- For all the pages and documents and libraries and archives around the world, there are some stories that remain veiled in mystery.

But with her storytelling, today's guest helps us understand events and people largely lost to the passage of time.

She's Dolen Perkins-Valdez, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (music softens) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina Universit%y.

- And I'm G Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Dolen Perkins-Valdez, a bestselling author whose most recent novel is "Happy Land."

She's with us in the studio today, thanks to our friends at the Rhode Island Center for the book who made "Happy Land" this year's Selection for Reading across Rhode Island, the Annual Statewide Read.

Dolen, so great to have you with us today.

- Thank you.

I'm happy to be here.

- So, first of all, "Happy Land" is wonderful.

I enjoyed it immensely, and we're gonna talk about it at length.

But for the audience at home who maybe has not read it yet, why don't you give us that quick overview about what the novel is?

- Sure.

This is a novel inspired by a true historical story of these newly freed people from South Carolina who climbed the mountains into North Carolina and established their own community.

They called it a kingdom.

They modeled themselves after royalty, and they named a king and a queen.

- How did you discover this story in the first place?

- Well, I discovered it by accident.

I was researching old-time musicians in Western North Carolina and stumbled on a local newspaper article about this kingdom.

I thought, is this just local lore?

Is this true?

I reached out to a librarian from Hendersonville, North Carolina, and he said, yes, it was true.

- Happy coincidence, huh?

- Yes, it really was.

- I mean, sometimes that happens when you look at the newspaper clips.

- I always say, I just find things by being human, living my life.

- That's the best way.

- That is the best way.

- Yes.

- So why did you decide to give it a literary treatment?

- Well, first of all, I'm a novelist.

I'm not a journalist.

And so that's sort of the way I view the world.

I view it through the imagination.

And what typically happens when I find one of these stories is that you do a lot of research and then you hit a brick wall in the archive.

And so I try to fill it in with the things I imagine might have happened.

I just thought this was so unique.

Of all the communities I've heard of before, I'd never heard of one where they call themselves royalty.

- Talk to us about the time periods here.

You alternate between the present and the 1800s, and that keeps you reading, clearly pulls you along.

You want to see what's happening to the next installment, but talk about those two time periods.

- Yes, so in the contemporary storyline, Nikki is almost 40 years old.

She lives in Washington DC and she goes to North Carolina to visit her grandmother for the first time in years, she learns about this story of her ancestors who lived on this kingdom that one of her maternal ancestors was a queen.

It's a story that Nikki feels is hard to believe, and she can't believe that her mother has never shared it with her.

I really wanted to have the archival research I did show up in that past storyline about Luella, the queen, and then I wanted to have this contemporary storyline about a descendant, a kingdom descendant who when she finds out about this story, it changes her life.

- So, when you're writing this, right, so you've got two different narrative arcs, two different narrative time periods.

Do you write them one and then the other?

Do you write them at the same time?

Like, this is gonna be this chapter and that chapter is gonna come next.

Or do you write one story through and then the other story through, and then figure out how to kluge them together?

Like how does, how does the process of actually writing those two narrative arcs work?

- Well, I do think it's different for every writer that writes a dual timeline novel.

I have a journal, I usually buy a journal that has no, it's unlined paper.

I draw a line down the center, and I have the past on one side and the present on the other.

And then I just sort of sketch out what are the major scenes that need to happen in each storyline.

- Are they, is there any parallel, like in this one, as I was reading this, right?

Because sometimes you'll read something and there's sort of like, there are parallel developments happening in the two different timelines.

That's not really the approach that you've taken here, but are there just milestones that you know the story has to meet because you've got, you're not gonna have 36 chapters on one thing and then eight chapters on the other timeline, right?

How do you keep that pacing consistent across those two timelines?

I think that's the question I'm trying to ask.

- Yeah, that's a good question.

That's a good question.

- You got there.

- But, you know, and when I was writing it, I had the same question.

I didn't know how I was gonna do that either.

I was trying to figure it out myself because this was the first true dual timeline novel I'd ever written.

So I think I think of it less as parallel developments and more as like passing the football.

So when one chapter ends in the past and I'm switching over to the present, there has to be, it has to be a natural point at which we need to go back into this other timeline.

And so it's like passing the baton between timelines, I think more like that rather than what's happening in the past has to parallel with what's happening in the present.

- I find it interesting that you use paper and pen.

When I write my books, I write them on a screen.

The only time I use paper and pen is when I have a draft.

I'll print it out and then take my red pen and do that.

But you find that productive and useful.

- I do.

I find that sometimes when I can't, when I get stuck at my computer, going to my journal and writing longhand works for me.

Now, I will say, that at one point in the current manuscript I'm working on, I thought I had lost a part of the manuscript just to like my computer.

- Oh, that's always the worst.

- I was so worried and stressed out and I woke up in the middle of the night and remembered that I had written those in the journal.

(they laugh) So all I had to do is look, but I had never transferred it over.

- And of course you woke up in the middle of the night 'cause it's like haunting you.

- It was haunting me.

So I woke up in the middle of the night and I said, oh, I wrote those parts of the book longhand.

I didn't type them in.

So sometimes you can drive yourself a little crazy.

'cause some of it's in the computer and some of it's on paper.

- So let's talk a little bit about the three remarkably strong women characters that really sort of drive us through this book.

There's Luella, there's Mama Rita, and there's Nikki.

Let's just take them one at a time.

- Yes.

- Let's start with Luella.

- So Luella, you know, is on her journey when the book begins.

She's young, she's in her early twenties.

She marries William Montgomery and the two of them are named king and queen.

She really has no idea what it means to take on this role.

William is trying to urge her.

"You can't just, you know, sit around, gossiping with the women.

You're the queen, you've gotta separate yourself."

So she's sort of becoming an adult, learning what it means to be a leader.

And eventually as the book progresses, we see her rising into her- - [Jim] And so this is in the period after the Civil War?

- In the period after the Civil War.

They come up that mountain in the late 1870s.

Yes.

And then her descendant in the book is Mother Rita.

And Mother Rita is trying to, still lives on the kingdom land in western North Carolina, trying to hold on to the story for the benefit of her daughter and her granddaughter and her great-granddaughter.

And she calls at the very beginning in the opening chapter, she calls her granddaughter Nikki back to North Carolina so that she can share this with her while she still can.

And Nikki's mother Lurelle lives in DC, doesn't wanna have anything to do with this old kingdom folk story.

And she and her mother, Mother Rita, have a rift over it.

- So, you and I chatted about this at an event last night, and one of the things that I pressed you on, I'm gonna press you on here too- - Okay.

- Is how much of the story about the kingdom is rooted in what we actually know, what you actually know, and how much of that is your imagination?

Because when I googled the Kingdom of the Happy Land, I found a lot about your book, but I also found some journalistic accounts that all seem to make the same reference, that it's sort of veiled in mystery, right?

So what do we actually know?

And how much of the story that you tell about the kingdom is the product of your imagination?

- Well, I will say a lot of what I talk about is true.

For 60 years we had this pamphlet about the kingdom that said that they came up from Mississippi and had some other erroneous information.

It had some stuff in it was true, but other parts were erroneous.

And I discovered that they actually came from South Carolina along with my research partners in North Carolina.

So a lot of it is true.

They did come up from South Carolina, they did form this kingdom.

The names are real: Martin Bobo, Luella Bobo, William Montgomery.

I tried to keep all of the original kingdom settlers with their real names.

The imaginative part has to do with the marriage of some of the things that happened with Luella and her husband William, and the love of her life, William's brother Robert.

Some of that I imagined.

But other than the relationship part, someone asked me about the, there's a big wedding that happens late in the book.

I don't know if there was a big wedding that happened with Luella's daughter.

I do know Luella's daughter married, but I don't know the details of a wedding.

So there were some things there that I dramatized using my imagination.

- So this is not your first foray into historical fiction, right?

So how do you know when to, you gotta stay true to the event and when you can actually take those storytelling liberties to advance your narrative?

- I think at the core of it, you know, most people, when they read historical fiction, when they finish the book, they head straight to the internet.

They wanna know more.

They're researching.

- That's what I do.

(laughs) - Yes, and to me, that's the fun of historical fiction that has opened me up to a chapter in history that I didn't really know.

- Right.

- So I think the core of the book should be faithful to what actually happened.

I mean, of course there's other kinds of historical fiction.

There's sort of like speculative historical fiction.

Alternate history.

But I'm just talking about traditional historical fiction.

I think you should stay true to the core, but there are certain things that we just don't know from the historical account.

And that to me is when the novelist comes in.

What if?

What if this is how it happened?

What if this is what they were thinking?

And, you know, when that archive goes cold, to me, the novelist steps in.

- Have any relatives, descendants of the kingdom, read the book or contacted you?

Or are they around?

- Yes, there are descendants, there are families.

When we were doing our research, we created a Google Drive with all of the people that we were learning about and we created biographies of various kingdom people.

We were able to share some of those biographies with kingdom descendants.

I've spoken with them.

I just got a voicemail the other night via my email.

But it was a voicemail message from a woman who says she's 89 years old.

I haven't had a chance to call her back yet.

But she said that her granddaughter had told her about the book and that she was a kingdom descendant and she wanted to talk to me.

- So what does that feel like as an author when you get that kind of feedback on, just knowing that you've actually touched somebody who's actually a descendant of the story that you've just told?

- It's really surreal.

I said this book is my love letter to Western North Carolina and to the people of Appalachia and also people everywhere that come from a little tiny place that has a remarkable story.

Because this is like a very small chapter of history.

This is not a big chapter.

I didn't really have sort of national and international resonance.

It was just a story of this little community of people that wanted to scrape out their little part of the American dream.

And I was just so captivated by their imagination.

Right?

And so I hope that for the descendants, this will inspire them to think even more broadly about their family history.

- So one of the things that I found remarkable about Luella in that post Civil War era is that she is really a fully modern woman.

She gains political power, she gains economic power.

She becomes a property owner, as a woman, as a Black woman- - Yes.

- in North Carolina in the 1870s.

That's all true?

- It is all true.

And you know, one of the things I always say is that you can find these remarkable women in history who are ahead of their time, there are so many.

I mean, some of us have them in our own families, right?

Somebody might have a grandmother that was a rancher and carried a gun.

(Jim laughing) I mean, you know, or that raised 15 children as a single mother and all 15 of them went to college, right?

Like, I know there's stories like that that never make it to the paper.

And so Luella is one of those really remarkable women of history.

And yes, her name is on the deed to over a hundred acres of land at a time when no woman, white or Black, typically was on the deed of property.

- The Ku Klux Klan plays a role- - Yes.

- In this story.

Tell us about that.

- So I think it's really important when we dug up this history that they weren't from Mississippi, because once we learned they were from South Carolina, we knew why they came there in the first place.

They fled Cross Anchor, South Carolina, Spartanburg County, fearing for their lives because the Klan was after them.

One of the reasons is because Martin Bobo was encouraging the men to vote and they were voting.

Another reason I learned Martin Bobo, Luella's father was prosperous.

He was earning over $900 a year as a farmer, which was a lot more than some white farmers.

And so there was some jealousy of that too.

- Well, you know, one of the things that struck me is that there are different places where you really grapple with big, substantive media issues, racial justice, the post-war, post Civil War South.

But you don't sort of hit your reader over the head about it.

You have a way of sort of, you know, stating, matter of factly, I wanna find the right quote.

"We already tried voting and they killed us for it.

And that was pretty much the end of the conversation from the Luella's perspective, right?

What's the discipline that it takes as an author to engage with the issue, but not do it from a moralizing or you're not making a speech, it's just, it's there, it's the reality but leaving it to the reader to draw the inferences?

- It's interesting because there's no way to avoid it.

Right?

I mean, we know what time we're in.

We know in the book why they leave South Carolina, but they extricated themselves from the American experiment.

I never found evidence that they ever voted again.

So they really created a place of refuge and safety and restoration.

And that's what the book is focused on.

The book is not focused on Klan violence.

The book is focused on these remarkable people that saved their money, pooled their money together for 10 years, bought over 200 acres of land, developed a successful, wildly successful product, the Happy Land Liniment, and rebuilt their families.

And I thought, well, we gotta talk about those stories too.

- We like to talk about craft on this show- - Okay.

- often, and you've mentioned already some of your work and how you've done this.

You just mentioned Google Drive, the biographies.

How long did it take to write this book and how did you write it?

- So- - I mean, morning, afternoon, what?

- Oh.

okay.

(they laugh) Yes, I love those questions.

So it took about three years from start to finish.

From the first time I reached out to Ronnie Pepper until the book came out.

I was working closely with Ronnie Pepper and another Hendersonville resident, Suzanne Hale.

I wanna give them a shout out 'cause they are my partners and friends for life.

But these days, and it's changed as my life has changed.

But these days I write in the morning, I am a morning person.

I wake up without an alarm clock.

I just get up and get to the page.

I love early morning when things are still quiet and the birds are chirping.

- Got the house to yourself.

- Exactly.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Great.

- Do you, so, you know, there is, there's a ton, there's so much that I want to ask you about.

How do you navigate the, when something, somebody like the Rhode Island Center For the Book comes to you and says, "We wanna make this a statewide read."

What does that do for you as an author?

That's gotta be quite the honor.

- It is an honor.

And you know, these, y'all, you know, one of the things that us writers think about is how do we get more exposure?

How do we get our books out there in the world?

There are so many books to read.

There are so many movies to watch.

So whenever an opportunity comes along like this, this is really life changing for an author, especially for me.

You know, a little book that, you know, I call this book The Little Engine That Could, that just keeps making its way into reader's hearts.

- You've spent some time- - The little engine that did.

- You've spent some time with high school students and others who have read this book.

What kind of feedback do you get from them that's maybe a little bit different from what you get from a more adult audience?

- Well, the younger students and readers, they ask the questions that the adults are sort of like, they say things like, "Well, why did Robert do that?"

"And why did he leave his family?"

And they also are very opinionated.

They'll say, "I don't agree with that choice."

You know, or "I didn't like that ending."

I love younger readers because they are so honest, but in a good way.

Like in a sort of, they want to engage you.

They wanna engage the book.

And so I love the honesty of younger readers.

And not to say that like, you know, adult readers aren't honest, but adult readers, you know, we as a tendency, we want to be polite and we filter a little bit, but young people, they don't filter.

(they chuckle) - What, as a writer, what draws you to writing historical fiction?

- I love the research.

I love the archive.

I get excited.

- You love the work.

- I love the work of it.

I love going into the archive and I have to put on white gloves and they bring me a box and I get to handle these delicate papers that once were on someone's desk in the 1800s.

I love the smell of old things.

- And you've told me previously that the research that you developed for "Happy Land," you've made publicly available.

- Yes, so Suzanne Hale from Hendersonville had this great idea.

We applied for a grant from the Dogwood Foundation in North Carolina.

We got the grant.

We hired a public historian from Asheville, North Carolina.

We built a website that's housed on the Blue Ridge Community College website.

There's a link to it on my website.

If you go to my website, dolenperkinsvaldez.com, right there on the front page, there's a link and you can see all, you can see pictures of the kingdom.

You can see what, actually, after you finish the book for anybody listening, you can see pictures of the kingdom, and all the things that we found.

- That's tremendous.

- I admire that.

That's very generous.

Not every writer would do that.

So- - Yes.

- Good for you.

- Well, I wanted everybody to have access to it and not for my book to become primary archive.

Like I wanted any, any journalist that writes about it, I wanted them to have the stuff.

- There's an audio edition of the book.

Correct?

- Yes.

- Did you narrate it?

How did that come to be?

- I didn't.

You know, nowadays, the audio book narrators are like actors- - Yeah, they are.

- and they have to do voices and they have accents.

I don't think I can compete with them.

They're hugely talented.

- Yeah, they are.

- And I had two hugely talented audiobook narrators for this book.

- That's great.

Congratulations.

- Thank you.

- So you've been recognized for the way you've helped the public understand the way the judicial system works, the legal system works.

"Take My Hand" in particular was singled out for celebration of that service that you provided to readers.

Is that something that you had in mind when you wrote "Take My Hand"?

Or was that just the fruit of the topic you were writing about?

- Well, absolutely not.

It was not anything I had in mind.

You know, the last thing I wanted to do was try to put together court scenes and legal proceedings.

I was hoping with "Take My Hand," my previous novel, that I'd be able to find the transcripts of the trial.

But the transcripts I could never find.

They were never digitized and I couldn't find them.

I went to the National Archives, I went everywhere.

So I had to put it all together myself, which meant I had to, my husband gave me a copy of Robert's Rules of Procedure, civil Procedure or whatever, and I fell asleep reading that.

'cause it was so tedious to read.

But I had to know a little bit about how the proceeding would work.

One of my friends said, "Well, why don't you just watch 'Law and Order'?"

Which I thought hilarious.

(they laugh) - Well, but because there's a legal dynamic in this too, - It's pretty well researched.

- Yeah.

- There's a legal dynamic in "Happy Land" too.

And the procedure that we get there.

So I didn't know about Aris property.

- Right.

- And so I wonder if in part of writing these novels, you're also specifically educating the reader about things that are still very current and very real today, even through the lens of historical fiction.

Is that part of what animates you?

- It is, I mean, I definitely feel from a general sense that history is connected to the contemporary moment.

And I feel like our understanding of who we are, particularly in a country like the United States, where our history is still so recent.

We're not talking about a thousand years ago, right?

Some of these people, particularly for my book right before this one, these people are still alive.

- Right.

- The Ralph Sisters are still alive.

And again, as we just mentioned, descendants of "Happy Land" are still alive.

They remembers.

So we have to, you know, remember ourselves.

And so my feeling about it is those things are naturally gonna arise from writing historical fiction.

How are we connected to it in this present moment?

- When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

- I didn't know because when I was growing up, I didn't know any writers.

All writers were dead.

You know?

I mean, the students now, they get to meet a living writer.

I never met a living writer.

(Jim chuckling) And so, but I was a reader and I was a reader from a very young age, and I was a reader in a family of non-readers.

So I got books the best way I could, which was typically at the supermarket because that was one place we went.

My mom and I went to the supermarket every week, and she would buy me a novel from the supermarket.

And so when I finished college, I was writing.

My first year of college, actually, I published my first short story.

I had a roommate who was an art major.

She had come from a family of artists.

I just had dinner with her in New York a couple of weeks ago.

And she didn't remember this, but it's true.

And she said, "You should publish a short story."

And I said "I should?"

And I sent off a short story.

I published it, and they paid me $130, which was a lot of money to make.

- What was it about, quickly?

- It was a romance story.

It was like a Conde Nast publication.

One of those magazines you can buy at the store.

And it was just a little romance story.

But I'd never forgot that $130 check, which was more than what I made working in the local mall.

- And you're getting paid to be a writer, like hello.

- Right, yes.

For something I would've done for free.

- Right, right, right.

We've got about 30 seconds left here.

- Okay.

- You know, So I told you when I finished this book, I went and I started Googling and I wanted to know more about "Happy Land," but I also wanna know more about Nikki.

And so she's a fictional character.

So my question for you as an author is do you ever think about your fictional characters after the novels is done?

- Absolutely.

They stay with me forever.

I know.

They live with me.

You know, to me, they're alive.

Even the ones that are, you know, even Luella.

The ones who are in the far past are still alive for me.

And I know they're okay.

I just- - I get that.

- Yeah, I know they're okay.

- They're gonna live with a lot of us for a long time.

- Thank you.

- Dolen Perkins-Valdez, thank you so much for being with us.

The book is "Happy Land."

Congratulations.

- Thank you so much.

- That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit us at salve.edu/pellcenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (upbeat music)