An Unexpected
Literary Podcast
Every week, host Adam Sockel interviews a popular member of the literary world about their passions beyond what they're known for. These longform, relaxed conversations show listeners a new side of some of their favorite content creators as well as provide insight into the things that inspire their work.
Discovery through dance with Judith Turner-Yamamoto
| E:23Judith Turner-Yamamoto spent three decades attending dance glasses and it's brought a new perspective to how she interacts with the world. In this discussion, Adam and Judith chat about the connections between movement and writing and how the world of dance helps her appreciate her environment more as well as how the discipline has driven her writing.
They then chat about her new book, Loving the Dead and Gone, which folds into a mutual passion they both share- the stories of a small town. It's a powerfully emotional story that you won't be able to put down.
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[Music Playing]
Adam Sockel: You are listening to Passions & Prologues, a literary podcast where each week, I interview an author about a thing they love and how it inspires their work.
My name’s Adam Sockel, and if this is your first time joining in, thanks so much for being here. If you’ve been here since the beginning, thanks for coming back.
Today’s episode is with Judith Turner-Yamamoto, the author of Loving the Dead and Gone, which is a fabulous small-town novel. If you’re a fan of this podcast and you’ve been listening to me recommend books for a while, you know that I love small-town stories with big emotions, complicated stubborn characters, and that is Loving the Dead and Gone absolutely to a T.
We get into what the book is about a little bit later into this episode, but first, we start with a discussion all about Judith’s love and passion for movement in general, specifically dance.
She was involved in ballet for about 30 years’ worth of going to classes, which is a really interesting life story. She didn’t actually pick up ballet until she turned 19, a time which I joke … because ballet is one of those things where it is not for people who age unfortunately.
Ballet dancers that you see in professional ballet tend to be very, very young. And so, I said, I was like, it’s interesting that she got into this specific type of movement when most professionals are giving it up.
But it’s a really interesting conversation, just the connections between the movement and the discipline and all the different things you need to be a successful ballerina and how it’s connected to the writing process.
We talk about how, because she’s been involved in the world of dance, how she comes to watch and appreciate dance a little bit more differently.
It’s a really, really fascinating conversation, I think you guys will really, really enjoy it. Everyone who’s been listening for a while knows how much I love movement. I love running, all these different things. So, anytime anyone comes on and talks about a type of movement, I’m all for it.
As a reminder, you can always get customized book recommendations from me by leaving me a five-star rating or review wherever you listen to podcast, and just sending me an email at [email protected].
I am coming up on the end of the month here, so I’ll be picking a winner of a bookshop.org gift card for anyone who sends me their passions, again, to [email protected].
Just let me know what you’re passionate about. I will pick one of them randomly, and I will send you a bookshop.org gift card. Perfect time of year for it, right? The holidays right around the corner and currently happening as well. So, before we get to that, I want to give you a recommendation of a book.
Towards the end of the year, in addition to reading books that I have previously read, I also love a cozy Agatha Christie style mystery, and there is no better Agatha Christie style mystery than The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict.
If you’re not familiar with Marie Benedict, she writes about women in history who haven’t gotten their proper due. She has several incredible books, including Carnegie’s Maid, Her Hidden Genius, The Only Woman in the Room, The Other Einstein.
Obviously, Agatha Christie is a very, very well-known person, but there is this interesting time in her life where for about 11 days, she completely disappeared. People couldn’t find her, they didn’t know where she went, and then she just sort of showed up and never really explained what happened.
So, Marie takes that true story and tries to piece together what happened. It’s a really, really interesting book. That’s The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict.
Before we get to Judith, I just want to say thank you once more for all the people who have been listening in since we launched the podcast back in the summer. We are coming up on the end of the year, so about six months of having this out in the world.
If you’ve been enjoying it, I hope you’ll share it with some people. Just let them know about it as well. We are growing and it is a great community that we’ve got here. So, love to have more people on there.
Okay, that is all of the housekeeping. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Judith Turner-Yamamoto, author of Loving the Dead and Gone on Passions & Prologues.
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Adam Sockel (interview): So, I am so excited to dive into this. Judith, what is the thing you’re super passionate about that we’re going to be discussing today?
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: I would have to say the power of movement. And for me, that’s meant a lot of different kinds of movement.
Actually, my love for exercise actually began when I was 19 and one of my friends dragged me to a ballet class in college, and I just went because she wanted to go. She ended up going twice, and I ended up dancing for the next 30 years.
So, I see a lot of parallels in a commitment to exercise and what you have to bring to writing, not only just every day, but in the long run, discipline is really an important key to everything.
Adam Sockel: So, you mentioned starting your dance journey at 19, a time when most people might either have to start thinking about giving it up or taking it so seriously that it’s the only thing they do.
So, I guess just like, take me through what it was about, if you remember, that first class or those first few classes — what was it that drew you immediately and intensely to want to dance and use your body in that way? And what kind of kept you going throughout the years?
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: I think it was a discovery of an innate gift of musicality that I had never been aware of, and it was something that I would hear from teachers throughout the years, and I just found in ballet, there’s this discipline. You go to class and things happen in this particular order.
You begin with ballet with pliés and you move on to tendu, and on and on and on until you’re in center floor and there’s reverence and all that. And I just found it to be a place where — and I think this is true for a lot of exercise, it’s a freeing mental space where you go in and these things are going to happen.
I mean, I find it now like lifting weights. I mean, I love counting reps. That probably sounds sick, but there’s this meditative quality to it, yes. And I’m sure you must know this from being a runner. I find that if I’m swimming laps, these ideas will just drop into my head like gifts.
And my husband’s a visual artist, and he says the same thing. He’ll come out from the pool, and he’ll say, “I had this great idea for an installation” or “I know how I’m going to address this proposal now.”
And I think that that’s one of the gifts. It’s like connection to your mind, connection to your body, but it’s like it opens all those channels.
Adam Sockel: I know exactly what you mean, like you said, from a distance running standpoint. Like it doesn’t happen for me in the first mile or the first 15 minutes or anything like that, but there definitely gets to that point where meditative is such a perfect word for it, because even if I’m listening to music or a podcast or something, I’ll inevitably zone out and you’re right, like my mind drifts to story ideas or just things I want to tell like my brother or a friend in real time or again, jot it down.
I definitely understand like you said for swimming and for lifting weights, same thing, like that kind of losing yourself in the moment. I’m curious for dance, I’ve heard a lot of people who do stage acting. I’ve talked to a lot of people who have done like theater for a living, and they talk about when they’re playing a character for so long, they can lose themselves into that character and then they can seek out like nuances and ways to keep it fresher themselves.
I’m curious when you’re talking about dance and ballet, like if you were working on a specific performance or show or whatever it might be for so long, is it something where you’re able to find new aspects of the dance itself to focus on?
And I don’t have any dance experience personally — I’m curious what that feeling is like; if it is similar to a stage actor or if it’s something that’s completely different.
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: And full disclosure, I never performed. I was just taking three classes a week for 30 years, but there is this kind of, you’re going through these same motions. Ballet is an open-ended experience where you can continue to perfect yourself. It’s like the unattainable perfection, much like rewriting.
So, every time you do a certain combination in center floor, you find that your body, muscle memory becoming more proficient in increments. So, there’s this very slow kind of progression of getting better, improving, that is enormously satisfying.
And then there will usually be like a leap (no pun intended). There’s usually a leap where you go to some other level and then you’re working from there if that makes any sense. So, you’re constantly building and perfecting your tools, and it all comes through that just returning to the studio.
It’s like returning to your desk, and you go in there at an appoint time and you put yourself in that zone and you proceed from where you were a day, two days before.
Adam Sockel: I always joke with people, and actually on the first episode of this podcast, with Mallory O’Meara, I joked … she’s a power lifter, and we were talking about my love of running, and I joked that a lot of people who are runners, they love having ran, like they love being done with a run and talking about their run.
Just like a lot of writers, like having written, they like knowing whether they’re morning writers and they’ve written their 1500 or 2000 words, whatever it is for the day. They love being done and being like, “Oh, okay, I’ve written, I have done the thing I like doing, and now, it’s done and I can think about it.”
I like the hard part, I like the running process. I like sitting down in my manuscript and like turning out words and trying to figure that stuff out, but I also appreciate the people who say like now that they’re done with their morning writing session, like “Okay, I’m good to go.”
For you, for dance, is it similar? Is it like, “Okay, now that I’m done with the movements, my body feels better, and my mind feels refreshed?” Or are you more like me where you like being in the moment of doing like you said, even if it’s the same movement over and over, going through that process?
Is it something you enjoy in the moment or something you like after the fact as well?
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Well, I like it after the fact, but I’m with you. It’s being in that moment and the actual doing of it. I am one of those people who just loves to move, so I don’t like to sit still at all. So, yeah, definitely. It’s the doing of it. I find real joy in it. So, that’s where it is for me.
Adam Sockel: Do you think you see examples of dance differently having spent so much time doing it yourself? Like I’ve talked to so many writers who now when they read books, they can’t help but think about the process or the choices of characters and things like that.
Do you think dance is the same way for you, having spent so much time and understanding kind of how the sausage gets made, for lack of a better term?
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Oh my God, yes. I mean, to go to a performance, because you can see I know what it takes to get that leg up that high, and to have that kind of extension, you are doubly in awe of it.
And I’ll even sit there and deconstruct the movements and think what’s happening; tendu, glissé, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I get a certain rush out of being able to do that.
So, I do think that it makes you appreciate it from a more enriched perspective. And also, when I read, I certainly do look at how did they do it. And I find myself, if there’s a change of scene, it’s like, okay, let me go back and look at how this writer got that person from this room into the car. Because that happened really quickly, but it was very smooth and wow, I’m impressed by that.
One of my favorite pieces, and I must have reread this thing now at least five times, is Mary Gordon’s, The Liar’s Wife, and it’s three novellas and the Liar’s Wife is the first one. And that is the one that I return to because she so skillfully moves around in this piece and takes us inside the consciousness of the protagonist, and into her memories in such incredible detail, but believable recall, if that makes sense.
I’m just in awe of how she does it. So, yeah, it’s true of both those things. I look at them from a totally different perspective, I think, than just somebody picking up a book or watching a performance.
Adam Sockel: I love that. There’s a book that I feel the same way. I read it at the end of every year. It’s Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney, and she does something similar with like the recall.
It’s about this older woman who … people who have listened to me do podcasts for a while are like rolling their eyes, going to talk about this book probably like once every three months.
But it’s this older woman who lives in New York City and she goes through a walk and she is recalling all of her life in advertising in New York City for R.H. Macy’s, and same thing, like she does these recall stories where it just feels surrealistic. And actually, last time I was in New York, I walked by what is the actual restaurant she goes to.
And I like had this moment where I was like, “Oh my God, everything here looks exactly like is described in the book.” And it’s the same thing, like I just found myself realizing, thinking about how the author put that all together.
And then you’re right, I think there’s like a different appreciation for things like you were talking about for dance and for me, for running. Before I got really big into running, the concept of watching like the Olympic marathon would be like, “Why would I want to watch anyone run for two hours?”
And now, anytime there’s a big run, I’ll be like, “Oh my God, look at this person’s form for two hours and three minutes.” And I think dance is similar to, you mentioned swimming and running.
I think there’s these things where like you as a person who has spent so much time in dance, if you were to watch a performance, you would be even more impressed by everything than someone like me would who I could say like, “Oh wow, that’s a beautiful expression of a movement of a body.”
But like you said, you being like, “I know exactly how much work that went into putting that foot where it is,” I imagine that’s something you appreciate even further than the normal just watcher or someone who goes to like The Nutcracker once a year and doesn’t look at any other type of dance.
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Right, exactly. It’s totally different and I think it’s richer and other people have knowledge about other aspects of things. I mean, I think about one of my friends in New York who was an art director at different magazines for many years that were involved in the design and arts world.
And I know it’s a very different experience for him to pick up a magazine and look at it than say, for a person buying one on a newsstand to flip through. And I think that’s true of every aspect of life, no? It’s the experiences that we bring to it. And in fiction, I think it’s the experiences.
Alice McDermott has this fabulous new book about writing, What About the Baby? And in it, she says that when we read fiction, what we’re looking for is we’re looking for us. And I think that’s so true. You’re looking for something that relates back to experiences that you’ve had and that you can connect with and enlarge your own life.
Adam Sockel: I totally agree with that. As a person who … I was talking about Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, like there’s so many books that I find myself drawn to because I’m a nostalgic person.
And so, even though I’m in my mid-thirties, like I’m drawn to books that feature characters who are in their like seventies and eighties looking back on their life because it’s like a forced nostalgia.
And I always say that I love books that have small stories with big emotions, and like that’s because that’s kind of how I see my own world. Like I’m one small story, but I’m a very emotional person. And so, I think you’re absolutely right.
And I want to kind of transition to your actual writing process. Do you find yourself, when you’re sitting down to write a book, like do you find yourself relating your writing process to, like you talked about dance and movement?
Because obviously the writing process is the opposite of movement. It is sitting down and being stationary on a keyboard or a computer for whether it’s 20 minutes or three hours. Like how would you say those two things are connected for you?
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Mmm, wow, toughie. I think the bridge would be discipline and sticking with something, because when you sit down at that keyboard, you are looking to engage with this part of your mind that is building this story.
So, that, I think is the thread that connects those two things. It’s just being able to wheel yourself to get into that place. You talked about how when you run, that first couple — that 10 minutes or so, it’s like rough.
But then you’re in and you’re in the flow and you kind of have to wait, you have to have the perseverance to wait for the wave to catch you to take you into this fictional dream. So, I think that’s it.
Adam Sockel: Yeah, because obviously, for dance, or even like you said, for like weightlifting or for swimming, there’s a plan and a direction. Like for dance you know the next movement, you know the next thing you’re going to put your body through.
And obviously, for swimming, it can be repetitive, and it can be one stroke after the next, but you know the process and like you said, counting reps for weightlifting, all these different things.
Like how do you approach a problem in your writing when there isn’t maybe a clear direction? Is it something that you just try to like write through? Or do you find yourself doing the like look out the window and think through it contemplatively?
I guess, how do you, when you come up to a part of a manuscript that you don’t yet know the next movement, how do you approach that?
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Well, this is going to take me to the part of where my stories come from. And especially, this first writing of a story, it’s not an intellectual exercise for me at all.
I confess I hear voices and that’s where my stories come from. And they begin with, I’ll just hear these characters talking in my head in these very distinct voices. And they’ll say something, and I’ll go, “Huh!”
And that’s the beginning of it. I mean, I’ve even had characters in a second book start talking before I had finished the first one, and it’s like “Listen, listen, you have to tell my story” kind of thing.
And then it’s a process of discovering who this person is that’s talking and what their story is. So, for me, it’s almost like watching a film. Writing is like watching a film, and I see this thing in my head, I hear these voices, I hear the dialogue, and I’m working to get it all down.
And it’s not until I go back to the editing and the unending reworking where the intellectual side plays into it, and then I’m looking at more technical things like structure and that kind of thing.
And just on a pragmatic day-to-day kind of writing exercise, I always go back. When I sit down, it’s like, okay, it’s these three hours. And it’s always at this time, I usually write … now, it used to be years ago I wrote in the mornings when my son was in school, and now, I write at night, like in the early evening, like 7 to 10, 10:30, something like that when my husband goes back to his studio.
So, it’s a time, it’s like your unconscious knows that this is where you go at this time. And then I go back and I read what I wrote the day before, and that is the entry into that unconscious place where the story flows forward.
I’m not a plot person. I really am not interested in plot at all. What I’m interested in, and you said something about this earlier, is about people just living their lives and the emotions they experience along the way.
Adam Sockel: Yeah, for me, it’s like if I can write something that will move someone emotionally — I always think of if I’m sitting down with a book or I’m listening to an audio book, whatever, however I’m engaging with a book; I know I’m going to spend depending on the length of the book, 8, 10, 12, 20 hours with this story.
And to me, yes, plot, obviously, is important, that’s a big driver of the ideas of a book is, but I know that I will remember a book because of how it made me feel more than what happened on the pages.
And so, I know when I’m writing, if I can write something that feels emotional, that someday someone else will read it, I hope they like where my story went, but I more so want them to feel something.
I would rather have them hate a scene. At least they would remember it that way as opposed to being apathetic. To me, any emotion is better than no emotion. Even if I finish a book and it like infuriates me, I’m still like, “Wow, great job by that author” because they made me feel something. I was invested enough in the emotions of these characters and this plot to remember it in some way. I totally know what you mean. That’s really, really interesting.
[Music Playing]
Adam Sockel: We’ll be back with more passions and prologues after this break.
[Music Playing]
And now, back to Passions & Prologues.
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: One of the most gratifying parts of having this novel, Loving the Dead and Gone out in the world now is getting reviewer and reader feedback. And it’s interesting NetGalley — you know that platform?
Adam Sockel: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: With advanced reader copies of books available for reviewers. There’s some kind of little algorithm trick you can do where you can see like what are the main words that have come up in reviews of your book.
And thinking about what’s your book about has really been a process of reduction for me. And the words that kept coming up were love, loss, grief, and grace. And that’s really what the book is about.
And I can at this point, even distill it further to core wounds. This book grew out of my memory of the tragic death of a favorite uncle when I was three. And then that conflating with later parental infidelities to become loving the dead and gone.
But I don’t know that I was actually in touch with all that until these reviews started to come in. And then the readers were telling me what this book was about, and it was the most gratifying experience, I can’t tell you.
Adam Sockel: I know what you mean because I’m working on querying a novel right now. And I had an author friend look at my original query letter and she’s like, “This is a well-written letter. It doesn’t tell me a single thing about your book though.” And I was like, “Man, I have to like distill my book down to like two paragraphs, it’s so hard.”
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: No, no, Adam, you need one sentence.
Adam Sockel: Yeah, exactly. And that’s exactly right. And that’s a really great point. So, to that, would you mind giving our listeners a little more in-depth, kind of plot description of Loving the Dead and Gone.
It starts with a car crash that kind of like moves things into motion. Can you kind of go from there just to give them a little bit more about what it’s about? Because it’s so wonderful, but I want to make sure you do it justice as the author of the book, now that you have practiced seeing other people describe it.
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Now that I have practice, yeah. So, you’re right, it does begin with this freak car crash in 1960s, rural North Carolina. And that puts in motion moments of grace and redemption for these two generations of women and the lives that they touch.
So, I used this tragedy, a dual timeline and this small stage of this 1960 southern Milltown to take readers inside the lives of four people who were experiencing the fallout from that death, and then following their paths as they deal with this.
As I said, there are four characters. There’s Clayton who is thrown into a midlife crisis after he discovers Donald Ray. He realizes that he’s been emotionally dead for at least a decade, and he cannot shake the feeling that he is living for this dead boy.
And his wife Berta Mae, struggles with her mother’s lifelong withholding of love and also, this growing crisis in her marriage that she can’t really identify, but that just has her in a constant state of anxiety.
And Aurilla, Berta Mae’s mother is, as we say in the south, too mean to die. But we come to learn that she’s had this life that’s just been riddled with unthinkable losses and secrets, and that explains her meanness.
And then there’s Darlene, the impetuous fiery 17-year-old widow who is struggling not only with losing a new husband, but trying to keep him alive and trying to keep herself alive. And in doing that, she just crashes into Aurilla’s family with the force of a meteor. So, those are all the pieces that are in play in the story.
Adam Sockel: And they all come together so beautifully. And I absolutely love that. But I’m curious, you were talking earlier about loving the like repetitiveness of dance and loving the repetitiveness of swimming and counting reps when you’re at the gym, and how you also kinda love that reworking of a manuscript and things like having this out in the world now and seeing reviews.
How does that feel? Like have you been able to let go of the story and put push it out into the world? Or is it something that you still feel extremely like attached to and want to in your mind go back and continue reworking things?
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Well, Adam, I rewrote this novel five times over a 30-year period. And I tell you, after going through the editing process to just to get it to print and the multiple rounds of that experience, I think I’m done with this one.
Adam Sockel: That’s fair.
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Yeah. I nearly feel like I could recite it in my sleep at this point.
Adam Sockel: How does it feel, thinking about like moving on to another story? Like does it feel like moving on from like a family member, I imagine after spending so much time?
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Well, but you see, I have this very strange career arc; there was a time in the eighties and nineties, I had this period of 12 years where I wrote four novels, adapted a screenplay from the second one, wrote a large number of short stories and things were happening with the writing.
I went through three agents, I think, prizes were won, awards came, but publication didn’t. And I just kept … this takes us back to the undaunted stubborn part. I just kept working because the voices and the stories kept coming.
So, I can remember there is this period of sort of grief when you finish (and I put quotation marks around that) a story because for me, at least, I do find myself experiencing the world for my characters. And suddenly, you don’t have those people to pour those things into, to gift with those experiences.
So, it’s a bit unmooring, I do remember that. But this time is very different. The question I find myself dealing with now, it’s like, okay, which of these three other novels am I going to focus on, and which one makes the most sense to put forward next?
So, it’s a different place from where I was then when I was finishing all those manuscripts. I was writing a new book every two years. I know, it’s weird. It’s a weird story.
Adam Sockel: Yeah, like having, like I said, querying a novel now and like understanding … having been in the literary world for over a decade, I understand that the moments from like querying to getting an agent, to getting a publisher, to publishing is a very long time. And so, I don’t want to just like sit around and do nothing while I wait for all these different things.
But at the same time, like you said, I finished my first, this story, and now, where do I focus all this attention? Because writers are going to write no matter whether they’re published or not or not a single person ever looks at the thing you write, or a million people do. Like it doesn’t matter, you’re always going to try to write something.
Yeah, I know it should be like that whole, like, okay, well, I’ve seen the world through these characters’ eyes for so long, and now, I need to either look at a different world or through different characters’ eyes.
It’s very much like an emotional — it’s like losing someone, it’s like mourning something while also embracing the start of something new. A lot goes into it, it’s a lot of emotions.
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Exactly, exactly. Because you form these relationships with these people and you find yourself thinking, well, what would so-and-so think about this? That kind of thing. Or how would they react in this situation? That whole thing of like letting go and going forward to something else.
But a very wise artist friend of mine talked about how the tide comes in, the tide goes out, and you have put so much into this thing, the tide is out for the moment. And you have to allow yourself the space to let the tide come back in and bring you these new ideas in order to hear new voices.
But you have to trust the process. You really have to trust the process. And I don’t think it’s something that could be forced. And it shouldn’t be because as with a run when you’re in the zone or dance when you’re in the flow, it’s a moment of grace as well. And I think that writing is very much a moment of grace.
Adam Sockel: Oh my gosh, I love that sentence. I’m going to write that down next to anywhere that I’m writing; writing is a moment of grace.
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Wow, did I say that? Did I really say that?
Adam Sockel: Yeah, Judith, that is perfect. You should like sell t-shirts with that; writing is a moment of grace.
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: What did I say, Adam?
Adam Sockel: Writing is a moment of grace. I love that. So, that’s like fantastic. That’s so good.
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Oh, thank you.
Adam Sockel: So, last question for you. I always end with asking for a recommendation from the author. It could be a book recommendation, it could be a TV show or a recipe. Somebody, I think, one of my most recent guests, literally her recommendation was go for a walk.
Like what’s something that you recommend to people that you think more people should know about? Again, it could be a dance or a book, whatever you want to recommend. The floor is yours.
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Wow. There’s so many things. I annoy my husband endlessly at breakfast as I’m going through the New York Times and social media, and I have to share this, and I have to share that.
And at the moment, I’m reading to prepare for a panel for a Kentucky Book Festival next week. One of the authors I’m on the panel with is Sheila Williams, and she’s … oh gosh, am I going to be able to find the title now?
Her newest book, it’s Things Past Telling by Sheila Williams. The panel is about honoring family legacy through writing. And the story is incredible because she found some census records in Ohio (bringing it back to us), this woman, she was like 112-years-old in 1878.
So, she found this record of this woman and she did all this historical research and also brought in her own family history as an African American to this story. And I am just so humbled to be on this panel because I’m addressing these personal family wounds in my writing and they’re addressing this legacy that is just unimaginable.
And this character’s going back and remembering their lives and the whole arc of it. And right now, the slave-ship just got commandeered by a pirate and it’s like just this unbelievable story. But it’s told so incredibly well, and you really are inside this narrator and feeling this unbelievable pain. I’m just amazed. It’s so good.
Adam Sockel: That sounds fantastic. And speaking of so, so good, Loving the Dead and Gone is fantastic. And to everyone listening, I’m telling you, you have to go get Judith’s book. It is so wonderful and I loved every second of both the book and this conversation. Judith, thank you so much for joining me today.
Judith Turner-Yamamoto: Oh, Adam, it has been my pleasure. It was lovely speaking with you. Great conversation.
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Adam Sockel: Passions & Prologues is proud to be an Evergreen podcast and was created by Adam Sockel. It was produced by Adam Sockel and Sean Rule-Hoffman. And if you are interested in this podcast and any other Evergreen podcast, you can go to evergreenpodcasts.com to discover all the different stories we have to tell.
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