Feminist Heists and Climate Justice with Aya De León
*Machine generatedd transcript.There can be errors. The audio podcast is the definitive record of the episode.*
###### Lee Schneider:
So I just finished reading _That Dangerous Energy_ and _Undercover Latina_, and I really enjoyed both. And I wanted to talk about _That Dangerous Energy_ first. What a great idea to write a feminist heist caper climate novel, which is, it's gotta be a big time genre coming up. It's fresh now. I can already see the movie turning in my head. But why did you choose that genre?
###### Aya De Leon:
Well, I love a good thriller. And I, one of the things about spying and heist, it's very political. And heist has to do with redistribution of resources. It could be wealth, it could be information, but I love that. And as someone who's an organizer and an activist, I feel really strongly that things should be organized differently in the society. And so in real life, I work doing different kinds of political organizing, electoral organizing, other types of action to change the situation. And if I were to try to steal something, I would get caught and end up in the carceral system and that would not go well for me. But in the fantasy of fiction, I can write stories about people who are more skilled and lucky. They work directly to redistribute resources and get away with it. So I love that. _That Dangerous Energy_ was my fifth climate novel. And the first one, _Side Chick Nation_, was part of a larger feminist heist series, the Justice Hustlers series, but it was the first one that was specifically focused on climate. The second one, _A Spy in the Struggle_, was about an FBI agent who is sent to infiltrate a climate justice, racial justice organization and ends up having divided loyalty. And then, _Queen of Urban Prophecy_ was about a hip hop artist who goes out on tour of the US and in the process encounters a lot of climate crisis and resistance. And I had a young adult climate novel that is open source available for free on Orion magazine called _The Mystery Woman in Room 3_. And it is about a Senate kidnapping plot to stop the Green New Deal and these two teen girls who interrupted. So, you know, and then _That Dangerous Energy_. And I have to say _That Dangerous Energy_ was my boldest climate book because I really wanted us by the end to get to some climate solutions. And I found the ending very satisfying in terms of having a major move away from fossil fuels and frankly towards the fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty. A little bit of a spoiler there, but you knew that was where we were trying to go.
###### Lee Schneider:
Right. All right. Well, now I have so many questions, so let me try to organize my mind. First of all, so many novels. I mean, how do you do that? How does someone become as prolific as you are?
###### Aya De Leon:
Yes, especially as a working mom. But the thing, the secret that I will tell you, and it's not something that I necessarily recommend, I am compulsively productive when I'm anxious. So for example, I wrote book after book after book in the pandemic. I've written books that I haven't even published, you know, because I'm just like, the climate crisis, right another. So that's been part of it. At the same time, I will say, and I noticed this as a difference between me and some of my colleagues, as an organizer, I am really obsessed with getting it done, know, getting it done. Whereas I have other colleagues who, you know, fuss over every sentence and are like, is this good enough? And my thing is like, my God, I wanna get all the messages out there. So every book that I write has a really strong message around climate, around other social justice issues. So I'm just like, let me get them out there. And so my process is very connected to that, wanting to get the message out and feeling passionate about that. And so I've learned to write fast and to...
###### Lee Schneider:
Fascinating. That's really interesting to think about that. We'll get to... I want to talk about activism a bit in a moment, but the other thing I wondered about is we all know more than we put in the book. Know, our knowledge of the universe that we're writing about is much bigger than what fits in those pages. And with your position as an activist, how do you keep it from not becoming pedantic?
###### Aya De Leon:
Be satisfied with novels that are pretty good. Whereas other folks are like putting in twice as much effort trying to get to perfection and no one ever gets to perfection.
###### Lee Schneider:
And becoming a lecture because _That Dangerous Energy_ is vastly entertaining. I could read it like it was a Netflix movie or a Ryan Coogler movie or a Soderbergh movie or a great fun novel. And yet I, you know, I got what you were doing. You know, there's all this, let's call it messaging, but it doesn't feel like that at all. So how do you do that?
###### Aya De Leon:
Well, I think my secret really is just genre fiction. You know, I'm writing a thriller and the job of the thriller is to be thrilling and fun. You know, you want to you're rooting for this character. My God, they're in danger. What's going to happen? You know, that's that's the secret. You know, many people when it comes to climate either write sci fi fantasy, you know, more on that later. Or they'll write literary fiction. And literary fiction, you know, has a certain depth and a certain gravitas. And you know, I'm writing sexy thrillers. That's my wheelhouse. I write sexy romantic thrillers about the climate crisis. And so the genre does the heavy lifting in making it fun and interesting. And I don't need necessarily to put in big messages. Usually someone gives some speech at some point in the book, but you know, in a 300 page book, you get a couple of speeches. It's not the bulk of the book, but the issues come through because what's at stake, the thing that the characters care about has to do with issues like the climate crisis, issues like wealth inequality, or health or public health or safety issues for certain communities, racial justice. Those are the things that the characters care about and the plot is organized around that. And you can organize a plot around anything, but as an activist, I like to organize a plot around social justice issues and then you don't have to have people making speeches.
###### Lee Schneider:
Hmm. And it does because characters are plot. It's the same thing, really. How would you inspire other writers to write more climate fiction? It's my opinion that we need more climate fiction. Need to visualize what your books do so well. We need to visualize what it's like living now and what can be done, not necessarily what it will be like.
###### Aya De Leon:
This really matters because what's happening is it matters to the characters and then we're in that world and that is what makes, that's what I think makes the novels work well.
###### Lee Schneider:
And what we can't do. In other words, I'm speaking to the dystopian issue. Your books are in the now and they but they present very real troubles and conflicts and show the characters fighting their way out of it, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding. That's what makes things interesting. But what would you say to inspire others to go in that direction?
###### Aya De Leon:
Well, I absolutely agree with you that so much of what we have now in climate fiction is dystopian. The reason, so first of all, I want to say no shade, folks who like a good dystopian story, enjoy yourselves, y'all. Keep reading them, keep writing them, and they are wonderful for entertainment. The challenge for me as an organizer for climate justice is that Octavia Butler's _Parable of the Sower_, came out in 1993. So over 30 years of cautionary tales around the climate crisis have not translated into mass movements and necessary action, right? So as an entertainment genre, that kind of climate fiction is fine and lovely. But as an activist project, I'm not convinced that it's been effective. And that's one of the reasons that I believe it's critical for people to write climate novels, particularly climate justice novels that are set in the here and now because the audience needs to be able to take action now. Yesterday, last week, 20 years ago, but really all we have is the now. So that's why I think it's really important. And I think, you know, my encouragement to people over the years has been thinking about where you can get climate into your novel. So for example, _Queen of Urban Prophecy_ is a story about a hip hop artist on tour, having lots of drama and chaos in her young life, falling in love with her DJ, which is just a terrible idea or is it? And, you know, trying to make her way in the music industry. And initially, I wrote it just as kind of a simple romance. It was like a hip hop romance. But then when I started working on it for publication a few years later, I was deeper in my climate activism and was like, okay, how can I make this a climate book? And the answer was, you don't have to look far. She's on a bus traveling around the country. All that had to happen is that everywhere she went, she was encountering some kind of problem with the climate crisis. And of course, that was effortless because the climate crisis is everywhere. So when she's in New Orleans, she goes to Hurricane Katrina Museum and is deeply affected. The DJ is Puerto Rican. His family is still reeling from Hurricane Maria. And so, you know, everywhere we went, there were wildfires, flooding, different kinds of problems connected to climate. And so it became pretty effortless for her to be like, whoa. And her politicization came from just paying attention. But then it got fun because I had, at one point I have an organizer contact her and say, you know, can you get your bus off fossil fuels? It's a diesel bus. How about you use recycled vegetable oil? And they're like, okay, let's do it. And then that, again, like you said, character plot, now they're working with recycled vegetable oil and because they're high profile, the people are like driving it to them and there are things that they have to do. And when they fail to do all the things, then there are high jinks that ensue. But yeah, you can get climate into any book. Some books, obviously, like _Side Chick Nation_ is all about Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. So it's like climate in the absolute center, like that hurricane drives the entire plot. But any book that you have for any author that you're writing about, for any author, any subject that you're writing about in any genre, you can add climate in. You know, folks have been saying for a while now that actually any book set in present time that presupposes a stable climate and no climate crises and problems, that's science fiction. That is not realistic at this point.
###### Lee Schneider:
Yes, very true. Well put. So to talk about _Undercover Latina_ for a moment, I'm always amazed when I read fiction for young readers how adult it is, how scary it is, how the topics, the people, the situations, they seem very adult to me, just the characters are young. And I felt that way with _Undercover Latina_, too, because you talk about racism, you talk about passing, talk about it gives younger people various models, behavior models to see how they would navigate situations with racism. Like there's a few scenes where the main character who's passing to be white has can't stop herself and she speaks up against a racist remark and the way people need to do. My question here is do you feel constrained in writing in the young audiences genre? Is it freeing? Do you have to be careful in a sense or what's your orientation toward it?
###### Aya De Leon:
Can you hear me? Okay, good. It says that my mic is muted, but it's not muted. So that's weird, but it's okay. Great. So, you know, one of the things that's wonderful about writing books for adults and books for young people is that I get an opportunity to say different things to different age groups. And ultimately I'm writing about all the same things, gender, race, social justice, the climate crisis. Economics, like I'm writing about all the same stuff, but there are different challenges with young people. Part of what I'm trying to do is talk about these issues without dumbing them down, but in a way that's age appropriate for young people to sort of absorb and engage with. And so for example, what I loved about _Undercover Latina_ was that I was taking on white nationalist terrorism for a middle grade audience. And the truth is that white nationalist terrorism is in the background of our lives. It is in the background of these young people's lives. I'm not inventing it to scare them. I'm taking it on and taking it on in a way that I think is digestible. So part of what was exciting about that book is that the protagonist is in a spy family working for a fictional spy organization that fights racism internationally. And she is the one who is sent. She's Latina, she's Puerto Rican and Mexican, kind of light skinned, but not super light. But when she straightens her hair, she's able to pass for white. And they need her. They need someone in her age group because the spy organization is trying to find and stop this white nationalist terrorist and they can't get a line on him. So they send her to befriend his estranged son who's a freshman in high school, right? And so part of what the setup is, you need a young teen to be the one on the scene. And that's the thing about that kind of fiction, middle grade fiction. This is why in middle grade fiction, you just have tons and tons of books with dead parents, right? Many times the parents have to be killed off because in a functional family with one or more parents, they would never let the children go on these life-threatening quests and adventures. So Harry Potter is just one example of like all these stories where the parents are dead and then the kids are sort of on their own. I'm not a fan of killing off parents. I think it's actually interesting and those stories are fine. I'm not being critical, but in my own work, you know, if you kill off the parents, then you're dealing with a grieving child and I'm not really writing the grieving child story. I'm trying to write a lighter adventure. So. What I end up with is figuring out how do you get the parents out of the way? And with spy fiction, the way that you get the parents out of the way is that the mission, the spy mission takes place in a teenage world where adults would stand out and don't work. So you have to have the teenagers doing all the spying in the world. And generally, the way that I set it up is, they think it's going to be safer than it is. So the parents who are good parents who would never put their kids in terrible danger are like, yeah, yeah, this is fine. And then like the danger heats up and then there's, you know, there's conflict and concern. And the parents may have second thoughts or, you know, crises in terms of what to do. But that's the setup that I like to work with. And, you know, within _Undercover Latina_, there is this sense of this danger of this white nationalist terrorism. And it's, you know, it's scary. People are scared, but I'm always working to create the sense of power, that the young people are powerful, that they're working to stop it, that they're, you know, they're fighting for that. They've got a team on it. And ultimately, that's what I want young people to understand about racism. Right? That racism is really dangerous, is really scary. And in the world, in movements, there are millions and millions of people working together to fight racism. And so I think that that's the message that I want young people to be able to look at scary things in our world, but to be able to look at them with a perspective of feeling like they're... I want them to be able to look at scary things, but I want them to be able to look from the perspective that they can join a movement of millions of people working to make the world right. And that's the important part for me.
###### Lee Schneider:
And it really comes through. There's a couple of things that come to mind there. One is there's a lot of ingenious problem solving on your part that the reader just approved. It's just there because it's good. It's like a well-made table or something where this issue of what to do about the parents or how to put people in dangerous situations and how to show people dealing with racism and chasing, stopping white supremacists or bringing bringing justice into an unjust world. These are all done, again, in the character format, which is I'm just admiring it for a moment. It's no real question in there. It's just it's an ingenious and elegant way of getting all of these things across.
###### Aya De Leon:
Well, thank you. That's one of the things that's just so great about genre fiction. That's so great about a thriller. Like in a thriller, you need a problem. You need a bad guy. You need a threat. And in thrillers, ever since World War II, there are all these historical thrillers that go back to the tried and true threat of the Germans, the Axis. The World War II being the last time that our nation was sort of in consensus about who the bad guys were and we really had a sense of our higher moral ground. And so, you know, people are still churning out World War II stories because that old school villain is such a comfortable villain for us because it was nice as a nation to feel like we, you know, were for the most part on the right side. But I'm interested in the current villains who relative to our work these days. And my work as an organizer is around climate justice, is around social justice, is around racial justice. So my villains are kind of fossil fuel moguls and corporate CEOs involved in a sex trafficking scandal and white nationalist terrorists. A book I'm working on now, you know, The Bad Guy is kind of the governor of a southern state who is allowing this pipeline to be built under really shaky and shady circumstances and it's threatening a town and the governor is trying to clamp down on protesters and doing all these shady things that are putting people at risk to keep people from being able to exercise their constitutional right to assemble and protest. So, you know, the thriller is great. You pick your villain, you got your stakes, you know, what are the things that happen? And so that's why I'm just such a fan of genre fiction, because it really allows these things, right? In creating a spy family. It's a great setup because the parents believe strongly in the cause, but they also want to protect their kids. So they want their kids to participate, but they don't want their kids to be in danger. And so it creates a nice setup where we can start out with everything's fine and then, everything's out of control. And then it creates lots of juicy conflicts among the characters and real stakes and problems for the plot.
###### Lee Schneider:
Hmm. Let's talk about you've brought up activism a couple of times. So I want to get into that here, what you're working on and what you're doing and also answer the question. I often get the question. I'm just one person. What can I do? You know, the what's going on now seems overwhelming to me. So that's a couple of questions in one. But how would you would you answer that?
###### Aya De Leon:
Well, I would say, first of all, what's going on now doesn't just seem overwhelming. It is pretty overwhelming. What's going on right now is pretty overwhelming in terms of the climate crisis. What's going on right now is pretty overwhelming in terms of threats to democracy. And those are real challenges. The first, my first suggestion to people is an unexpected one. And that is some of my mentors have been really clear over the past decade or so that one of the biggest tools of anti-democratic forces and the folks behind the climate crisis are to create situations that tap into our hopelessness and our sense of being small and helpless. And unfortunately, in the societies that we live in, know, young people, children, babies have a lot of really difficult and traumatic experiences, trauma, loss, et cetera. And these things leave young people in, you know, ages zero to five with strong internalized messages that like bad things happen. And there's nothing you can do, right? That trauma, those trauma recordings leave us feeling small and helpless. So one of the biggest things that people can do is actually work on their trauma. Know, whether that's therapy or support groups or spiritual work, there's so many different ways to work on trauma because if anyone has been around a baby who, you know, has reasonably responsive parents, they will not shut up until things are right. So whether that means they need to be fed, they're too hot, they're too cold, they need to be changed, they wanna be held, they won't shut up. And we need to learn from little babies who have not experienced trauma how to fight and not shut up until we get our world right. But because so many of us have experiences, whether like as babies we cried and no one came or when we were a little older, you know, we had hard things happen. Where we essentially, there was something we wanted or needed or some kind of safety or some kind of abuse and we ended up feeling defeated. So part of what happens now, whether it's the climate crisis or threats to democracy, when really big forces come our way, we feel defeated. You know, we, and we're seeing, you know, in some, with some folks in this administration that before the threats even come, people are already giving up. People are preemptively capitulating. And this is really a problem because this is where we really need our spine, we need our backbone, we need our clarity, and we need to believe that there are possibilities other than being defeated when big forces come our way. So the first thing that I think we need to do is separate the present from the past. I hear all the time, you know, we're doomed. I hear people talk a lot about whether it's climate or authoritarianism, like we're doomed, it's already done. And here's the thing, it's not over, right? And it's so interesting, particularly in terms of the climate crisis, I'm seeing this happen too, in terms of the crisis of democracy, that there's this long period of denial. It's not a problem, it's not a problem, it's not a problem. Climate, no, no, it's not a problem. And then when things tip to the point where it's clear that it's a problem, people are like, well, we've already lost. So I'm like, okay, let me get this straight. For a long time, we weren't supposed to do anything because it wasn't a problem. But now that we see that it's a problem, you've decided to tell us that it's a problem that we can't solve. But the reality is that the future isn't written yet. Yeah, there's a lot of danger. There's danger around climate, there's danger around threats to democracy. I can't say it looks sunny, but here's what I know. I know that we are still living in a democracy. I know that we are still living in a world with a habitable climate and that if we fight, we can have a livable future in terms of climate and we can make sure that we continue to live in a democracy. And it really all depends on our decision to fight. And so when people say they are one person, this is the other place where fiction comes in. Yes, they are just one person. One of the problems that I see in fiction a lot of the time, whether it's social justice or just people dealing with big problems in their characters' lives, a lot of times there's like the big powerful hero, whether it's the superhero or the rich uncle or the president or whatever. Who comes in and creates the solution. Whereas in reality, the kinds of big changes we want to see societally happen when masses of people come together. So it's not actually about being an individual with superpower. So the solution isn't about being an individual with superpower. The solution is as an individual deciding to join a collective effort that has collective power. And in terms of collective power, the things that I've been up to and I'm really excited about are these. In my climate organizing, I work with the Black Hive, which is the climate and environmental justice formation inside of the movement for Black lives. And that inspired me to start a Black Climate, Environmental and Food Justice Network in Northern California because Movement for Black Lives is national and international. I wanted a group to be organizing around climate, environment and food justice locally. And I'm also really active with the Working Families Party, both locally and they of course have national reach. And the thing that I love about the Working Families Party is this. I'm a registered Democrat, have been all my life. I continue to vote Democratic in a number of races and you know, the Democratic Party has done some good stuff. And at this point, particularly around climate, the Democratic Party has so many donors who are connected to fossil fuels. And that means that when it's time to make these hard decisions to push back against the fossil fuel lobby, they are dependent on those fossil fuel industry donations, on those corporate donations, or on those billionaire donations. And so they're not able to really vote their conscience, or perhaps for more moderate Democrats, that's not even their conscience. Whereas the Working Families Party, which in California alone has over 100 elected officials, including my congresswoman, Latifah Simon, and mayor of Oakland, Barbara Lee, they have a very clear stance that they don't take any fossil fuel money, any corporate donations, or billionaire money. So that folks are, as Shirley Chisholm said, unbought and unbossed and are able to govern with the best interests of the people in mind. And one of the reasons that more people don't know about the Working Families Party is that they have a complex strategy where they, for example, here in California, they're not on the ballot. You have to pay like millions of dollars to get on the ballot. And they don't have millions of dollars to get on the ballot because they're spending their money fighting for working families champions who are going to champion working people when they get elected. So instead, they will often run their candidates as super progressives in the Democratic Party. So that's why Latifah Simon and Barbara Lee, are Democrats, or Zaran Mamdani in New York is a working families party candidate, but people understand him as a Democrat because he won the Democratic primary in the New York City mayoral race. So I love that about the Working Families Party because they're flexible. And the other thing that I love about them is they don't, they have assessed reasonably that they haven't built enough power to run a candidate for president and win. So their strategy is generally to endorse the Democratic candidate, even though the Democratic candidate doesn't always align with all of our values and priorities because in our estimation, the Democratic candidate would be more effective than the Republican candidate in what is this two-party system. But what's great is that in states like New York, and I think there's one other state, you can vote if when the Working Families Party endorses a Democratic candidate, you can vote for that candidate on the Working Families Party ballot line. So it expands the reach of a third party while still trying to block Republican candidates. And they refer to it as their block and build strategy. They're blocking right-wing fossil fuel and authoritarian power while building progressive power. And you know, one of the things I love about them is they talk about themselves as being the party of climate justice. And that means a lot to me. So those are some of the organizations that I'm involved in and some of the efforts that I've been participating in.
###### Lee Schneider:
Fascinating. I didn't know that about the Working Families Party, all that strategy stuff. So that's very helpful. Thank you. I wanted to ask a few questions about writing. And as we wrap out, just so you know, so we're going to respect your time. What's the best piece of writing advice that you've ever given to your students?
###### Aya De Leon:
I'm so glad you asked me this. I think the and this also goes to your question of like, you know, productivity. So it's 2025. My 11th novel is coming out since my first book came out in 2016. So it's like 10 years, 11 novels. It's a lot. And the biggest gift that I encountered was NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month. And NaNoWriMo, you can go to NaNoWriMo.org. Every November, people all over the world write a novel in a month. And the, it's 30 days and you can outline ahead of time, but if you're playing strictly by the rules, you don't write until the month begins and then you end by the end of the month. A novel is approximately 50,000 words. So they break 50,000 words into 30 even days. And so the word count every day is 1700 words and you just write, write, write, write, write, then you're done for the day. And they have these great mottos like no plot, no problem, or quantity over quality. And so many of my books, I wrote the first draft as what I call a nano draft. That is to say, I wrote an outline, I broke it into 30 scenes, and I just wrote every day 1,700 words until I was done. And here's the best part. When you write fast like that, your first draft is garbage. And it's supposed to be garbage, right? What I tell my students is that if they were a ceramic artist, when I was a kid, my mom was a ceramic artist. If they were a ceramic artist, what they would get to start with is a big wet lump of clay and it's not going to look like anything it's just clay. The first draft as a writer you're just making clay. You're creating something that you will then shape into something beautiful that you're satisfied with. But the best thing for me was that a first draft is just about making clay. I would be on social media boasting about the garbage that I wrote that day and laughing about it and really delighted with myself like, my God, my word, I finally hit my word count. This is so bad. And laughing and delighted and then going off about my life. Feeling a sense of satisfaction as a writer. And that is one of the most freeing things. When I was a younger writer, I just felt like the... the initial things that I wrote, the first draft should be good. It should be good right away. And no, it shouldn't. I mean, some people write great stuff right off the bat. That's fine. The longer that I've been writing, the more my stuff sounds reasonably good the first time around, but it's so great just to have permission for it to be garbage the first time around. And so I teach a NaNoWriMo class. In my teaching at UC Berkeley, I'm teaching it now and it's just the funnest class. And the students are just so happy the whole time because they have nothing but a lot of permission to just get it out there and that someone is taking them seriously. As you know, folks in their late teens and early 20s, yes, you absolutely can write a novel. What do you want to write? Let's do it. Go for it.
###### Lee Schneider:
Awesome. That's great advice. So what from a mentor perhaps, what's been the best advice you've received as a writer?
###### Aya De Leon:
Well, NaNoWriMo was one for me, right? That I could write a first draft really quickly was great feedback. But I think the other thing is connected to something that I talked about earlier in terms of doing that work on ourselves emotionally. I think for me, one of the best pieces of advice that I got was that my everything in my artist life would go better if I worked on my emotional challenges. And that has really proven true because, you know, the biggest things that are hard on artists are self-criticism and discouragement. And my experience is that those critical voices, that sense of discouragement that you can't win. You know, most of that is really from our early lives, from early childhood trauma, from challenging experiences that we've had in school or early in our lives, you know, as children, teenagers and young adults, and working on those, working on uprooting that trauma, sifting through those difficulties, understanding what are the messages that we got from those hard experiences. That we can then say, you know what, that's not true. I'm gonna let that go. That's been really the best. And then it allows you both to be productive. It also allows you to say what you wanna say. When I was younger and much more insecure, part of why I was writing to sort of create a different persona for myself. You sometimes you'll see writers who, I don't know, their protagonist is just very cool. And they seem to be wanting to be very cool and wanting to be identified with being cool. What would it free up if they let go of their need to be cool? Could they have more fun? Would they be less worried or preoccupied or less of jerk to people than they perceive as uncool? I don't know. So yeah, the things that it really gave me is working on myself, helped me let go of perfectionism, not have to try to create any persona for myself in the work. And that allowed me to be like, well, what do I want to say? Like, is my, you know, what are the values if I'm not being driven by insecurity or trying to like charm and impress people? What do I want to say? You know, and it really allowed me to get out of my own way. In that way and then finally, you know, allows you to enjoy the success, right? If we're driven by our senses of insecurity and inadequacy, we'll never be able to enjoy the success that we have as writers. But if we, you know, if we worked on or worked through a lot of that, then we can be delighted. Look at that. I wrote another book. Woohoo! This is great.
###### Lee Schneider:
I love that. That's great.
###### Aya De Leon:
So, you know, those have been really important things for me. And I'll say connected to that too, they really do connect. So for me, the connecting the social justice to the writing and being able to engage in both really brings me a lot of joy. And in these tough political times brings me a sense of peace, you know. We're fighting hard for a lot of things. We may not win, but I feel like I'm in the right place doing the right thing, making my contribution. What can people do if they're just one person? I can't tell you what your role is. But if you sit deeply with yourself, push through discouragement and think about what contribution you want to make and really look deeply and find it, it brings a lot of joy and it brings a lot of peace. And I want that for everyone.
###### Lee Schneider:
That's a wonderful place to get close to ending. You mentioned you have a new book on the way. So let's talk about that.
###### Aya De Leon:
Yes. All right. Bam. Tada! _Undisclosed_. So _Undisclosed_ is the third book in the Factory series, and it is Amani, who appears in _Undercover Latina_ as sort of the second spy, is the primary character, but Andrea appears as well. And in this book, there is a third teenager who is the daughter of two factory spies and she learns about her father's death in the factory. It happened a while ago, but for various reasons, she's just learning about it. She's really upset about it. Again, talking about this stuff of trauma. She's very upset. She feels betrayed and the factory is really worried. That she is going to blow the whistle on them and disclose that their spy organization exists and make them more visible to their enemies. So they send Amani and Andrea to kind of monitor her and see if they can help ground her and get her to find a safe way, like to a therapist, to talk about her issues as opposed to talking about them. Publicly on social media or in her arts. So she's part of a band and they go undercover in this sort of vocal competition. So they go undercover in this teen vocal competition. Speaking of climate literature, one of the things that I love about this book is climate shows up in a couple of ways. One is that there's a band in the group called total futuration. And they're a group of teenagers who, you know, they write about the climate crisis, but they write about it, hopefully, right? Like if we take action, we can find a way to make our planet habitable for humans and other species, right? So they have a sort of an optimistic activist bent. So total futuration plays a particular role. I love that. But the other thing is that they're in the Pacific Northwest and there are climate effects happening. There are fires later in the book. In my factory series, is the one that's strongest yet in terms of climate. And yeah, and it's fun. It's again, a spy book, lots of shenanigans. And it's for kind of nine to 15 year olds. But I know a number of adults who have read it. And they like it too. So it's out on October 22nd.
###### Lee Schneider:
October 22nd and where do we find it?
###### Aya De Leon:
So _Undisclosed_ is available at bookstores and it's also available online. I know a lot of people use those major retailers that I'm not crazy about their politics, but a great alternative is bookshop.org, which is connected to independent bookstores, which of course supports independent books. Independent thought and independent authors.
###### Lee Schneider:
Big fan of bookshop.org. Finally, what do you think is the state today of writing and publishing, just generally?
###### Aya De Leon:
Wow, that's a great question. I capitalism is in crisis, right? And we're seeing that crisis manifest in so many different ways, including in the literary industry. And this crisis has been many decades brewing because the literary industry was founded around the turn of the 20th century, early in the 20th century by some of the kids of robber baron capitalists who had a lot of money available and wanted to use it to kind of be cool, engaged in culture, interact with authors. And that was a good strategy in some ways, but those fortunes didn't last indefinitely. And then starting in the eighties, nineties and early aughts, those publishing houses, you know, couldn't just be focused on prestige, they needed to make money. In the early 20th century, it was like a split in the industry. There were like books, you know, literature, you know, that was intended for, you know, more upscale audience. And they were like books of great literature. And, you know, meh, some of it, that was debatable. But that was how things were set up culturally. And then there was pulp fiction, which was cheap. And for the masses and kind of like trashy and exciting. And then, you know, in the 80s, 90s and 2000s, that was when there was this shift where publishing houses sort of needed to do both. They needed to make money. They still kind of wanted prestige, but they also, you know, needed to make money. And so then there were books that kind of did both that were kind of upscale, but also exciting. And that those were the unicorns that they were looking for. You know, every decade there are different crises in the industry. But I think, you know, the rise of social media and frankly, just the fact that when I was a kid in the 70s, television was garbage, you know? And in the last 20 to 30 years, television has gotten smart and interesting and people's lives have become sped up, really stressful, folks don't have as much time to read. So the literary industry is in crisis in a lot of ways for a lot of reasons. But the good news too is that there's more opportunity to do storytelling for artists and creatives in a lot of different ways. I know that I'm always gonna wanna write these long form stories because I'm fascinated by engaging with characters in this long term way that is novels. But who knows, it may show up more. In writing for film, TV and web. It may show up more in serialized fiction because that's more accessible. One reason that I wrote serialized fiction for _The Mystery Woman in Room 3_ was that I wanted to write about political issues that were relevant that year. And writing a novel was gonna mean that my Green New Deal novel would come out and like, 2023, by then, even the Green New Deal would have passed or we would have moved on in certain ways. And I wanted to be relevant. Right now, I'm focused less on fiction and more on shorter, more immediate forms that can impact the movement right now to fight authoritarianism. So I'm writing a lot of freedom songs and choreographing and writing liberation line dances because you know, in the next six to 18 months, we need a really strong push to get people to be active to fight for our democracy. And a novel is not going to come out until at best just before the 2028 presidential election. We got way more work to do before then. So I think that the literary industry is going to be there at least for a while, but people are going to continue to in some ways seize the means of production. To come up with ways of getting our stories out there that don't always depend on these industries because the industries are, you know, kind of in crisis, kind of ambivalent. They always want to make money. They want prestige. They kind of want to be part of social justice, but you know, sometimes they're scared. So I think that we need to keep writing, but we also need to be flexible about how it gets out there because to me, the most important thing is the movement, the message, and the creativity. And I want to be flexible about what that looks like.
###### Lee Schneider:
Awesome. Well, I'm in awe. Thanks so much for talking to me today, doing this interview. It's been really amazing. We'll look for your work in bookstores and in
