about like ice boxes and listening to radio shows, so different from my own upbringing,
[3:21]you know, in the 80s.
[3:23]I also heard about their their tales of abuse, and they used to laugh at some of those
[3:28]things, and it made me curious why are you laughing at pain, you know, and then they also
[3:32]couldn't seem to see why certain people were like they were as adults, you know, who
[3:36]got an abuse when they were little kids.
[3:39]And so I'd always been fascinated by exploring those connections and the patterns that
[3:43]I was seeing as a child and my family.
[3:46]And it wasn't until I was in my MFA program back in 2004.
[3:50]I had an assignment for a creative writing, creative nonfiction course, to write a story
[3:55]based on a photograph.
[3:57]And I chose one of my grandfather's three sisters, little girls, which is in the book.
[4:02]Yes, I'm page 27, I know now.
[4:07]And the voice of the middle one literally spoke to me and said, I'm afraid of that manner
[4:12]as camera.
[4:13]And I was like, what's okay, because usually when I write fiction, even those creative
[4:18]nonfiction, when I'm writing, I usually see scenes like movies, and then I have to use
[4:23]words to describe what I'm seeing.
[4:25]So her voice is powered through, did not shut up.
[4:28]I got a pen and a notebook and wrote down.
[4:31]And so that whole section came out in about 10 minutes.
[4:34]And I was like, oh my God.
[4:36]So that was actually the beginning of the book, but it still even wasn't a book at that
[4:39]point.
[4:40]You know, I was thinking that, okay, I want to write about my family.
[4:43]This is how it's coming out.
[4:45]I thought that was spiritual permission to go ahead and do it, but I was also finishing
[4:49]my ameth A thesis, which was a memoir at another novel on the table that I was finishing.
[4:54]And so basically I had all these family photographs and decided that I would build stories
[5:00]around them from the anecdotes that I'd heard.
[5:03]And also I done genealogical research on my family, but that was just my hobby.
[5:07]It wasn't again for a book, you know, so when people ask, how much research that you do,
[5:12]how long did it take you to write?
[5:13]It was a hard thing to answer because it's been literally on my life that this has been
[5:17]percolating.
[5:18]And so the key was actually reading Elizabeth Shout's Olive Kidderidge.
[5:23]When I read that novel, you know, I saw possibilities for a book because Olive is kind
[5:28]of the role of my great-grandmother who in the novel is called Celia Coleman.
[5:33]And she is just like this force, you know, but also kind of like a dark force where you
[5:39]you don't see Olive in every single chapter of the book, but you feel her presence.
[5:44]You know, everyone is kind of like bouncing off of her and she gets one or two chapters
[5:49]in the book.
[5:50]And I think that's because her personality is just so intense and kermagini that you
[5:55]could not be with her for the whole thing.
[5:58]And then I saw my great-grandmother as that role in the family to all these stories that
[6:02]I'd heard.
[6:03]And that's when I was like, oh, this is a book.
[6:05]This can be a book.
[6:06]It can bring all these tales together circulating around her.
[6:09]Wow.
[6:10]Well, you also talked about all the, I mean, to your point about the research that you
[6:15]had streamed that buildings were falling down and that it gave you the permission to go
[6:20]in and get the archives and, you know, they had been in Bibles and everything.
[6:24]It actually didn't give me the permission.
[6:25]I wanted to go on the house.
[6:27]I didn't care about it was my family who didn't want to go.
[6:30]You know, so I just kept having these dreams and that was just reinforcing and I kept calling
[6:34]my family because I was living in Washington, DC at the time.
[6:37]So I couldn't easily access the house.
[6:40]And so I had to call my family to please go in the house.
[6:43]There's something in there.
[6:44]You know, you're on, told you that there are pictures and Bibles are like, oh, don't
[6:47]believe or she lies about everything.
[6:49]And then my family calls me up one day and they're like, oh, guess what?
[6:53]We went into the house and I'm like, yes, yes, guess what we found and I'm like,
[6:57]whoa, whoa, what?
[6:58]We found pictures.
[6:59]Oh my God, yes.
[7:00]So I was luckily able to make a visit to Jersey and go in the house.
[7:05]I mean, probably not that long weeks before it was torn down and I, no one had found
[7:10]the Bible.
[7:11]So my aunt said that they were in her bedroom on her bed post.
[7:15]I went straight to the bedroom.
[7:16]The Bibles were there.
[7:17]I grabbed them.
[7:18]So all the stuff would have been lost, you know, thrown away trashed.
[7:22]We had these beautiful painted photographs of my great, great grandparents.
[7:27]You know, these huge photographs, which would have been lost and one actually appears
[7:31]in the book.
[7:33]And you know, so for me, those, those were valuable.
[7:36]You know, other, other relatives might have been searching for like, oh, I want something
[7:39]to sell, you know, some coins or like gold or whatever, jewelry, you know, but for
[7:44]me, the heirlooms for the family, those are really valuable and important.
[7:48]Wow.
[7:49]It's just amazing to think how much gets lost all the time.
[7:53]Yes.
[7:54]All the time.
[7:55]They're self is about other people.
[7:57]I mean, yes.
[7:58]Like it's a miracle to even capture anything, but yeah, because people don't, again,
[8:03]think that certain things are important.
[8:05]I mean, I'm someone I, I've always had this avid interest in history and maybe it's
[8:10]because there's a little girl again.
[8:11]I heard all these stories about a different time period.
[8:14]And so for me, it was always just fascinating being able to step back in time and touch
[8:19]artifacts that, you know, people from a bygone era had lit, you know, like shoes and
[8:25]everything, everything.
[8:27]So that was just always fascinating, but I know like not everyone has that same passion
[8:31]or interest.
[8:32]So when they see these old photographs, like, oh, we don't know who this is, you know,
[8:36]doesn't matter.
[8:37]So many more.
[8:38]So we just get rid of it.
[8:39]When my grandmother passed away, my cousins were like, does anybody want all these pictures
[8:43]and boxes?
[8:44]And I was like, yes.
[8:45]I do.
[8:46]I want everything and I want to like shove them.
[8:48]They're all like scattered, you know, in any, any extra place I can find because I'm like,
[8:53]how can we, you know, even recipe cards from my other grandmother?
[8:55]Yeah.
[8:56]I wanted all the handwriting, all of it.
[8:58]Exactly.
[8:59]Exactly.
[9:00]You also mentioned that your mom was surprised at how well you captured her life.
[9:06]And you were like, what?
[9:07]Yeah.
[9:08]I think I was listening.
[9:09]Tell me.
[9:10]Yes.
[9:11]Yeah.
[9:12]That's the point.
[9:13]Actually, when I entered my MFA program and it was in 1932, which is significant.
[9:19]Because one of the date books that actually found in my aunt's house was a calendar year
[9:23]for 1932.
[9:24]Amazing.
[9:25]Yeah.
[9:26]So I, it was actually based on some of the stories that I heard.
[9:29]So I didn't even do research technically because I was just building in all the facts, you
[9:34]know, that I heard growing up.
[9:36]And I love, don't get me wrong.
[9:37]I love historical research.
[9:39]I wanted to be a professional historian at some point and really deep dive and
[9:42]to archives and interview people and all that kind of stuff.
[9:45]But for that, I just used my mother's recollections.
[9:48]And yeah, I was just like, did you think I was ignoring or maybe, you know, I think the
[9:53]thing is sometimes what children we don't think that they're listening.
[9:58]You know, like, they were children once and so.
[10:00]I talk about my family members as children
[10:03]scooping in on, quote, grown folks business, right?
[10:06]But I guess people forget like your child
[10:09]and you absorb and you listen to things,
[10:11]and you're also trying to make sense of different things.
[10:14]So, but yeah, she was just even today.
[10:17]She's like, oh, how did you know these things?
[10:19]I'm like, you told the same stories over and over again
[10:23]at every single holiday gathering.
[10:25]Yes.
[10:25]You're like, what did you think of this doing?
[10:28]Where is the credit?
[10:31]Yeah, it's so funny.
[10:33]It's not too late, by the way.
[10:34]If you want to be a historian, I feel like you're here.
[10:37]Oh, I know, I know.
[10:38]I definitely know that.
[10:41]Yeah, one of my favorite stories that I tell
[10:43]is I work in academic student services for many years.
[10:46]So with college students, and one of my favorite stories
[10:49]that I would tell them was about this professor
[10:52]that I met when I was probably about 22, 23.
[10:56]I was in DC.
[10:57]And this was when I was debating
[10:58]that that was going to be a historian
[11:00]or pursuit creator writing or I was applying
[11:03]for the school bright fellowship to go to Ghana
[11:05]and that was research where the other not what
[11:07]was doing hardcore research for that.
[11:09]And I met this PhD and she's very accomplished in her field.
[11:13]She's an anthropologist.
[11:14]She's traveled all around the world.
[11:16]I wanted to do what she did and interview people
[11:18]and learn about cultures.
[11:20]And I remember telling her, I don't know what I want
[11:22]to do with my life.
[11:23]And she just looked at me and smiled.
[11:25]She was probably like in her 50s at that point.
[11:27]She smiled and said, I don't either.
[11:31]And so I was like, oh, oh, you can change things.
[11:35]And you don't have to stick with one thing.
[11:38]So I think for me that that freaked me up
[11:40]actually to pursue the creative writing
[11:41]because I realized that all my interests in history,
[11:46]I was looking at the African diaspora.
[11:48]I wanted to especially look at Latin America
[11:50]and African connections there with the slavery.
[11:53]I realized that all of my research interests
[11:56]were feeding into my fiction.
[11:59]And then I won the Fulbright Fellowship
[12:01]to go to Ghana for the year to do research.
[12:03]So since I had gotten that, I was like, well,
[12:06]let me devote more time to the creative writing
[12:08]because if I do a history program,
[12:10]I know that I won't have time to write creatively.
[12:13]And that's more important.
[12:15]And I was just showing off.
[12:16]I mean, it's like, it's not even showing off.
[12:21]I'm kidding.
[12:22]I'm totally kidding.
[12:23]I'm totally kidding.
[12:24]But you know, when people say these things,
[12:26]it's like, it's something I love.
[12:27]I have a burning passion.
[12:29]And especially for PhD programs,
[12:31]the messages that I was getting is like,
[12:33]if you're not totally invested in this thing,
[12:35]you should not do it because this PhD programs
[12:37]are average a couple of years.
[12:39]You're spending a couple of years on schoolwork,
[12:41]working on a dissertation,
[12:43]and you need the longevity and all of that
[12:45]to really carry through.
[12:47]And this was something I'm like,
[12:48]I'd happily sit in some dusty old archives.
[12:51]Like that, that's just like, yeah.
[12:53]I mean, I'd be just totally happy
[12:54]and in dusty or high, like looking up documents
[12:57]and like getting a headache from, you know,
[13:00]trying to look at old scripts.
[13:02]So yeah, and so with my family,
[13:04]even the fact that I was interviewing people,
[13:06]I was already incorporating some of that,
[13:08]and it's normally on my own
[13:10]because it was just exciting and fascinating to me.
[13:14]And one thing that you did through the retelling
[13:17]of all the stories is capturing the voice
[13:20]in which the narrator perhaps was speaking
[13:22]or you have a, you know, your style sort of progresses
[13:26]throughout the narrative of how the voice itself
[13:28]is developing.
[13:29]Talk about that.
[13:30]Yes.
[13:31]So it was almost accidental
[13:32]because that very first narrative came out
[13:34]in the first person I.
[13:36]Then when I started the other stories,
[13:39]they were, they were in third person,
[13:41]but then this you voice came in.
[13:43]So there's three sections that are narrated
[13:45]from the second person, you.
[13:47]And I don't even remember how I chose that,
[13:51]but it just felt really natural
[13:53]because originally they all started with the same refrain
[13:56]and ended with the same kind of summary wrap up.
[13:59]And I did that because it was almost,
[14:02]so it's looking at three generations
[14:03]of alcoholism in the family.
[14:05]And for me, it was almost like the same person
[14:08]was just kind of repeating,
[14:10]even though they lived at the same time,
[14:11]all three women.
[14:13]It was like the same person was just kind of repeating
[14:16]and kind of recreating that thing.
[14:19]And so the you voice felt really natural for that.
[14:23]But you know, along the,
[14:24]through the years I've been reading various novels
[14:27]with these different voices,
[14:29]for the first time that realizing,
[14:30]oh, you can write a whole novel using the second person.
[14:34]And then I was exposed to a novel
[14:36]written in the collective first person, we.
[14:40]So after reading that book,
[14:42]I actually wrote the first section of Coleman Hill,
[14:46]which is from the lead perspective,
[14:47]because I was like, oh, you can do that.
[14:48]Oh, I didn't know that.
[14:52]And so those push me to experiments and explore.
[14:57]And then there's one other section
[14:59]that from the I, the first person,
[15:01]and it's another one of my great odds.
[15:03]And the reason is because like,
[15:05]I feel like the first person is really overused,
[15:07]especially in contemporary fiction.
[15:09]And I feel like I pick up these books
[15:11]and it's like the voice is not really right.
[15:14]I feel because sometimes it's like,
[15:16]oh, this is like, it sounds like someone
[15:18]with an MFA in poetry.
[15:19]And how is that when, you know,
[15:21]your narrator is 12 years old
[15:23]and you say that they have an even read a book,
[15:25]you know, and they they're not very literate.
[15:27]They don't hang out literary circles,
[15:29]but they're talking about due drops on leaves.
[15:31]And I'm just like, how was that?
[15:33]And there's a iteration and all this.
[15:35]How is that possible, you know?
[15:36]And so for me, I was very careful
[15:39]with the first person voice,
[15:41]unless I had that person's voice in my head.
[15:43]Like the first one that just came to me,
[15:45]it was a little girl.
[15:47]And she was speaking in dialect, you know.
[15:50]And it was interesting because that other novel
[15:53]that I was writing in 1932,
[15:55]my character was my, I had two main characters.
[15:58]One was working class four and black.
[16:02]And the other one was middle upper class and black.
[16:06]But my working class four, again,
[16:07]who probably didn't really read books, you know,
[16:11]whose family didn't read books, they weren't educated.
[16:14]And she's writing from the first person,
[16:16]I was writing from the first person.
[16:18]And, you know, she's speaking with however is in the bus
[16:21]and their force.
[16:22]And then later I looked at it, I was like,
[16:23]why was she speaking like that?
[16:25]Oh, yeah, because I was writing this through college
[16:28]when I was writing academic papers.
[16:30]And so that language, that language had slipped into the right.
[16:34]I was like, this is totally the wrong voice
[16:35]for this character.
[16:37]You know, so when the post,
[16:39]the first part of Coleman Hill came out,
[16:40]I was like, this is the voice that I should have been writing in,
[16:43]right, but maybe at that point I was like,
[16:45]well, this voice is not sophisticated enough
[16:48]because this is considered like, quote, bad English, you know.
[16:51]But it's an English that these people spoke,
[16:55]that I myself spoke when I was a little girl,
[16:58]you know, growing up in home,
[16:59]that my friend spoke at school, you know,
[17:01]I was a grew up in a predominantly black town in Jersey
[17:04]that we spoke on the playground, you know.
[17:06]And there's poetry in this way that we speak, right?
[17:09]And I wanted to honor that.
[17:11]I respect that.
[17:13]And so for the other section, my great aunt,
[17:15]she was a comedian.
[17:17]She always had everybody laughing.
[17:19]Her voice was really, really strong in my head,
[17:21]especially because I got a chance to interview her,
[17:23]not long before she died,
[17:25]maybe a couple of months before she passed away.
[17:27]So her voice, her jokes,
[17:29]all of that were like really, really strongly in my head.
[17:32]But again, I wanted to honor the way that she spoke, right?
[17:35]So again, she was not someone who,
[17:37]she didn't even finish high school, right?
[17:39]She was not someone who was well read, all this stuff,
[17:42]but she had a way of talking, of strings, the other words
[17:45]that could make you laugh, you know,
[17:48]and telling stories that could really engage you.
[17:50]And so that's why I chose that first person.
[17:53]Wow, amazing.
[17:55]And how did the voice and the writing inform
[17:58]the treatment of trauma in the book
[18:00]and how you wrote about that?
[18:01]So yeah, I think like it really hit me
[18:04]with my grandfather payments of the book
[18:06]because originally was supposed to be all
[18:08]from the women's perspectives,
[18:10]and then he just bars his way in one day,
[18:12]and I was like, okay, grandpa, I didn't want to go there
[18:16]because I had to talk about him part of his life
[18:20]as an abuser towards my grandmother.
[18:22]And that was something that I didn't learn
[18:24]in so later in life, you know, that that happened.
[18:27]And it really sickened me and disappointed me
[18:29]because, you know, as a little girl,
[18:31]I wouldn't have never thought that about my grandfather.
[18:34]You know, he seemed like very kind of almost timid, you know,
[18:38]but he was very tall, but like very quiet
[18:41]and just kind of like mellow, you know,
[18:44]so to hear that like what he did,
[18:45]what's in my grandmother,
[18:47]and then have to write about that.
[18:48]But when I started writing about him, you know,
[18:51]I realized that again, I had to honor who he was
[18:54]with all his flaws, you know, and so,
[18:57]and also be true to how he would have interpreted
[19:00]what he did, right?
[19:02]And so I realized that my writing was having this matter
[19:06]of fact, quality, you know, so it wasn't like I'm coming in
[19:09]as me, the author or the narrator or the author,
[19:12]as opposed to the narrator, but, you know,
[19:14]I realized that I couldn't come in and judge, you know,
[19:17]because I couldn't write about who they were
[19:19]if I was judging.
[19:22]But at the same time, you know, the way that I set up the book,
[19:24]you know, you have, so there's so many different
[19:27]family members who narrate, who tell their stories.
[19:30]And so you get to see one person as let's say,
[19:34]committing abuse, but you get to see someone else
[19:36]who's a recipient of abuse,
[19:38]you get to see one else who stops the abuse, right?
[19:41]And so to see all these stories play out from different angles,
[19:44]it's like, well, yes, the trauma happens,
[19:47]but I don't let people get away with the trauma
[19:49]that they're, you know, putting out there, you know,
[19:52]so that's, it's not necessarily judgments,
[19:54]but again, just showing you these different angles
[19:57]of people who resisted, you know, people who didn't.
[20:00]think that that was right, you know, and then showing that it's left up to the reader
[20:04]to make a decision. And again, I don't even think it's like judgment is a thing. It's just like
[20:09]being able to see more clearly, you know, the dynamics that are going on that make people do the
[20:15]things that they do, right, that make people have, you know, make people put certain labels on
[20:21]other people like evil or mean or whatever, whatever the term is, you know, so that you can see,
[20:28]okay, well, no one, no one was born evil or mean, you know, where does this behavior come
[20:33]from, you know, so really looking at the roots of that. So what do you most want people to know
[20:39]about your family? I just, I want to know just how they lived, you know, how, how, how the north
[20:46]was to them, especially, you know, because coming up from the south, like the north was presented
[20:51]as kind of a promised land, you know, just as it was for immigrants coming from the from Europe at the
[20:55]time with the whole image of the streets paved with gold, you know, and especially for black folks
[21:01]escaping the south, it's like, okay, they're, they're very dangerous to your, your person living in
[21:06]the south that time under segregation. And, you know, so they, they, they were so excited about the
[21:13]north and the economic opportunities, the educational opportunities, you know, but when they came,
[21:18]there were so many disappointments, you know, like a lot of the women were still domestic,
[21:22]like they were in the south. The men, you know, were getting factory work, they got paid more,
[21:27]but, you know, there was still discrimination, there was still racism, and there was still held back
[21:31]in ways. And I think also for me to go down south and meet relatives who never left, you know,
[21:38]and to see that they had advanced further than my family in terms of home ownership and education,
[21:44]it was infuriating actually because, again, it's like, oh, my family, they're the ones that kind
[21:49]of got out of the south, you know, for better opportunities and ended up not really advancing
[21:55]more than the folks who stayed, but conversely, the folks who stayed, you know, they quickly told me
[22:00]that, well, the reason why we were able to do these things is because the people left,
[22:05]they've all gotten left, you know, because then the schools became emptier, you know,
[22:10]the student teacher ratio went down or our teachers were invested in us that they had more attention
[22:15]that they could focus on us, you know, so it's, that's the paradox, you know, that's the thing
[22:20]that I want to, you know, hopefully get across the people that, you know, through my family, of
[22:25]course, there's so many other families that left the south that the north also had these kind of
[22:30]complications. And tell me just a little more about your whole publication journey, Zando and
[22:36]everything. I mean, very exciting. How did that all happen and what happened in life? No, it's
[22:40]exciting. Yeah. So it happened very, very quickly, but I have been trying to be published for many,
[22:46]many years. Um, I got my MFA back in 2005 with a memoir and so that was like my official, you know,
[22:54]search for an agent, but I'd also sent my first query letter when I was 12 years old.
[22:59]Oh, I love that. So that was writing, you know, manuscripts back then. So I wanted to actually be
[23:05]the youngest person to publish a novel in this country. Wait, that's what I wanted.
[23:10]Oh, really? Seriously. I was like 10 years old and I would like go into it here. And I was like,
[23:16]I'm going to be the youngest person ever. Like acceptance features. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So,
[23:22]hey, you're the first person I'm talking to that chair. That's funny. I don't need to.
[23:26]And then I think when I was like 14, I read an magazine that someone had published, you know,
[23:30]or I was like 15 and someone was like, you know, so I never thought it would take this long
[23:36]to get a book published because I was writing all throughout high school and all of that. And
[23:40]like I said, at the novel in college and everything. But you know, my first manuscript was a memoir.
[23:45]And at that time, everyone was like, well, who are you? Yeah, the writing is good, but who are you?
[23:50]You're not anybody that we can't sell this book. You know, so then realizing like the politics and
[23:55]economics of publishing the publishing world. And then I wrote another novel, which is the one
[24:00]that I went to Ghana for to do research for, which sandal, you know, I'm so grateful that they
[24:05]purchased that book as well. That'll be my second book that's published. But it was years and years
[24:10]and years. And then Coleman Hill, I was actually writing, you know, in the instrument between
[24:14]drafts of other manuscripts as a whole other novel that I started. There's like a screenplay.
[24:20]There's like so many things that I've been working on all these years. And so at some point,
[24:24]everyone kept telling me, finished Coleman Hill, finished Coleman Hill. But, you know, years before
[24:28]that it was finished saltwater sister, which was my kind of novel when I was working on the one
[24:32]from 1932. So I was like, okay, here we go again. Here we go again. This is I don't know how many
[24:38]manuscripts in we have. So when I did finish it, and I was like, okay, here's my agent search again.
[24:45]I can't even tell you maybe like the fifth major agent search that I had done. And it happened
[24:50]so quickly. It like like in a blink, I had an agent, you know, and then like literally in a couple
[24:56]months, my agent is sending it out to editors because at the point when I was working with my
[25:00]agents and the consensus was it's almost done. Right. And so this is again a novel that kind of
[25:06]stuck up on me. I didn't even know it was a book. And all of a sudden, he worked on me, finished this
[25:10]book and I finished it. And they're like, oh yeah, it's practically like it's going to be clean and
[25:15]done. I'm like, oh, okay, cool. So basically, she sent it out to lots of editors and Zando
[25:24]happened to be one of the publishing houses that was interested. I had no idea that Sarah Jessica
[25:29]was a book person. An agent mentioned the name. I was like, oh, there must be an editor named Sarah
[25:35]Jessica. Oh, that's so cool. Someone named their daughter after, you know. And so when we zoom,
[25:43]I was like, oh no, it's her. It's real, the real Sarah Jessica. So it was just like mind blowing,
[25:49]and then the deal happened so quickly also. And like I said, Zando bought Home and Hill, but they
[25:55]also bought Saltwater Sister. So after so many years of trying to get that one published, I'm so
[26:00]happy and grateful that, you know, it'll finally see the, be out in the world. And so it's just been
[26:06]like a really, really beautiful experience. You know, I've heard again over the years of accumulated
[26:12]so many stories from different authors about their publishing experience, all the horror stories
[26:17]and ways of things can go wrong in publishing. It's like, oh yeah, I took 10 years to get an
[26:21]agent and then like, you know, right before the agent submitted, they died and I'm like, oh God,
[26:26]you know, and then like, oh my cover, they put the, you know, a wrong picture on my cover,
[26:31]all this kind of stuff. And I have to say that my experience has just been so smooth. And the
[26:36]team at Zando has been so supportive and just so passionate, you know, everyone brings their
[26:42]passion and enthusiasm. So I've just been telling everyone, it's like beyond wildest dreams,
[26:47]honestly, at this point. Because I had dreams, I've obviously had dreams since I was a little girl.
[26:53]And so, you know, have my books out, but it's been actually beyond wildest dreams. So I'm really,
[26:59]really grateful for all of this. I'm so excited. That's such a great story.
[27:03]That's really great. When is the next, when is Saltwater Sister coming in?
[27:07]So it's anticipated 2025. Yes. So I need to really get to writing and finishing.
[27:15]For real, finishing that for, you know, and what is your advice for aspiring authors?
[27:21]Oh, you know, right. Right. Tell your stories. You know, if there's something that you're
[27:27]burning to tell, tell it, do it. Don't let anything stop you. You know, and the fact that like,
[27:33]if you're wanting to publish, publishing can be very, very difficult, you know, but I mean,
[27:37]some people, it seems like it's so easy. Like, you know, you have the 23 year old, this is their
[27:42]first book and they get published and like by 24, their book is out and they've had the string
[27:47]of best sellers ever since, you know, but it doesn't work out that way for everyone, you know,
[27:52]and I would say like if you're not again, like just like with the PhD, if you're not passionate
[27:56]about that story, if you don't have the commitments you would, it might not happen. You know,
[28:02]so figure out a story that you really just can't, can't let go of, you know, because that,
[28:07]that is what will keep you through and build community as well. The community of writers,
[28:12]friends who believe in you, I could not have done it for so many years if I didn't have that
[28:16]community around me. Amazing. Well, thank you, Kim. This is so great. Thank you for sharing
[28:23]the stories that we can all sort of cheer along with you and sharing your family story and all of
[28:28]that. So congratulations. Thank you. Okay. All right. Have a great day. All right. Okay.
[28:33]Okay. Thanks again. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time
[28:39]to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zibi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to
[28:44]Read Books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and
[28:49]meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan in fact,
[28:53]texture sound for the sound editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing
[28:58]this fantastic intro and outro music.