Bryn Greenwood

the story of a witch and how one and down on her lot and her unlikely champion straight out of the middle ages and j mcintyre and today on katie are present a reckless both we made by britain greenwood greenwood lives in lawrence she's the author of the best selling all the ugly and wonderful things how often talks to topeka other time april about his two thousand eighteen novel found documents from the life of mel johnson door that book was just awarded the byron caldwell's notebook award from the hall center for the humanities at the university of kansas it will be recognised at the hall center on september twenty fifth but first the reckless of we made by britain greenwood goes on sale august twentieth with events that week in lawrence and wichita bryn thanks so much for coming by to keep your studios today thanks for having me we'll talk about reckless of in a minute but i'd like to go back to two thousand six lane seized a correctional facility just up the road and an escape that involved a volunteer at the prison how did that incident make its way into this

story i think more than anything it's simply introduce the likelihood of all the current problems we're having at prisons in kansas opening the door to escapes and tie does the nature in which there are are fuzzy lines around security prisons when it comes to volunteers my sister used to volunteer in eldorado source familiar with how that worked but seeing that story made me think oh people do get away with things like that well that prison escape is a major plot point of the reckless both we made at the center of the story is actually the sister of that character georgia lady georgia also known as z tell us about sea busy is very much our wichita girl i'm a born and raised there and she's living on the edge of survival and in the way that

i think a lot of people are these days where money is tight there's no money for every did everything that needs to be done there's not enough money for and so she's always picking and choosing ok which bills get paid which medications get bought because she's responsible for her or for in her invalid mother arm so she's really just struggling on a daily basis to deal with finances and of course she has health issues she has that she has chronic pain from a hip injury that has made her life just like an extra layer of miserable have you read it the very first paragraph of the reckless of we made and just sort of set us up and introduce us to the uk people talk about having an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other i had a pair of imaginary bill collectors so no matter which way i turn there were somebody to remind me i needed money that's how i ended up on a train at four o'clock in the morning with my nephew and a hundred pounds of weed so from the very first paragraph you know that it's going to be

a bumpy ride with his character yes and not just because of the money but because she is in such dire straits that she's making terrible decisions about her life when i was reading the requisite we made it envisioned georgia as looking a lot like nicky nichols that one of the characters the redheaded character i'm in the early season for orange is the new black had tough girl as she takes no guff but she has kind of a soft spot in her hard image and that bit a guard a kind of vulnerability but now that i've met you i'm wondering if the character of jurors that it may be history it'll cause of the home world i mean she's just characters that i finally let myself write it in the novel a bow or a redhead which i've never written a story that hadn't the redhead as the main character a solar myself do that and you know i wrote very personally from the experience of chronic pain because i also have a hip injury that i've basically the last twenty five years have had chronic pain from not caused by the same thing occurs is caused by that

i am really familiar with how that just drives you down on a daily basis and especially getting any kind of physical work the main character in the book they're reckless of we made is gentry frank who could may be best be described as living in his own upright at renaissance fair tell me about country gentry is that it controls autistic and day he's like like many autistic people he is very much i am deeply passionate about a few specific things in his cases these super passionate about all things medieval whether it be a medieval literature or our historical medieval combat anything related to that is is of big interest to him and so he tries to live his life that when he is he's essentially trying to live by a short coda which includes him you know abruptly announcing his order that the teaser champion that he's there to protect her whether she really needs some are not

when we first made century he's sweeping and to help suzy and her nephew make their way into her mom's house and he's a bully announcing to reporters to let the lady past and you think really he is heard night in signing armor but then as he says i realized what i done it invited my stalker into my mother's house it was literary with blast who is this guy end and what's going on here and i'll play a brand that is the moment that i was totally hooked on the spot and i i feel like you know the starter thing that is more or less a joke but it is a case where in the gentry has literally been waiting in the wings for his moment tim to be her hero he they know each other not very well at all and had met several years before he's convinced that the time is going to come where she's going to need him and of course he's right of however he's right about it for years and that's how he's been living his life

and from from zinn's prospective course he's this very odd young man who has been kind to her but that he's just perpetually a presence that that shows up in joe d's in the parking lot of hershey works or dry firehouse nothing menacing but he's just omnipresent in that way to j also has that kind of uncharacteristic of speaking only in old english and oddly enough it ends up sounding really natural in his voice hagel did it feel for you to write in the voice of the difficulty wasn't the middle english middle english i i studied medieval literature in college the difficulty was could i turned actual middle english into something that would still resemble middle english about that the vast majority of readers who have not studied it would still be able to understand what i was saying so i had you know modernize all the spelling i had to clean up a lot of things like that or still trying to keep all the syntax and grammar that's that's part of middle english that we don't really do any more and i had a lot of battles with

a few editors over things too where they would say well this doesn't sound right or in some cases they would say this sounds to harder because there are things in middle english that sort of we've carried through so much debt that a dance towns moderate even though it's not have you had any experience writing an old english before i could be only expensive and was literally writing in middle english for an assignment on and in real middle english rather than in my a sort of fake doubt helped modernized version so so it was weird to sort of be working to make the transition into something else one of their sweeteners scenes in the book the records of three made gentry and his brother trying are teaching georgia's nephew marquez how to fight that fistfight that as the night said could you read that scene for us brands want to try anyway in the yard he was holding a little wooden sword

and shield yet on the chain mail shirt that came down to his knees and on either side of him stood gentry and trying their swords were wood to but other than that they were done up like something out of a movie big shields and all kinds of armor plates on their arms and legs trains or was mismatched pieces but jen trees was black and silver top to bottom in the grass next to them or their home it's like a pair of metal bucket i plan to walk down and hug markets but he was totally focused on gentry that didn't surprise me so much as the fact that gentry was focused on marcus he was leaning down to talk to him really paying attention to him now the power has seen brother trying and i fight and gentry was saying telling what balart mr marcus with ai knows or cares that touch me marcus hesitated but he reached out and tap his little sore against gen trees chest if bunk against his armor tis good gentry set affair touch again yet mark a spoken with the sword four or five times and then the next time gently shifted his own sword and pushed marcus's away i stopped the how you hit my

sword with yours yeah master marcus does called perry again marcus tried to touch him again and but not quite sure of himself as he had been and gently pushed is stored away again and if i touch me gentry reached out and tap his sword in the middle of marcos's chest it made me fights but marcus gable gentry did it again and got more deals that just not that i stand the master marcus will not carry me the next time gentry try to tap and marcus put his hand up and pushed the stored away ababa true sort of sharp it is not safe to grasp with five their hand guns the paradise or design this time marcus prices will sort out and tap gentry is not really hard enough to push it away but gently let him well done master marcus again and now counts their use by shield in another couple minutes he had mark is doing something that looked like sword fighting to me trying had been watching gentry to looked up and saw me standing on the patio behold says lady georgia he said antsy and ceo nick knight that's brenn greenwood

reading from the reckless both we made her latest black brendan talk to me about that seat an interaction between country in markets or markets is having really terrible week because he's essentially been separated from his mother is missing and that things are very confusing and i think for gentry did you really recognizes that may be winning in his own world that he he recognizes the situation the markets as an his childhood wasn't particularly easy and and i think for them it's really easy to make a connection with markets for that reason like he understands what marcus is experiencing and so he wants to connect and break through that and i think he's a natural teacher when the title of your book is the reckless both we made what is that reckless of all of the cingular probably for marketing purposes i feel like there are a variety of reckless that's going on in this book i feel like really the central one is simply jan trees oath to commit to how

busy with whatever she needs to be helped with which ultimately is some very dangerous stuff but he makes that both anyway without really a lot of consideration for consequences to himself and does she make an as well as she does not even realizing it i think that she'd she makes an oath about the role that she's going to allow gentry to play in her life and from there on out i mean she is she even without maybe acknowledging it yourself has made a commitment to him and that's pretty reckless for her because she's not usually in the business of doing that she's also made an oath to help take care of her nephew markets yes and that's really rather than opposed to say or sister somebody that's really more of an oath that she makes the markets himself on that she is not going to she is not going to disappear out of his life which is harder than we would like it to be for family

members who are parents gentry literally hears voices in his head during this during the storytelling and what to do to giving him advice sometimes giving him very bad advice and a curtain a bed that is a brilliant device for an author and allows you to talk about what he's thinking without telling us what he's thinking ott from transcends device because i think for a lot of people really think of someone hears voices we have a reaction to some characters in the book do which is oh that someone with a mental illness and the reality has lots of people hear voices and we don't talk about it for instance i've heard voices and so i was a fairly small child but you can tell people that because as soon as you say oh yes i have i have a voice that tells me this about all the time people are like oh yes she's crazy and so for gently he's very much for sharing space inside his head with these other people and in that sense it's more than what he's thinking it's more than

sharing his boss because he is literally you know having conversations with personalities that are not his own it's not just his conscience he speak no no use these are literally separate you know in cities now obviously they're manufactured by his mind but that doesn't mean that they are inherently part of himself and he doesn't view than white in the senate i don't believe my voice is being me they are something else and something is quite annoying an intrusive as his are so it's different joshua has a very complicated relationship with her family with her sister with her mom gentry also has a very complicated relationship with his biological mother and with his adopted family who'd come to embrace the talk about the role of family and what it means to this story i think for me nearly every story is something about

family in and maybe that's a reflection of my own feeling about my family which is very complicated but the thing that's tricky thing where you can get rid of them there theoretically they're supposed to be bigger always there for us help you though that's not always true and that's you know as is the case with gently where his biological mother not really not really very fond of him although of course that's that's separate from the reality of why she had to give him up and she's very young mother and could not cope with a child who had special needs like gentry but even as an adult where he's a functional adult but she is not really fond of him he's not someone she likes and similarly says he's mother was her but she's certainly not you know her mother's favorite person end and they don't have they don't have a very affectionate relationship they have a lot of conflict surrounding newsies life and her mother's life choice it's but then you have this adoptive family bed come to

embrace century and m and the scenes with them or just heartwarming i think obviously not all adopted families did things work out because adoptive families have all the same dysfunctions that biological families have but i think for a lot of adoptive families it's simply it's easier to embrace things that are outside of your ideal because you've made this choice you're like ok well yes i know this child has problems but i'm choosing to take him and my family and now he's family no matter what his problems are and so i do know some adoptive families where i feel like they are more welcoming because they already have practice that biological families like oh here's your baby taken from the hospital and then you just have to sort of figure it out but it's your baby you're stuck with that you haven't chosen really necessarily to make it part of your family you just mentioned showers isn't mom see is a hoarder

which adds its own set of complications to seize life talking about that aspect of the story i know people have i've probably watched all their unit was a big trend for a while of shows about hoarding on and in some ways that shows get right but in other ways they are i don't think that they can ever really get out what it's like to and i come from a family of hoarders so it's that thing where on some level it seems totally normal but as you you know you grow up and grow out of the world you sort of realized oh this is not this is not normal this is not how most people live and it becomes it becomes this massive burden on the whole family and i have a very good friend of my also his mother is in order and that's when it becomes is that all of these objects become not just the responsibility of the person who's collected them but then their immediate family members and it becomes this whole notion of all if your family

member is the hoarder get sick or dies suddenly you've inherited all the responsibility for all this stuff of questionable value and it really does it's it's like this strange illness because its mentor but it occupies so much physical space and they literally get in the way as the being able to be home to be around her mom ryan within the story as he leaves home as a teenager because there's literally nowhere for her to sleep but she comes on for school one day her mother has taken over her back to last her last bastion against the stuff for her bad as been taken over now she can't sleep at home and it sort of sets the tone for a lot of the rest of her life that descends batch there is no place where she is really a whole jurors heard her sister lorraine i'm not saying that right long run more rarely

gentry talk to me about the navy's the you've chosen to the characters in this book well it's this thing where i think a lot of we get a lot of social commentary about armed black families and black meaning traditions that are what are considered non traditional but you don't have to go very far into the wilds of misery or oklahoma to meet that exact same element with envy either whirlpool white community where there's this desire to give your child an unusual name and often and names that appear perceives as being sophisticated her elegant armed all it really does is sort of signal to everyone else there you know you're you're poor white trash and so say you have unity georgia has this very sort of elegant sounding name but it also is not a common name and it's also you know so far outside the balance of common now audie that that it didn't really it signals her out as being like oh there's something on all that family and similarly low rent you know it's meant

to make her sound like she's a queen but it also signals to everyone that her family is not really all that sophisticated i'd forget you either gender that such a subject he uses name i feel like i mean i think that i went to school with european supply guys named gentry although it's pronounced jeffrey where i came from you know i don't i haven't read that name of like the landed gentry is and that's why you know for a certain you know suzie economic class that seems like a very sophisticated name because it does imply a wealth and standing but you only ever meet guys named jeffrey who are you know rednecks would beat up pick up soon and who live in a trailer and to work on a farm and you know they're great guys that that is one of those names again gives away that they don't come from wealthy family so it becomes almost this this mirror reaction where the wealthy don't give their

kids' names like that it's not an american i think in europe are still some very and he shook me traditions poem i'd know manning paisley once but very wealthy family i was a traditional family name worse really poor families are giving their kids these unusual names to try to make it seem more sophisticated there's a scene where john kerry and z are camping and see describes being with gentry best way i felt better knowing he wasn't there it's like being alone but not alone i guess mostly happens to us with people we know really well i'm like i always have that feeling when i'm with my sister that is will sit in a room for hours and in fact already have the perfect vacation is sitting in a room reading books so as we traveled other places to sit in a room and read books and we often get home to our but it's that same sensation of like

someone that you don't feel it doesn't feel performative arm and for whatever reason being busy reaches that was gentry and that he does not seem to expect anything for he does not make any demands of her arm it's ok to just be quiet around him and so being somewhere at home i think it's safe for her like she's alone he's not to bother her he's not been a demand that she speak to him or pay attention to him but she's you know not alone he's there he's also not going to demand anything physically are essentially from her oh no because you know yes he has very firm boundaries an ad for a lot of autistic people into those boundaries are about just comfort level is not having you know unexpected physical contact which for him says the situation is it's not that he's opposed to this book i think he just has to prepare himself for the possibility and so nbc is good because she's had some

experience with non consensual physical contact that makes her very aware that it's important to note that the other person and is allowing you to touch but rather than you just doing it on your own in the preface to the reckless of we made you say that the city's weakness is her loyalty and that gentry is loyalty is his strength that's marketing speak but just for a little in math for gentry the thing that has really propped him up for his whole life is just this really packed like he doesn't let people go on for the most part it if they are willing to to be you know in some sort of relationship with him he will stick with them for as long as that's too whereas for zebulon being loyal has had really terrible consequences for me because of course the difference being if you're loyal to someone who betrays you it's terrible where is gentry for the most part has has chosen wisely and has been loyal to people who need to return that feeling

brandy your previous but all their ugly and wonderful things did very well commercially it was a new york times bestseller how is that changed writing for you or has it hasn't changed the writing process which will probably be troubling news to my agent i which is that i'm still entirely writing what i want to write in the term so i want to right arm which maybe doesnt make publishing super happy with me but in terms of like my daily life it's it's been a huge change in that i quit my day job which is nice because after you know ten plus years of working eighty hours a week you know you go to your day job and then you come home and write for forty hours a week it's exhausting so i feel like ed and the french army is giving to right now and so the exhausted me as i continue a greater liberty to write more about what she write without having to worry is the senate so how come not so much in those terms i mean my goal has been not to know over right because i'm like ok now this is my full time job which means

i you know write and i work on a fifty to sixty hours a week on but honestly and i've always written what i want to write and for longtime publishing thought i was terrible for that nobody wanted my will in fact all the ugly wonderful things although it was a huge success as a huge success after a hundred and twenty two agents said no we don't think we can sell this this isn't the sort of book that the publishing once well it turns out they were wrong arm but still publishing i think looks at me like what is she going to do next and will it in fact selling books and i'm sure they look at the records of you made that way because of the middle english because of a lot of the other things so other common threads that you see through how your writing career i definitely because i'm always writing about dysfunctional families and i'm always writing about people who don't necessarily fit in the way they're supposed to fit in a man's i'm always writing about really inappropriate or awkward sex is

air so they are there are there are these common things that better happening in all my books because there's things that i'm obsessed with i'm obsessed with the issue of consent which is why all my books are about that bring greenwood as the author of the reckless both we made it when you got a number of events coming up in connection with the release of this but i do about the date book comes out is august twentieth ah all the billboards public library of the raven bookstores hosting me there with wise public library which is at seven pm and then the very next day i will be in wichita hosted by watermark books that at six pm and then i'd go on a whole series of things to edmund oklahoma tulsa oklahoma and then further further afield than that the reckless and three made is the latest novel by brendan greene would brand this has been such a pleasure congratulations on a great book and best of like tia thanks for having me kansas public radio have the copy of brain greenwood spoke to give away if you like a chance to win the reckless of we made leave a comment on k pr as facebook page

i'm kate mcintyre just ahead to peek at other times avril talks about his latest book found out he rents from the light out now johnson door that says kbr prisons continues right after this