Poured Over: Leila Mottley on Nightcrawling

“I really wanted to depict the ways that young Black girls are made adults by a culture that sees us as that. And I wanted to show the way that that pressure piles on and what it does to teenage Black girls, who are really often forgotten in our culture.”

Nightcrawling is a powerful story of family, grief and justice with an unforgettable teenage narrator (and equally unforgettable author), and it’s out now. Leila joins us on the show to talk about writing her first novel at 14, sibling dynamics, the importance of published Black authors, the portrayal of young Black girls in the media, gentrification in Oakland, and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. 

Featured Books:

Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

There There by Tommy Orange

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the host and producer of Poured Over and I am delighted to have Leila Mottley here to talk about her debut, Nightcrawling. But before we do anything, Leila, I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself for listeners.

Leila Mottley: It’s such an honor to be here. My name is Leila Mottley. I am 19 years old. I was the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. I’m a poet. I’m a novelist. I’m an artist, and I’m from Oakland, California.

B&N: How old were you when you started writing Nightcrawling?

LM: I was 17. 16 turning 17.

B&N: Sixteen turning 17. How old were you when you finished the first draft?

LM: I finished when I was 17. And then we sold. I mean, I signed my contract on my 18th birthday.

B&N: Okay. So this is where I’m going to mention, Nightcrawling has sold, not only obviously in the United States, but REITs have been bought in Germany, France, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Brazil, Finland, United Kingdom, Korea. And that’s a really wide range of territories for this book to have sold. And we’re gonna get to the story in a second because the other piece of this and I keep looking away from the screen because I’m looking at my notes. Kiese Layman has blurbed your book, Diana Mathis is blurbed your book. Ruth Ozeki, James McBride, and Tommy Orange. They all love this book, the way I love this book, which is really exciting. I am a huge fan of their work. So I’m just giving listeners a little bit of background because this is your debut. You are on the younger side of things. You are on the younger side. And we are going to talk about you know shifting from poetry to prose and everything else. But what I really want to start with is voice because the heart of Nightcrawling is a teenage girl called Kiara and her family life is complicated. But she is a wonder of a character. And actually, I was thinking about this this morning. And she’s not unlike the titular character of Young Mungo, which is the new novel from Douglas Stuart who wrote Shuggie Bain, and she has a lot of heart. And she’s messy, and she makes some bad decisions, but she’s young. But would you bring people into Kiara’s life?

LM: Yeah. Kiara is 17 at the beginning of the book, and she is essentially on her own with her brother. And they’re really trying to survive their daily lives. And they have been forced into adulthood before either of them are ready for it. And because of the gendered roles in her family, because of the expectations of black girls, she is left to kind of do it all on her own. And figure out all of these things without a lot of support. And I think that leaves her in some precarious positions. And I appreciate what you said about how she doesn’t always make the right decision. But I wrote this book when I was 17. I can attest to the fact that like, when you’re 17, your brain isn’t fully developed. And you don’t always think about all of your decisions. And impulse control can be hard. And sometimes we’re put in places where it feels like there are no choices. And I think that Kiara does her best in those moments.

B&N: So how did this novel start for you? Did you have her voice first? Because I really feel like you tapped into her. And then the rest of the story came?

LM: Yes, yeah. Kiara was first.

B&N: Okay. So how did she show up? Were you working on poetry at the time? Or did you decide that you were going to switch to prose and see what happened?

LM: And this is actually my third novel. So I have been writing fiction since I was the same time I started writing poetry. And a lot of people just don’t know that about me because I had such a public role with poetry. And I love poetry. And I think fiction has always been more of like a private endeavor for me. And I wrote my first novel when I was 14, my second one when I was 16. And then with Nightcrawling, Kiara came to me first, and actually the first line in the book is the first line ever wrote, and I think that she, her voice kind of just took over and I allowed her to be the center. I did a lot of journaling from her perspective. And just really being inside of her. And all of the other characters came through that.

B&N: Ok, would you read that first line? That opening line? It’s pretty great.

LM: I should have a book next to me.

B&N: That’s okay. I see one behind you if we need it.

LM: The swimming pool is filled with dogshit. And D’s laughter mocks us at dawn.

B&N: So D is the neighbor who has a son called Trevor and Kiara is not only parenting herself. She’s parenting her older brother Marcus, who they both been through a lot. And we are going to go spoiler free in this conversation, because this is going to air very close to pub date. And there are a lot of difficult moments in this book. But they are beautifully told, and they are part of Kiara and Marcus’s story. And Trevor, D’s son, the little neighbor boy, is part of that story. So here’s Kiara, essentially, parenting in some way, this little boy from next door, who she’s getting him to school, and she’s getting him fed. And at one point, he has to come live with her because his mother has disappeared. But I bring this up, because the families in this book, for the most part, are all living on the edge of poverty. They’re either just below the poverty line or just a hair over it. It’s tough territory. And we need to talk about poverty in the context of your story, and we’re gonna get there. But you’ve got D. Kiara’s mom, Kiara and Marcus’s mother is in a halfway house, because she can’t be home right now. Let’s put it that way. My mom has made some decisions that have not worked out well for anyone and their dad has died. Hmm. So did you know that Kiara was going to be essentially orphaned, and essentially, a miniature adult, even though she doesn’t necessarily make great and she’s 17, she doesn’t make great decisions. But she’s more adept than her older brother in some ways.

LM: Yeah, I knew that from the beginning. I really wanted to depict the ways that young Black girls are made adults by a culture that sees us as that. And I wanted to show the way that that pressure piles on and what it what it does to teenage Black girls, who are really often forgotten in our culture. And I think her parents and the way that her family life has gone has created the conditions for her to end up the way she does. And and I think that what happens with her family is also a product of the systems that have failed them over and over again. And I think even just her dad’s death is is a direct consequence of the justice system. Even if, you know that’s not the way that an autopsy would report it.

B&N: Your concern and interest for the portrayal of Black girls and media is that where Kiara comes from? Or I mean, is that really where the book starts for you?

LM: Yes, and no, I think that as a teenage Black girl, I felt, in many ways, invisible and vulnerable. And I think that the world doesn’t think of us as vulnerable. And that leaves us even more so. And I hadn’t ever really read a book that acknowledged that. And I wanted, I wanted to write it. And I think Kiara really came out of that and and the ways that because the world doesn’t allow us to be vulnerable, we are forced into kind of the opposite, which is this hyper vigilance, this pursuit of doing it all, even when we can’t.

B&N: You open with Kiara looking for a job. And she’s going to so many different places and they’ll say, well, we need a resume, you need work experience. You need this, you need that and she’s saying, Well, I can work. And at one point she goes back to sort of corner store where she’d worked before and it turns out the owner has died and there is no place for her and they can’t afford to hire someone and she ends up making a choice that is deeply dangerous for her and actually isolates her from her brother and her best friend Ali, because of shame. And we’re gonna dance around this a little bit. But I think shame is a really important piece. I think shame is something that we frequently like to ascribe to people who are not necessarily ourselves. You know that we like to point at other people and say, oh, you should be ashamed. And Kiara’s really on the receiving end of a lot of judgment from other people. But she’s very much judging herself.

LM: Yeah, I think in many ways, she feels as though she doesn’t have choices. And at the same time, when she makes one, she feels already, like she’s made the wrong one. And at the same time, I think that like sex work, is so demonized, and just simply because of the criminalization of sex work in this country. It means that Kiara is vulnerable to what happens to her already, and also to the shame and, and silencing that we see from the people around her as they learn of what she’s doing.

B&N: The way you depict the sibling relationship between Marcus and Kiara is very real. I suspect you are not an only child. I don’t know how many siblings you have. But I suspect you are not an only child. You don’t always see this kind of really given take an actual sibling relationship and fiction. And that’s kind of the fun, although Marcus is very caught up in this idea that he can get them out of trouble because he’s going to become a rap star. And this is not necessarily based on nothing, they have their Uncle Ty, their dad’s younger brother, who has gone to California and pulled out of their lives for reasons that are not necessarily about his career. And I think we should let readers discover that. Can we talk about Marcus and can we talk about his anger and his trauma and his hardship, because it’s not entirely the same.

LM: I think that siblings, it’s such a unique relationship, because your sibling is the only other person who’s ever going to understand what it was like to be a child in your family. And at the same time, because of gender roles in their family, Marcus has an entirely different way of coping with what has happened. And also because of this idea that black men, the only way that they can be successful is through fame. Whether it’s you’re an athlete or a rapper, I think Marcus becomes convinced that that’s his only way out. And because he doesn’t feel the pressure of obligation in the same way that Kiara does, I think that he, he doesn’t even really realize that he’s abandoning her. And I think that that is something that rings true for me, I have an older brother, who is far more, I would say, empathetic and in tune than Marcus is but, who also has been raised in a very different way, just by nature of being a boy in the family. And I think that, that it’s an important thing to recognize. Because when, I mean, it’s that saying that Black mothers, raise their daughters and love their sons. And I think that it’s an interesting thing. And I don’t think it’s always true. But I do think that there is this pattern of believing that you need to raise your daughter to take on the responsibilities, the weight of being a Black woman, which we see Kiara’s mom kind of crumble under and that the sons get a little bit let off the hook.

B&N: When you sat down to write Nightcrawling, were you writing in a linear fashion? Or were you taking scenes and sort of assembling them as you needed them and as the characters needed them.

LM: I write linearly. So I write all the way through and then in revision, I do all of the changing of the structure and with this book, a lot of things moved around, but through the first draft, I just write all the way through.

B&N: Part of this book is based on a true story. It is a scandal that was seen in the Oakland Police Department. Again, we’re going to talk a little bit around it just because it’s so much of a part of the story and Kiara’s experience. When did that piece come in? Because you’ve lived in Oakland your entire life. So you knew about this when this was happening, and you’re about it when it was happening?

LM: Yeah, I think I was like 13 or 14, and very much like coming into an awareness of the world and my body in the world. And it was like a formative understanding of don’t expect to be protected. And I think that I followed the story pretty closely. And I think a lot of people in Oakland did. But as a lot of these cases of police sexual violence, like they don’t make it often past that local news. If if that, and, and I think that it stuck with me, and I continue to think about it. And as I, you know, grew into my adolescence and really felt the, the lack of protection, the vulnerability of existing in my body in the world. And I think that, then, when I started to, like, have this idea about the book, I did some research about other cases. And you know, very few are reported, and of those that are reported very few ever make it to any kind of justice, which I’m not even sure we can ever achieve justice through the justice system. But I think that those things allowed me to create a more understanding about like, the, what happens when, when people attempt to report this, even though it is incredibly difficult to report something to the people that are harming you. And I thought a lot about this, especially during the 2015 uprisings and the 2020 uprisings, which were after I wrote the book, but they’re, you know, Black women are the founders and organizers of so many of our organizations, Black Lives Matter, Say Her Name, even #MeToo like, Black women are at the head of these and have attempted to center black women’s experiences with police brutality, but it always seems to get a little co-opted. And I remember, like being in these protests and, and they start with this the state her name chant. And it always morphs into, say his name, every single time. And I think it’s really interesting the way that we veer away from this acknowledgement of black women’s pain, and especially if it has something to do with sexual violence, because recognizing sexual violence as a method to control and harm means we have to look to the ways that, you know, that continues to thrive in our own communities as well. So I think I wanted a book that to write a book that really acknowledged it as a human experience, not a theory or a concept, but as something that happens to people because I believe politics are about people.

B&N: And voice is how we capture that. I mean, you’re covering gender, you’re covering justice, you’re covering poverty, you are covering family dynamics that are flawed, in some cases, dangerous, in some cases, just deeply sad. You’re doing all of this as a teenager. Did you start covering all of these really big ideas with your poetry? Or did you really need a novel to be able to do this in consistency, and the length of a single voice to be able to do that?

LM: That’s a good question. Um, I think that in my poetry, I mean, I handle a lot of different topics. But I don’t think I try to pack in all of that in one poem. But I think poetry, I’ve always said like it has this vibrational quality. And I definitely lean on that when I when I want to convey something. It’s a felt sense. And with novels, I think that the beauty of fiction is that we are able to fully enter someone’s world without thinking of it as a lesson. And I wanted readers to get to just love Kiara and love the people around her and care about them as humans. Because I do think that often when we think about racism and police brutality and poverty, we think about it in such a theoretical abstract way that doesn’t ever allow us to understand what it means to feel that, and so I wanted readers to get to feel like.

B&N: What’s your favorite part of Kiara as a character?

LM: I think that the moments that she gets to be it be a kid are definitely some of my favorite parts. I think the world doesn’t allow her to do that often. But I think through Trevor and L.A., she gets to just be a kid. And, and we get to see her, you know, have aspirations and delights and connections and grief and all of these different things. And, she gets to be more than one thing at a time.

B&N: Does Kiara have a sense of community? It feels like her world is really circumscribed?

LM: I think she does. I think she does. And she doesn’t, I don’t necessarily think she thinks her community is going to support her. But I do think she feels as though she has won. Um, and I think I wanted to convey just like the, the feeling of home and of being at home, on a street and in a neighborhood and in the city. And, I think that Kiara definitely feels that, but I don’t think she feels like, her community’s going to protect her or save her. And, and I wanted both of those things to be true at once. Because you can love a place and we can love people. And we can also not feel like they are going to support us in the way we support them.

B&N: Part of why I asked that question in that way, though, is that she has so much love for LA and even Marcus, even though he’s, sometimes he’s a chucklehead. And she’s almost like a raw nerve in a lot of ways. And there are moments in the book where I feel like she remembers what it’s like to have more people in her world. But that in order to protect herself, she has to shut down a little bit. And all she’s got bandwidth for honestly, is Trevor, the little boy next door, right. Because even with LA, who she’s very fond of, and they have a charming relationship. And LA will tell her the truth in ways that no one else really can get care to hear. She still very much, and I think this is a product of being a teenager, she’s just very much in our own head. And she’s just kind of very focused on what she thinks she has to do.

LM: Yeah, I think it’s a product of being a teenager and also a product of trying to survive because I think that when we’re looking for housing, security and job security and any way to like make it through the day, it is hard to do anything else. And and I think that with Trevor she she’s caring for him, she feels a sense of responsibility for him. But she’s also She’s a kid kind of trying to raise the kid but she’s also through Trevor getting to experience being a kid. And and I think she only allows herself to do that with him because it’s also part of her obligation. And I think that both of those are true at the same time and she She does love him and she loves the people around her but she is in need of so many other things and kind of has no other ability to do anything else besides try to meet her needs and the people around her.

B&N: Did anything surprise you while you were writing Nightcrawling? Did Kiara or Marcus do something that you were just not expecting either of them to do?

LM: I think with Marcus i I originally thought he might have been able to see her earlier and stand by her in some way. And I think he does. You know he tries in his own way. But I also think that he’s so stubborn and so stuck in his own way of thinking and being and that he doesn’t think of her as a person in pain. And I don’t think that he even considers really, that he could help her. And, and I think that that was a surprise for me writing it, but I don’t know, I think that kind of the way it happens feels almost inevitable. And, so I wasn’t necessarily surprised by everything or anything that they did because I felt very much like Kiara would do whatever she needed to do.

B&N: She seems really certain in that way that young people have a lot of time when they’re just like, oh, yeah, this is the thing to do. Yeah, this is the obvious thing to do. Because what else am I going to do? And little time a little distance, right. But poverty is almost its own character in this book. I mean, they are facing eviction. What is a studio apartment that at one point, four people were living in as a family, and Oakland, like many places on either coast has been gentrifying quite aggressively. Yeah, especially in the last few years, and the entire building is in danger of being ejected. And there is no family for her to they’re not moving down to Los Angeles to live with Uncle Ty and his family. And he says point blank, my house is big enough for my family, myself, my wife and my children. That’s it. And I don’t know how you think I live, which obviously, they think he has a much fancier life. But he’s not taking them in. So they really have to figure out a way to pay the rent. And there are so many people who don’t actually ever have to think about.

LM: Right. And I even think like the relativity of how big kids houses to them, I bet his house is big. To him, it might be just the size for him and his family. But they live in a studio apartment, and they love their apartment and, and then in their family for decades, and I don’t think they ever expected to leave. And I think that’s one of the the harsh realities of displacement is that we can feel so secure, and so at home, and then the next day, you know, we’re trying to figure out where we’re gonna go. And, I think that they have no way of understanding, of knowing how to cope with that, or what to do next, especially in a city where rent prices are just driven up over and over and over and over again. And if they’re still paying the rent that they were paying decades ago, that it is an entirely different market. And I really wanted to make sure that this book included all of the realities of Oakland, and it would have been just a disservice to the book as an authentic text if it didn’t include the realities of displacement and, and housing insecurity. And they are, you know, left with not many options. And that’s the truth of it. And especially as teenagers without cars or, you know, even an understanding of how you would get an apartment I think we often don’t think of like, the basic knowledge that people need in order to get an apartment, get a job, write a resume. And Kiara is left with kinda like, I don’t know how to do any of that. And how am I gonna survive if I don’t.

B&N: Part of that poverty too is they don’t have a lot of tech. There is no personal computer. There is no laptop, there’s no television. Kiara has a cell phone, her brother has a cell phone, but these are not smartphones, these are old school. Hey, as you go, you have exactly x amount of time, and do not waste it. And it is, you know, right. That does contribute to a certain kind of timelessness about I mean, even though the book is set in the present day, the way Kiara moves through Oakland. I mean, she knows the buses cold but she also knows the streets and she knows when the streets change and when they get flattened when they get hilly, also where they’re going. What that means, was that deliberate on your part, that you knew technology had to be sort of pulled out I mean, If she was able to Google and address or jump on Twitter and suddenly see what was going on, I mean, she does need to be in a tiny bit of a bubble, right.

LM: And I think that, that isolation is also a contributing factor to how she ends up trying to figure out what to do. Because she doesn’t, she doesn’t even have like a world beyond her physical world, which is, you know, what the internet does for us. And, and that’s like, a different type of adolescence than many of us are living in right now. And, you know, they have a little TV, they could go to the library. You know, there are other options, but the internet is in the central, like, the focal point of their lives and the way that I think we assume all teenagers are living just on the internet. And I think, you know, a lot of us are, but I don’t think that’s the only way. And I, I mean, I never looked up addresses really, as a kid, or a teenager, I just like, I knew my bus routes, and I knew where to go. And and I don’t know if that’s like an Oakland thing, or? I don’t know what it is exactly about that. But, um, but I think that there’s something special about knowing your city so deeply that you can walk and know exactly where you’re going.

B&N: And how to carry yourself. Because there’s a lot that Chiara has to think about that your average kid doesn’t mean a lot of different ways. And not just looking for a job or just going day to day or finding food. It’s, I don’t want to call it code switching. Because it’s not that exactly, it’s more the sort of innate adaptability that she has. Yeah, there are also moments where she makes herself really small.

LM: I think that like alertness to her surroundings, that hyper vigilance is actually something I think a lot of teenage girls live with. And I know that I’ve tried to describe it to the men in my family, and they just can’t even comprehend the idea that you have to stay really alert. And you have to think about everything about where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, what you look like when you’re walking, what person is beside you, what street, you’re gonna go down. All of these things that do shape the way that we’re able to move through the world. And I think Kiara knows all of that. And she’s trying to get through these shifting realities of how to survive. And I think it’s really interesting because we don’t survive in the same way in the same place. So when she’s in downtown, it’s very different. When she’s looking for a job, it’s a very different way to survive than when she is on International. And I think that she has that, that having to adapt, creates, like a certain amount of paranoia, a certain amount of both distrust in the body, and detachment, and distrust of the of the surroundings, too, and people. And I think that all of that also contributes to the way that she she ends up trying to live and survive.

B&N: I want to go back to something you said really early on, which was you don’t believe that there is justice system the way it is now? Is there anything we can do to change that? I mean, as a culture and a country, we’ve been having these conversations for much longer than the last couple of years, though, for some people, it feels like it’s all we’ve been talking about the last, you know, 36 months, and honestly, we’ve been having these conversations for a really, really long time. It’s just a matter of who’s been participating in the conversation. So can we get there?

LM: I believe that there is a corruptness and policing in general. And, and because of the origins of policing and because of just the this power imbalance implicit in the uniform, it makes it so that like police sexual violence is going to be true as long as there are police and I don’t think anything that we do to try to safeguard that or create. I mean, there are there are things in place and there are also other laws that that make it hard for this kind of thing to ever make it to court. But even if when it does make it to court, like we see charges dropped with the, you know, suspensions and stead of badges revoked, so like we see so many liberties taken and I think that that’s always going to be true because this, this culture, this country thrives on policing and control. And one tactic of control that’s always been around is sexual violence. And we have to think of it as a form of brutality and violence. Because it is, even if we are too uncomfortable to talk about it. I think if for all of those reasons, that’s why abolition is really the only method of, of getting any past this in any kind of way. And, I think that when when I say like, there’s no way to get justice through the justice system, I don’t mean that there’s no justice. But I think that by seeking it from the entity that creates the harm in the first place, we’re always going to lose, it’s never going to be for us. And so I think I seek justice in other ways. And I like to think about, like, how can we move away from these punitive systems? And towards more of like, a restorative justice oriented system of, of looking at how do we heal? And how do we confront? And and what does it look like to acknowledge the pain we’ve caused? And how do we treat survivors and the aftermath of the harm that will never be able to be erased? And how do we acknowledge that and still look to change the methods in which we move forward.

B&N: So it sounds to me like you took Toni Morrison’s advice, and you wrote the book you wanted to read? Yeah. Who were some of your other literary influences? Because she’s got to be at the top of the list without a doubt, but I knew she was not. She on the top of everyone’s list. Actually, she is. I frequently talk to people about Toni Morrison. Yeah, it’s, you know, everyone from Marlon James, and Viet Thanh Nguyen to you. And I love that range. And I love that we’re all coming to Toni Morrison with our own experiences, but who else?

LM: Language and storytelling are unbelievable. They’re so masterful. Um, I love Jasmyn Ward. Anyone who knows me knows that she is just like, my favorite author. I read every one of her books. I’m awaiting the next one. I love Jacqueline Woodson. I am like such a fan of of people who also bend genre. Arundhati Roy, mainly an essayist. But her book, The God of Small Things, I really love that. Britt Bennett, I love her books. Um, I I’m just like such a fan of really all books, all of the people who blurbed me, I am just like completely in awe and so thankful that they would read my books, but Kiese Layman, love him. And I love James McBride, and Ayana Mathis. And I definitely like to read like a wide array of books. But I also like mainly read Black books. And I think that that’s something that that I do, because I think that it’s it’s a beautiful thing to see a spectrum of Black authors and the and the ways that we can all interpret our community in entirely different ways. Like it’s not a monolith. And if you read Black literature, you know that and Tommy Orange, who wrote There There is makes me feel just like so honored to get to have. I mean, people people are like, these are two Oakland books, and I need even more Oakland books. I definitely don’t think there’s enough. But it’s so cool to see the way that his depiction of Oakland is an entirely different Oakland and the same at the same time. And I think that that’s very much true to Oakland, as a city.

B&N: Do you have a favorite moment from the writing of Nightcrawling? Do you have a moment where you were sitting in the chair and you said, oh, wait a minute, I think I’ve just figured this out. I’ve got this.

LM: I worked in preschools during the time that I wrote Nightcrawling and my shift was constantly changing. So sometimes I started at seven in the morning, and sometimes it started at, you know, 2pm and it changed a lot and so I kind of took whatever moment I could to write and often that was like during nap time. So the kids would go to sleep. And I would write longhand in my journal. And a lot of the like, really the pinnacle moments in a book were written just with a pen and paper, while kids were sleeping or trying to and whispering, what are you writing? And I think that that’s part of how Trevor comes in, because I was so surrounded by just like the life and presence of children. And I yeah, I think that those moments of like, complete quiet. And I mean, I wrote on the bus, I wrote wherever I could. And I think that those times where I wasn’t on a computer are always my favorite times when I’m writing. Things click.

B&N: Is that the advice you’d give someone who’s just starting out, just do the work, just grab the time where you can just write when you don’t need a desk or a special pen? You just need to put words on the page. Is that what you’re saying?

LM: Yeah, I mean, that that is definitely part of it. I think there’s, there’s a discipline that is required of writing novels, that is really different from writing other things. And I think that it requires you to stick with your story. I think part of it is like, know what you want to write, and be prepared to think about that every single day for years. And, to write through even the moments where you’re bored, where you are not sure what to do next, or something is not fitting. I think that it’s easy to stop because it gets hard. It gets really, really hard, and I think that if you if you want to write that book, like you’ve got to push through that, and take every moment you have and use it.

B&N: What’s next for you?

LM: Um, I have a poetry collection coming out in the next year or two, and then more novels, either. I’m definitely expanding beyond Kiara, but holding her with me, can’t wait to see her live and breathe in the world.

B&N: I’m very, very excited for other readers to meet Kiara. I think she is. She’s got a lot of heart. And I hope people recognize that. And I hope people recognize that she’s got some challenges that not everyone has. She’s well intentioned, and she’s ferocious, and she’s got her eye on what the future needs to be. And, you know, the world may never necessarily cooperate with her the way we would like it to. But I think the fact that I’m the reader and you’re the writer, and we’re both talking about a fictional character, like she’s somehow sitting somewhere between Oakland and New York right now, I think that says a lot about what you did in this book. We cannot wait to see what you do next. Nightcrawling is out now. Leila Mottley, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over, it’s really been fun.

LM: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure.