A Mirror or a Door with Terah Shelton Harris

[00:00:00] What's good, family? I'm Nikesha Elise Williams, the host of Black & Published Podcast, and the author of the novel, The Seven Daughters of Dupree. This historical fiction novel is about the secrets kept between mothers and daughters over the course of seven generations, and is told backwards in time from 1995 to 1860. The Seven Daughters of Dupree was published January 27, 2026, and is available everywhere books are sold.

[00:00:28] So if you can, please consider getting a copy of The Seven Daughters of Dupree today. This is the Mahogany Books Podcast Network. I don't like the judgments from other writers when I feel like they just lack the capacity to understand what a writer is trying to do. What's good? I'm Nikesha Elise Williams and this is Black & Published,

[00:00:53] bringing you the journeys of writers, poets, playwrights, and storytellers of all kinds. We have a returned guest to the show today. Terah Shelton Harris is back to discuss her best-selling new novel, Where the Wildflowers Grow. It's a novel about a woman who grew up off the grid, finds herself incarcerated, but after a major accident, is allowed a chance to rebuild her life and learn to love herself, thanks in no small part to a handsome man.

[00:01:23] Listen, we all are adults here. Adults have sex, right? And for me and my books, I'm never going to put an unnecessary sex scene in the book, right? It's not going to be an unnecessary sex scene. If there is a sex scene in my book, it's because it's needed. It moves the story forward. Tara may deny it, but she's not beating the allegations that this novel is also a romance, with a slow burn and spicy scenes to boot.

[00:01:50] In our conversation, she explains why she hates the term smut, when it's used to describe any book with sex on the page. Plus, the three ingredients she says must be present in a Terah Shelton Harris novel. And why she made grief and how to heal from complex grief, even without closure, the primary theme of her novel. That and more is next, when Black & Published continues.

[00:02:32] Let's jump in, because this is not like this is your first time on Black & Published. So we're just going to talk about wildflowers. Yes, girl! I love it. Let's go. Where did this book come from? I know, right? Like, what were you thinking? What was you on when you was like, you know what? What was I on? Yes, like, I'm going to write a book about a woman who grew up off the grid, has all these survival skills, and is literally on the run for her life. My books come to me, I don't go to them. And so I'm that writer that waits for inspiration.

[00:03:01] I don't try to force anything. And I feel like if I do, I feel like the readers will know that I'm being, you know, disingenuous. And so one of the things I start with is my theme first. So I knew I needed to look back and find a theme that I felt comfortable writing. And so in order to do that, I went and I looked back at the themes of my first two books. And I realized that grief was a secondary theme in both of those books.

[00:03:28] And I said, wow, am I running away from writing about grief? And so that's when I decided that I'm going to write a book about grief. So that's how I got to the theme of this book of grief was going to be like the main thing. And so then I read an article about a 17 year old girl in Colorado, who was a non entity off the grid. And this poor girl just wanted to go to college. She just wanted to get a driver's license. And she couldn't because technically on paper, she wasn't a person she did not exist.

[00:03:56] And I thought, how's that possible in the United States of America that a person, a physical person does not exist. The government does not recognize this person. So it sent me down this rabbit hole of non entities and being born off the grid and not having your birth reported. And like I say in the book, you have 10 days to report your birth. And if your birth is not reported, you know, you don't receive a social security card and a birth certificate, which we know you can do nothing in this world without those things.

[00:04:23] So the government does not know that she exists. That was the lifestyle that her parents chose. She didn't choose that for herself. And when she got old enough, she decided that this is not the life that I want to live. Like I want to go beyond the grid only to discover that she does not exist. And so it got me down this rabbit hole thinking about, you know, what would that be like for her mentally? And so that's where the whole invisible themes kind of came in at is like she felt invisible because she technically did not exist,

[00:04:51] but yet was still raised off the grid and was hidden off the grid, too. And so I mirrored that with the themes of grief. And so that kind of became like the big part of Lee's struggle. The second part was I read this article about this man named Bobby Love, who was an escaped convicted felon. He was an armed robber and he served some time in prison and just escaped from prison. And he lived the next like 30 years of his life as an upstanding citizen.

[00:05:20] He said that he would never commit another crime. He would never hurt another person. And so when he walked away, he got married, became a deacon in his church, had two kids and just lived the life of an upstanding citizen. You know, until one day the police knocked at his door. His wife answers the door and they asked for him by his real name, a name that his wife does not know him by. And she casually said, you know, oh, there's nobody here by that name.

[00:05:47] And they were like, uh, him right there. And she didn't even know. And so I thought about how do you live your life, 30 years of your life, knowing that at any moment, like the police could come. Like it could all be over. Do you ever get past that? Is it ever like this recurring thing with you? So I kind of took those two stories and blended them together along with my theme of grief. And that is how a lot of Lee story came about.

[00:06:13] So grief, invisibility, and what rehabilitation looks like for a formerly incarcerated person. Yes. Even though they still live with the shadow of who they were before behind them. Yes. Yes. Yes, exactly. With all of that, I feel like some of the main points in the story, like grief might be the primary theme, but I felt like the main secondary theme was mental health. Like, Lee is not well.

[00:06:41] There's a lot of themes in this book, but just about how your mind can just play tricks on you, how your mind can fool you into believing that you don't matter, you know, trick and lie to you and tell you these things over and over and over and over again. And she just didn't, she never had an example. She just didn't know how to be a person. And so, you know, when she's at the flower farm, she didn't even know how to just be with a family and be a normal person.

[00:07:07] She was still figuring out so many things about herself, you know, and she didn't realize that, you know what, I've never lived a life at all. And unfortunately for her, she decides that she's going to start living a life. And she decides that when she's at the bottom of the ravine after the bus is, you know, careened off the road. The prison bus, by the way. The prison bus. The prison bus. Yes. We can't forget that. Right.

[00:07:32] Because I'm reading, I'm like, what, where am I? What the hell am I reading? What is going on? Like the bus is half under the water. She's wrenching herself loose, trying to swim through and come up. Yes. I struggled on where to start the story. And you know, you're a writer, you know this. It's like, where, what's the best entry point for the reader? Where do we, what's the most impactful? Where do we start the story?

[00:07:55] And originally I thought I would start the story with her on the bus driving. And then we actually see the bus go off the road, which that I added it later on. But I said, no, that's not, that's not the best entry for this story. The best entry for this story is this is a book about a very complicated character who I need the reader to immediately begin to bond with and immediately try to understand who she is.

[00:08:18] So how about I just started in the water? So I took out everything until she was actually in the water because I want the reader, like, what is happening? Prison transport bus off the road. I mean, like you immediately start, I mean, like people have told me that they held their breath whenever they was reading those first pages because they felt like they were drowning. And you immediately as a reader start to have this sympathy for this person that you don't even know. And then you see her try to save Officer Madison.

[00:08:46] And so those were like my first hints and clues that she's not a bad person because if she was, you know, self-preservation would have kicked in and she would have left. She'd have been like, okay, listen, this is my chance to get away. I'm going to go. But she didn't. And so I said, this is the best place. I know my agent and my editor was like, okay. And I was like, no, this is, this is the best place to start the story. No, really? What was the feedback when you turned in this manuscript? Cause I'm just like, where have you been?

[00:09:13] They were like, you're, you're coming in hot here. And I said, yes. Well, because that's also, you know, as a writer, we have to hook these readers pretty early on. And so I felt like that was a good enough hook to like, okay, you want to read like what's going to happen? You know, what's going to happen? Who is this person? What is she going to do? And so once I explained like my reasoning behind it and they read like the next chapters, they was like, okay, I see what you're doing here. You know, you're hooking the reader. You're starting to build this character. This is the best place to start the story.

[00:09:43] And so then it was, okay, let's just move this first part you took out, but let's explain how this bus did go off the road. And so we did that in a later chapter. Do you actively think about the reader while you're writing? No, I don't. Because I feel like the moment I do that, my writing is going to change. I think about the story that needs to be told. You know, I am led by the characters and the voices that I hear in my head. And I know that sounds weird. It won't sound weird to you, but it'll sound weird to anybody else that's not a writer.

[00:10:11] I am telling their stories. I care about getting their story right. I can't start to think about the reader's not going to like this. The reader's not going to like that. But I can't think about, I can't think about that when I'm doing my initial drafting, the initial writing. Now, sometimes things come in like when I'm in my third or fourth draft of the book, but not in that initial, no. You said this when we were doing another event together, a virtual panel, that you write the first and the last chapter first.

[00:10:39] Tell the people what that is all about and why, because I am still lost. I have to know how it ends. I have to know how it ends because I am not a outliner. I don't outline the books. I am a pantser complete through and through. And so if, because I am a pantser, because I don't outline, because I don't know what's going to happen until I actually started writing it.

[00:11:02] I need to know how it ends because it doesn't matter what happens in the middle, the beginning in the middle, as long as it ends this particular way. And most of the time when my characters come to me, the first thing they tell me is the end of their story. I can't help that. Lee told me the end of this, which I won't spoil for anybody that's listening. She told me the end of this and I said, okay. And so then it was, how do I start this?

[00:11:28] And so then that's when I did the first chapter. And then after that, everything else was like pieces. I'll write a scene here. I'll write a scene here, some dialogue here and there. And then everything just gets pushed together. Oh God, that would drive me nuts. Over the course of the three books that you've written with this one being your third, what have you learned about yourself as a writer? That I'm constantly evolving and changing and that I like to challenge myself with every one of my books.

[00:11:56] I mean, I think people see and recognize a theme in my books, which I think is great, but I like to challenge myself and do something different. Wildflowers was the most literary book that I've written. My other books wasn't, wasn't that detailed. And I challenged myself to write that. And I enjoy that. I think I work and operate better when I'm constantly challenging myself and trying new and different things.

[00:12:19] Do you feel a pressure to write more literary fiction versus upmarket or traditional women's fiction, whatever those genre lines are? No, I don't. I write upmarket fiction. This one just skewed a little bit more on the literary side than my other two, but I am comfortable in upmarket fiction. My books are always going to be character based. There's two things. Well, actually three things.

[00:12:44] They're always going to be emotionally charged in some kind of way, you know, and they are going to be character driven. You know, there's a plot, of course, there's something that you can pull through and be able to find out and you reading it, turning the pages to try to find out and discover something. And then three, you know, you're always going to learn something. My books are going to tackle certain topics that people have not heard of, you know, so I don't feel like I need to change myself to readers and adjust to them in any kind of way.

[00:13:12] So then in writing where the wildflowers grow and knowing that you wanted to challenge yourself, was it difficult pulling all the different pieces and threads together to write a cohesive story about this woman, non-entancy, formerly incarcerated person who is actively rebuilding her life? No, I think people underestimate just how much of this book came to me.

[00:13:41] Like it was given to me. It was pushed in front of me and how much I did not have to step outside any comfort zone in order to write it. From reading those two articles, from discovering the grief theme, I went to a book festival and was paired up with a grief therapist who I work with to get the grief parts of this story right. It was just like, you're a grief therapist? Really? I went to a library event and was paired up with a flower farmer. What? You're a flower farmer? Show me pictures of the farm?

[00:14:10] Like all of this, all these pieces just kind of came together. So it wasn't a stretch. The hardest part of writing this book was lead the character herself because I am used to my characters just waking me up at night and constantly talking to me. And she wasn't. She was the most quiet of all the characters that have ever come to me. And it was frustrating because once all this research is done, it's like, okay, it's time to start writing. I'm right. Let's let's we got you, hun. Let's start talking.

[00:14:40] She gave me the end and she gave me a little bit of the beginning and that was pretty much it. And I was like, okay, girl, we got a book. We're on deadline. Let's bring it. And then the guys came, Luke and Tib and Jackson and Walt. The guys came. So I was able to kind of work on that. And I was like, Lee, we need to hear your story. And it was so frustrating for me. And I was, I, you know, I built a house and there's about a quarter of a mile. We have a private road to get to the main road. So I walk up and down that road.

[00:15:08] And it hit me on my way back that, oh, this is who you are as a person. This is your character. You're a survivor. You're an escaped convicted felon. You're not going to be overly talkative. You don't trust me. You don't trust me yet. I get it. Okay. You don't trust me. So once I realized that, then it started coming out. And so the reason why her story is told in pieces, when she slowly starts to tell us the story, is because that's the way I got it.

[00:15:34] And so I was like, this is the way that a survivor would act. You're not going to immediately trust everybody and start blabbing about what your story is. And then once I understood that it just, the story just kind of opened up. So you said you were doing a library event where you were partnered with a flower farmer and that a lot of this came to you. Can we talk about the flower farm in G's Bend and be it in the middle of each Jesus? No way. Yes. So, okay. My husband is a Jackson.

[00:16:04] My husband is Alabama country boy through and through. I am a Southerner by marriage, not by birth. I'm a Midwest girl. You know, I was born in Chicago. I was raised in Southern Illinois. I'm not a Southerner, but he loves the South. He loves Alabama. And he said, when are you ever going to write a book set in Alabama? And I was like, well, I need a book. I'm writing a book that has an escaped convicted felon who unpacks her trauma somewhere. And it needs to be a rule setting because, you know, in cities, in these large places,

[00:16:34] you know, you're under constant surveillance. She would have been caught almost immediately. So I knew I needed a rule setting. He said, what about G's bin? And of course I heard G's bin. I knew about the quilt. I've driven through there, but I'd never actually made it to stop there. And so I grabbed my sister-in-law, God bless her, because she is the one that goes on me on these research trips. And I make a hotel reservation because it's about five hours from where we live. Alabama is a huge state. And at the bottom of the hotel reservations that I made, it tells you to print any directions

[00:17:03] because your phone, your data, it's not going to work out here. And I thought, oh, this is perfect. This is perfect for Lee. It's because I needed a realistic place. If I put her in the middle of Atlanta, readers would have been like, girl, ain't no way she would have not been caught. So I needed a rule setting. So we go there and everything in the book is real. Like we go there, you get on the ferry, you get there. And we went during the airing of the quilts festival, but we drove past that just so I can get like this inspiration.

[00:17:31] And so we're in her Jeep and there's the main roads are paved, but there's a couple of like dirt roads. So we turned down this dirt road and we're driving. And my sister-in-law, Sheila, she says, Tara, where are we going? Because our phones are not going to work out here. If we get a flat tire, something happens, like we are stranded. And I was like, I just need to get the inspiration. And she was like, listen, inspiration needs to come in about five minutes. And it actually came like three minutes later.

[00:17:58] We pull up on this large field because it's a lot of like farmland and like the sun, I kid you not, the sun looks like beaming down. And it just like kind of shined over this field. And I said it right here. And we got out and I took a bunch of pictures for inspiration for later because there are no Jackson's flower farm does not exist on G's Bend. So I knew that I was going to create that. And I said, oh, a farm. She's going to heal on the farm.

[00:18:23] And so I left there thinking that it was just going to be a farm with animals and crops and stuff. And then the next week I go to ALA and my publisher has this dinner where they invite all these booksellers and she's a bookseller and she just so happened to be a flower farmer too. And I was like, um, can I see pick? I mean, I held her hostage most of the dinner and you know, we're supposed to talk to all these different booksellers.

[00:18:51] Bingling, networking, smoothing, trying to get your books into everybody's store. And you hold it one lady hostage. One me, me and her, her name is Melanie. Me and Melanie talked most of the night and she was showing me pictures of her flower farm and she was explaining to me how it worked. Cause I was like, I had never heard of a flower farm. Listen, I knew flowers came from somewhere. Okay. Like I'm not naive to think flowers come from somewhere. I don't think I realized that they were grown in such on farms. And so of course I'm a naturally curious person by nature.

[00:19:20] And so I was like, oh, this is going to be a flower farm because, you know, I read a couple of hundred books a year and I thought to myself, had I ever read a book set or even mentioned a flower farm? And I said, I don't think so. And I asked a couple of librarian friends of mine to like dig in their mental Rolodexes. Like, have you heard of a, and they were like, no. And I was like, okay, this is new. And I love challenging and adding that curiosity to my books. So I was like, okay, flower farm. There it is.

[00:19:46] How many interviews with Melanie did you do to get all the details of the flower farm? Right. Cause they work at hard. Like I would never think flowers were so intense. Like they are working really hard every day. Yeah. We talked a lot. And then I, and then once I knew the flower farm, then I can do my general research on flower farms. And I knew I had to narrow down, get the size and how they worked and how these things work. The whole co-op part of this book, I had to do research on that because those co-ops exist.

[00:20:14] And so once I knew that, and I could just ask, and if I needed questions, you know, had answers to questions I didn't have, I would reach out to her and say, Hey, what about this? You know, what about that? But for the most part, I can just do regular research. Once I knew it was going to be on the flower farm. Where did Jackson come from? Jackson, Jackson. Jackson has had an evolution from the, from the beginning to the end of this book. This came from Megan, the grief therapist. And I debated whether or not that she was going to have a love interest in this book

[00:20:44] because it's not a romance. It's not a romance. Are you sure? Are you sure? I am so sure. I am so sure this book is not a romance. Regina, Regina Black is a really close friend of mine. You know, she writes romances and she said, she read it. She was like, Tara. I agree with Regina. She said, Tara, you're not beating the allegations. You're not beating the allegations. You're not beating the allegations. You're not. Regina told me how I have to do this.

[00:21:12] She said, Tara, you write upmarket contemporary fiction with romantic subplots. And I said, okay, I like that. I can do that. And so because it's not a romance, I was like, I don't want people to get distracted. The purpose of this book was Lee finding herself and understanding herself and learning herself and moving past her grief and working and unpacking that childhood trauma that she had, not her falling in love. Because that's the main theme of romances is the love.

[00:21:42] And so I was like, I don't want this to overpower her story. And, but Megan. I was like, but, cause I'm like, but she said, love is so important. You know, love is healing. You know, when she said stuff like that, it was like, okay, love is healing. So then I started thinking, what kind of man would Lee need to help her open up and unpack? And so Jackson is formed.

[00:22:10] His personality, who he is, is based on what she needed. All the guys are. So I built them out based on what she needed to help her heal. So they were not, this is the first time I ever created a character that was 100% based on another character's growth. And so his patience, you know, a man would need to be patient with her because she got on that farm and she didn't want to wear the shoes. She didn't want to go to the dinners. She didn't want to do anything.

[00:22:38] She was so standoffish and he would need to be patient. And so he was framed and developed based on what she needed. Again, you are not beating the allegations. It's not a romance. You're right. It's not. But the romantic subplot is in all of the books because in one summer in Savannah, I know I was waiting. I was waiting. I was like, I know we're there together. Yeah. Even then I was like, finally. Yes. They slow burns, girl. They are slow burns for sure. It's a slow burn. But once they got there, it was good. And I was happy for, I was like, yes, girl.

[00:23:09] Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that because my editor, God bless her. It was okay. We got to the romance, right? And she was like, is this too much? And I was like, no, it's not too much. This is good. This is good. And my reasoning was, I believe in balance in my books. I believe if you lean too far one way, it messes up like the structure of the story. So all we knew is Lee knew the pain of love, the pain of losing her family, the pain of

[00:23:39] going to prison. You know, she knew pain, the pains of love. And so the balance of that is the pleasure of love and for the reader and for the reader. I didn't want this to trauma dump all this stuff on the reader and not have an emotional payoff for them in some kind of way. And so it was, okay, you have to read about her drowning. You have to read about what happened to her family. You have to read about her going to prison, but you get to read and see her fall in love with somebody, right? You get to see her explore her body.

[00:24:10] Like that balance was very important to me. Why would your editor or agent think it was too much? I'm really curious about it. Because I don't write romance. Because I don't write romance. Because it's not a romance. But people who have relationships and have sex outside of like romance novels, like it's part of life. Yeah. Like some of the scenes, like the first scene, I think I cut a little bit of that and a couple of other scenes, I kind of like narrowed it back just so it just wouldn't kind of overtake

[00:24:39] the forward motion of Lee's healing journey. I get that. And I don't write romances. Like I don't write, I don't, it's not a romance. And so it was like, okay, let's pull this back a little bit. Okay. So like I have big feelings about that. Like, I don't know, there's not really a forum to talk about this, but right here, but like, no, really? Like people have relationships in life. So I feel like no matter what you're writing, if there is a couple or some kind of relationship

[00:25:07] dynamic and everybody's adulting consenting, we should be able to see what that looks like and play with it on the page. Like it doesn't have to be a romance for that to exist. I agree. I think she meant more of the length of my scenes. Okay. Not that it didn't belong there, but more of the length of the scene. The length and the detail. Okay. Yes. And the deep girl, the detail, you read the detail, the detail, but you know what? That's the way I wrote the book. The book is very detailed.

[00:25:36] Like you are designed to go on this healing journey. You are designed to understand and see what she sees. So guess what? Like you get to feel what she feels too, through those details. Exactly. But I agree with you about the love and sex in books. And that's why I hate the term smut. It's just like, they say, oh, this book has smut in it. Listen, we all are adults here. Adults have sex, right? And for me and my books, I'm never going to put an unnecessary sex scene in the book, right?

[00:26:04] It's not going to be an unnecessary sex scene. If there is a sex scene in my book, it's because it's needed. It moves the story forward. It says something about the character, something about the plot, something about the character development. It moves the story forward. So it's never going to be just thrown in there because I'm just want to satisfy the reader. And so you can read, you know, a sex scene. The sex scenes in this book were very important. And there were like three of them. You know, the first time that she was realizing that she was in love with Jackson, that was

[00:26:34] a very important sex scene. There is another sex scene where she is starting to unpack and feel how she feels. And it's like in her skin, her body, how that feels. That was important for her to understand that and experience that. So I'm never going to write a sex scene. She had never experienced that before. She had never experienced that before. Never. And that's when she starts to understand how her mom could have ended up in a situation like this. It was through that.

[00:26:59] And so that was the purpose of that scene was to get her mindset and to get the reader to understand, oh, this is how she came to this place of making peace with her mom. So when people say smut in books, it's like, guys, come on, we're adults. Okay. Adults have sex. This stuff is important in some of these books that we're writing. And I feel like sometimes some readers, but I really feel like it's other authors can be very puritanical about it.

[00:27:24] I was at a festival earlier this year and I was sitting in the audience of a panel of a friend and she was the interviewer. And I'm listening to these people talk about their works and their books. And at one point, one of the authors said something about a sex scene in that, like, I was so glad that it wasn't nasty because so often so many of sex scenes today are nasty. And I texted a friend, I won't say who, but I texted a friend. I was like, it's supposed to be nasty sometimes. Yes. Yes. I was like, what are we doing?

[00:27:54] What are we doing? If you don't want to write those in your books, that's fine. That's fine. But like, you don't get to decide whether or not I do that. And then look at me, you know, with the crooked eyebrow, because, you know, this is a deeper thing than what you have the capacity to even understand. And again, it's three sex scenes and what, 400 semi pages? Yes. And then, you know, it comes more closer to the end. So it's not like we just jumped in. Right. Like we didn't start in the bed.

[00:28:23] We had to get to the bed. Yes. And so it's important. It's important. But, you know, you have different type of readers. You have different type of writers. I understand that. But I don't like the judgments from other writers when I feel like they just lack this capacity to understand what a writer is trying to do. Fair. I think this is a good part to have you read something from Where the Wildflowers Grow and then we can go deeper into the conversation.

[00:28:46] Where the Wildflowers Grow by Tara Shelton Harris follows Lee Wild from the day she was supposed to die at the bottom of a ravine after her prison transport bus careened off the road. But Lee doesn't die. She survives against all odds thanks to the skills she learned from the way she was raised from a past she doesn't want to remember.

[00:29:08] As she hides out in rural Alabama, unlearning the harm of her childhood and processing the tragedy of losing any living member of her family, she slowly begins to find herself thanks to the healing power of flowers and love. Here's Tara. I would love to read that passage that we were just talking about when she was starting to come to the place of peace with her mom. Okay. I will start with, I'm on 374.

[00:29:35] I discovered I like sex and Jackson was all too happy to allow me to explore what I like. He allowed me to explore with my fingers, lips and tongue, him and his powerful body, which came honestly through hard work and years of chopping wood and the thick and long lower part of him, which came from genetics and the almighty. And he explored me, his fingers and tongue serving as an alarm clock, awakening areas that had never been active. There was no one way, one position I preferred over the other.

[00:30:02] He was a luxury I couldn't seem to sip, but I loved straddling him face to face, holding his eyes with mine and rolling my hips deep while he pressed me closer to him, raking his fingers down my spine. Something had broken loose inside of me, inside of us. The clues were in the kisses on my neck and across my breasts and the words of praise that he whispered in my ear when I climaxed. He couldn't stop loving on me and we couldn't stay away or keep our hands off each other.

[00:30:29] Often sneaking away for afternoon rumps in my cabin or unrolling a blanket in the field along the early wildflowers starting to bloom to satisfy our need, me clothed in nothing but his bare arms. Our need at turns, wild and tender, rough and ripe. The feelings of him, a tattoo on my skin, a gift. It wasn't just the sensations of sex, but what accompanied it. What it meant to be human, to hold capacity for both pleasure and pain, was laid bare before me.

[00:30:54] I had sipped from the cup of suffering, but had never had felt such a deep death of desire. It seemed unfair that such bliss was concealed beneath the surface, waiting to be revealed. I knew then what it felt to be human, to feel it all, to live within the full spectrum of emotions and sensations, and that as a human, I was capable of so many things. I became more aware of my body, more than I ever have. What it held, what it gave, what it took. It absorbed, it released, it ached.

[00:31:22] It breathed and lived in the back and forth of pain and joy, and the ebb and flow that makes us alive. I knew all the ways that love could hurt, but none of its pleasures until now. In the stillness of those nights, after Jackson and I made love, when sleep came for him, I'd lie there, wide awake, pressing my ear to his chest, his heartbeat steady beneath my cheek. My heart swelled with love that I felt for him. Lila had known that feeling too. In her short life, she tasted the joy of love with Robert.

[00:31:50] She had come home still smelling of him, his scent lingering in her hair, in the air, as if it were still in the room with us. She'd bite her lip, a soft smile playing at the corners of her mouth and stare, unfocused, caught in a world of her own, a world with him in it. Now I knew what she saw, what she felt. She found love where it wasn't supposed to be, and now I had to. I wanted to tell her about it, this new kind of happiness, the kind that you could never quite explain but only feel. I thought of Mama too.

[00:32:20] She had her own history, her own ancestors. In these quiet moments, I began to understand the person she became, the way she had lived, and something began to shift inside of me. I could see it now, the pull that kept Mama in that trailer, the way love wrapped itself around her like a chain, making the impossible feel simple. It didn't make sense, not really, but somewhere in that understanding, the sharp edges of my anger tore her softened. Love makes you do wild things with the lack of reason that makes it feel flogged.

[00:32:49] It didn't make her actions right, but I finally reached a place where I could at least understand that love can bend you into things you never thought you could be. Thank you. And see, that's why the sex scene prior to that was important, because it led her to start thinking about her sister and what her sister saw, and even how her mother could even, it didn't make sense to her, but she could at least understand, right? Sometimes all you need in order to move on from something is just to reach a place of understanding.

[00:33:19] It doesn't mean that their actions was right, but at least you could understand it. What do you think Lee learned the most about herself that prepared her for what she did in the end with the lady who I felt like was a villain? I didn't really like her, but it's fine. Nobody, nobody likes Carly. Carly serves such an important role throughout this book, and nobody really liked Carly. Sure. You like girl? Sure.

[00:33:44] I think that she learned that she did not have to hold it all, all the time. You know, we as Black women, we hold and we juggle so many balls in the air. We throw so much at ourselves. And the most important thing that she learned that it was okay to just rest and be herself and slowly unpack, you know, these things that had happened to her and be at a place of peace with it.

[00:34:08] And, you know, one of my favorite scenes in this book is when they're out on the farm and she tells Jackson, you know, you just want to save me. And Jackson says to her, you know, he clocked her immediately. He said, you don't need to be saved, you know, and she says, well, what do I need? And he said, rest, right? Like she never thought that that was even an option that she could have, that she could just rest, that she wasn't having to learn how to do this and do this and do that, that it's okay to let all these balls around you just tumble down.

[00:34:37] You know, it was really important for her to just rest and learn and be able to hold what she had been through and not let it kill her and destroy her. Knowing that many of your readers are women, many of them are Black women in that, you know, maybe you should just put all that shit down and go lay down. Girl, the response from this book. You know, I tell people that my books are mirrors or doors.

[00:35:02] It's either a mirror, like you're going to read this book and see yourself in it, or it's a window to where you get a chance to peek into a different lifestyle and understand. I think more people see this book as a mirror for them than a window, right? Like that is what they see. And man, the mirrors are shining stuff back to people that I don't even think that they realize. Like there's been so many people that said, I don't think I realized that I was not living my life, that I've just been surviving my life.

[00:35:31] I don't think I realized I have not finished grieving. Insert here. My husband, my brother, my father, my mother. Like it has been just this shining mirror for a lot of people in a very good way, in a very good way. Because one of the things that I want to do in my books is yes, there's going to be this thing that happened to these characters, but I want to show the healing too. I want to show the healing.

[00:35:55] And so it's giving people some suggestions on what are some of the things that they can do to heal, you know, taking walks, you know, grounding, gardening, stuff like that. And so I think it's really helping people understand themselves and like, wow, it's okay to like fall apart. It's okay to, you know, not have all the answers. It's okay to just rest. I mean, you think about the 92% of us black women. That's what we're doing now. Aren't we? Aren't we resting? And we collectively decided that we was going to rest.

[00:36:25] There was no meeting. There was no like, okay, guys, what are we going to do? It was like, you know what? I'm, we tried and I'm done. And I'm not holding this anymore. We're going to mind our black woman business. We're going to mind our business and let this happen over here. Right. And so that's what Lee did. Lee was, I mean, but it took Jackson's kind of pushing and encouraging her to get to that point, that place of rest. What does, if anything, what is telling these stories do to you personally?

[00:36:52] Because they are so fraught. Like from the beginning, from one summer in Savannah, you just throwing punches. Like, does it harm you in any way? Is it a relief to you? Like what does writing these kinds of stories do for you, do to you? One, they help me understand the world around me because that's kind of my niche.

[00:37:14] My niche is I'm going to tell stories about circumstances, conditions that happen to people every day that we don't know enough about or we don't talk enough about. You're going to close one of my books and you're going to know more about something, insert whatever that is. And I think doing that, I learned about those things too. You know, my second book really explores air property. And it was like, I knew nothing about that. I didn't know it existed, what that was. And so now I'm better informed of the world around me. So that helps me.

[00:37:44] But what it does for me is when people walk up to me and like tears in their eyes and like, thank you. You know, I feel so seen in this book, you know, that people have been recommending this book to people who are going through grief, you know, who are going through certain, especially complex grief, especially complex grief. You know, that grief of grieving somebody who you'll never get that closure from. You'll never get that sorry. You'll never be able to hear them say what you think you need to hear them say in order to move on.

[00:38:10] And people have just been crying and talking about it in my DMs, in my emails, talking about it. That makes me feel good that people can feel seen through the books. And so I just feel like I'm adding to, you know, this literary landscape and making my small little mark somewhere. And it makes me feel good. So forever the librarian is what it's giving. Forever the librarian. Because you know what? Actually, this is why I write these books. You know, for years I was collection development librarian.

[00:38:38] It was my job to buy all the adult print and digital materials from my library. And I live in rural Alabama. We had a small budget. And so I was very mindful of where those dollars were spent. And so I was constantly talking to my patrons, like, what do I need more of? What do we have too much of? And it wasn't so much that a subject or a topic was missing as so much the type of books was missing because they didn't exist. Right? They did not exist. And they were like, we like this, but we're looking for more something.

[00:39:08] I discovered that readers don't mind being educated through fiction. And I was like, this is it. This is okay. This is interesting. And I kind of just 18 years of like tucking all this stuff in the back of my mind and just said, my books are going to educate. And not in a way that you're beating them over the head with it, but just here you go. Like you feel like you know more. And if you want to know more, you just in the middle of the book, open it up and you see something. Are you looking up? So many people have looked up the Cahaba lilies.

[00:39:37] They looked up at G's bin. They looked up the quilts. Like they looked up non-entities. Like all of that. And so great. You know what? If I'm adding to that, to the education, it's good. So yes, I, yeah, my, my library and background has definitely helped me as a writer. And so what is it propelling you toward next? Can you say? Yes. So my next book and, you know, listen, I never thought that I would write or go back to a story. I feel like when my characters stop talking, everything is done.

[00:40:07] And my next book is a standalone book to One Summer in Savannah. And it was like, okay, okay, okay. We're going to do it. So many people have been asking about it and I thought, okay, but what's the story going to be? Because it's not a sequel, even though I still feel like you need to read the first book to really understand the magnitude of it. And I said, what's the story going to be? And again, I was walking up and down the road and it came to me.

[00:40:33] Alana came to me and she says, I'm 18 and 28 years old. And I said, oh, oh, it's your story. It's going to be your story because you were eight in One Summer in Savannah. You're going to be 18 and 28. And so this basically tells the story of her and this identity crisis that it happens to her when she finds out the truth of her conception and how she was conceived. Is her daddy still alive? No. No, no. I was trying to remember like that.

[00:41:03] I was like, no, he didn't make it. No, he did not make it. No. But it's the after effects of when you know that you were conceived from violence and what that does to you and how important legacy is and what you pass on to your children and what you accept and what you don't accept about yourself. And so she struggles with that. And there's two timelines because there's one timeline when she's an adult.

[00:41:28] And then the 18 year old timeline explains why she's the way she is as an adult. Are her mother and uncle still together? Well, happily answer that question. Yes, because people love Sarah and Jacob so much. Yes, they are still happily together. Okay. That concludes my questions about what you're working on next and for this interview. Thank you so much, Tara, for coming to play with me again. Big thank you to Tara Shelton Harris for being here today on Black & Published.

[00:41:54] You can follow Tara on Instagram and threads at Tara S. Harris. And Terah is spelled T-E-R-A-H. And make sure you check out Where the Wildflowers Grow, out now from Sourcebooks. You can get a copy of the novel from Mahogany Books and get 10% off your first purchase using code BLACKPUB at checkout. And that's B-L-K-P-U-B. That's our show for the week.

[00:42:22] If you like this episode and want more Black & Published, head to our Instagram or YouTube page. It's at Black & Published and that's B-L-K-& Published. There, you can watch a bonus clip from my interview with Tara about the currency of pretty privilege and the real cost of being a poor, beautiful woman in the world. Make sure you check it out and let me know what you think in the comments.

[00:42:49] I'll holler at y'all next week when our guest will be Dr. LaConte Deal, author of the triptych poetry collection, Soul Survivors. I never was ashamed from being from the hood. I have it in my bio that's from South Central and I remember a few years ago I was introducing myself and I said that and my homegirl, who's also a scholar and from Englewood, she gasped. But she's like, I didn't know we could do that. Like, I didn't know we could rep. And I think it's just, I've always repped.

[00:43:18] That's next week on Black & Published. I'll talk to you then. Peace. What's going on, family? This is Derek Young. And Ramonda Young. Owners of both Mahogany Books and the Mahogany Books Podcast Network. We really want to thank each and every one of you for listening to this episode.

[00:43:42] And if you enjoyed what you just heard, drop us a review and rate us on whatever platform you download podcasts on. We truly appreciate each and every one of you for supporting us and making us your go-to for Black books. And we look forward to connecting with you all sometime in the future. Thank you again, fam. And always remember, Black books matter.