Poured Over: Natashia Deón on The Perishing

From this episode:

B&N: I think it’s fair to mention, though, that your publisher is using Octavia Butler, and NK Jemisin as comp authors. So, this is a different experience from Grace. This [The Perishing] is a little more speculative, but it’s very much grounded in Los Angeles history. And you’re talking about things like the St. Francis Dam collapse, you’re talking about the massacre of Chinese laborers in 1871. Also Route 66. There’s a lot of Los Angeles here. It’s not getting too far afield from Lou to talk about the kind of research you needed to do. Now, you grew up in Los Angeles, and you grew up also around Los Angeles, you’ve been there your entire life, but you still had a little research to do.

Natashia Deón: I had a lot of research to do, because the things that I had grown to learn, you know, in school, the history that we learn is not focused on St. Francis Dam break, for instance, which had to do with Mulholland. People know more about Mulholland Drive than they do about the dam break that actually ended his career…

…I think that even in our not knowing, I think sincerity is maybe the most mature position we can any of us can take, knowing that you don’t know and that you’re not the expert wherever you go. And I think that that is a beautiful posture to take whenever we encounter a new place, but also who we are also gets in the way. So it’s also stumbling over that you know who we are or who we should be…

…I remember coming to Santa Clarita, which was a suburb of LA, still LA County, but it was the first time that I was followed around grocery stores. It was the first time that I knew other people expected me to be a certain way because of the color of my skin. Like let’s see you dance, Natashia, let’s see you run, you must be good. You must be a fast runner…. it was like they watched movies or TV. They expected me to talk a certain way….And I wanted Lou to come in as I did in Santa Clara not knowing that people expected me to be a certain way, like my best friends, you know, up to the time I was 10 plus a girl named Esther who I named this character after, as, you know, who was Korean and Chinese and my black friend but we all went to private school together….In Santa Clarita, where everyone was white, I was a stranger. And they had certain ideas that they would put on me, you know, you must be like this. So then I started thinking, Maybe I have to be like that. So I have to learn how to dance. Now I better watch some videos, I need to learn how to play basketball. And I need to learn what’s that word again, honey child, okay, honey child, you know, like, I’m like learning new language. And it wasn’t who I was.