Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Today, we're learning about a novel that brings a family ancestor to life. Junie is written by Brooklyn-based author Erin Crosby Eckstein. It tells the story of Junie, an enslaved girl living on a plantation in rural Alabama. After the sudden death of her sister Minnie, and when she learns of new plans from her white owners, Junie does something that reawakens her sister's spirit. From there, Minnie's ghost shows Junie some secrets of the plantation that forces Junie to question everything.

Eckstein wrote the book inspired by her personal history she first learned from her grandmother, who was the family keeper of stories. It turns out Eckstein's great great great grandmother escaped slavery before the Civil War. She helped establish a Black community in Elmore County, Alabama, where members of Eckstein's family still live today. Junie is available now, and Erin is in studio. Nice to talk to you.

Erin Crosby Eckstein: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Before we talk about the inspiration for the book, let's talk a little bit about Junie, this girl. She's an enslaved girl. She lives on a plantation in Alabama. What's her state of mind when we meet her?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: When we first meet Junie, she is really in a state of grief, but the way that that's manifesting for her is in some rebellion. When we first start off the book, she has done something that she probably doesn't have any business doing. We are really jumping in right in the middle of that action.

Alison Stewart: What would you say her core values are as a person?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: Junie really lives in pursuit of this idea of the sublime, which is this kind of pursuit of beauty, of knowledge to some extent, which, of course, is going to be really, really complex under the circumstances that she lives in. She wants to find ways to seek out little bits of freedom, even though at the very beginning of the book, she doesn't really know that that's what she's looking for. In a lot of ways, I wanted Junie to feel like a real teenager, so I wanted her to have that bit of rebellious spirit going on, even if she doesn't quite know what it is or how to navigate that under the circumstances she lives under.

Alison Stewart: Okay, I'm not giving any spoilers away, but she awakens her sister's ghost.

Erin Crosby Eckstein: Very much so.

Alison Stewart: How does this ghost awakening, how does it affect her, Junie?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: I believe it affects her very deeply because throughout the book, she is in a state of grief over the death of this sister. Her older sister dies in such a way that Junie actually blames herself without giving anything away. They had a bit of a complicated relationship. In thinking about, I think for anyone, if you had a complicated relationship with someone and you feel a sense of responsibility for them being gone, if that person suddenly reappeared, that's going to raise so many complicated emotions, which is what we really see in the book, is Junie wrestling with the many challenges of having someone re-emerge who you weren't ready to see again.

Alison Stewart: Was that always a big part of the story?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: Yes. I always wanted the ghost to be a part of it. I just personally really enjoy ghost stories, and I really enjoy the way that ghosts are used in literature. I knew I want that in there, and I knew that if I was going to have a ghost re-emerge, I wanted it to be complicated, and I wanted it to be a little different than anything I'd read personally before.

Alison Stewart: Oh, I was going to ask you, what other ghost stories have you read that you thought of as you were as you were milling about this idea?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: Many, but the biggest one, I would say, is Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. I actually used to teach that book. I used to be a high school teacher, and it was part of my ninth grade curriculum. I absolutely love the way that Ward weaves in ghost throughout that story and the ways in which they kind of bring forward reality in really important ways. I would say that was probably my biggest ghostly inspiration.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Erin Crosby Eckstein. She's a debut author. The novel is called Junie. We've dedicated today's show to authors who are having their debut novels and are really psyched about them. Junie has a love of poetry, which you do as well. Who are some of your favorite poets growing up?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: Growing up? Who are some-- I actually, I think a lot of the reason I chose the romantic poets as Junie's focus here is because I personally really liked them when I was a teenager. I think I first got exposed to it probably in my high school AP English class or something, but I really loved the natural imagery. I really loved that sort of sweeping, kind of some might mellow it dramatic vibe. I think it fit for me at the time.

As I got older, I did start to kind of consider how the identities of those particular poets impacted the way that they were able to see the world at the time, considering all of those poets are white men, lthey were these British, usually wealthy white men who could go off into nature and do whatever they wanted, while other people certainly didn't have that ability.

As I've gotten older, I've grown to really also love Mary Oliver's work. Mary Oliver kind of came up as a big inspiration for me in thinking about the way Junie thinks about the world as well. Really, a lot of those poets that kind of circle around those sort of naturey imagery and the kind of importance of that, those were all big influences for me with this book.

Alison Stewart: I have to ask about your grandmother.

Erin Crosby Eckstein: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Your grandmother's influence on this story. She was the family storyteller. When did you realize she was telling you this story that you would be able to use in your novel?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: It was back in spring of 2018. I was visiting my grandparents for Easter, and my grandmother would often repeat a lot of our family stories. She would tell them over and over, tell them in new ways, that kind of thing. I'd heard this story before of Jane Cotton, who's my grandmother's grandmother's grandmother. My grandmother told it to me at this particular moment, and for some reason, I don't really know why, it just clicked in my head in a new way.

I think I'd read Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits not that long before this time or maybe around the same time. I'd always loved these sort of intergenerational family novels. It was actually something my grandmother and I both loved together. That was one of the things we'd always connect over. I think that just kind of the confluence of what I'd been reading with her story made me think, like, "Hey, could I take this story I've been hearing for so long and do something with it?" That something ended up evolving into this book.

Alison Stewart: What did you hear about Jane Cotton that gave you the inspiration? One thing.

Erin Crosby Eckstein: My favorite fact about her, actually, is that she lived to be well into her hundreds and only died because she got hit by a horse and buggy. That was the favorite fact about her that usually stuck with me for most of my childhood. I loved that. I thought that was wild. Then when I realized that, on top of it, she had also escaped from slavery when she was incredibly young, and it was this-- I'm not going to give away the details of that because it's part of the spoilers of the book.

When I kind of compared the fact that she had had this incredibly harrowing early life that we knew nothing about, and yet she was still able to go on to live so long and to be this entrenched member of her community. One of the stories that goes in my family is that so many people came to her wake that the porch started caving in. That was so meaningful to me in thinking about this woman's life, and that's what made me want to really do something with her story.

Alison Stewart: Without giving away too much, how much research did you have to do into your family for this book?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: I did do a bit of research. I was lucky that, in the early stages of drafting, my grandmother was still alive. That did help with being able to kind of talk to her about what she remembered. My mother's also a historian, which also helps. She's very good for being helpful with history details.

Where I needed to to fill in the gaps of this time period, I did conduct some research. A lot of the time, I was focused specifically on Antebellum Alabama, and Antebellum Montgomery because I wanted it to feel pretty specific to just this area. I wanted to be able to nail what was going on in Montgomery at that time. I'm lucky to have resources in my family, but I was also lucky to find some really good ones.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Erin Crosby Eckstein. Her novel is called Junie. She's here as part of our debut day dedicated to today's authors who also happen to be debut novelists. You're going to read a little bit for us. Can you set this up for us?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: Sure. I'm just going to start from the beginning of the book, because I think that that just gets us all in the same place. I'm not going to explain much. I'm hoping that it will make sense since it's the beginning. We're starting from chapter one.

Junie wakes up in the red mud, listening to the water that slithers between the rocks and the creek. The faint first light of sunrise slips through the gray moss tangled between black oak branches. The sunshine's needle points warm her bare legs as mud cools her from below. The earth smell is enchanting after the rain, sharp, metallic, and sickening if you inhale too long, like copper pots on a humid day. The mud takes what should be hard and makes it soft, what should be finished and makes it raw. The distant crack of the foreman's whip tells her she's not supposed to be here.

Alison Stewart: Junie is a complex, unique character. I know that you wanted to stay away from certain tropes about enslaved people. What did you want to stay away from?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: I wanted to write a version of this time that was just different than what I'd personally read. I feel like the big buckets that I was thinking about where you either have this very Gone with the Wind end, which we know we don't want to do that, where we have super happy enslaved people who just are so happy to be there. The other bucket, I think, is that while this is far more accurate, I think a lot more stories really will focus on just non-stop physical abuse.

What I wanted to do was really delve into the character. I wanted to delve into the person, the psychology, and I really also wanted to delve into the systemic and emotional abuse of slavery because it felt like something that I just hadn't read before. I wanted Junie to feel, as much as possible, like a very layered. I wanted her to feel flawed. I wanted there to be some morally gray elements to her as well as the cast of characters overall. I wanted the characters to really feel like people because I think we often have a tendency to think about history and people from the past as no longer having these sort of human flaws and these human traits.

I think it's really important that when we're thinking about people who are suffering under horrific circumstances to remember that these are people with flaws, dreams, love, grief, all of these complicated, complex feelings that we all experience. I, therefore, wanted Junie to really reflect that. I wanted my readers to feel deeply connected with her, not as just this sort of far off historical figure, but as someone who felt relatable, at least emotionally.

Alison Stewart: You started the outline for this book, and I heard that you actually kind of walked away from it.

Erin Crosby Eckstein: I did, yes. I walked away from it probably for not major reasons other than just getting busy and losing confidence in myself a little bit. Like I said before, I was a high school teacher. I was kind of fitting in writing around that. I was fitting it in around working full-time, doing all that. It was often really hard, honestly, to teach all day and then come home and try to work on something that was also an emotionally complicated and often draining project in and of itself was difficult time. I did kind of put it aside for a while where I was just like, "Okay, we'll see what happens."

Alison Stewart: What motivated you to go back to it?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: COVID, honestly. When schools shut down back in March of 2020, which is crazy because it was almost exactly five years ago now, I got this just random sort of premonition idea where I was like, "Hey, you should go print out all the pages that you've written so far on the school computer."

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Erin Crosby Eckstein: I just ran down to the school copier and very much against the rules of my job.

Alison Stewart: Nobody heard this. Nobody heard this. You allegedly went down.

Erin Crosby Eckstein: I allegedly used the school copier and printed off all these pages, and I brought them home with me. I was like, "Okay, you know what? I'm going to just edit what I have so far. I'll just do this, because if I am going to be stuck in my apartment for two weeks, I might as well." That really was the start of me getting back into. It was just the fact that I suddenly was stuck in my apartment and felt like this was going to be the time that I got to focus on this thing.

I do also think that the murder of George Floyd and the protests that came up around that at the time also kind of inspired me to get back into it. I felt more motivation to start writing and start writing about what I was thinking and what I saw. That also kind of drove me back into working on the book.

Alison Stewart: Where did you find your confidence during that time, because that was a difficult time?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: It was. I think I found my confidence from a lot of different places. My partner was a big one, honestly. I think he was really supportive and motivating during that time. We were locked together in my apartment. I think that helped at the time when he was still there, that that was-- he was definitely someone who, I think, helped imbue me with some confidence.

I also think I just kind of reached a point in my life around that time where I was like, "Come on. The world is going, it's going off in directions that we've never seen before. If there's anything, if there's any time to just go do something, just to do it, I might as well do it now." In some ways, I think the confidence came from a place of just being like, "What do I have to lose right now? There's so much going on. There are people, honestly, losing their lives, losing their family. You only have so much time to pursue the things you want to do." That was part of it, too.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the novel, Junie. Its author is Erin Crosby Eckstein. What was a difficult part in writing this book, whether it was either writer's block or some part of the book that you just couldn't get right, and how'd you get around it?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: The hardest part for me to write is a scene towards the end, and therefore, I'm not going to tell you what the scene is, but there is--

Alison Stewart: What got in the way? Was it--

Erin Crosby Eckstein: Mostly, it was just figuring out how to get the combination of characters right and to get everything to happen in a way that was going to make sense, beause I kind of knew where I needed it to go. I knew what I needed the ending to be, and I knew I needed to have this big center kind of big ending scenes. I had all these different kind of components. I knew I wanted to be there, but I couldn't figure out how to fit them together. I definitely wrote a bunch of different drafts of being like, "Okay, maybe these characters do it this way. Okay, maybe I take that character out and then we swap in this character." There was a lot of kind of rearranging these puzzle pieces to get it right.

It was less that I really had a writer's block about it. It was just like it took a long time to figure out what was going to be the right combination that was going to make sense. I also found as a writer that the best way to write things is to use really, as few characters as possible, so whenever you cannot add in a new character, that is better.

Alison Stewart: Oh, smart.

Erin Crosby Eckstein: Yes. In my original versions, I had things where we were adding in a new character, we adding in new things. It took me time to think about, "Okay, what if instead of adding in things, how could I use something I already have and make this character that's already there work in this role?" That was a lot of the thinking and the rearranging towards the end was trying to get that part right.

Alison Stewart: What was so easy, was really simple, and why was it easy?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: The character in this book of Violet, who is the master's daughter, she was the by far easiest character for me to write. I think it's for a lot of reasons. In some ways, I think she just has a really strong voice as a character. Therefore, it just would kind of leap out of me to know, "Okay, yes, this is what she's gonna say."

At the same time, I also think that I just read so many things and watched so many things, read so many classic novels when I was in college, and I just am like a classic novel, like a 19th century novel fiend. I kind of knew what that character sounded like. As a result, I think she was the easiest one for me to write throughout. I always kind of knew what to do with Violet.

Alison Stewart: You were a full time teacher and you taught literature. What part of your teaching helped you write this book?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: Definitely the time around teenagers. That was the biggest one. Since Junie herself is 16, there are two other major characters who are also teenagers. I spent so much time with teenagers all the time that I understood how their brains worked, both on a sort of more professional, kind of academic level, as well as just on an inner daily basis, kind of interpersonal level. I really was committed in this book to making sure that my teenage characters felt like teenagers. I wanted them to still have teenage brains, even if their society didn't think about teenagers the same way that our society does. The brain chemistry of being 16 has not changed since 1860.

As a result, I really wove in a lot of the behaviors of my students into these characters, the rebelliousness, but as well as this sort of what I like to call the sponginess of teenagers that I really love where they are in this perfect place for absorbing new ideas. They're just beginning to wrap their heads around the complexities of the world and are sort of still open to new concepts. They haven't sort of closed off in the way I think that we often do as we get older. Therefore, I wanted to really have that reflected in the characters that I was writing.

Alison Stewart: Part of your legacy will be that you were signed by your literary agent after you DMed her five chapters via Twitter.

Erin Crosby Eckstein: Yes, that is accurate.

Alison Stewart: What's your biggest takeaway about the process now that you know about it?

Erin Crosby Eckstein: One. Yes, that was a wild experience. That actually is how things panned. I think that my biggest takeaway was just the-- I think I steal the Nike's just do it is really what it came down to. So much of me becoming a writer, publishing a book was me just kind of ignoring being scared and committing to just doing the thing, even if I could face rejection or feel embarrassed later. I just really committed to the idea of just getting the thing done and doing it and moving forward, because if I hadn' put myself out there, I wouldn't be here.

Alison Stewart: The name of the novel is Junie. It is by Erin Crosby Eckstein. It is one of our debuts. Thank you so much for coming to the studio. We really just appreciate it.

Erin Crosby Eckstein: Thank you so much for having me.