In Courtney Gould’s latest young adult love story, “Where Echoes Die,” two sisters travel to a strange desert town to investigate the death of their mother … and find that everything is not as it seems. In Jennifer Dugan’s novel “The Last Girls Standing,” two survivors of a summer camp massacre search for the truth of what happened that terrifying night. OPB’s Jenn Chavez talked to Dugan and Gould at the 2023 Portland Book Festival about psychological thrillers and writing queer love stories for a YA audience.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. You might not think that romance and horror have too much in common, but we’re going to hear today about their overlaps. Jennifer Dugan writes mostly young adult romance novels. Then in 2023, she tried her hand at the young adult thriller genre with her book “The Last Girls Standing.” Courtney Gould, on the other hand, is only interested in, as she puts it, “girls, ghosts and things that go bump in the night.” Her books include “The Dead and the Dark,” “Where Echoes Die,” and “What the Woods Took.”
Dugan and Gould spoke on stage at the 2023 Portland Book Festival with OPB’s Jenn Chávez.
Jenn Chávez: Jennifer and Courtney, thank you so much for being with us here today.
Jennifer Dugan: Thank you for having me. I’m so amped.
Courtney Gould: Yes, thank you.
[Audience applause]
Chávez: Courtney, I want to start with a question for you. “Where Echoes Die” begins with your main character Beck, at the end of a long drive into the desert in Arizona, along with her little sister Riley. Their mom, who has recently died, was an investigative reporter who started working on a story about the mysterious town of Backravel, Arizona – a story that consumed her in her later life. So, could you start by telling us a little bit about Beck and why she’s headed to Backravel?
Gould: Absolutely. It’s funny, because the inspiration for “Where Echoes Die” really came when I made a very similar trek down to Phoenix, Arizona. It was right at the beginning of COVID-19, and I wanted to be really conscious about flying. I didn’t want to be exposed to too many folks. But my dad lived in Phoenix, Arizona and wanted us to come down for Thanksgiving. And I lived in Tacoma, Washington at the time. So I decided, all right, I’m going to get in the car and I’m going to drive from Tacoma to Phoenix for Thanksgiving.
I remember, I was trying to think of what I was gonna write next. I had come off of “The Dead and the Dark.” I really wanted to write another story that was about a small town, another story that dealt with the loneliness of those rural places, and a town where nothing is quite what it seems. As I was leaving L.A. and Palm Springs, and driving through the desert toward Phoenix, it was sunset. I was looking around and I thought, “Oh, this is the place. This is correct.”
I started imagining the kind of person who would make a trek like this, other than me. And I just could not get this girl out of my head, this person who’s struggling with a really difficult cocktail of intense grief and PTSD, mixed with mental illness that she was already combating in her life; and the fact that this obsessive search is something that she both values and honors, because it was something that her mother would have done in her life. But also it’s the same thing that’s going to be destroying her mental health, similarly to her mother. And I thought this idea of her trying to be different from her mother, but also following those same footsteps in that sort of “echo,” was something that made a really compelling character. And I just couldn’t get her out of my head.
Chávez: You’re right that there’s so many parallels between her mother and her, and their nature. You mentioned that part of what she’s dealing with when she’s on this trip is grief for her mother’s loss. How does this quest to learn more in Backravel fit into how Beck is grieving for her mother?
Gould: It was something that I was trying to combat in my own life when I was writing it, because during the drafting process of “Where Echoes Die,” I had a couple of losses in my family that I was really trying to reckon with at the time. And there’s this sort of block that you hit when you’re going through that process of … if I continue to process this loss, if I move on, how much of that person am I losing?
And Beck is caught at this crossroads where she’s deciding if she wants to solve this story, solve this case, so that she can move on, or solve it so that she can keep her mother with her. And that suspension is something that, without spoiling the book, is a feeling that a lot of people in Backravel have.
Chávez: Jennifer, I want to turn to you now for a moment. In “The Last Girls Standing,” your main character, Sloan, is also in a grieving process. She and her now-girlfriend, Cherry, were the only survivors of this horrible and traumatic attack on a summer camp, where they were both counselors. And they’ve been attending the funerals together of the counselors and staff members who were killed. In the time since the murders, they’ve become really inseparable. Can you tell us a bit more about their relationship when we meet them?
Dugan: I thought it would be really interesting to explore their dynamic, which is a very codependent, toxic dynamic, especially because I’m known for my romance, where I try to show healthy relationships. In the ones where I do veer, like “Verona Comics,” which deals with very strong mental health issues, I show how you can navigate that if you see yourself in these things. So I try to always be a positive influence, until “The Last Girls Standing,” when I was just like, “I wanna go dark and I’m going to go very dark.” And my publisher, shockingly, was like, “We’re in, we’re gonna let you do this.”
So it was really interesting for me to show because Cherry, who is the only other survivor with her, starts to feel like this is the only person who can understand me. This is the only person who’s been through this traumatic event. And throughout the book, one of the things going on is that Sloan doesn’t have her own memories of the event. She’s very traumatized by it, so she relies on Cherry repeating, “No, this is what happened, this is how we got out.”
It was so great to be able to take such a codependent relationship where she is depending on it, and start sowing these seeds of doubt, where it’s like, is Cherry’s truth the actual truth, what I’m being told? So I was able to still take that romance element and just kind of twist it and twist it until it was almost unrecognizable from my usual romances. I felt like I was writing in the upside down. It was just so fun.
Chávez: And you set me up perfectly to ask you this next question. You’re talking about how Sloan is traumatized. She’s lost some of her memories, and Cherry is the one supplying this information to her. She has these dreams, but they kind of stop right where her memory stops. Why is it so important for her to be able to trust her own memories and get those memories back, to the degree that she’s trying all these different ways to unlock these memories that faded after this trauma she had?
Dugan: I think, in that way, it really parallels your book also, especially when you’re talking about reclaiming and being in the stasis with the grieving process. In this case, she did lose her co-counselors and things like that, but those were people she just met. I think her biggest loss coming from that was her sense of self. So trying to get these memories back is part of her trying to reclaim her own narrative, and trying to make sure that she hasn’t completely lost herself in the process.
This takes place this summer after her senior year. She was just about to go to college. She thought she kind of knew who she was and now she feels more like this thing that survived something, versus the person. So, that’s really what she’s after, just reclaiming her own history in a sense.
Chávez: Her as a person, rather than her as a survivor of this event that is now her life.
Gould: That’s so interesting. I was gonna say something that I really love about that thread in “Last Girls Standing,” is this idea that sometimes she feels empowered by who she is now. She thinks of Sloan before as not fully an adult and not really in the world. And Sloan, who’s survived, is now really strong and able to endure anything. It’s really interesting to dive into that mental health space where you want to be able to feel empowered by the things you’ve been through, but sometimes that can keep you from processing the things that you’ve been through.
Dugan: Right. It’s always fascinating to me – and there’s been times in my life where this has been true for myself – where your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness, and you have to hold space for both things.
Chávez: Courtney, Jennifer just mentioned that there’s a lot of parallels on this issue in both of your books. Memory and how it’s affected by trauma and loss is also very central to your book, “Where Echoes Die.” Beck’s mom experienced memory loss later in her life. And Beck, in her own memories, sometimes experiences these blurred lines between memory and present reality, not always knowing which one is real, as they’re playing in her head. How does Beck struggle with sorting this out once she’s in Backravel?
Gould: Yeah, I mean, she struggles so much with sorting this out. Without diving too much into the lore of Backravel, because part of the book is uncovering these little pieces of the town, but memory itself works differently in Backravel than it does in other places. So, Beck – I felt it was important to show that she’s already been struggling with PTSD, and having these issues where she gets stuck in these loops of her memory and can’t quite get out.
She has a hard time being very present in her normal life, because she thinks of the time before she went through all of her loss as “better,” and it was a time that was better for her. Even if, from an objective point of view, we can see that she was suffering then, too – she had a lot of issues that she needed to get help with – she thinks of those times as a really fond moment in her history. And she thinks of those times as something she’s trying to get back to.
So when she gets to Backravel, and those past memories are so much more accessible to her, she’s able to really live in them and completely dip out of the present. She leans into that sometimes. It’s comforting to her, because it is the thing that she’s wanted to do all along. So, at times, even though she knows objectively, this is not healthy … I need to live in the present and that’s the point of this. I want to be able to solve this mystery, so that I can move on and completely live in the present and heal from what I’ve been through. She finds it so compelling to live in the past and so enticing, in a way, that Backravel sort of sucks her in. She has a hard time fully committing to the idea of living in the present. So the more it starts blurring, the more she is fully leaning into that.
Chávez; You both touched a little bit on the mental health struggles that these characters are going through. And something else in both of these books, that at least felt relatable to me, was how you both portrayed mental healthcare spaces. And I remember honestly being a teenager. These characters were going to therapy and not always feeling like I wanted to be there, feeling like it was helping, and I felt this power imbalance as a younger person. It was hard for me to feel like I could trust it at that time.
How do you both think readers might relate to how Beck and Sloan are experiencing this? Or just more broadly, everyone’s expectations of them, for how they should be acting after these traumatic events happened to them?
Gould: It’s interesting because, as a person who took a long time to come around to the idea of treating mental health, it was something that, growing up, I didn’t feel like I needed help with my mental health. That’s only for really extreme cases, because that’s the rhetoric that we saw growing up. Then I started going to therapy, and I was like, “Actually, this is amazing! I love it.” And I wanted to write a character in Beck that was very similar to me.
Beck doesn’t feel like she needs help. Beck feels like, “If I solve this case, I will be mentally well and it will all be good.” And these ideas that, “If I fix this one thing in my life, or if I make this one change and I accomplish this one goal, then the symptoms of mental illness that I experience will go away, and they’ll be done now.” I wanted to really dismantle this idea. So, Beck feels that, “I’ve been suggested to go to the guidance counselor and my sister tells me that I need to talk to somebody about the things that I’ve been through. But I know deep down, if I just solve this mystery, then I’ll be good to go.”
She learns quickly, throughout the course of the book, that that is not true and that what she did need was somebody to help her, because you can’t do everything by yourself and you can’t find quick fixes for the kinds of mental health struggles that you have when you’ve been through really tough times.
Dugan: This was an interesting one for me because in “Verona Comics,” which is my romance Romeo and Juliet fix-it, it’s more of a coming of age, but I show mental health care in a really positive light. And it was important to me to show that there is help out there. So this time I wrote a character in Sloan … her mother is a very engaged mother and she has offered her every kind of help under the sun, and Sloan has rejected all of it. Then she ends up at this quack-hypnotist-last-chance-person. There is a time and a place for things like hypnotism, and CBT, and all these different kinds of things that you can do, but this is not really it – where Sloan lands. So I didn’t want her to have someone who was actually a helpful, board-certified, like, “We’re gonna do this right.”
Sloan was just, “You can take what you can get from me. I’ll talk to this lady because she’s strange and unusual, and not really trying to fix anything. She’ll help me just try to recover these memories.” So I just thought it was a really interesting thing to explore, when you are tackling mental health in a dangerous way instead of a controlled way. And that’s her experience throughout when she goes to see the person that she’s talking to. They’re not always following the “best practices,” we’ll say.
Chávez: Another big element of both of y’all’s books is secrets. In “Where Echoes Die,” Beck is keeping pretty big secrets from her little sister, Riley. And with “The Last Girls Standing,” Sloan and Cherry pledge to each other, “no lies, no secrets,” but eventually they’re both keeping secrets from one another. I think most of us out there have at least some secrets. I know I do, and they can get really heavy. How do your characters deal with the weight of secrets?
Gould: Not well.
[Laughter]
Dugan: I was just gonna say that! They totally bomb the “coping with secrets” angle. It’s an unbearable burden for Sloan, especially as the distrust grows between the girls, as we start to see some of the elements, as more of the news stories come out and they get a little deeper into the people who perpetrated the attacks … and how Sloane feels that may turn into her life or Cherry’s life. So it becomes just truly, deeply something that she cannot manage after a certain point in the story.
Gould: I would say it’s interesting, because I really liked that element of “Last Girls Standing” where Sloan and Cherry together have turned their lives into this thing where they really only have each other. And when you’re keeping a secret from that person, you’re keeping it from everybody, and it’s just yours.
I think with “Where Echoes Die,” I wanted Beck’s relationship with Riley to have that feeling of the older sibling, younger sibling dynamic, where Beck believes that as long as Riley thinks of her as totally good to go, doesn’t recognize that she has any issues, then it’s like she doesn’t have the issues. As long as Riley believes that she’s got it together.
And over the years, Beck has parented Riley, in a way. She’s taken her to and from school. She’s made sure all their bills are paid. She’s made dinner for them. So she feels that she’s been a really reliable rock in Riley’s life. So Riley can’t notice any of her mental health issues, or that’s going to fall apart. She keeps these secrets from her and thinks if she can keep everything really surface level, she can maintain that relationship that she’s had with Riley all along.
It becomes a really important point for them, that you can’t just keep these things independent from the people that you love; that it does affect them. And she has to realize, by the end of the book, that all of the issues that she’s tried to hide and sweep under the rug and keep out of Riley’s radar, of course, Riley’s noticed all along. And Riley, in a climactic moment of the book that I won’t get too into, has to confront her and say, “You know, you haven’t just raised me, we’ve raised each other. We’ve had to be there for each other. And obviously, I’ve seen the things that you’ve been through. And I want to help you, but you have to tell me what’s going on for me to help you.”
As somebody who has a younger sister myself, who’s been very supportive and very essential to my mental health, and mine to hers, I think that it’s something that I really wanted to portray on page – this idea that you can’t hide things from the people you love because then they can’t help you.
Dugan: One of the things that I loved when I was reading it is how Beck is like, “I have everything under control. No one has any idea.” And then I’m looking at her and I’m like, Riley is totally sitting there like, “The wheels have come off the bus! The wheels have come off the bus!” And she’s like, “I’ve got this under control. I am Riley’s mom now.” I’m like, “In more ways than you think!”
Chávez: I feel like listening to y’all talk, something that comes up for me is, I feel I’ve experienced this personally, too, with secrets that I want to keep to myself. And the reason why is that, if I speak them to another person, they become real. I can pretend those things didn’t really happen or that these things are not really real, in this space that only exists inside of me. Is that … ?
Gould: Yeah, it’s that and it’s also this element of, if I tell somebody about this, I’m someone different to them now. That I like the idea of myself that I have created for this person who’s very important to me. And if I tell them that I’m struggling with something, or that I’ve done something wrong, or that I’ve made a huge mistake that could affect them, then their image of me will be different – and I don’t want it to be. I really wanted that to be the central struggle in “Where Echoes Die.”
It’s the same thing that their mother did to them. She kept everything to herself and left them with all of these questions after her death, when they could have supported her, helped her, and they could have been a family unit. But this idea that she wanted to be their mother and she didn’t want them to see that she was going through these things, kept her from getting the support she needed.
Chávez: Something that made both of these books so fun to read for me is the plot twists. I got to a point with both, where I would read 100-plus pages in one sitting, because something that happened shocked or surprised me so much that I’m like, “OK, I need to find out what is going on.” I was yelling at the book as I was sitting there reading. How do you both decide where and how to use plot twists in your stories?
Dugan: Oh, that’s hard. That’s very hard. In terms of structurally and technically, I don’t know that I was really like, “This is the point where I shall place a twist.” [Laughter] I have a much more organic process. So, for me, it was … I used to be a “pantser,” which, if you’re not familiar, is somebody who just writes, they don’t know where the book is going and there’s no plot. They’re just following the threads. With my deadlines now, I don’t have time to do that, because you paint yourself into a corner 18 times before you figure out what the book is about. So now, I plot roughly.
My friend made me this Excel spreadsheet. I talked about it like it was gold and she was like, “You need to stop. You need to stop telling people about this spreadsheet because they’re asking me for it.” And all I did was write out 30 chapters cause my books seem to always come in right around that. “All I wrote for you was ‘beginning, midpoint, end.’ Those are the only labels.” [Laughter]
And I’m like, “No, you don’t understand.” Kelsey Rodkey, she’s a romance author, but I’m like, “You don’t understand! She has a spreadsheet and it’s like gold. And all of a sudden you can write a book in one take.” And yeah, she’s like, “I have to send it to these people and then they’re like, ‘This is [it]? Is there a second one?’” [Laughter]
So I knew my beginning, midpoint and end was for sure there, but everything else, I just was unraveling with her as it happened. I was just organically falling apart in the story. It was really cathartic for me. I was drafting it during the beginnings of when things were really shut down with COVID-19. So it was a nice way to get all these dark, confused, scared feelings, and then I could shut the laptop.
I was also drafting my adult romance, which came out this year. So I would be like, OK, all morning I’d write my happy little romance if I woke up in a good mood, and then I’d be like, all right, I ate lunch, got a coffee, and I’m like, “Murder .... Let’s do this!” [Laughter]
Gould: I love that. I wish that I was able to freestyle like that, but unfortunately, I have my emotional support spreadsheet outlines. And I can’t let them go. I have to have them.
Dugan: I wanna see your spreadsheet. It would just give me anxiety!
Gould: I’ve got columns for what’s happening in the scene, who’s there, what’s the emotional ... I have to have them because I get lost and then overwhelmed, and I can’t write anymore because I have this mind paralysis. I don’t know what’s gonna happen next. In terms of twists, I don’t like to think of them as plot twists. I think of them as like twisting the knife moments ...
Chávez: Ahhh! I like that!
Gould: Because sometimes I don’t want it to be necessarily a surprise like, “Oh, I’m shocked, this is new information!” Sometimes I want it to feel like an inevitable thing, that we’ve known all along that this was going to happen. It was just a matter of how we get there, and how bad is it gonna hurt when we get there.
Dugan: That’s so nice cause there’s definitely moments in “The Last Girls Standing” where I just wanted to be like, ble-ah!! [Laughter] You’re just such a sweeter.
Gould: I’m like, “I’ll tell you what’s gonna happen. The main character doesn’t know, but I’ll tell you.” So, “Where Echoes Die” felt like that sort of book to me, where, when I wrote “The Dead and the Dark,” I wanted there to be these surprise moments and these connections that people had no idea were going to happen, so it came out of nowhere. But with “Where Echoes Die,” I wanted it to feel more like we understand the direction that this is going to go, that we know what the emotional outcome of this investigation … The further that she digs, she’s getting closer to this horrible truth, that the reader is already aware must be coming, but we just don’t want her to have to go through that.
And that’s how I thought of the twist in that book. So I always try to, when I’m starting a book, I think, “what’s the thing that’s really gonna hurt everyone’s feelings?” And I decide how and when we’re gonna get to that because that’s sort of what I live on. I’m like, “How can I make people cry in this book?” [Laughter] That’s our twist.
Dugan: Hurting feelings was definitely like a big motivation for writing “The Last Girls Standing.” [Laughter] When I’m writing my romances, I’m always like, “How can I hurt your feelings but just pull back enough so you don’t hate them?” Like you have to find them still redeemable. You have to still want them to kiss.
And I’m like, “I just hurt you?” I mean, thank you, thank you all for coming. I’m so happy you’re here, but also just like a little bit of pain. I wanted just a sprinkle for a treat.
Chávez: You know, you’re talking about the interplay between your romance writing and “The Last Girls Standing.” Both of these books do feature queer characters and portray queer love. What draws you both to this type of story – a psychological thriller – as an interesting and important space to explore queer identity, queer relationships, queer love?
Gould: It’s interesting, because I feel like this has really been a project of mine. When I was growing up, I felt like queer stories, especially young adult queer stories, were very specific things. It was either contemporary books about the horrible traumatic experience of being a queer person and all of the horrible things that you go through being a queer person – which didn’t make me feel great about being a lesbian at the time, I will say. That, or these side characters, who either were there to add comic relief or there to die tragically and just show you how cruel the world is.
I wanted this space where I could put queer characters in these speculative genre fiction because I love genre fiction. I love horror, and I love fantasy, and thrillers. And I wanted queer people to be front and center in those stories. So, I really make it a mission of mine to feature queer characters in the center of any story that I’m writing. And I don’t see myself writing straight contemporary at any point in time; I really love speculative.
With that, I feel like horror specifically is a really fun space, because when you have these queer characters in the center of these stories, you can have them confront things that we find difficult to confront in real life – these big concepts that you can’t actually dismantle as one person in the real world. But in a horror novel, it can be a monster or a weird town or a strange, scientific thing that’s happening, and you can take care of that.
And then you’re able to confront this concept that queer people struggle with, and really come out on top, and beat it in a way that we can’t necessarily do in real life. So that’s something I really enjoy, is the catharsis of horror for queer people.
Dugan: I think, for me, I’m a little bit older than you. I’m certifiably ancient, so I didn’t really have access when I was younger to queer stories. It is a little bit bummer that you still kind of have that experience. I’m really excited now, because young adult has is having this great moment with queer lit across the board, whether it’s horror or contemporary. I’m so grateful to be a part of that, and add to that conversation. But for me, growing up, horror was just super gay. Like, that’s what we had.
I didn’t have good rep, but I had Ursula and “The Little Mermaid,” and “Pinhead” and “Hellraiser.” It’s like, we’re all going there. You’re made to feel like the “other.” Growing up, you’re “othered,” so consistently, at least in my experience when I was a teenager. So I started just relating – unhealthily, getting back to mental health – but I just started to really see myself in these monsters.
And sometimes I would be like, “Do you guys realize the context?” Cause it’s also a chance, where you’re on a spaceship, and you’re battling an alien, and your bro is gonna go out. But, it’s a suicide mission or something to fight this alien, and the bro’s get this one like big intense hug with long, longing looks. And I’m like, “Are you getting this? Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Which is why I think fanfic has developed to be such a massively queer space also.
For me, I watch – and we were discussing this, you were a little surprised – a horror movie almost every single night. So, for me to get to add to that was really a no-brainer. I think I’m incapable of writing straights. I apologize to anyone looking for that rep at this panel, I think there are other panels for you, but … I’m kidding … I’m kidding.
Gould: There’s plenty. [Laughter]
Dugan: For me, it was just really exciting to be able to do that and be a part of that conversation, the way I have been so much for sapphic and bisexual romance. So I’m just telling a fun adventure, living my childhood dreams.
Chávez: I’m wondering, what do you hope you can help your readers process with these stories?
Gould: I just love that there’s this space now for people to see a huge variety of experiences of queerness in their protagonists. I think, for a long time, we had this mentality of needing queer characters, or any marginalized characters, to be this sort of perfect victim. That they need to have done nothing wrong and be great all of the time. And then we can feel sad for the things that happen to them, because if they have flaws, or if they make mistakes, or if they feel big emotions that they don’t always enact properly, then we don’t feel bad for them and the things that they’ve gone through, or we don’t sympathize.
When I wrote Beck, I really wanted her to consistently and repeatedly make the wrong choice. I wanted her to look objectively at the things in front of her, as she’s dealing with this intense mental illness and grief. And I wanted her to consistently make choices that the reader would say, “I wouldn’t have done that,” or, “I think that was wrong,” because I wanted us to remember that she’s still a teenager. She’s a queer teenager who’s been very isolated and who is going through really hard times, and we should still want her to be happy in the end.
We should still want her to come out ahead of this thing and to beat this darkness that is taking over her life, even though she makes bad choices and even though some of the bad things that happened to her were brought on by her own actions. I don’t want queer youth to think that because they’ve done something wrong, or they responded to something badly, or because they felt alone and isolated, and reacted, that now they’re no longer deserving of care, support and happiness.
Dugan: I’m known thematically, across all of my books – whether you’re reading a psychological thriller or romance – for writing what I call “disaster bi’s.” So, they’re always gonna make the wrong choice. You’re never gonna find a perfect victim. In my romance, I write very messy, complicated girls and women. That’s actually my Instagram bio because I’ve gotten so many messages from typically older reviewers, who are like, “Can they just be nice?” And I’m like, “No!” [Laughter]
Then, when we decided to really go for it in “The Last Girls Standing,” I was like, we’re not even skirting nice. We are exploring the rage that comes with, not just being a woman, but being a survivor and being all of that tied in, that so many women and girls can relate to. And she takes it to, again, not a great place. This is not a “how-to” guide to process trauma, certainly. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it is the same thing where your motivations are coming from an especially dark emotional place. So I really wanted to show that and explore that in a way that I don’t always get to.
Chávez: I have one more question for y’all in these last few minutes. I think that we’re in a time where young readers are really feeling this external pressure from people trying to tell them what they should and shouldn’t be reading, what they can and can’t be reading. Do y’all have any advice for young readers who are kind of navigating that space?
Dugan: It is so hard for readers, because they do not have the financial freedom to access things once they’re taken out of their libraries. So I try to make myself accessible on social media to a certain extent, just to show that it gets better, not to be fully cliche, but there are people out there.
My books are heavily banned. “Hot Dog Girl” is my most banned book. It’s always wild when I go into a bookstore that has a banned book display and it’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” “The Hate You Give,” a girl in a hotdog suit … I’m like, “Should I sign this or do we want to pretend this isn’t happening? I could go either way.” And it’s wild because, if you’ve seen a Disney movie, it’s more G-rated. It makes Disney movies look tawdry. There’s kisses in the last chapter but not even a full “make-out.” You have to read past “Hot Dog Girl” to get to books with that.
But, yeah, in the beginning, I tried to make covers that were very … I was blessed to have a lot of cover input. So I would try to do things like, in “Hot Dog Girl,” the cover used a Bi-flag color scheme, but when you look at it outwardly, it’s just a girl in a hot dog suit. So I used to try to hide it, but as the people who are trying to shut us up get louder, I’ve decided to get louder. So my covers have become more and more queer, the romance ones.
“The Last Girls Standing” is machetes and stuff like that. I should have made them like rainbow-colored machetes, or something. I’ll try harder next time! [Laughter]
Gould: I would say, as somebody who experienced baby’s first book ban recently – thank you, Texas – I remember getting the news that “The Dead and the Dark,” my debut novel, had been banned in Texas and being really surprised. And I thought, “Oh, it must be the serial killing, right? They don’t want kids reading about the serial killing.” That wasn’t the reason why, unfortunately. It was an interesting wake-up call, because obviously I understood that this was something that was happening widely for queer and marginalized folks, that it’s just the portrayal of these people living their life. A girl being attracted to another girl is the reason that it’s banned.
For people who are banning books, they actually don’t need a reason beyond that. They don’t try to justify it beyond that, which is very intimidating and scary. I can’t imagine being a teen and coming up against that, that just the very nature of who you are is enough to keep it off the shelves.
So I, similar to you, am trying to be very vocal and very open about my identity and the identity of my characters, because even if you can’t find it on a shelf, I want you to hear me talking about the experience of my characters and the things that they go through. The fact that they live a very visibly queer life, and that this is something that is just a part of them, and it’s not something that they should be judged for or taken out of visibility for. And it’s a really difficult space to be in because, how do you combat something that’s so huge and that is working to keep you from even being visible to people?
It’s very difficult. But I would say just being loud about your identity and about the identity of the people that you write about, and trying to make sure that if somebody looks to your books, they don’t have to question the kind of character that you’re writing, is something that at least I’ve found empowering.
And I know that there’s also a power in these sort of stealth covers that we’ve talked about in the past, the covers for books, like you were saying with “Hot Dog Girl,” where if somebody picked it up for their child, they might not know that it was a queer book and that’s how some people are able to get queer books into the hands of queer youths without having to worry about those bans. And I think that there’s definitely a call for both.
Dugan: Yeah, the “pinky-touch” covers are very hot right now, so if you see pinkies touching on a cover, just know it’s probably very gay. [Laughter] The author wanted them making out. This is what they could get away with.
Gould: As somebody who has art from “Where Echoes Die” available at the signing that involves pinkies touching …
Miller: That was Jennifer Dugan and Courtney Gould, talking to OPB’s Jenn Chávez at the 2023 Portland Book Festival from Literary Arts.
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