Rock Star Writers: J.L. Powers

I truly believe writers should be elevated to the same level of public recognition and should receive equal media attention as rock stars. Thus, Rock Star Writers.

Recently, I had both the pleasure and honor to interview author, J.L. Powers about her recent book, This Thing Called the Future. It is, by far, one of the best YA novels I have read in a long time. I HIGHLY recommend it.

Khosi lives with her beloved grandmother Gogo, her little sister Zi, and her weekend mother in a matchbox house on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. In that shantytown, it seems like somebody is dying all the time. Billboards everywhere warn of the disease of the day. Her Gogo goes to a traditional healer when there is trouble, but her mother, who works in another city and is wasting away before their eyes, refuses even to go to the doctor. She is afraid and Khosi doesn't know what it is that makes the blood come up from her choking lungs. Witchcraft? A curse? AIDS? Can Khosi take her to the doctor? Gogo asks. No, says Mama, Khosi must stay in school. Only education will save Khosi and Zi from the poverty and ignorance of the old Zulu ways.

School, though, is not bad. There is a boy her own age there, Little Man Ncobo, and she loves the color of his skin, so much darker than her own, and his blue-black lips, but he mocks her when a witch's curse, her mother's wasting sorrow, and a neighbor's accusations send her and Gogo scrambling off to the sangoma's hut in search of a healing potion. –from Goodreads

Where did the seed of This Thing Called the Future come from?

The seed for this story came when I first lived in South Africa in 2006 and one of the teen girls I was living with confessed that her boyfriend was in his thirties. What kind of man thinks it is okay to date—or sleep with—a thirteen year old? This was my introduction to the huge problem of sugar daddies in South Africa where men offer small gifts—for example, cell phone minutes—in exchange for sex.

Sugar daddies are one problem and rape is another. 1 in 4 South African men admitted to raping a woman in 2009. A huge number of young women experience violence in their first sexual encounters.

Also, I was staying in a township in KwaZulu Natal, where the HIV-AIDS epidemic has hit highest, not only in Africa but, basically, the world. I was really struck by the fact that 1/3 of the people around me were HIV+. It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that 30% of the population has a life-threatening disease which, in 2006, was still likely to result in their death. (Since then, through America’s PEPFAR program, many of those people are on anti-retroviral medications. Though an imperfect solution, those medications sustain the lives of HIV+ individuals and prevent them from getting AIDS for much longer than if they went without medication altogether.)

As I looked into the HIV epidemic, I started to become interested in traditional healers. With 5-7 million HIV+ people, only 32,000 medical doctors, and upwards of 300,000 traditional healers, guess who people are going to first with their medical problems? Looking at traditional healing led me to the problem of witchcraft. To paraphrase scholar Adam Ashforth, many people in South Africa understand HIV to be both sexually transmitted and to be the work of witches. So with the higher number of HIV, naturally, the higher number of witches. This has created enormous “spiritual insecurity” in the townships and rural areas.

BUT—and this is a huge BUT—despite all of these problems, South Africans are among the kindest, most hospitable, most wonderful people you will ever meet anywhere. The warmth and vitality of all South Africans—white, black, and “colored” (mixed race)—is something to enjoy and celebrate and love.

All of this played into my writing a story about a young girl who sees death and evil and violence hidden in every corner and crevice of her life. At the same time, she has a loving, though far-from-perfect, family, who are being threatened by spiritual forces all around them. How will she find the strength to be free of fear and to celebrate her life and the lives around her?

Are any of your characters based on people you met while in South Africa?

I named my main character, Khosi, after my 14-year-old sister in the Zulu family I lived with when I first lived in South Africa in 2006. I named the little sister Zi after the 13-year-old sister in that family. But other than names, I imagined both characters into existence. Still, a lot of what those girls told me, as well as what another young friend I met in Cape Town told me, made it into the book in some fashion or another. For example, my friend in Cape Town, Nadine, told me what it was like to have girlfriends with sugar daddies. Otherwise, it was a struggle to imagine what it was like so I really needed an insider perspective. I got these insider perspectives from a lot of people; I tried to thank each and every one in my acknowledgements. Hopefully I didn’t forget anybody.

There are many important threads running through your novel: AIDS, female empowerment, traditional versus modern ways. What do you most want young readers, as well as adults, to take away from your book?

I would be happy if readers look at the world a little bit differently after reading my book. I work hard, in my writing, to show the complexity of the world we live in—that nothing is exactly black and white, that not only are there shades of gray but also shades of blue and pink and red and green in there. So I would love it if people read my book and considered the multiple ways that people live, as well as the variety of ways we look at illness and womanhood and tradition, and if they come away realizing that their own ideas about these subjects are just one way of looking at it, not the “right” way or the only way.

Your characters are so realistic and three-dimensional. What advice do you have for writers when it comes to character development?

Layers! Write in layers. Your first draft is a fragile dream and you have only begun to get to know your characters. You must keep writing draft after draft. As you get to know them better, those details creep in and, finally, your characters can live and breathe on the page.

I also think that we have to let go of our idealistic desire to have characters be all good and all bad. If you think about the people you love in your life, you know how horribly imperfect they are and yet you love them anyway. To write characters that are real, we have to let them be as complex as real people are.

Do you have any other up-and-coming novels? And, is there any chance of seeing Khosi and Little Man again?

I’m drafting a psychothriller right now, in which a young girl gets sucked into a game of sex and power and fear that costs lives, possibly even her own. I also plan to revise a novel I haven’t looked at in three years, which explores the friendship between a young man living on the streets after his family threw him out for his drug abuse and a young woman from a fundamentalist religious family. When the girl thinks she’s received a command from God to do something, it endangers everybody around her.

I do want to write a sequel to This Thing Called the Future. I’m not sure if it will be from Khosi’s perspective, Little Man’s perspective, or maybe Khosi’s little sister Zi’s perspective. Hopefully I’ll find time to work on it…soon!

There has been much talk throughout the writing blogosphere about being a plotter or a pantser. Which one are you?

I’m definitely a pantser, though I’d like to be more of a plotter. I always have a vague idea of where I want to end up but I don’t know what the journey is going to be like to get there. This makes the first draft hard to write. I much prefer revising once I have that first draft down!!!

Finally, what authors have inspired you to write?

I really have a wide repertoire of writers that I love, in many different genres and from many different time periods. For young adult, I always mention Benjamin Alire Saenz, whose novels are freaking fantastic. For general fiction, I also like Joe Meno and Richard Brautigan. As a child, my favorite writers were L.M. Montgomery and Laura Ingalls Wilder. For non-fiction, I love Jon Krakauer and Alexandra Fuller and J.C. Hallman. For classics, I love Chinua Achebe.

This Thing Called the Future is J.L. Powers second YA novel. She can be found at http://jlpowers.net/.