Maud Newton

Presenting: a conversation with Maud Newton, author of ANCESTOR TROUBLE: A RECKONING AND A RECONCILIATION.

In which: we discuss the ins and the outs of writing ANCESTOR TROUBLE; of “making the line well”; of Aristotle at two in the morning; of freedom from and fealty to form in books and in blogs; of creative evolution; of taking the time to get to the truth; and of freeing oneself from the creative and personal boulders we push up the hills in before us.

About Maud:

Maud Newton is a writer, critic, and occasional speaker. Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation (Random House), her first book, has been called “a literary feat” by the New York Times Book Review and a “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” by the Boston Globe, praised by Oprah Daily, NPR, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vulture, the Los Angeles Times, Wired, and many others, and named one of Esquire’s best books of 2022. Excerpts from the book have appeared in Esquire, Time, and the Wall Street Journal.

Her essay on “America’s Ancestry Craze,” a seed of the book, was a Harper’s cover story. Both the book and the essay are outgrowths of old weekend ancestry posts on her blog.

Newton was born in Dallas, grew up in Miami, and graduated from the University of Florida with degrees in English and law. Eventually she moved to Brooklyn, and for the past six years she’s lived on Lenape land in Queens. She started blogging in May 2002 with the aim of finding others who were passionate about books, culture, and politics, and to establish an informal place to write about her life and family. Within a few years, her site had been praised, criticized, and quoted in the New York Times Book Review, Forbes, New York Magazine, the Washington Post, the UK Times, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, Poets & Writers Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New Yorker, Book Magazine, the Evening Standard, the Scotsman, Slate, the Denver Post, and Canada’s National Post.

Newton has blogged less frequently in recent years but sends her Ancestor Trouble newsletter every month (or so). You can also follow her on Twitter, Instagram, and Medium. She maintains a Facebook page.

Chapters

  • 00:00 - Introduction

  • 03:00 - "My guiding principle in all this was to get at truth – in all its complexity."

  • 05:44 - "I wanted to re-create the exact emotional dynamic for the reader... there was a didactic impulse there."

  • 10:04 - "I realized that being stuck in the (memoir) form... is sort of a false way of looking at it..."

  • 15:08 - "We need to do the work... to be able to sit with out feelings, accept those histories, and then talk about it with other people who are resistant...''

  • 21:20 - On ancestor veneration and "making the line well."

  • 31:42 - "My sense is that what we're looking for often is not limited to fact..."

  • 37:35 - "If you're claiming to make the historical records available, they should ALL be available..."

  • 43:40 - "There was a time when I was reading Aristotle at two in the morning... and I remember thinking, 'Am I writing a book or is this actually crazy?'"

  • 51:56 - "That was one of the reasons I was so drawn to the blog form..."

  • 55:46 - "... I don't think that I gave myself the opportunity to approach fiction as an opportunity to truly make things up..."

  • 57:15 - Where to connect / Twitter / Newsletter / Etc

  • 58:03 - Conclusions

Linkage

Theme music, INTERSECTIONS, by Uziel Colón; all rights reserved.

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