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B.L. Blanchard
1.8k Plays1 year ago
B.L. BLANCHARD
Her novel The Peacekeeper:
"Against the backdrop of a never-colonized North America, a broken Ojibwe detective embarks on an emotional and twisting journey toward solving two murders, rediscovering family, and finding himself.
North America was never colonized. The United States and Canada don’t exist. The Great Lakes are surrounded by an independent Ojibwe nation. And in the village of Baawitigong, a Peacekeeper confronts his devastating past.
Twenty years ago to the day, Chibenashi’s mother was murdered and his father confessed. Ever since, caring for his still-traumatized younger sister has been Chibenashi’s privilege and penance. Now, on the same night of the Manoomin harvest, another woman is slain. His mother’s best friend. This leads to a seemingly impossible connection that takes Chibenashi far from the only world he’s ever known.
The major city of Shikaakwa is home to the victim’s cruelly estranged family—and to two people Chibenashi never wanted to see again: his imprisoned father and the lover who broke his heart. As the questions mount, the answers will change his and his sister’s lives forever. Because Chibenashi is about to discover that everything about their lives has been a lie."
About the author:
'I am originally from Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but I have lived in California for so long that I can no longer handle cold weather.
I am an author, a mother, and an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, a federally-recognized tribe.
I graduated from UC Davis’s inaugural undergraduate Creative Writing Honors Program in 2006 and was a Writing Fellow at Boston University School of Law. I can stare at maps all day and am obsessed with figure skating. I am constantly planning my next trip abroad. I will watch any documentary about space and space exploration you put in front of me. I’m always looking for new podcasts and shows about true crime.'
BL Blanchard on Twitter:@blblanchard
On Instagram: @blblanchard_wrties
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:02
Speaker
You are listening to Something Rather Than Nothing, creator and host Ken Vellante, editor and producer, Peter Bauer. This is Ken Vellante with the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast and we have BL Blanchard, Brooke, author of The Peacekeeper and soon to come out in May
00:00:32
Speaker
the mother. Brooke, welcome to something rather than nothing podcast. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's
00:00:42
Speaker
I was very excited to encounter your work and also to see your first book and there's something exciting about maybe capturing you or connecting with you in the sense of just having this out there. It was named the Notable Book for Michigan.
00:01:04
Speaker
So, you know, being seen and recognized.
BL Blanchard's Writing Journey
00:01:10
Speaker
I wanted to ask you off the bat, because I know you've had other things you've done in life and work and professional and creating things. When did you see yourself in this sense as a writer, as writing this book, as far as your identity? What was your experience?
00:01:34
Speaker
Well, like a lot of writers, I have always wanted to write. I can't remember a time where I didn't think of myself as, at the very least, an aspiring writer. And it was something I've always, always wanted to do. Like a lot of kids, books were my escape, books were my friends, books were where a lot of my memories happened, and I wanted to create it.
00:02:00
Speaker
And so it was always there in the background, but I always thought I need to do something that that's not a career path. That's not a realistic thing to do. So it was just always there in the background. And then I got this idea several years ago and was
00:02:18
Speaker
you know, excited about it in a way I hadn't been about any other writing project I've done. And it happened that I was on maternity leave with my second child and I knew I'd be going back to work.
00:02:31
Speaker
And so after dealing with a colicky baby for three months, after about three months, she could sleep through, you could actually set her down once in a while and I had another three months until I was going back to work. So I thought it's now or never, I've got to, if I'm going to do it, this is the time. And by day I'm a lawyer and if being a lawyer has taught me nothing else, it's how to write, to meet a deadline. So I thought, I want to do this and I'm going to do it now because who knows what,
00:03:01
Speaker
Things will look like when I come back from leave and what things look like when I came back from leave, by the way, was the pandemic. So it was I'm especially glad I wrote when I had the chance. And so that's when I really started to take it seriously, you know, seriously in the sense of I'm going to do this. I'm going to try to get it published. But I was going to write it either way. And I've
00:03:21
Speaker
you know, written other books that will never see the light of day or started and abandoned projects. So writing is something that I've always done and would always do even if it never was going to be published. You just, you know, you can't help yourself. You're always coming up with stories. You live with these characters. You know, you have to do it. That's kind of my feeling with writing.
00:03:43
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and I talk about a windy, windy quick story of a few years right there. And I once you said the length of time and colicky baby, I'm like, well, dude.
00:03:56
Speaker
you know, deep needs from from the child and sleep and things like that. Hey folks, I wanted to listeners to mention do just a description of the the Peacekeeper, which is the big thing.
00:04:14
Speaker
will be talking about. So Brooke, I'm going to read the listener's description, a basic description at the beginning of what the peacekeeper is.
The Peacekeeper: World-Building and Themes
00:04:25
Speaker
Against the backdrop of a never colonized North America, a broken Ojibwe detective embarks on an emotional and twisting journey towards solving two murders, rediscovering family, and finding himself.
00:04:39
Speaker
North America was never colonized. The United States and Canada don't exist. The Great Lakes are surrounded by an independent Ojibwe nation, and in the village of Bawitigong,
00:04:51
Speaker
a peacekeeper confronts his devastating past. That was enough to get me in. And so your backdrop, your setting is a different history, an alternate history. And the development of a history without or limited contact
00:05:16
Speaker
without colonization. And within the book, there's the language, native language, and there's also the development of different types of traditions around justice and just different social ways of movements amongst folks. How tough was it to create
00:05:45
Speaker
a world for readers that they could enter into but was a lot different or is a completely different history. How was that?
00:05:57
Speaker
Creating the world was the first thing I did, and I sort of came up with the plot afterward. The initial vision I had for it, I was driving to work. I live and work in San Diego, California, and I work downtown. My commute takes me through Balboa Park, and it kind of spits you out right into the middle of downtown. It's a really pretty drive.
00:06:20
Speaker
I was, as I kind of drove in, I just, you know, I was looking up at the buildings I'd seen a million times and I kind of pictured one that had a, and this building does appear in the book. It's a high rise skyscraper, but it has a dream catcher. And then it's almost like a cathedral window is the dream catcher in the window. And I thought, ooh, what would that look like? And spent,
00:06:47
Speaker
a long, long time, like a couple of years, thinking about what this world would look like. Now, you know, Native community, we are not a monolith. I know people who have thought about a world without colonization their whole lives. Me, I had never really thought about it until I came up with this idea. So some people have thought about it in very different ways, and there are so many ways you could go with it. I kind of thought about it linearly at first. If I were to
00:07:18
Speaker
Okay, if no colonization had happened in the 15th and 16th centuries, well,
00:07:26
Speaker
How does that change reality? There's probably no transatlantic slave trade. So how does that impact Africa? How does that impact Europe? Do they try to colonize elsewhere or do they not? And just lots of different ways you could go with it. And there's really, you know, you kind of get the sense for how much of this history is really interwoven with each other and how different the world could look.
00:07:49
Speaker
And then I eventually decided, I kind of want to just have think of my end result, how and what I wanted to see was, you know, a 21st century, I can't talk 21st century industrialized, you know, city with a lot of familiar technology to us, but one that was, you know, kind of built and created out of more native values than a lot of what might
00:08:16
Speaker
ring familiar to those of us living in our world. So that was sort of where I started. But I thought that while society would look very different, the values would look very different, and just the world itself would look different, a lot of things would be the same because humans are going to human no matter what time point you're in. So the plot is a murder mystery. And there's
00:08:45
Speaker
things that I think that the society in The Peacekeeper does better than, you know, Western society does, but there's a lot of things that they don't do as well, or do just as poorly, you know, it espouses equality, but that's a problem, no matter your system of government, no matter your economic system, there has always been a problem with inequality, and there's always been a problem with
00:09:09
Speaker
you know, especially a large society living up to the values that it that it preaches. So people will fall through the cracks. It's not utopia. So that was a big one, but I did want it to feel. And so I thought that would make it familiar. There's the book. It kind of takes place. It starts in a very small village called Boitagong, which is where the cities of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan on the St. Mary's River. It's a small town and
00:09:39
Speaker
Our hero, Chibinashi, has to go to the big city, Chikakwa, which is where what we know is Chicago, and kind of gets a taste of the city after living in a small village. And I think that would ring true for a lot of people as real. Well, I lived in Sault Ste. Marie when I was a kid. We then lived in a very rural area of Sacramento, California.
00:10:02
Speaker
So
Justice Systems: Fictional and Real-World Reflection
00:10:03
Speaker
moving to a more urban place can be a bit of a culture shock when you do that. And again, no matter what timeline we're in, there's going to be those divides. There's going to be, you know, what it feels like to be in an insular community. Some people feel very safe. Some people feel very trapped.
00:10:21
Speaker
um you get to a city some people feel at home they feel free some feel isolated and exposed and want to go back so i think that that human condition is going to be the same everywhere and that's something i thought would not only help people get assimilated into the world but also show you know we're just people and oh definitely yeah yeah you know well what's funny is one of the first early readers on the book
00:10:48
Speaker
gave me the feedback of, oh, I just love how the Chippewa have cell phones. And I'm sitting there thinking, I'm a Chippewa who has a cell phone. So there is a perception that we live this very separate and apart existence. And I wanted to show, no, we really don't. We're people like anyone else. And probably we're all more similar than we are different.
00:11:18
Speaker
You know, one of the things in going into and reading the book, and we talked about the language, I think, and you had hinted at it with work that you do.
00:11:29
Speaker
uh, you know, uh, within law, but the ideas of justice I thought were kind of, um, I love interrogating the idea of justice because I think, and I'm not speaking for you, but I'm speaking about what the perception around, um, our system, like our justice system, say in the U S and, and, and, and mass incarceration in
00:11:53
Speaker
incredible issues. But even on justice, the idea of opposition within justice, of hiding what might be the truth, parties might be in the position of sequestering things away and not showing because there's an advocacy versus a defense. And I think within the introduction of a different concept is not just
00:12:16
Speaker
fufi ideas. It's restorative. It's moving towards truth. It's moving towards a dialogue. Yes, there's somebody hurt. There are victims and there are perpetrators, but
00:12:31
Speaker
Can we, it's almost like, can we not injure society further when we go through the justice system and damage society through it, but can we bring justice in through it? And just that general idea I found to be the most intellectually stimulating for me. And again, it's not just like, oh, justice will work perfectly in that system, but the idea that it's more calibrated towards understanding what happened and how to recover
00:12:56
Speaker
And, of course, with the murders within the book, tied closely and contemporarily with MMIW, MMIP, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two Spirits, that massive issue is right there, and its echoes are right there.
00:13:22
Speaker
Do you think what you show as an idea of the justice system in the Peacekeeper is a direction that is helpful to move or to think about in policy? I sure hope so. So for background in the Peacekeeper, the justice system works very differently than how
00:13:45
Speaker
it does in the Western world and probably most of the world. And I can only really speak to the US system. You have the prosecutor, you have the defendant, you have the judge, and you have the jury. And in the criminal justice system, now I've worked in the public defender. My own father has been in and out of the criminal justice systems. This is one that I just have been on
00:14:15
Speaker
multiple sides of now. The focus, the spotlight is laser focused on the defendant. Whether or not this person is guilty, we're going to present evidence of this person or if you have multiple defendants, their guilt. And you're going to decide, if so, how are they going to be punished? That is the system, that is the focus.
00:14:39
Speaker
That's not how other disputes get resolved in the US. Now, I'm primarily a civil lawyer. I work in those types of disputes or not in the criminal system. Most of those get resolved through, I mean, there is a trial system. You have the plaintiff, you have the defendant. The plaintiff is arguing that the defendant is liable.
00:14:58
Speaker
and you have to decide if so. But the vast, vast, vast majority of those disputes get resolved through a system called mediation. And that's where everyone gets in a room or a couple rooms and they hash it out and they negotiate what's a settlement that everyone can at least live with. Maybe not everyone's happy, but what's an amount of usually money that everyone can live with that will resolve the dispute.
00:15:24
Speaker
And this is how much criminal, how criminal cases are resolved in indigenous societies. Now I looked and I looked and I tried to find what is the Anishinaabe system of justice, pre-colonial. I looked, I couldn't find it. It's probably, I'm sure it's out there and I failed too. So I thought if we take this, but the idea of restorative justice is not mine. It's,
00:15:48
Speaker
ingrained in many, many tribal societies and it's still practice. I looked at the biggest one. I looked at our Navajo peacemaker courts.
00:15:57
Speaker
And I've also looked at historical records of other tribes, primarily Algonquin area tribes, and came up with, okay, this is how the justice system would be. So rather than focusing on the defendant and whether this person did it and this person is guilty, what if we shift that focus to the victim? How has this person been wronged?
00:16:20
Speaker
and what would make them whole. And again, that's kind of the idea when you're in mediation is what is a resolution that makes everyone, that everyone can live with and that seems fair to resolve the dispute. If you took that attitude toward criminal justice,
00:16:36
Speaker
I mean, in the book, we see, we don't, it's certainly not fail safe, right? But I do think that regardless of your political bent or how much you've interacted with the criminal justice system, probably everyone thing would probably agree that our system has room for improvement.
00:16:54
Speaker
And so this is not a fail-safe one. It's not a perfect one. I don't think such a thing exists. But to have a system where you're looking at, okay, victim, here's what happened to you. What will make you whole? What have you lost? What can this person do that will, you know, you can't unring the bell, you can't undo what happened, but what can they do to help bring you back to what makes you whole? And if you approach it from that, it becomes less punitive.
00:17:20
Speaker
it becomes, you know, the person's not a pariah, they're part of the solution. And that way, everyone can kind of try to resolve it and move on. And that, I think, would be a really great way to resolve disputes. Again, it's not perfect. It certainly isn't in the book. But that would be, I think, a step in the right direction. Because right now, if you're caught up in the criminal justice system,
00:17:44
Speaker
That's a stain that doesn't, in America especially, that stain does not wash off. That record follows you. It attaches itself to your family. Growing up, having had a father in and out of prison, I certainly felt that. I deliberately wrote The Peacekeeper from the perspective of a person who's
00:18:04
Speaker
father has been in prison for a crime, and from that perspective, a lot of writers write from that perspective, but I don't think a lot of them write from having lived that perspective. So right now, if you're caught up in the criminal justice system, you can serve your time, but you're never truly done. You're never truly out of it.
00:18:26
Speaker
And its recidivism rates are very high for a reason. Once you're in, it's very difficult to get into, you know, stable employment, housing, all sorts of things. It's very, very difficult once you're in it. And so if the idea is, well, let's focus on making the victim whole, that allows everyone to move on and everyone to become a productive member of society or at the very least sets up the opportunity for that to happen much more than our punitive system is set up. So I think that
00:19:07
Speaker
At one point, it may be still, as far as incarceration rates, the United States was the highest rate of incarceration, and there was these massive and profit incentives for prisons and privatization within prisons and aspects of prison labor, and of course,
00:19:19
Speaker
would have a lot to recommend to it.
00:19:28
Speaker
drug crimes and things that came from the 80s and 90s which damage communities and families and we're still because of the how the system went at least my understanding how the system went that like We need to like mitigate damage somewhere and i'm not trying to be pollyannish about it But like we need to mitigate the damages happen things have occurred And I feel like a lot of times we we add on to it. Um
00:19:52
Speaker
with some wrong incentives. I think the introduction of the notions that you have in there is just really fertile intellectually and within the book. Just how is this going to happen? What's going to come out of this process that feels new to a lot of folks?
Art and Literature's Role in Society
00:20:13
Speaker
Okay, I want to talk a couple art questions because now you're writing books and you're creating art in literature, but in moving into how much you put into creativity and the way that you did it, I say, I'm going to do this now. I wanted to ask you, you're creating something and I wanted to ask your thoughts around creativity and about what is art.
00:20:44
Speaker
I just think how cool is it that I had this idea one day while driving to work and I thought about it for a long time and on a time deadline, put it on a piece of paper and that has now been shared with people who are experiencing it through reading it. That's almost like magic to me. I do this as a reader when I consume a piece of art, a book or
00:21:10
Speaker
a film or a painting or what have you, a play. Part of the magic of it is you're caught up with these things that are completely make-believe, that are the figment of someone else's imagination, but we forge a connection through it because we get to experience it together. We experience this thing that we have made up. And I just think that's what's so
00:21:33
Speaker
I hate to say it again, but magical and wonderful about art is we use this as a way to connect with each other. Just these things that are inside of us, we express it. Someone else experiences it. They're going to experience it differently from the person who created it.
00:21:48
Speaker
You know, somewhat my internal view of what Chicago looks like is probably going to look different from yours, probably different from anyone else's. And that's what's so great about it. You know, multiple people can look at the same piece of art, can read the same book, see the same film or play or look at the same painting and get completely different things out of it. And they're all right.
00:22:08
Speaker
every single person's take of it is absolutely valid and correct. And that's, again, all from a little germ, germinating seed in one person's mind. I think that's what's so cool about art is and the connections we all make through. I mean, how many I know, I've definitely made friends and, you know, really grown friendships because we liked the same book or we liked the same TV show or or something like that, that that and
00:22:34
Speaker
those are people getting together. We're all going to read this thing and talk about it and form friendships through it. I think that's really cool about art.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think it could be really profound and particularly if you're sensitive to art. I'm sensitive and imagine you are quite sensitive to art, but what it does to jostle or invoke or inspire. And I think in doing the podcast, what I decided to do as a way to live or partially live is to put myself in contact with that because
00:23:11
Speaker
I am different, much, much, much different than when I first started the show. And it's in contact with things I might know a little about, a lot about, but it's in contact with art and that magic too. And going back, like right when you said it, like the ideas in my head, that's like the neuron fired in your head.
00:23:31
Speaker
And then things carry from that. And I wouldn't shy. I mean, that is the magic. And I really connect with that sentiment. And which is really cool is another book in the series that I understand to be within the universe, the mother, due to be out May 23rd of 2023, which is a really cool number.
00:24:01
Speaker
and date. I was so excited about this book, Brooke, I already told you. I said I was going to be getting it at the bookstore months before it even came out. My bookseller browser's bookstore is right down the street who has copies, if you're in Albany, Oregon, has copies of The Peacekeeper, told me that Ken, no, I don't have
00:24:23
Speaker
uh the copy of the mother for you because uh it's out in may and i said thank you so um so in this in the universe and just just give us a little bit about that because obviously i'm excited to get to the next one yeah so the mother is
00:24:41
Speaker
It's in the same universe. I'm calling it sort of the mirror image or the companion novel. So it's different characters, different plot line. And it's set in the Europe that never had overseas empires. So what, that's a big question I got as I was telling people about the idea and when I was writing the book and when people are reading as well, what does Europe look like? And so, well, we're going to find out. So it's a, it's more of a thriller. It's not a murder mystery.
00:25:11
Speaker
It starts in England, it starts in Suffolk, which is sort of on the east coast of England, and it takes us through to Bruges in what we know as Belgium, down to Frankfurt in what we know as Germany, to Strasbourg in what we know as France, and
00:25:30
Speaker
you know, other points from there. And it's, so first off, the borders are very different. One of the things I love about the Peacekeeper, and I'm so happy that my publisher agreed to do is that we have a map at the beginning that shows
00:25:44
Speaker
what the Americas look like from a new perspective. It is consistent with Anishinaabe tradition. The map is oriented toward the east, so it looks sideways from how we typically look at a map. It's not oriented toward the north. I'm a huge map nerd and geography nerd.
00:26:03
Speaker
One thing that blew my mind when I learned about this years and years ago is that there's no reason why maps have to be oriented toward north. That's done by custom more than anything else. So what I love about the map is it tells you just in one image, you're going to be looking at America from a new perspective. There are no borders. You just see the names of peoples, different tribes, different nations, but nations are not the same as states.
00:26:32
Speaker
You know, state is drawing a line around a piece of land, nations are people. You have the nations, you see it in a different language, and you can tell, okay, this is a different world, but it tells you almost 500 years of history in a single image, because nowhere in the book do we go into why
00:26:48
Speaker
America or how America avoided being colonized. Similarly, in The Mother, we have a map and it shows how the borders are different. That tells a story as well of how the world looks different and maybe give some hints as to how colonization could have been avoided. By the way, I think any theory on how, if you want to think about how did colonization not happen and what went wrong or what went not wrong,
00:27:18
Speaker
on what went wrong to have it happen in the real world, what went right to avoid it in the book. I think any theory is valid. And the reason I do is because I don't think it was just one thing. Any major disaster, a lot of things have to go wrong for something to happen. I think I've used this analogy before, but when I used to watch this show, I think it was on Discovery or something like that, it was called Seconds from Disaster. And it talks about how any major disaster like the Titanic, the Hindenburg,
00:27:47
Speaker
the challenger. It's never one thing that goes wrong. It's a chain of things that go wrong. And if one of those things doesn't go wrong, the whole disaster is avoided. You have to have all those things. And I don't think colonization, genocide, I don't think that's any
Historical Perspectives and Upcoming Work
00:28:01
Speaker
different. I think a lot of things had to go wrong for that to happen. A lot, you know, a lot, almost a perfect storm of terrible incidents and terrible people and terrible germs and all sorts of things. So
00:28:15
Speaker
If you're, so point being, if you look in the map, you'll see some things that might suggest, oh, here's how it was not avoided, or how it was avoided. But it's not the whole story. But the point is I want people thinking about it, because I bet if I asked 10 different people, I'd get 10 different answers, and I hope that I would.
00:28:35
Speaker
And that's the point. It was not inevitable. It did not have to go this way. It was not preordained. There was not a lack of will to fight. There was not a difference in natural ability or intelligence. It was truly like all major disasters. I think a lot of bad things came together to create one really horrible thing. So in The Mother, you do see that map in there that gives you an idea of
00:28:59
Speaker
how it got to this point. It's the story of a woman who's in a marriage in a very restrictive society in a very obscure nation called England, which if Britain doesn't have the British Empire, it's an island in the North Sea.
00:29:15
Speaker
That's cold and rainy. Cold and rainy and has a really weird language that makes no sense because it's basically three languages in a trench coat. And, you know, in this very restrictive society, how do you get out and where do you go and how do you escape? So that's kind of
00:29:37
Speaker
where we pick up. And the cover is sort of the opening image of the novel, which I love. I think it captures the mood really well. I lived in the UK for a year when I was in undergrad and went to all these cities over the course of my time there. So since I wrote this in a pandemic, I could not go visit it. So I drew on memories and pictures and talking to friends who went on
00:30:05
Speaker
those excursions with me and my awesome friend Toby, who was one of my flatmates in the UK, he's from Suffolk and he took some time to take me on the Zoom tour to make sure I got the ambiance right there and near is our mind, not his. And so yeah, that's kind of where we begin.
00:30:24
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Oh, gosh. Well, that's coming in May. And thanks for telling a bit about it and some of the pieces in there.
00:30:39
Speaker
I've been blessed to be able to go to London twice in my life. And the last time I went, this is just the way that I am. My guidebook was Weird London.
00:30:55
Speaker
so like it was geographically centered and if you know old bones were buried over here or if there's a haunting or there's a scandalous book so um so it was really fun and i was just kind of picking up on like thinking back and what was it like did that actually happen or what were the colors or and so i think it's uh
00:31:18
Speaker
An interesting piece is to be of the research at the best you can and go back and like did we actually see that and what did it look like and And have some folks there. I We're speaking with author BL Blanchard Brooke is Sue Saint
00:31:35
Speaker
Sault Ste. Marie, a member of Sault Ste. Marie of Chippewa. And I did not ask you, Brooke, about a related question to art, and I think you hinted at it. But a question I ask on the show is, myself and my guests think art is important, but what is the role of art
00:31:59
Speaker
And as of right now, is there anything different about the world or different about us where art's role has changed? I think that art can be sort of whatever. It's one thing for the person creating it, you know, that's often a way of someone to work through some sort of emotion or experience or idea that they have. And that's the expression of it.
00:32:23
Speaker
I think the role is different for the person who's consuming it. They are receiving something, maybe they are getting something out of it completely different from what the person who created it intended or was going for. Maybe you'll read into it deeper meetings than even the creator knew about.
00:32:39
Speaker
or you're getting something that they hoped someone would find. So I think that the role of it, it's going to depend on who you're talking to. Such a lawyer answer, right? It depends. But I think it's true. I didn't say anything. I read a lot.
00:33:01
Speaker
The last few years I've read between 60 and 90 books a year, the last few years. When I'm reading a book, sometimes I'm doing it to escape. Sometimes I'm doing it for research. Sometimes I think it's because it's a book about very important things written by someone with a very important perspective.
00:33:21
Speaker
Um, so I'm reading it for very important reasons. Um, sometimes it's, I'm having a bad day and I need to escape and I want a book about people who are happy and falling in love. Um, so what we seek it out for kind of reflects what we need, but that's, um, you know, that's its role I think is to give, uh, help us sort through things and help us,
00:33:44
Speaker
you know, whether it's escapism or, you know, you want to feel a certain way. I mean, how many of us listen to sad songs when we're already sad? You know, it helps us work through our emotions. And I think that's a big role of art and it's universal. Everyone feels these things. Everyone needs that sort of insight. And again, it helps us connect. You know, you can find communities based on art and a lot of people do. Maybe you are
00:34:11
Speaker
not alike in any other way, but you both love a creator's work or you both love a piece of art and you can discuss it and find connection through it. In terms of how has the role of art changed, I think it's a lot more, what is the word?
00:34:29
Speaker
mass produced a mass, you know, it's made from mass for wider audiences. And so you have more people consuming the same things. I think that's, I don't think that's a bad thing. I don't think that necessarily excludes other things, although it does make it harder for creators to break in. And it may, like I said, I guess I shouldn't say that there isn't anything bad to it, but it's good and bad, right? On the one hand, there's, you know, these pieces of art that millions of people
00:34:59
Speaker
um, can consume and bond over and talk about, it does mean that you get more of a flattening of, of things that it is harder for other perspectives and other and smaller creators to get out there. So the audience is a little less fragmented. Um, so, you know, I think, but I think its role is always going to be the same where we seek it out for various reasons and we're all going to get something different out of it. And,
00:35:26
Speaker
you know, ultimately, I think what we want is some sort of connection, whether it's with ourselves, whether it's with the person creating it, you feel connection with that person, or you feel connection with other people who are consuming it as well.
00:35:37
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. The power of the connection within it is the big draw for me. Like I'm always organizing people and organizing thought and for myself and understanding. So it has that massive power. And I want to I want to just you were talking about just reading and sometimes it's good to just pause right there because I found myself
00:36:03
Speaker
getting a lot more benefits with just setting the time to read. And it's the balance and the cadence in my head and the movement, whatever that type of movement is, because I just harkened back when I was much younger. I had a very intensive reading period of a few months where I was definitely reading like 300 plus pages a day. And it's like every single day.
00:36:26
Speaker
And I was young, but I was smart enough to know at the end that was different. I was just different. I was a different human after it than I was before it. And if you have that experience, just the experience of reading and reading deeply, that's
00:36:44
Speaker
love to talk about books. That's why I love it. It's great to talk to you. I can recognize the importance of particular books and what they're doing for you. When I was 11, I didn't know when I was 11, sitting in back of the Toyota Corolla hatchback, my parents on a short trip reading War of the Worlds, why I needed it. Why War of the Worlds was important to me as a city kid, but it was
00:37:13
Speaker
I like this place. And that can be fun. Yeah. Yeah, I remember, you know, I was obsessed with Babysitter's Club books starting when I was about eight until I was about 10 or 11. I think I read all of them all 100 something multiple times. My favorite one, like I read it so many times the cover fell off.
00:37:34
Speaker
And what's interesting is when I went to the UK, so my favorite, if anyone is listening and liked babysitter's club books, my favorite was a one called Stacy's emergency. And it's a, she's a character who has type one diabetes, and she's hospitalized in that book because it acts up. So, okay, I read that in the mid 90s, early to mid 90s.
00:37:56
Speaker
Years later, when I just turned 20 years old, I moved to the UK to be an exchange student. And my flat had other exchange students from all over the world. And right across the hall was my friend Soojin Kim, who was from Korea. And she and I, we both loved the Babysitter's Club books. That was our favorite book. We had the same favorite. And we both quoted the same favorite line from it. Two people who grew up on opposite sides of the world read the same book separately.
00:38:20
Speaker
And they found themselves in a foreign country together and immediately we were like, oh, we both read this book and loved it and we quoted the exact same line to each other. I think that's what's so cool about books. That is just incredible.
00:38:38
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, the way was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Like as soon as we, one of us said, well, Stacy's emergency is my favorite. And the other one said, I was sick and tired. And the other one finished up being sick and tired. It was so cool writing, writing dialogue right off the right off the bat with it. I don't know if he came in contact with it, but it was it was some
00:38:59
Speaker
I think it was Roxanne Gay and I forget if it was like Sweet Valley High, she went deep into this, deep into the meaning, deep into like I'm putting out all these theories, like I am up and proud about this, this is so important to me and just that experience and I think
00:39:19
Speaker
I think that that declaration is always good because it connects you. Because if something's important to you, I think a lot of times people go along and they're like, oh, that wasn't really that important to me. No, it was important to you. It still is important to you. Okay. Leading from there and jumping on over to the big question that I ask on the show.
00:39:47
Speaker
Brooke, why is there something rather than nothing? Oh, boy. I guess if you think about it in terms of art, if we don't have it, we're just surviving, right? We're going through the motions, we're living. I think our connections are less connected, our experiences less vibrant when we're not creating art. I mean, that is what we create. That's what survives. I mean, we see cave paintings from
00:40:17
Speaker
40,000 years ago and we see pottery and we see all sorts. It's the art that survives. Maybe some weapons, maybe some foundations of buildings, maybe some remnants of things, but really what gives us the insight is the art. It's the writing, it's the painting, it's the pottery, it's what survives that tells us so much about ourselves. I think that makes us something.
00:40:48
Speaker
Because otherwise, what are we doing? And you don't have to be a creator yourself. I spent years and years writing stories or starting stories that no one but me ever will read. That was still valuable to me. It made me something. I still will journal if I'm going through something. I've taught my kids to do that too if they have
00:41:11
Speaker
a lot of feelings to work out. I say, well, write down what you're feeling. For me, it's writing. That's the form of art that I've always connected to the most. I've been driven to create and reading other people's words. We have all these things going on in our heads. We have all these thoughts, these feelings. This is the safe way to channel it into
00:41:39
Speaker
into something that creates it. It doesn't have to be good or bad. That's not the point. What matters is we've created it. It is the expression of a feeling and it's taking the intangible and making it tangible. We're literally making something out of it. And, you know, we are still something, even if we haven't done it, but that helps, helps us see it and experience it and understand it. Yeah. Thank you. Um, you know, maybe putting the pen to, putting the pen to paper and
00:42:08
Speaker
And having it having to go out that way. Um, no, I really appreciate your thoughts there. I want the audience to be able to connect with the
00:42:20
Speaker
literary works and art of B.L. Blanchard. Brooke, can you tell us where to go? So folks and listeners, if you're in Albany, Oregon, browser's bookstore, making sure they order them. But if you're not located in this area, Brooke, where do we find you?
00:42:41
Speaker
Well, the books are available everywhere. Books are sold. Your library, bookstores, online, what have you. I'm on, I'm moving away from Twitter like everyone else, but I'm at BL Blanchard on Twitter and I'm on Instagram at BL Blanchard underscore rights. And I have a website BLBlanchard.com that links to all of the above and hopefully you'll reach out and say hi.
00:43:08
Speaker
Oh, that's wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much. And it's nice to talk at this time too with the work you have coming out and just in hearing about it and thank you for sharing, you know, yourself and your thoughts and back behind it.
00:43:29
Speaker
There's something special about talking about books, and I think you feel the power of them and the connection to them. And just for us to have the ability to chat about this, which I deeply enjoy and highly, highly recommend. So looking forward to the next one. But thanks for coming on to the show and talking about your writing, and really encourage everybody to check out BL Blanchard's work.
00:43:59
Speaker
Thanks again, Brooke. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. This was, this was wonderful. Take care. This is something rather than nothing.