Cadwell Turnbull Interview

The full interview with the author of The Lesson, about science fiction and social change.

So let's see, I guess, maybe we can start talking about The Lesson and some of your fiction writing. So like I said, I really loved The Lesson. I read it the last time I was on a plane so I have some fond associations with it, from the before times. But one thing that I really loved about it is how vividly character driven it was. It's a very like intense book, but there's also this kind of everyday drama about it that feels very real to me. There's this huge precariousness going on in the background, but then life just kind of like marches on and people are trying to make things work on a day to day basis. And I wonder to what extent life feels that way to you.

In some ways, I wrote the book to have a conversation about colonialism and power dynamics, when someone is vastly more powerful than a particular group in a particular place, and they kind of lord over them up close and from afar. And that kind of relationship dynamic and what that does. And so now, even looking at all the stuff that's happening in America and across the world, there's that weird mix of normal life, and all of these politics that kind of feel distant but they they reach into your life.

And I would say that it's very similar, thinking about the Virgin Islands. Day to day, the Virgin Islands just feels like it's all about these three islands and the people on them. But there's all these ways that being a part of the United States kind of tangentially plays into the culture and affects how we think about ourselves in relation to our place—how we think about people coming in, tourists, how we think about our various family members abroad. It's this way that we're always, even though it's very distant, relating ourselves to the mainland, to stateside.

And sometimes it's not that obvious, but our economy's very tourist heavy. So the cruise ships come in every week and people come off the cruise ships and they're all walking down Main Street and they're shopping and they're interacting with the commerce of the place, but not necessarily the people of the place. There's this interesting wall between those things, between normal life as a St. Thomian, and the tourist culture, relating to people who are relating to us from a strictly commercial sense.

Yeah, it kind of reminds me a little of China Mieville's The City & the City. Where there's two cities that sort of overlap each other. And it kind of reminds me of what you're talking about where they're existing in the same space, but there's this disconnect.

Right. So like with the Ynaa, they interact with the island, kind of. Sometimes a member of the Ynaa will be walking down the street or they'll be eating some of the food. They're definitely a part of the island and the islanders know they're a part of it. And even though you could see the spaceship on the waterfront, the regular day to day stuff still feels the same, despite the fact that every once in a while you might pass an alien.

Right, right. Yeah, and that's kind of what I was getting at with the everydayness of it, how it's like life just sort of goes on even though there's this tremendous threat that you could just sort of stumble across at any given time. I know you're a big Buffy fan, and I'm a big Buffy fan as well, and your work kind of reminds me of Buffy in that sense, the way it uses these supernatural elements to bring out the intensities of regular, real life. It feels very real, even though there's this very fantastical element. And I wonder how much of that is intentional on your part? And what do you feel sci-fi and fantasy elements bring to your fiction?

I mean, in terms of Buffy, you know, I grew up watching that show. And it was always interesting to see these high schoolers fighting the forces of evil on the side, and occasionally a vampire showing up in the halls. But then on the regular day to day, the teachers didn't seem to be aware of it, like students would be absent because they were murdered off screen, right? And no one seemed to be like, hey where's Andy, he didn't show up to class today. I just always thought that was really fun and there seemed to be a playfulness to it. You know, at one point, the school actually just blows up. And Sunnydale proper just goes on as usual. And it seems like Sunnydale exists in some kind of weird snow globe where everyone else is just like, yeah, that just happens there. But everywhere else, you know, we're just normal over here.

And so yeah, engaging with that kind of media and enjoying it must have played a role in the way that I think about my fiction, the way I think about The Lesson. I don't know if it was particularly conscious. I just know that when I when I was writing The Lesson, I didn't want to prioritize the aliens too much. I didn't want it to feel like it was about them. The human characters are relating to the Ynaa in different ways, but it's all very rooted in their own experience. And their relationship to other people, their relationship to the place, their questions about faith and sexuality, all these big things.

They're using the aliens, in some way, like metaphors for things that are happening in their lives. But I thought it was important to center the human stories or the human-like stories over the big spaceship battles. I didn't want a war between aliens and human beings or any of that stuff. That didn't feel like the story I wanted to tell. And a lot of my fiction tends to treat the speculative elements that way. They work on their own, the Ynaa are real, they have their own concerns, they have their own culture, and history. But for the people in the story, it seemed important to me that they relate to the Ynaa through themselves, not on the Ynaa's terms.

It's kind of like they're trying to not let the Ynaa's presence define who they are, but it's always this presence there in their lives.

Right. And I would say, it's similar to the Virgin Islands' relationship to the US. It is a presence. We are the US Virgin Islands, but when we talk about stateside, we say "stateside." We tend to separate ourselves, at least in a linguistic way, when we talk about the country we belong to. It's the country we belong to, but not us all the time. It's kind of fluid.

You know, you mentioned you wanted to write a story about colonialism and that's strongly present in the book. And it kept making me think of how there's this trope in especially classic science fiction of colonialism, right? You know, it's like terraforming other planets and setting up these outposts and conquering these distant monsters. I wonder how much of that bothered you being a science fiction fan, when you were growing up, or now. And how much, as you were writing your own alien story, you wanted to subvert those tropes in your work.

Yes, it bothered me. A lot of the times, I would engage with science fiction the way anybody would. I wasn't always being critical of the science fiction. One of my favorite shows was Stargate growing up, and I would watch Stargate and I didn't think about the militaristic aspect of Stargate. It was fun. It was like, yeah, they were wearing military uniforms, but they were exploring other planets. And they had advisory roles on different planets, or they would mitigate some kind of disaster happening somewhere or some conflict between two nations on some planet. And I thought that was really interesting and fun.

I did not think about the fact that it was America doing that and how it fit into ideas about American imperialism, how how even on a galactic scale, America was centering itself and its concerns, and the story was bending over backwards to present this American worldview as being just and good. And, you know, we're saving the galaxy now, not just the world. But there would be times when I was watching the show, and the SG1 team would be interacting with some locals or they would be mitigating some conflict, and I would find myself on the other side, defending the worldview of the people there or being like, you're not giving enough time to what they're feeling about your invasion, right? And I feel like at least it was stewing somewhere in my subconscious when I was young.

As I got older, and I read more speculative fiction, I got more critical of the kinds of things I saw. I was like, why are the aliens always showing up to New York? Or DC? And why would they think those places are important? Why would it be important to them? When we explore other planets, why do we assume our supremacy in those contexts? Why don't we think that it's problematic to land on a planet without talking to the inhabitants first, and that kind of thing. But it took me a while to get there.

I feel like The Lesson, through writing it, I was also engaging with my critique of science fiction that I saw before and trying to do something different. And I didn't always know what I was critiquing or what was bothering me when I started. But as I went through it, I was like, oh okay, it would be interesting to think about human relationships to other humans in the midst of an alien invasion. One of the things that I kind of refer to in the book, is how the rest of the world treats the Virgin Islands, while the Virgin Islands is bearing the brunt of the Ynaa's existence. They're there, and they're causing legitimate harm to the community, but the rest of the world is benefiting from Ynaa technology. And there's a kind of saltiness the Virgin Islanders have in relation to the rest of the world because of that. I think that that's truer to what would actually happen, that not everybody's relationship with the aliens would be equal on Earth. We're not just one human race. There are complicated power dynamics among us and those things would play out even in the midst of an alien presence.

You know, it's kind of funny, it makes me think about in Star Trek or whatever, when they would go to another planet, I always found it interesting how the planet always had one language, one culture. I was always like, are there other people on this planet who don't agree with what's happening here? You know, and they're totally invisible.

At least with Stargate, they would go through the gate, they would end up on this other planet and they would meet people and those people would either be against or for them being there and there would be no mention of what's going on on any other continent. Or how they would feel about the sudden appearance of aliens. It wasn't unpacked in those terms, and some of that is because it's a TV show and it's an hour. But it is interesting and it is something that I noticed, and it's one of the reasons why I decided to make the planet of Sa have multiple sentient beings on it, along with the Ynaa. And their culture is built out of the interactions with all of these sentient beings, before they even left their planet, and it's part of the reason why their culture is the way it is.

Well, in some way, you're talking about having the presence of politics in your writing, which you said something in a Geeks Guide to the Galaxy interview that I thought was really powerful, which was, a lot of times writers and literature want to focus on the personal. But you were saying for you, you can't separate the political from the personal because your politics are how you relate to the world. Can you elaborate on that point?

I'll use healthcare for an example. I grew up in a cultural context where we were really hesitant to go to the doctor. There was a lot of anxiety attached to it. And I know that a lot of people have anxiety attached to going to the doctor. But within a community that is poor and doesn't have adequate health care and knows that going to the doctor is going to affect their ability to pay rent next week or feed their kids, there's a lot of extra anxiety about doing those kind of things. And so, those things are likely to be put off, and sometimes with disastrous consequences. I've had family members die because they didn't go to the hospital. Something was wrong with them, and they just did know because they never went.

So to me, you could write that story as a personal story about someone with a phobia of going to the hospital and treat it as if it's just an individual thing. Or you could talk about the fact that most people don't have adequate health care, it's really expensive, it destabilizes people's households when someone gets sick. And so there's a lot of anxiety and fear attached to wellness, or seeking help, for physical health or mental health. And that is political. That is politics. That is policy.

You know, I grew up and part of my family was on food stamps assistance and some of my aunts and cousins lived in public housing. Those things are attached to politics. There's a reason why some people are able to buy homes and create generational wealth, and some people can't. There's a reason why some people can afford to buy food on a regular basis, and some people have to struggle to buy food, and how that affects their health and how that affects their levels of stress. There's a reason why some people's homes feel more secure.

And a lot of that has to do with systems. It's not just that some people have difficulty relating to each other. It has to do with how much pressure is on an individual, how much pressure is on a family, and those things have to do with larger political systems, not just what's happening in that one place.

Right. It's definitely a privilege to be able to not engage with politics. You know, and not everybody has that ability to sort of separate it off as something that you might watch on TV or something in the news.

Right, it's happening to them.

Well, I guess that leads well into your essay for Wired, about dystopia and utopia. And I wanted to ask you about a couple things in that piece. So one topic that I thought was really powerful was the way you define utopia as being a move toward justice and equity, and not necessarily this perfect world. I wonder if you could kind of elaborate on, in your mind, what the difference is between justice and perfection.

The way that I usually hear the conversation around utopia, and it kind of bugs me, is that it's used—we don't really have a good word for a just and equitable society. We use utopia as a stand in for both our ideas of what a perfect society might look like, and what a just and equitable society might look like. And the conflation means that you can use the perfect society definition to gaslight the justice and equity one.

You can say, "perfection is impossible" to a question about housing, about education. There's a way that we can normalize the present and we can pretend like the things that are happening, the injustices that we see in our current world, aren't the result of choices we're actually making. We can say, “Well, this is just the world. The world is not fair. The world is imperfect.” When what we're really talking about is that our systems are really bad. And that's a different conversation. But we don't treat them as different conversations.

Someone will say, we should make our society work for everyone and someone else will say, what you're describing is utopia and utopia is impossible. Someone will propose something that's better, or at least propose the attempt to find something better, and someone will respond, with, “Nothing can be perfect. This is good enough. We should improve upon this thing." When, in reality, this thing is really bad. And we should question the whole assumption of this thing.

I always think of how part of the American perspective is that some people deserve to thrive and some people just don't, and it's not our jobs to say who does and who doesn't, we'll just sort of let it work itself out. And, you know, it's just natural that some people are going to suffer. It kind of feels like that's a little bit of what you're talking about. But I wonder if that's something that you think that can change in the American perspective. It feels like such a big part of what the what the country is, I don't know.

I don't know, either. I mean, part of the reason why I was writing that essay was that I was grappling internally with a lot of things that I was feeling and that was the first time articulating what I felt was a huge problem for me. There's just a way that we operate that assumes a lot of things, and those assumptions, I think, are really bad and they perpetuate injustice. There's a way that we just take for granted the suffering of marginalized groups of people. And that to get to a better society, those same people have to suffer more. Like arguing and arguing, being attacked, being discriminated against, in order to get people to recognize just their basic humanity. I feel like if we were to change the framing, at least in our conversations, we might get a step towards changing culture a little bit.

The idea that some people should suffer is something we should challenge. And even if it's true that some people might end up suffering anyway, because suffering is a part of life, we should question it in terms of the operations of our systems. We should say, at the very least, everyone should be comfortable. And that should be something that we try to make true. And that we believe it exists, that that is a possibility of existence that people can have comfortable, fulfilling lives, that they're not stressed out about survival.

You know, health concerns are unavoidable, natural disasters are unavoidable, those kinds of things. But the system shouldn't be harming people, or killing people. And the system itself shouldn't be standing idly by as people suffer and die. And that, to me, seems basic.

But I don't know if we're ready to give up on the idea—I mean, part of this is a conversation around merit, too. I've brought this up with people and sometimes they give me this kind of like, what are you talking about look, when I say that meritocracy is bad. And what I really mean is that meritocracy is bad when you're using it to justify whether or not somebody should live and prosper in a system or suffer and die in a system. That there should be a basic assumption of humanity and we should treat people like they're deserving of that basic amount, and that should not be in question. And then meritocracy could be, within that, you get X job, or whether or not you get a paycheck that is X more, or whatever. I'm fine with that, but I just feel like people should be able to eat. That should not be an argument about merit. You know, no one should have to prove that they are deserving of eating.

Yeah, I mean, there's a talking point among sort of conservatives that, you know, not everybody deserves health care. That not everybody deserves to live and be healthy, which is such a strange sort of way to think about the world.

Yeah, like why? If you take a step back, it sounds absurd. If you were to remove all of the history of where that political opinion comes from and the way that we've normalized it. If you step back and just look at it, it seems ridiculous. It's like, no, everybody should have health care. Everybody should be able to eat, everybody should have shelter, all of the things that we know that people need to live and survive, everyone should have.

And then we could have a conversation about a merit-based system based on like responsibility. If you want someone to have a really difficult job, they have to show that they're responsible enough to have that job. Sure. I believe in that, that makes sense to me. But we have all of these ridiculous hoops for just, whether or not someone is homeless or not. These things have real consequences when we when we don't think about what is basic, what is inalienable for a human being, what a human being just should have.

Yeah, well, it reminds me of that line in your essay, which is, it creates the assumption that injustice is normal, and that oppression is realistic. And anything else is kind of preposterous that you would propose that. I think a lot about how a big part of the project of activism is to try to make things that seem totally preposterous seem like they're normal, and make things that might seem normal seem preposterous. So flipping our understanding of what reality is. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you see a failure of imagination as a problem of injustice, and how we might get people to change what they believe is possible, or if that can be done.

On the second part of that question, I think that art is one way. I think about the reason I got into science fiction and genre, because I wanted to imagine alternatives to being and treat them as if those could be normal. So one of my favorite books from from college and remains my favorite book is The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. That story takes for granted that it's possible to have a political system based on everyone having what everybody else else has. And that there's some level of self governance that can be assumed, and that humanity wouldn't implode because of it. Everyone being fine, being relatively okay. Life on Anarres is really hard, but everyone being relatively okay or sharing resources isn't going to lead to the breakdown of society. That, to me, is really powerful. And you can't get there without creating a story around something like that, as if it's real.

So that's one of the reasons why I found speculative fiction really attractive, going into it and wanting to write it. But I think that in terms of activism, I think asking a question or critiquing a thing helps to challenge the assumption of its rightness and true-ness and centered-ness. If I ask a question like, why prison? Someone has to respond with, well, these are the reasons why we must have prisons, and then you can then have a conversation about each one of those things.

Well, does our prison system do that? No, not really. Is it rehabilitating? No. Should we punish people in that way? Do you think that's a good way to punish people? Maybe not. It's a way of renegotiating what we should consider normal. And to me that only works with engagement or asking the questions of why. You can't take reality for granted. The way that we've set things up was made by either deliberate or unconscious decisions, and the way that we change that is by deliberate or unconscious decisions.

Do you see your writing as part of your activism or your politics? Or how do you see your activism as part of your writing? Do you find them to be kind of the same thing? Or are they sort of different projects for you?

I think they're different projects. Ursula Le Guin talked about this, where she felt like her dedication was to her work. Her writing, that was her activism. And James Baldwin talks about this too, how he would try to join different organizations and then he would want to question them. And there's a way that even progressive or radical organizations assume certain things to be true and they don't challenge themselves on those assumptions.

I feel like, for my own brain, I really like art, and I really like fiction, because you can create a premise and you can also challenge a premise within it, and you need to. Inherent within fiction, you need to talk about conflict, or else it's not interesting, it's not a story. So reading The Dispossessed, that society is, I would say, much better than ours in terms of its ethics. But there are conflicts and problems within it. And those conflicts need to be resolved by the characters within the story.

I feel like there's a way that—I don't want to say it like this—but there's a way when you are organizing with other people, you kind of have to drink the Kool Aid. You kind of have to like, critique it, but not critique it on a foundational level. Where I think that with art, you can critique anything on a foundational level. Even the thing that you are presenting as a remedy. It teaches an underlying way of questioning, even when you think you're right, that I think is important and valuable to activism. It's important and valuable to social change. And I just find stories where that is happening more compelling because I feel like the work is never done and your story should treat it that way, and you shouldn't assume that you've arrived at the answer. It's a step.

When you're sitting down to write, do you have particular outcome in mind? Do you say like, okay, I want people to better understand the legacy of colonialism or the experience of a marginalized community, or you just kind of get started and that's the direction it goes?

I think I hop around. When I think of a project, I am thinking about these big political things in the beginning. I'm working on a trilogy right now that I'm excited and nervous about, but there's a lot of political stuff that I'm exploring—I have cooperatives in there and economic democracy, and radical politics. And I also have monsters from Caribbean folklore in it. It's like a contemporary fantasy, but very political. I was thinking about it like the civil rights movement for monsters. And part of that is because it was a very intentional thing that I wanted people to engage with these tropes that are fun, but also eat their vegetables or something. I wanted to explore questions about society through these fun tropes that I love too, like watching Buffy.

But, you know, when you get down to writing a story, you have to think about character and you have to think about plot, you have to think about setting, and all of those things, to me, feel like very different things. It's like all of the reasons why I got into it kind of slip to the background, and I'm thinking about this story and the characters and the place. And those things become more important.

You know, doing that work might actually change what I think I'm trying to do. I don't know what a society with monsters and humans would be like, where they both would feel like they're not being slighted by each other. But doing this project helps me to figure that out, and some of that may not be at all useful for thinking about our society. But it is interesting and fun to think about. And some of it might be useful for thinking about this society.

I feel like I don't go into it with my mind made up about what the answer might be, but the story helps me figure that out. I figure it out through characters, and sometimes my characters don't care about the politics, or their politics are not mine. They disagree with me. And then I have to look at them and be like, well, no, you have a point. I disagree with me too. I think that that experience is kind of fun.

I saw a tweet once about why writing is so hard. And it was something along the lines of like, writing is where you think you know something. And then you go to write it down, and you realize you don't know it at all. And then you have to actually figure it out what it is, and that's why it's so hard, because it's a process of discovering what you don't know.

Right, right. No, that's exactly what it is. You know, I went into this thinking a lot of things. And I just finished maybe the seventh revision on the first book, and I'm thinking a lot about the second and third books. And I'm like, I honestly don't know what the answer is for this.

I came into the project thinking, for one, that I wanted to end the project with the Virgin Islands receiving statehood. And now I'm not so sure. And that's partly because of like, life. I've been interacting with a lot of people from back home that feel very differently about the Virgin Islands' relationship to the US. Some people want independence. And there were independence movements in the past. Some people want statehood. Some people want it to remain exactly the same. And part of the question is, what do I think is a good place for it to be? Am I wrong about that? And right now I think I'm wrong about that. Like I don't know if statehood is a good place.

What seems like a logical place you would end? What eventuality can I make make sense? If that makes sense. Is complete independence a thing that I could imagine happening within the next 12 years? I don't know. My hunch is no. But then I feel like I always critique people about not being bold and not imagining something big enough. And I feel like statehood is all we could hope for. But then again, I don't know if statehood is a bad thing. This is totally unrelated from the thing that you asked, but it's something that I'm kind of puzzling out in my mind with this project.

Well, no, I think it's very relevant because we were talking about how activism and writing both challenge people to push their imaginations of what they think is possible. And it sounds like during the process of writing, you have to do that to yourself as well. You have to push your own imagination.

Right, yeah. And you also have to justify it, which is a weird thing about speculative fiction in particular. But you know, all fiction, you have to create a thing that is absolutely not true. It's fiction. But you have to justify it in such a way that people buy into the fiction of it, right? They're like, oh that's possible. That's plausible. And it might not be. It might be complete fluff, you just created a real enough representation of our world that the stuff that you're fudging, people can kind of be like, oh yeah, sure. It might not be a thing that could be possible, but you know. It's the project.

Well, I don't want to take up too much of your time, but I did definitely want to get into your work with Grassroots Economic Organizing. That seems like the big group that you're engaged with. And I wonder if you could tell me about how you got involved with that group and what speaks to you about their work?

Right. It came out of fiction. I'll tell you exactly what I was thinking about. I was thinking about having family that grew up in public housing, having grown up part of my life in public housing, I was thinking about how tight knit those communities are. You can really like walk next door and ask for sugar. It's not a cliche, it's a thing that you can do. And having the experience of someone in your neighborhood buying bikes for a bunch of the neighborhood kids on that street. Now as an adult, I'm like, where did he get the money to buy those bikes? But at the time, it was really sweet and no one seemed to think it was odd. Everyone just got a bike and they were excited.

There was just that kind of relationship where you just knew everyone. You would go outside, and you'd walk down the sidewalk and pass the same people you pass every day, and they would ask you about your aunt and ask you about your cousin, ask about your mom or your grandmother. You'd be like, she's fine, how's so and so.

I was trying to imagine a speculative story where that same kind of culture was used to the economic benefit of the entire block or the entire community. They would create a business together, or cook food and deliver it to other people. Or they would buy cars together, they would create some kind of structure where they could buy a car and you could all use the car to do deliveries or whatever. All of these very working class jobs, but they would pool that money into making the community better and making the community stronger, investing in other things and other projects and other businesses. And that over time, they could create stability as a group.

I was like, what would that look like? And then I looked online. I was like, there must be something like this. And I found co-ops. I didn't know what a co-op was, and growing up, I couldn't point to one. We don't really have things set up that way. I feel like talking to people in the states, they at least know what like a co-op grocery store is or something. But I had no conception of that. So then I saw that, and over time, I got really interested in co-ops and started reading a lot more about them.

Through that work, which was at that time, research for a project that just never happened, but through that work I got submerged in the community. And then I met someone that was a part of a co-op, and they recommended Grassroots Economic Organizing to me, and then I reached out to them and I thought what they were doing was really interesting. And then I joined.

But it came out of me trying to write a short story or something with this imagined cooperative structure. It turns out that it actually exists in the world. It's actually quite diverse and complex. And there's a lot of different kinds of co-ops—housing co-ops, worker co-ops, co-op associations, open value networks, all of these interesting, cooperative setups. And most people don't really know about them. I was like, this is something that I could do, I could figure out a way to work with GEO to make these things better known or write about them, to engage with them in fiction.

That's really interesting. And I can see why that would be so like, appealing. I'm a big fan the Boston Ujima Project. And what I really like about them is like the way they sort of, and the way a lot of co ops do this is they chop up different parts of the existing economy and sort of piece together something totally new out of it, you know, does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, it does. Right now I've been working on a co-op game, like me and a few co-op people. We imagine a fictional co-op, and we've created characters within that co-op, and we play them and they interact and they have conflict and there’s this larger world conflict that's happening. It's very cool.

Like a role playing game?

Like a role playing game. We Zoom. Well, we don't Zoom, there's this co-op version of Zoom. But we have these chats on Sundays, they last an hour and a half, two hours. And we have these shared characters and this shared co-op, and a shared world. And we'll set a theme. They're like at a cafe and they're discussing X. We kind of debate what the characters will do in the situation. So this is what this person says, what would what would Ray say? And we have a whole conversation about what Ray's actual response would be based on the character. And then we'll write down what Ray said, and then we'll pass it to the next person. We've been doing that for a number of weeks. And it's getting quite elaborate now.

That's really cool. Do you find that is a way to explore the possibilities of different concepts that could be put into place in co-ops, or is it just for fun?

It's both. It's for fun. A lot of us are just having fun with it. It's an opportunity for us to play on a new co-op model, and play out what the model would entail, but it's also really fun. And to me, it's the closest that I've gotten to imagining what a co-op would actually be like without actually being in one. They're self-owned and they're self governed, so by nature, they tend to be hard to parse. Their conflicts are very specific and very personal. So you can't just go and ask a co-op, tell me about a conflict you guys had. Their relationships are complicated and dynamic. And so through this game, I've been able to think more about what a co-op would actually be like and feel like, and that has helped my fictional rendering of co-ops.

Interesting. So it's kind of like you're able to explore the concepts in a more pure sense, because they don't have those same personal dynamics mixed into them.

Right, there would be the kind of conflict you would see in a co-op, but they’re not pulling from their relationship with a co-op member. They're not saying, yeah, me and Travis had this conflict back then. And this is how we resolved or didn't resolve it. That's too personal. It's a way for us to think about the co op structure and the dynamics of being in a co-op, without like, putting anyone on blast.

That's so cool. Okay, well, I want to get toward wrapping up here. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk. I really enjoyed this, and I wish you the best in your writing and all these big life changes coming up.

Thank you. This was really great. I really enjoyed our conversation.