A.S. King

A.S. King:
This is the thing I think people don't get about childhood trauma. At 16, you're still normalizing it. You're trying to do the stuff you're supposed to be doing at 16, learning how to drive, maybe have a boyfriend, maybe you have a girlfriend, graduate high school, whatever the heck it is, right? That's what you're supposed to be doing.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Life doesn't always make sense. In fact, it rarely ever does. We all tend to figure that out pretty quickly as we enter adulthood. But for teenagers, that overwhelming confusion and bitterness, and passion and angst is all fresh unexplored territory, and that's even more exacerbated when dealing with trauma. A.S King has taken it as her personal mission to validate those feelings.

A.S. King:
So, I see my job as trying to soothe the trauma that teenagers don't know they have yet, because everybody's so busy telling them that they don't.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
A.S., who goes by Amy, is a prolific and one-of-a-kind writer best known for Dig, Ask the Passengers, Please Ignore Vera Dietz, and her most recent Printz-winning book, The Collectors. She's also written a lot of books that she isn't known for.

A.S. King:
Yeah, I have nine unpublished books in my attic. Yeah, I don't want you to read them. If they ever get published, I'm going to haunt that person.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
For the work she has published, Amy has earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Edgar Award, and the Printz honor, twice. Her works often blend surreal elements with raw emotional depth, offering readers a unique perspective on the human experience. In this episode, Amy calls out adults for pointless teen shaming, explains why surrealism makes perfect sense to young readers, and walks us through her advocacy for LGBTQ+ youth through Gracie's House, a nonprofit named for her late daughter. She also tells us about how her tattoo of cheese led her to a revelation about humaneness.

My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and illustrators about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more. Make sure to check us out on Instagram for giveaways @thereadingculturepod, and also subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. All right, on to the show.

First of all, is that Kurt Vonnegut behind you, and Spock?

A.S. King:
Yeah, actually it's my holy trinity actually, that set, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Vonnegut.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay, amazing.

A.S. King:
You'd usually see them all on the full screen, but yeah.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Those are life-size cutouts?

A.S. King:
Actually, yes. Spock is a tall drink of water. He's about 6'2". When I first got him, there was a moment where I was setting him up and I had to hold him around the waist, and I was like, this is feeling kind of-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It's very intimate.

A.S. King:
I haven't had human touch in a while, and this cardboard cutout may be just what I needed, Jordan. I had him on this side of the room for a while, but now I moved him over there so when I leave, I can Vulcan high-five him on the way out every day.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Amazing. Yes.

A.S. King:
I'm done writing, I give him ... Even when I just go down for tea refills, I high-five him. And Kurt actually should be taller, but his legs are bent. He's homemade. He was a gift from a local English teacher when she retired.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Really?

A.S. King:
I used to go and talk in her classroom every year, and she did say to me like, "You're going to get him when I retire." And I thought, "She's not going to give." And then, she did.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow. Okay. You were born in Reading?

A.S. King:
Mm-hmm. Reading, Pennsylvania.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Mispronounced as reading all the time.

A.S. King:
All the time.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Which makes sense for you too. So, let's talk a little bit about your ... You have a love for Pennsylvania.

A.S. King:
I do. I grew up in the middle of a cornfield, I don't know how many miles outside of Reading, the city, but back then you didn't have to be that many miles outside the city to grow up in the middle of a cornfield. Now it's all just a big box store where I grew up. But I lived about a quarter mile walk to the Schuylkill River-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow.

A.S. King:
... which is the river that goes down to Philadelphia. And we had a garden. We were told to go outside and not come back until it was dark. I was a barefoot kid who walked to my only friend's house across the road. And I was so lucky, without her I would've had no local friends.

I wasn't an only child, but I was the youngest and the gap was big enough that I had, I think, I don't know, a different upbringing than my sisters. I was a loner in a lot of ways. When I was a little kid, I used to go into my ... Because there was a gap, I had my own room. Right? So, I would go into my own room and I would close the door and lock the door, and then I would go into my closet and I would close that door, and then I would read books and I would write stuff.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It was a household where there was a lot of reading happening. Are you going to the library or how did you discover that you liked to read?

A.S. King:
I think I discovered it early on because of my elementary school librarian. She was incredible. She still comes to my book launches. That's why I make sure I have an extra book launch over at the library where I grew up, that wasn't there when I grew up, if that makes sense? There were books in the house. My parents to this day read the paper every day. And so, critical thinking was actually one of those things that my mother had a great thing. She would be reading the paper and she'd say, "Hey, Amy." It didn't matter how old I was, Jordan, it could have been five and I could have been 15, it could have been 25. "Hey, Amy, come here, read this article." And I'd say, "Okay." She'd let me read it. And then she'd say, magic words, critical thinking, magic words, "What do you think about that?" She'd say, "What do you think about that?" She didn't sit there and tell me how to think. She never once taught me how to think. She just asked me what I thought.

And I look back now and I think, wow, there's sometimes I answered in a way that she wouldn't have agreed with and she didn't say a word. She just watched me grow.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
She didn't debate you?

A.S. King:
Yeah, she watched me grow.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You said you were a loner. Did you feel that way at school too? I think you talk a lot about weirdness or embracing that. Did you feel different, so to speak, at a young age?

A.S. King:
Yeah. Jordan, I'll put it this way because, and this is why I'm not this open book like I would be about so many other things. I had early childhood trauma. I had trauma, and so because of that, I always felt weird. It's one of the reasons why I say that weirdness has emotional currency for young people when you write it into books.

So, the reason I write the books that I do are because I believe weirdness can pull out the same elements that we feel as people who carry PTSD, complex PTSD, and who have experienced shock at young ages, which of course, for me, when I think back to myself, I always felt weird, but no one really knew. And that's the trick of trauma. The trick of normalized trauma is to walk around and be like, "I can do this. I can put a ball on a hoop. I can earn trophies and be a basketball player, and be kind of popular and have friends, or not popular," whatever I was. But it doesn't really matter because in a way, there's an echo to everything. There's an echo because you don't have childhood memories like normal people. You'll have childhood memories of things ... They're just different. Everything's different.

I couldn't describe it until I was in my 40s and 50s to sort of explain that it's like I kind of live in a weird chamber. It's safe, it's nice, it's fine, it's no big deal, but in my head, so it's like when life is happening, there's a delay for me. So, I wasn't a loner, but I'm always going to be a loner because I'm alone in that, that I carry around. But then also, I was sent to therapy when I was 15 because something traumatic that everybody knew happened, something happened with my mom's health, and it was actually, she died in front of me and then was violently resuscitated in front of me. One of the funniest ... I love your eyes, right? When I just said that.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What?

A.S. King:
No, check it out. She's still alive. My mother is 85 years old.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I know. I just heard you. You were just referencing them.

A.S. King:
She's amazing.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I know she writes surreal, but what's going on?

A.S. King:
Life is surreal though. I was 15, I was there with my dad. It was a Saturday morning after basketball practice, and my mother just died right in front of us, and we thought she'd gone to sleep finally. She'd been up all night in the ER because we couldn't find her a bed and stuff. And she had a pretty challenging, still has a pretty challenging illness, but we didn't realize that she had died. And then, someone came in and tried to wake her up.

And what's hilarious is that I was in therapy recently for about a year, and I said, "Oh, yeah, well, that was the year that my mother died in front of me." And she goes, "Wait, what? Can we just list all this stuff?"

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's how therapy is though. All of a sudden you're like, "Oh, I didn't mention that?"

A.S. King:
Right.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
"Sorry." They're like, "What?"

A.S. King:
Yeah. But after that, they did send me to a therapist, but of course I never told him about ... By that time I was only 16. And this is the thing I think people don't get about childhood trauma. At 16, you're still normalizing it. You're trying to do the stuff you're supposed to be doing at 16, learning how to drive, maybe have a boyfriend, maybe have a girlfriend, graduate high school, whatever the heck it is, right? That's what you're supposed to be doing. But I look back now and I'm like, this is why I write the way I do. It was a lifeline. Being weird was an absolute lifeline.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Weirdness is a lifeline. That's basically Amy's manifesto in four words. And as you'll hear her explain throughout this episode, celebrating weirdness creates safe spaces. It provides a means to navigate complex emotions. And most importantly for teenagers, it validates that feeling of otherness. It offers permission and acceptance for their confusing thoughts and emotions that adults so often dismiss.

A.S. King:
Four-year-old Amy was absolutely aware that her feelings mattered. This is early, early childhood, right? And I was aware that my feelings mattered. And I have notes that I used to write to my parents from my closet, but not from me, from Lester, this elf that lived in my room, who knew my feelings, he was awesome.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Of course.

A.S. King:
So, Lester would write to Mr. and Mrs. Sarig, and he would tell them how Amy felt. And some of the things he would say were from the mind of an eight or a 10-year-old, "Her finger hurts. Hey, listen to her, because her finger hurts." That's a real eight-year-old, 10-year-old thing to say. But then there were other things that were incredibly mature, like, "I believe that so-and-so is ruining the bond between us." What?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What?

A.S. King:
What eight-year-old says that? But that eight-year-old who knew that so-and-so was a problem. And so, it's interesting. You look at that and you're like, wow, human beings are so awesome.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yes.

A.S. King:
But I did know that feelings were incredibly important. And as I go through and I think about teen years and I look at how people treat teenagers, this is why I'm a fierce advocate for teenagers, because once a kid hits an age with the number one, we are rolling our eyes at them and we are telling them their feelings don't matter, and we're telling them they're small, we're telling them they smell. We're telling them their taste in music is stupid. We're telling them that we had their hairstyle once. We're telling them, "I can't believe that shirt is in again." We're telling them all these things that are so superior and so demoralizing, and I'm done with it. I'm so done.

If I could do anything, if anyone gave me a million bucks, I would go on a campaign to stop bullying teenagers. I'm tired of it. And now that I've been doing the research I've been doing, when you really look at the mental health crisis, especially not just since the pandemic, to be honest, since long before it, but especially since the pandemic, when you're really looking at the mental health crisis in our teen population, there are 40 million people in this country who are struggling every single day, and that's our teenagers.

Every time somebody on Facebook complains about what their eight-year-old did that day, and someone says, "Well, just wait until they're teenagers." I just want to reach through the screen and punch them, like, stop it. Yes, little people, little problems, bigger people, bigger problems. Let's be compassionate. Let's have that. Let's model it for them and for our friends, because everyone makes fun of teenagers, and I'm so done with it. And I don't know, I think I slipped through pretty carefree. I mean, thank God for basketball and thank God for journals. Thank God for my 10th grade English teacher who made us journal. And I was like, "Oh, this is so stupid." And I'm like, oh my God.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Saved your life.

A.S. King:
Thank God for Vicki Steinberg and that fricking journal, man.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yes, thank you, Vicki Steinberg. And did you write also beyond the journaling, though? Because I think you came to writing later in life, right? So, I guess, I'm curious if the evidence of what was to come was there back then?

A.S. King:
No, the vision was there. Eighth grade, I was in the lunch line right outside ... There's a place in my middle school where I've signed the wall. I call it the dream spot. I had just read this book probably for the 9000th time. I'm holding up Paul Zindel's Confession of a Teenage Baboon. I stole one from the Exeter Junior High School library in 1983. Still have it. I stole all the Paul Zindel books. I still have all of them. I've lectured on them, and I've taken them around the world on a little journey as I moved.

But I wanted to write books that helped adults understand teenagers and teenagers understand adults. I wrote [inaudible 00:12:18] at age 14, and then everybody said, "Your grades are too bad for you to be a writer." And I said, "Oh, okay." And then I went to college to be a forest ranger, and then I got kicked out of college, actually for something I didn't do. So, that's actually true. I got kicked off campus for something I didn't do at all, and then I moved to Ireland. Once I moved to Ireland, I had to start writing because it was challenging. I went from one traumatic experience in my childhood to another traumatic experience.

And so, once I got there, I was far more isolated than I was when I was here. So, it wasn't just a matter of locking myself in bathrooms. It was a matter of how do I stay safe? And then in the end, it was just about escaping in my brain and being able to stay safe that way, until I could finally-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In Ireland?

A.S. King:
Yeah. I just kept trying to navigate something that was really not navigatable. I navigated the un-navigatable for 29 years. And then finally, really, my life's so different now. It's wonderful. I finally don't have day-to-day trauma.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
When you were in Ireland, you were writing, writing, writing, but you wrote, wrote, wrote, but they didn't become books or they were books that were not published or what was happening?

A.S. King:
Yeah. Yeah. The first seven were unpublished. I started writing when I was-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Seven?

A.S. King:
Yeah, I have nine unpublished books in my attic. I don't want you to read them. If they ever get published, I'm going to haunt that person. They're terrible. I didn't go to school for writing. I mean, not like I think that matters. Just like anything else, I had to miss the hoop a lot before I put the ball in it.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay. That's a lot of perseverance though.

A.S. King:
Yeah. I didn't get published until I was 40, so it was 15 years, 500 rejection letters. I have a good few of those still. That was back when they used to send them.

The senator cursed, "Why did you say that, Father?" It was a tender question.

The senator cursed again. "I just wish there didn't have to be this acrimony, this tension every time we talk. I love you so."

There was more cursing made harsher by the fact that the senator was close to tears. "Why would you swear when I say I love you, Father?"

And the father turns around and he says, "You're the man who stands on a street corner with a roll of toilet paper and written on each square are the words, 'I love you.' And each passerby, no matter who, gets a square all his or her own. I don't want my square of toilet paper."

And Elliott says, "I didn't realize it was toilet paper."

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Kurt Vonnegut's books are teeming with aliens, time travel, religions based on touching feet, futuristic visions of the human race with fur and webbed toes, and that's just the beginning. Known for writing strange and imaginative stories, Vonnegut is often labeled a science fiction writer, a title he reluctantly accepted. Instead, he loved to describe himself as first and foremost, a humanist.

Vonnegut's works show us that the most direct way to the honest human experience is through being weird. The most famous example is his exploration of trauma and PTSD in Slaughterhouse-Five. But the passage Amy just read us is not that book. It's from the 1965 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a story of a reluctant heir to generational wealth who drowns his guilt through perfunctory giving, alcohol, and an obsession with volunteer firefighters. The scene she read from is a conversation between said reluctant heir and his wealthy father.

A.S. King:
I just think it's one of the most cutting scenes. It's just so perfect.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
It is perfect.

A.S. King:
A son and his father, right? And the fact that there's this son loving his father and his father doesn't understand love because all he understands is money. Oh, welcome to my whole view of the world.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow.

A.S. King:
Kurt Vonnegut is a huge, huge influence. And that humanism, I think comes from trauma. Again, it comes from trauma. What he experienced in the war changed him for his whole life. Did you know he was a ... Well, I mean, everybody knows he's a pacifist, but he was a very vocal pacifist until ... His mother actually passed away four months before he decided to enlist for the Second World War. But up until then, he was 100% like, "I'm a pacifist. I'm not doing this. I don't do this." And then he ended up-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I did not know that.

A.S. King:
... in the bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war. I mean, unbelievable, right? But my first book that I read of his was probably, it was either Slaughterhouse-Five or Breakfast of Champions, because I got them both for Christmas. And I don't know which one I read first, but I read them both and went, "Oh, boy." And then for about two years, just sought out every single book of his and read them often twice. And God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, is my favorite book of all time. Not as weird as the others. Actually, interestingly enough, it's inspiring the Printz acceptance speech that I'm still in the middle of writing.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
How so?

A.S. King:
How so? Because I was at the deli the other day ... All right, you asked. I'm going to tell you. I'm at the deli, right? And I'm waiting for the woman to wait on me. And the man before me is getting some cheese and she throws it on the scale and she says, "It's a bit over. Do you mind?" And because I am who I am, I go, "Who?" I said, "I don't know about you, but there's no such thing as too much cheese." Now you don't know this, but I have a cheese tattoo on the back of my right calf. It's actually a piece of cheese and it's inside a heart and it says help on the side of it. My late daughter drew it, and it's just perfect. It's perfect, because that's how I feel about cheese, and it's also how she felt about cheese.

And so, he says, "Yeah, I know, right?" And then he said something like, "So, you like cheese?" And I was like, "Yeah." And then, I showed him my tattoo because I was in a pair of shorts, and I said, "Yeah, see, I have cheese here on my arm." And then he was looking around, and it was an invitation for him to comment on my other tattoos. He said something about this tattoo here on my left arm. He said, "Well, what's that one?" And I said, "Oh, well, that's Kurt Vonnegut's self-portrait." And he said, "Who?" And I said, "Kurt Vonnegut." And this is like a 75-year-old man.

So, I just want to say to the readers listening, we live in a small bubble in which we know who Kurt Vonnegut is. I'm going to start right there. It's sad. I don't want to think about it. I try not to think about it on it most days. Anyway, I told him about Kurt Vonnegut because he was interested. And then I told him to read Slaughterhouse-Five. I asked him, does he know a lot about the Second World War? Because he had that look like he'd been through his World War II phase definitely, because he was a white dude, 75, come on.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's the target. Yeah.

A.S. King:
Right. And so, I told him Slaughterhouse-Five. And then before he walked away, I had the audacity to give him a content warning. I said, "Oh, just to let you know, that's a little weird." Because he looked so normal. I mean, dude, I live in a Christian conservative town. This place is white nationalists and fascists and it's bonkers. I can't believe I live here. But I was like, oh, they don't handle weirdness well. So, I said, "It's really weird." And so, I connected then, I realized that what I was really doing was warning him about humaneness. And then, I thought, oh my God, that's a great reflection of the world we live in right now, and then it became a speech.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Throughout Amy's life, books have been a consistent source of validation. Reading authors like Vonnegut and Paul Zindel taught her that it's okay to be weird because their stories are weird too, and so is life. Embracing it became a way to make sense of it all. And she wants teens to feel the same way she does.

A.S. King:
I see myself ... Look, I just write. If you think about how I started writing, I'm writing my way out of my own trauma. I'm writing to survive. So, when you're writing to survive, you are making metaphors out of ... And you're knitting them. You're weaving them into someone else's life, or you're weaving other people into the story. I don't know how to explain it, but in every one of my books, there's at least one realistic scene or even storyline.

I see my job as validating teenagers, which is the opposite of what we talked about in the beginning, which is bullying. I always say to them, when I go in, I'm like, "How many of you own a cellphone?" And then, they all raise their hands in a high school. Actually, almost all of them in a middle school, and a lot of them in upper elementary school also raise their hands. And then I say, "How many of you have TikTok or social media?" And then, they also raise their hands. And I said, "I don't know what Instagram was concerned about for you today, but it is incredibly concerned with my neck wrinkles." And they laugh, right?

And then we get into a conversation of, "But hold on, it's not funny. What were they concerned about?" And then they tell me what Instagram makes them feel like crap about. And it's easy with teenagers because, A, they don't have full armor on yet. If they do, it's their early armor. It's almost like baby teeth, right? Baby armor.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

A.S. King:
Okay. So, think of it this way, in this day and age, now we have teenagers who can't talk about their trauma because their own adults won't be able to handle it. Let's think about this for a second. Right? We've got adults trying to ban books about real experience, real life experience that teenagers are going through right now, saying, "Oh, teens shouldn't read about this." But the teens have already gone through it.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right.

A.S. King:
I've worked with survivors of a great many things. I'm a volunteer. I'm a lifelong volunteer. I've worked with survivors of every kind of pretty much nasty thing you can think of, everything. And most of it happened to them before they were 18 years old. And so, the idea that we're taking books away because we don't want kids reading about things that are nasty, it doesn't make any sense. In fact, they're experiencing things that adults won't even recognize.

So, let's talk about the studies that have been done about the trauma that comes from just school intruder drills. Let's talk about those studies. They've done studies finally. When I wrote I Crawl Through It, they hadn't done studies yet. So, I was trying to write a book that was going to soothe the souls of teenagers that I knew were being traumatized because they were being forced into closets and all of these things. But I knew something was coming from that because you know why? Because I had two kids and I watched the things that they said after they had a drill.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Mine remember very clearly that first one, especially, the man in the black sweatshirt.

A.S. King:
Wow. See?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Mm-hmm.

A.S. King:
So, my job is to somehow give them an outlet, "Somebody sees me. Oh my gosh." That outlet, that's that weird feeling. So this way, it doesn't really matter. It's not about what race, what gender, what sexuality. It doesn't matter. None of that. I don't care how old you are. I don't care how short your pants are. I don't care how rich or poor your parents are. I don't care where you live. Every single kid is experiencing this. So, I want them to go, "Oh, shit, there's an invisible helicopter, and that somebody can only see it on a Tuesday. Somehow I relate to this. Somehow I relate to China who turns herself inside out." Or, this, or this desperation, because adults aren't listening and they don't seem to care, and their votes are presently so black and white that we can't seem to solve a single problem.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah.

A.S. King:
And while this is happening and the children are actually suffering, we are taking away books, which is akin to removing all the fire extinguishers before you blow the place up.

But for me, I'm on that deeper level, which is, "Stay kids. I know that your life is completely messed up and all these adults are arguing over ridiculous crap that has nothing to do with you. Read this book. See if it can make you feel validated." I often hold up that Zindel book, Jordan, and I say, "This book made me see myself." And yet, there's only one teenager in it and he's a boy, and he and I had nothing in common. The reason this book helped me see myself was that most of the adults in it are drunk white adults. And then I say it and people think, "Oh, you must've been surrounded by drunk white adults." No, we're all surrounded by drunk white adults. Have you seen the Super Bowl commercials? They're all for beer. Everybody's drunk all the time, and everybody's supposed to be happy and drunk.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah.

A.S. King:
So, I see my job as trying to soothe the trauma that teenagers don't know they have yet, because everybody's so busy telling them that they don't.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Trauma is something Amy has become all too familiar with throughout her life. But her mission to validate teens' experiences and their trauma is inspired by more than just her own struggles at that age. She also lost her daughter to these struggles. And now in honor of Gracie, Amy's advocacy extends far beyond her writing.

A.S. King:
I lost my daughter Gracie five-and-a-half years ago. She died by suicide. She was 16 years old. Inside my copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, I have a note from her that she drew the bomb from the front of it, and she said, "I stayed up until 3:00 A.M. but it was worth it." So, obviously she got to read Slaughterhouse-Five before she died. She struggled a long time. She silently struggled in some ways. The depth, I think, of her pain were not as known to us until closer to the end, I'll say.

But she was the most unconditional lover you've ever met in your life. She was so buoyant, and her energy was so incredible. Her loss was devastating, as it would be. And long before she died, I was going to schools that had had losses by suicide or had had active shooters, things like this, and talking to teenagers about their trauma. It was weird because when she died, then I looked at my superintendent and said, "I would usually be coming into your school, but I can't, because I don't know what to do with myself." That's the first thing I felt like doing, but I couldn't do that.

It's been a terribly hard journey. One of the most amazing things I've learned, especially now as a suicide educator, is that most people are very ignorant about suicide. Most people say incredibly wrong things about suicide, whether it's weakness or selfishness or all those strange things that people talk about. The idea of finding fault, the idea of wondering who was the bullier, who was at fault? Getting the scoop. Trying to figure out, ooh, why? Why, why, why? And in actual fact, the answers are right there in front of us, they're the things that we're avoiding every day and things that we've been talking about for the rest of this conversation.

But also, it's just the fact that there's illness. There's an illness. You're given a course of treatment, much like cancer, any other long-term illness, and you follow the course of treatment and sometimes you don't survive. It's how it goes. It's puzzling, really. What's been amazing is working in a group like that is finding an incredible group of people who have been through the same kind of judgment. And gosh, that kind of blender, I don't even know what to call that, I'll call it the blender, that kind of blender. It's a loss like no other. It's a complicated loss immediately. And then, there's secondary and tertiary losses that are forever. My daughter died at the school, so I drive my son to that school every day, and I have to be in that room.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
He goes to the same school?

A.S. King:
Yeah. And we're in rural.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, this is it.

A.S. King:
You go where you go. Right?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Gotcha.

A.S. King:
And I remember in the beginning, I mean, I couldn't drive by the school without blowing kisses to it or doing something. And now I'm just there all the time and it's just ... He's got one more year in there. It's interesting, the grace and the mercy that you learn. It's interesting, the capacity for joy that you have when you have great tragedy. It's hard to explain, but it's something we talk about, especially when we talk about child loss. But you don't wish it not even on your worst enemy. You wouldn't wish it on them. It's a terrible, terrible thing.

Five years later, Jackson, my son, and I, who's 16 now, we decided to start Gracie's House, which is a nonprofit that is all about safe spaces. It's safe spaces for queer kids in rural communities. It's that simple. We're going to start a camp at Gracie's, and his, and my favorite camp, it's an award-winning camp here in Pennsylvania, for non-binary, trans, and queer kids. And it's just a safe place to just go and have fun. It's not like we're going to do strange gay things. We're just going to do things like cannonballs off the diving board and maybe make some stuff out of popsicle sticks and learn some songs on the ukulele.

But then also in communities as well, and be able to foster safe spaces in communities and support them with grants and things like that. Because especially now as our country is making people illegal again-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Again.

A.S. King:
... because of distractions, it's all for distraction, political distraction really, and due to propaganda and miseducation. It's really time to protect the most vulnerable. It's the usual, you protect the most vulnerable. That's what you're supposed to do. So, protect trans kids. That's where I'm at, and that's what Gracie really stood for when she was here. Her love and her support for her queer friends was enormous. She was part of the community as well.

And so, that's what we've decided to do with our love, is spread it and make it bigger and grow it. So, if anybody's interested in donating to Gracie's House, you can find us on the internet and you can just look at my Instagram feed. You'll find us. Don't worry.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I'm so moved, I think, because you said it's been five-and-a-half years, you're this person who has ... Who knows how many lives your books have saved, honestly. And then, you're managing your own grief and you're still able to go further than just writing and to actually create something for her. Like that forward action, I think, is just, as a mom, it feels unimaginable. It is unimaginable. But that idea of doing.

A.S. King:
Yeah. Doing. And honestly, when I think about what she struggled with and how at times, how nearly paralyzed she was by it. And then, thinking about, it's almost like she's gone but it gave her more hands because all of our hands are her hands now. We can do the work that she would have done, if that makes sense? And part of that is education. Part of that is her own critical thinking. Me saying to her, "What do you think about that?" Right?

If I could teach people to be as loving as she was, but then I see the world and there's a lot of people who aren't willing to be loving. And they would say, "Oh, safe spaces are for losers." Yeah, okay, that's it. And somebody's like, "Well, are you going to do stuff and work in suicide prevention?" I'm like, "No. I already work in suicide prevention over here. I write books for kids and I work with kids."

I actually just talked to someone recently, she was talking about how librarians call pretty much most young adult books, there's not any specific set of them, like I said, you never know the book, you don't know what it is, right? But they call them suicide prevention books, and that's a heck of a shorthand.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow. Shit.

A.S. King:
It's a shorthand thing. But when you really think about the books that they're targeting and the fact that they're targeting young adult books and they're trying to get the young adult books into the adult section and get them away from the young adults, it's like hiding the fire extinguishers right before you're about to set the place alight.

As a suicide educator and as someone who knows about it and has read about it and understands it to a point, and then works with lots of different people who've experienced it. You get into that place of like ... People are like, "Well, if that happens here again." And I just go, "When." It's like, look, you're not going to stop it. I do a lot of work in prevention and all the prevention people, we talk to each other. We all know we can't prevent suicide until we drop the stigma. And you can't drop the stigma until you're willing to educate yourself, and you can't do that until you're willing to change your mind. Find me somebody who's willing to change their mind in this day and age.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Oh my God.

A.S. King:
Everybody's incredibly static. And then they've got Gracie, who to me is now in a form that is the opposite of static. She is in every molecule. She is here. She's with you right now. She's with me right now. She's in our hearts. She's the heart surgeon. She's the whole thing.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
One of my favorite quotes from authors we've interviewed on this show comes from Yuyi Morales. She said this.

Yuyi Morales:
I remember coming to United States and hearing people mention the writing of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez as magical realism. I remember thinking, I never saw it as magic, I always saw it as realism. For me, the way that he was writing was the real life.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Throughout our conversation, I kept thinking about Amy's relationship to surrealism and how it felt similar to Yuyi's relationship to magical realism. And this is what Amy said when I shared that sentiment.

A.S. King:
That's really fair. It's like Frida Kahlo. Frida Kahlo said that, "They call me a surrealist. This is how I see the world." So, when I saw that quote, I was like, that makes a lot of sense to me. Again, I go back to the first thing we talked about. When you have technically, complex PTSD or PTSD from when you were a kid, you really do see the world through a totally different way, and everybody does. You really have to think about how many people walk around with trauma from their childhood, and we all have interesting ways to see the world. For me, I went with surrealism because honestly, when I look back at Breton's manifesto, and I looked at it and I went, "Oh, I write like that." I've written every book ... I've written like 30 books-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Not because of the manifesto, huh? You just-

A.S. King:
Not because of it. Afterwards, I was like, oh, that's what I do. I actually have it right here.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So, your mind is sort of working in the way of your books, I gather-

A.S. King:
So much.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
... there's a lot happening and it's coming from a lot of these shards in a way.

A.S. King:
Yeah. Fragments of things. And when I think about what I write, yeah, I mean, I would call ... Two of the books are full-on surrealist books. Yeah. Switch is a surrealist book, and I Crawl Through It is a surrealist book. But then that touch of surrealism fits in other spaces. Pick the Lock is no different. I mean, it's a book about a pneumatic tube system that shuttles her mother around.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Of course.

A.S. King:
It's human-sized.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Amy Sarig King is a busy person, between her Ph.D., her heavy school visit schedule, and writing over 30 books, though we may never see most of them, she's got a lot going on. Here's just a few of the items on the top of her agenda right now.

A.S. King:
Here, I have one right here. I'm just showing it to you there. There it's on the wall.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, yes.

A.S. King:
Yeah, that's my next middle grade. I don't usually plan, but middle grades, I do plan a little bit.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, really? Yeah. I was going to say. Yeah, you-

A.S. King:
So excited. I get to talk about, it's a prequel to Me and Marvin Gardens.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, really? Oh, that's cool. That's exciting.

A.S. King:
Yeah, I've never done a sequel-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And then, Pick the Lock is also coming out?

A.S. King:
Pick the Lock's coming out this year in the 24th of September.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, soon. Okay.

A.S. King:
Yeah, very soon. Yeah. And then, I'll start writing that other one once I finish my dissertation.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my God. You better get that high-fived.

A.S. King:
Yeah. Yeah. Spock will high-five me today.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Get that Spock energy.

A.S. King:
It's cool, man. Today is strategic goal day and then a little therapy, and then I go and I meet some strangers in the nonprofit community. But this is how I like living my life. It's a little bit like fragments again. I burned out on the dissertation a week ago, because I'd worked on it nonstop for like six weeks.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You needed a break.

A.S. King:
I'm just like, I'm out. I'm going to do nonprofit stuff for two weeks and then go to ALA, pick up that Printz Award, which I get to do in person. Last time I had to pick it up through a box in my kitchen because it was a pandemic, right? But it's interesting. I was there the other week and I was on my own. I was hanging out, I was talking to Gracie, I do that sometimes, and I was just talking to her and I was like, "Dude, you weren't here for me winning either of the Printz Golds. You weren't here for the Edwards Award. You weren't here for this. There was all these awards." And then it made me stop, and I like to think she made me stop because I don't do it for myself. And I'm a single mom, I'm here on my own, and my son's great, he'll talk me up, but I don't really talk myself up. But it was like, "Mom, yeah, you did, actually. You did just win two Printz Awards. You did just do all this."

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Fittingly, Amy's reading challenge is odd, right down to the name. To save myself some breath, I'll just pass it over to her.

A.S. King:
It's weird stuff that's totally readable, kind of could be old, but it's really good, hear me out. That's what it's called. That's the whole title.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Amazing.

A.S. King:
All right. And it's also, I'm going to give this warning, it's very white. Now, there's definitely some authors in here who aren't, but I realize when you go back and especially into the old stuff, and even in the new stuff, most of the stuff that's weirder, takes risks, et cetera, are usually white people, because either A, they had the means, right? Or B, same as me, they wouldn't publish me for years because I was weird. So, I'm assuming people of color who were weird, they weren't going to publish them either. I don't really know.

All I can say is that a lot of these are either old, some of them are dead white guys, whatever. But this is my list. So, this one isn't old. This is only maybe a decade or two old. It's called The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg. It is a surrealist poetry collection. That is my favorite. There's a graphic memoir called Pretending is Lying by Dominique Goblet. Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero is still one of my favorite books of all time. It's a little bit weird, it's a little bit of everything, and I love it. I'm going to put a Vonnegut in here, which is I'm going to give you Slaughterhouse-Five because if you haven't read it, you got to.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, that's a must. That's on the must list.

A.S. King:
It's a must. It's an anti-war book. If you're like, "Oh God, I'm over Vonnegut." Then read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. This is an either/or. It's got its own weirdness in it, even though it's not surreal or anything, it's literally the same thing that we've been talking about. It's a reflection of how dumb the world is.

The book that actually put me in the writing chair, the book that made me a writer is The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. One of the most beautiful pieces of magic realism and gosh, even surrealism, I'm not even sure what he would call it. It's incredible. It is a beautiful book.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can find A.S. King's reading challenge and all past reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com. And today's Beanstack featured librarian is Alana Graves, a librarian and summer experience coordinator at the Austin Public Library in Texas. Alana told us an adorable story from one of her summer programs.

Alana Graves:
What we try to do at APL is we have a jazzy event title like Mermaid Party, but we try to hide the learning where we are going to teach things, but the kids and parents don't necessarily know that they're going to learn things until they come to the program.

So, for this one, Mermaid Party, we actually put an environmental spin on it where we came up with activities that was around water pollution, sustainability, recycling, to save the mermaid. And I will never forget this. I was helping out at a branch and a lot of little girls came in Little Mermaid costumes or their mermaid Halloween costumes. It was so cute. And we had a fishing game where we took a big old toy tub, and we just asked our colleagues, "Hey, can you send us your trash?" We had them send us egg cartons, washed out soda cans, bottle caps, things like that, and we threw them in the tub and we gave the kids a fishing hook. And the idea was they hooked trash out of the ocean.

And I remember this little girl, she was probably four or five, in her mermaid costume. She fished out all of the trash out of the bucket, and she whispered to herself, "I saved the ocean." And it was just the cutest thing I have ever seen. She learned something that day. She learned about pulling trash out of the ocean. She learned about recycling. She didn't know it. But that's kind of what we aim to do with our events at APL during the summer.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to my conversation with A.S. King. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange, and Saints of the Household by Ari Tison.

If you've enjoyed today's episode, please show some love and give us a five-star review. It just takes a second, and it really helps. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media, and script edited by Josiah Lamberto Egan. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, please check out all of our resources at beanstack.com. And remember to sign up for our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and bonus content. Thanks for listening and keep reading.