Indies Introduce Q&A with Kalela Williams

Kalela Williams is the author of Tangleroot, a Summer/Fall 2024 Indies Introduce young adult selection and November/December 2024 Kids’ Next List pick.

Lily Taliaferro of Eagle Harbor Book Co. in Bainbridge Island, Washington, served on the bookseller panel that selected Williams’ debut for Indies Introduce.

“As soon as I picked this up, I knew it was going to be a showstopper,” Taliaferro said. “Kalela Williams beautifully writes a coming-of-age story, while reckoning with the history of slavery and the often overlooked parts of ancestry. This is a phenomenal new voice in the YA world and it is going to stun and delight readers across the board.”

Kalela Williams has always loved books, cats, and history. As a child, she began scrawling stories in marbled composition books. As a teenager, she'd blow out her birthday candles and wish for a greater light to illuminate history through fiction, which makes her debut novel, Tangleroot, literally a dream come true. Kalela has made a career in literary events, directing everything from the city-wide read program One Book, One Philadelphia to the Virginia Festival of the Book. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Kalela now lives in the Central Virginia town of Staunton, with her partner with whom she runs a story-centered organization, The OFF Center. Welcome, Kalela!

Kalea Williams: Hello! Thank you.

LT: It's so exciting to get to chat with you.

KW: Thanks. Yeah, same, same.

LT: Do you want to give us an elevator pitch, basically, of what Tangleroot is all about?

KW: Yes, absolutely. Tangleroot is the story of a young woman, Noni Reid, who moves from Boston to a small Central Virginia town, into a home that her enslaved ancestor built. She is living with her mom, who she does not get along with — vast understatement — and through the process of living in this home that her enslaved ancestor built, she learns the history of the house, and she learns the history of her town, and she learns a little bit more about her mom.

She also uncovers some family secrets along the way that shake up everything she thought she knew. So this is a story of discovery, and it's a story of her looking into history and finding out more than she realized she would.

LT: It was so fascinating to read all about the history, and there clearly was a lot of thought and work that went into it. What was your writing process like, in terms of research?

KW: Thank you for asking. When you're writing something that gets so deep into history, I felt like I owed it to the book, I owed it to my readers, and I owed it to the past to do my due diligence, so the research was pretty was pretty intensive. I spent a lot of time in archives. I spent a lot of time in the Library of Virginia, for instance, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. I looked at a lot of primary sources.

Of course, those are documents that are written within a contemporary time period, such as newspaper articles, letters, diaries. I read a lot of voices from the 19th century, and sometimes even the 18th century just to give me some context. There was a lot that went into it, but it was fascinating. Sometimes I thought I had something and then I discovered more. I felt a little bit like Noni Reid must have felt, just discovering more and more as you go along.

LT: Yeah! Was honing in on the importance of that sort of ancestral history an essential step while writing?

KW: It was. Noni discovers her ancestral history while she's looking into the history of this house. She's discovering more about who she is based on the people who came before her. She's reading about and hearing the voices of her ancestors. I've always been fascinated with my own genealogy, and this was a way for me to sort of live vicariously through someone fictional who's going on a deep dive.

In real life, of course, history — when we're researching it —  never quite answers the questions as fully as Noni’s experience. We get a lot of dead ends or a lot of things that we don't have an answer to quite yet. That's how history research works. But in her case, she has questions and there are some things that are left unanswered, but she also discovers a lot that she just never knew that informs who she is. So I felt that that was really important, but also it was fun to write.

LT: In Noni sort of finding out who she is, did you also find out more about yourself while writing? Sort of connecting Noni and yourself?

KW: I think so. That's a really interesting question, because Noni’s story isn't my story. None of this ever happened to me. But even when you're not writing about you, you're always writing about you. Noni doesn't always get things right. She doesn't always get her friendships right. She doesn't always get her interpretation of experiences right. She sort of has to go back and really understand where things are, and I felt like this was an opportunity for me to think about things that I haven't gotten right or didn't get right in the past, and learn to get them right. I think that really gave me an opportunity to discover some things about myself.

LT: That leads me into my next question: What was your inspiration? What made you want to write this story in particular?

KW: When I was about thirteen years old, I was in 4H and I went to a 4H camp. The camp was located on the grounds of an old plantation, and I went to the burial ground that had once been a burial ground of an enslaved community. I thought that I would see tombstones with names and dates, and instead it was just a wooded area — very quiet, very peaceful, a few depressions in the ground — but there were no tombstones. There were no names. You didn't know who was there. There were unmarked rocks, but there were no inscriptions.

It struck me, because I wanted to give names and stories to the people who had lived and toiled here, and died here. I wanted them to have names and stories. And of course, I will maybe never find that out. Not for this community, but there are so many other communities. In this case, I made a fictional community, and I wanted this fictional community to live. So that experience when I was thirteen years old developed over the years, and it became part of other experiences that I've had as a young adult. This book was years in the making — decades in the making, even — and it catalyzed and crystallized into what Tangleroot is.

LT: Wow! You can totally tell that it is a long time coming, and that you feel so much passion for it. If there was one thing that you want people to take away from reading Tangleroot, what do you want them to take away from it?

KW: I would want people to take away that there are so many unnamed people who came before us — unnamed in the sense of history, unnamed in the sense of looking back. We will never know their names. We will never know their stories. But they had stories, and they had names, and they had families, and they loved and they survived. And when they didn't survive, they left a mark.

Whether we can see that mark, or whether we think we can see that mark or not, there's a mark left. I want people to take away the importance of history. History isn't just dates and facts on paper. History is often the unseen. It's often the unknown. It's what we can maybe never, ever know. But if we know how a person might have lived, if we know — as Noni discovers — some of the particulars of being enslaved, then in some way we know these stories. This is the way that we can uncover these stories — to do our due diligence and read and learn and understand.

I'll also add — other writers have said this too — that when I researched Tangleroot, I wasn't sneaking into old buildings and looking through people's file cabinets. I wasn't tiptoeing around, I was going to publicly accessible archives. I was doing work that anybody could walk in and do. Sometimes you have to make an appointment, but I wasn't doing anything special. I was reading what we all could, what we all have access to.

LT: I love that. What a great way to wrap us up. Thank you so much for joining me today, and thank you to everyone else who is listening. Please go and grab your copy of Tangleroot on October 15. You're going to love it, and believe me, it will stay with you, and you will continue to think about it for months.

KW: Gosh, thank you. Thank you. This was such a great opportunity, and I'm just very excited about Tangleroot’s launch!

Tangleroot by Kalela Williams (Feiwel & Friends, 9781250880666, Hardcover Young Adult Mystery, $19.99) On Sale: 10/15/2024

Find out more about the author at kalelawilliams.com.

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