Please join us for a Q&A with author Princess Joy Perry, author of This Here is Love.
Please welcome Princess Joy L. Perry to our Ask the Author BookBrowse chat.
Princess is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship and a winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award. Her short stories have appeared in All About Skin, African American Review, and Kweli Journal. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia.
This Here is Love is her first novel, and it was one of our First Impressions selections earlier this year. Our readers gave it stellar reviews, and it will be featured in our November 19th newsletter.
Welcome, Princess, and thank you so much for being here. Please tell us a little about yourself.
Thank you for inviting me to have a conversation with your readers. It’s hard to decide what to say about myself, so I will start with some bookish things.
If I were stranded on an island, the books I would want with me are Sula by Toni Morrison, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, and Covenant of Water by Verghese. I aspire to write with the same level of vivid, tangible sensory detail that you will find in these stories. Beyond that, I am moved by stories of struggle and by the question of, “How did they come out of this on the other side.”
Boring stuff: I hate to talk until I have had my first cup of coffee; I didn’t learn to swim until I was thirty, and if I could live another life, I would love to be an archaeologist.
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That might be the best author intro we’ve had here, Princess! Thank you for sharing.
I guess we should jump right into This Here is Love. It’s funny that you aspire to write as well as some of the authors you mention above. I think you’re there! What a beautiful book, and yes, indeed, it was exceptionally vivid. Where did the idea for the story come from?
I wanted to write a story set in the 1940s. For that story, I needed a Black, male character who grew up in the segregated South, but who had remained immune to all of the influences (social, political, religious, etc.) that tried to force the idea of “inferiority” on Black people. I had to figure out what would have enabled my character to resist. The research I did to answer my question brought me to the 17th century. I found out that there were indentured/enslaved African who secured their freedom and owned land - sizeable plots - on the Eastern Shore of VA. And I found out about the decades in which enslaved Blacks and indentured Whites lived and worked and intermarried. If my character were the son of one of those Africans, or if he had never been enslaved because he was born to a white mother, he might have a foundation that allowed him to resist racism. Once I started thinking and learning about those 17th century possibilities, I never made it back to the 1940s.
You delve into the lives of several characters. Whose story came first? Was one character easier to form than others? Which was the most difficult?
When you started writing This Here is Love, did you have a good idea of where your lead characters (Bless, David, and Jack) would wind up, or did they evolve in unexpected directions?
When you first got the idea to write the story you’d intended to set in the 1940s, what prompted you to start forming that idea into a book? Was there something that provided the nudge you needed to start your project?
I went into this book knowing it would be a challenging read. While I always was aware of the horrors of the slave trade, I had no idea of the complexity of the process and the variety of different individuals as well as the number of companies involved. No other background materials had made me aware of the extent to which families were separated, especially the daughters who appeared to be a special commodity for unscrupulous buyers.
I am especially touched by the story that became the title of the book.
Greetings Princess,
I would love to be on that island discussing those books with you! I’m wondering if any of your short fiction has been gathered into a book format? I look forward to reading your novel. It sounds so interesting. Thanks.
Thank you @Lynne_G . The degree to which the slavery was an organized industry in which people were treated as commodities shocked me too. Many of my research days ended with long walks during which I simply tried to absorb what I’d read. Women were the most vulnerable of all.
Hi @Holly_K ! Wouldn’t that be such a great conversation?!So far, my short fiction is sprinkled in the journals in which I published before I began working on the novel. You can find my short stories in the following places: African American Review; Kweli Journal [this one is online and you can access their archives] ; and All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color.
I think I always knew where Bless would end up. That is because she is the most vulnerable of all of the main characters. She does not have the physical strength of David. She does not have the privileges of wealth and favored skin color like Jack. The outcomes for Jack and David surprised me. I discovered those outcomes as I grew in my knowledge of those characters.
When I finally realized that my real story took place in the 17th century, my guiding questions became, “How do you make someone into a slave? How do you make someone believe they have the right to own another person?” So, Bless, David and Jack evolved from those questions. They were, in the beginning, much more nebulous. I think the questions and the situations came to me before any of the characters.
Jack was the most difficult to know/write, and he took the longest to craft. I believe that’s because his experience is the least like mine. With Bless and David, I could draw on some of my personal feelings and experiences of being raised in the South, being female, and of course being Black. With Jack, I had to force myself to explore how I had internalized racism. That was a much more painful journey.
For me, writing always starts with a question. I wanted to know what Black fathers who had fought in WWI - yet had still been denied the promises of equality and freedom - would tell their sons who were facing service in World War II.
The “nudge” was the fact that I didn’t intend to write a novel! I thought I was writing a novella that I would pair with short stories I had already published. I wasn’t daunted by the thought of writing a novel, but cause that was not my original intention. I think I tricked myself!
I know you did extensive research for the book, visiting some of the existing plantations and pens and such, as well as researching documents from the time. How long did that process take you? Were you able to devote yourself to the research full time, or did you have to squeeze it in while continuing to work?
I found your stories online! Thank you.
As This Here is Love ends, it seems like there are multiple loose endings, any of which would make a good sequel. Does your next novel return to this world, pursue your original 1940 idea, or branch off in a totally new direction?
I did the research over the course of the many years of writing the novel. Each time I encountered something that I did not know or needed to know more about, I would pause to do the research. You don’t need to know everything going in. And you have to be careful not to let research (which can be really interesting) replace the harder work of making yourself put words on the page.
Like most writers, I did not (still don’t!) have the luxury of devoting all of my time to writing/researching. I try to touch the story in some way at least four days per week during the semester - I teach full time. During the summers, I try to work all of the week days and a little on the weekends.
My pleasure! Thanks for your interest!