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- [00:00]
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Alana K. Arnold
I'm right here.
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Announcer
Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again.
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Rebecca Buchanan
So what's next?
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Alana K. Arnold
I feel liberated. We're gonna take this city back over medicated in an all new season. Now streaming only on Disney plus. They're hunting us. It's time we started hunting them. I can work with them. This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again now streaming
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Announcer
only on Disney Pl.
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New Books Network Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host at New Books Network and today I'm here with Alana K. Arnold to talk about her new book, Holloway. Thank you so much Alana for being here with me today.
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Alana K. Arnold
Oh, it's such a pleasure. I'm so excited. This is Holloway's release day, so it's really neat to get to talk with someone who's read the book already. That doesn't usually happen right at the beginning of a launch, so this is exciting for me too.
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Rebecca Buchanan
So could you start off by giving a little bit of a synopsis about the book and what it's about?
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Alana K. Arnold
Sure. It makes me laugh because it's a hard one to encap, you know, to capture in a synopsis. But this is the story of Nora who is an 18 year old autistic girl. The story begins in 2021, kind of post Covid in quotes and she is on a train the metro in Paris alone because her mother refused to get the COVID vaccine, believing that the MMR gave her daughter autism. And her mother has died, leaving Nora alone in the world. And she's gone to Paris to try to do right by her mother and spread her ashes in a place she thinks she would want to be, but ends up through a series of events, slipping through a portal to 1946, France. Same place, different time, and the story moves on from there. It's a story about art and philosophy and neuroatypicality and family and what we owe people who have maybe done wrong by us. And I don't know how to heal in a time during which everything has fallen apart and the world is so messy and uncertain that people aren't even sure if it's a time during which one should sort of have joy or make art. So the two. The two years together. So, yeah, there you go. That's. That's my best attempt.
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Rebecca Buchanan
So can you. Can you talk a little bit about how this book came to be? Like, why this story? Why you chose to write the story?
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Alana K. Arnold
Yeah, so I always sort of pull from three or so places at the same time when an idea comes to me. I started Holloway in 2021, so it was, you know, Covid just kind of vaccines were available, but people were still reeling. And I was finishing a novel called the Blood Years, which is historical fiction based on my grandmother's teenage years in Chernobyts, Romania, during and before the Holocaust. So, you know, Europe was on my mind. World War II was on my mind. And I was reading a book called Outlander. I became sort of obsessed with this series of time travel romances. And I thought, oh, I want to write a fun portal fantasy time travel romance, but I can't really always write the thing I intended to write. I ended up writing this instead, which it does have portal and it does have some romance, but it is not, you know, anything like Outlander. And also at the same time, I was being, you know, going through a kind of a long, very welcome process of diagnosis with a psychiatrist, you know, labeling my brain as autistic, which was really interesting and complicated. It involved doing what they call, like a. Oh, what is it called? What's it called when you have to look at a body and see what happened to it after it's dead?
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Rebecca Buchanan
Oh, like an autopsy, kind of.
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Alana K. Arnold
We did an autopsy sort of of my whole life, my childhood. And I had to, like, look at all my old school records and teacher reports and talk about all my old friendships and what it was like to be a kid and me. And that was a really interesting, complex, and painful process. So those three things together, I think thinking about World War II, neuro atypicality in my brain, and Covid encyclicality brought this book into its first. Its first draft.
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Rebecca Buchanan
So I would love to talk a little bit about Nora. And Nora's a character. I was saying to you, I have a colleague who does with art space work and also looking at different sort of physical and mental issues and that writing about and writing a character who is autistic and sort of getting into that character. Can you talk a bit about Nora? Who. Nora is writing Nora and thinking about how do you represent autism in a way that people really understand the complexities of it?
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Alana K. Arnold
Well, Nora was the easiest character maybe I've ever written. I got to indulge in all the things, you know, I got to follow her brain in a way that's very similar to mine. She's smarter than I am, which was a real challenge. It's difficult to write a character who's smarter than you are. But she and I both are very tangential and we see everything as interconnected and we think everything is interesting and the world is bright and amazing and overwhelming and very special to get to exist in for both of us. She is like my character, my most famous character, Bixby Alexander Tam, who was a nine year old boy with autism in a book called A Boy Called Bat and its Sequels. So I have had some experience. I mean, I guess I think all my characters, one way or another are autistic, you know, because they came out of my brain in the same way. I think all my characters are Jewish in the lens of my, you know, sort of atypical, you know, agnostic Judaism. But she was a pleasure to write. Not a challenge her voice at all. And I guess I don't spend a lot of time, honestly, especially in the first drafts, I'm not very good at thinking about how it's going to land with readers or how to help readers experience the character. My editor helps me with some of that down the road, but in general, I don't think about the reader at all when I write anything. I just explore the character's mind and. And where the character's going. Things Nora and I don't have in common is I'm not an artist. So that was a huge amount of research and work for me. I have a interest but tenuous hold on philosophy, whereas Nora very much understands quite a bit about different kinds, different, you know, genres and movements. So there was a lot that I had to catch up on with her.
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Rebecca Buchanan
So I'd love to talk about the research, but let's look. You mentioned your writing process. Can you talk a little bit about that process for folks. Like, what is that process for you? Did you start with this character? Did you start with, like, you said you kind of knew you wanted to do this kind of portal, like time travel. Like, where do you start, and what is that process? Like?
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Alana K. Arnold
It's messy, you know, because I just think about things. I take a lot of long walks, and my brain now knows that when I'm on a long walk, it, like, chunks into creative time. Like, I have, like, a neural pathway. It's kind of like a hallway. No, it's kind of depressed into the earth. And once you slip in, it's hard to get out again. And my brain knows that long walk equals thinking about story. And so different things would just come up, and I would just sort of hold them together. And. And when I have enough that it feels like there's like three or four interesting things that belong together in a way I don't understand yet. That's usually what happens. I have no idea how these things are going to fit together. I just know that they do in an interesting way. And for me, a lot of the fun is figuring it out through writing the book, you know, how the disparate elements actually are part of the same thing. But again, my belief is that everything is connected. So I'm. I am always sure I'll figure it out. It's just, you know, they're also probably connected in more than one way. You know, they're connected in many ways. My brain can see these connections. Another brain would take the same things and see other connections, which I think is really cool. But so a lot of walking and thinking and taking notes. I'm always desperate to get started because I love to write. I love beginnings. So her voice came to me very early on, and I wrote the first couple of pages. The first line is. And I wrote it just the same as it is now. From shortly before my sixth birthday until I was nearly eight years old, I did not speak for over two years. Not a single word. And then there's this whole explanation about the day she stopped speaking. I had no idea why she stopped speaking or what news her mother brought at all. You know, when I wrote that. So that was really neat to get to sort of like, follow the mystery and find out.
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Rebecca Buchanan
One thing I really loved was that, I mean, well, I do love a good portal to any kind of other world. And I was, you know, thinking about, would I stay if I went through a portal? And what. And at what time in my life would I have stayed? Right?
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Alana K. Arnold
That's A good question.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Right, Right. It's funny because I asked my husband, he's like, well, I have kids now, so I would come back because I have kids. Right. But, like, this idea. But. But some of this is historically accurate, right? Like, so can you talk a little bit about the research you did and maybe also deciding, like, what do you want to include that is really accurate with the people that are actual, like, were people or places? Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [10:59]
Alana K. Arnold
Oh, my gosh. That was so thrilling for me. Yeah. So this book I wrote, like I said, after the Blood Years, which is historical fiction based on my grandmother's life. And I did a huge amount of research for that book. I learned about her, obviously, but then there wasn't enough of her story left for me to write a whole novel, you know. And so I did a huge amount of research in the, you know, the Holocaust Memorial Museums archives, listened to stories of a bunch of people from Chernowitz. I read a book called the Third Reich of Dreams. It was a collection of dreams Jews were having at the beginning of World War II that a psychologist wrote down and smuggled out of Germany. So my character in that book, Frederica, her dreams are taken from that book. It was incredibly important to me to not make stuff up about the Holocaust, that everything that's terrible was true. That just felt important to me. I felt like, it's not a playground, you know, I just wanted to be accurate. And so that was my first, really, all this research. But that was a very important thing to me that led me to. Through that book. And so when I was writing this book, I already knew a bunch about the time. Part of me is practical. I wanted to sort of reuse some of what I already had, my knowledge about World War II. But actually, it's kind of a funny story. I was planning on setting this in England because. At a tuberculosis sanatorium, because my grandmother went to a tuberculosis sanatorium, not in England. And I thought that would be an interesting place to have my character. Ended up. But then I saw an offering from the American Library in Paris for a writer in residence, if you're writing a book that combined French and American, you know, sort of storytelling. And so I said, whoa, I'm going to find a sanity, you know, sanatorium in. In France and set my book there so I can apply for this grant. And I found Saint Alban sur Le Mignel just through Google, you know, and immediately knew that the story was going to be set there because it's a real historical place that was so interesting and important, and I fell into the research. I watched, like, you know, this movie that's about, you know, the place and about the real people who live there. There's a character named JoJo Chasing, which is never mentioned anywhere except in this little. This old. This, you know, archival movie I watched.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Because my.
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Alana K. Arnold
My fact checker was like, I can't find this person. I'm like, no, it's like a passing reference, you know, in this archival movie. And I just fell in love with the research. And each draft, it got deeper and deeper. Um, like, I realized that the Paul Elaward. I'm probably saying that wrong, was at the sanatorium as an. As a poet, and he was also deeply grieving the li. The death of his wife. Um, I took some liberties of time and kind of squinched those things together. Um, the people who live at the sanatorium, including August, were real people that I researched and learned about and sort of came to my own conclusions about. You know, it seems to me that Auguste is a. Is a, you know, nonverbal autistic man who was misunderstood in his own time. So it was just such a fascinating. I couldn't, you know, the research I could do forever, ever, ever. There was also the. The caves at Lascaux, which I got to go to. And, you know, there's a dog in this book named Robot. And people would say, robot, that's not a name from 1946 France, but it is. That was the name of the dog that discovered these caves. And so working in that dog and figuring out why this dog would be with my fictional character that she meets Adrian, and it was just so much fun to get to do all that research.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, I know. Your book made me want to do, like, just go and read more about some of this stuff. And I am fascinated by those caves. So I love that because you also go now to those caves, but you don't. They, like, reproduced what. You know, so you've got. You're like, okay, I can put her in a time. I was like, oh, she gets to go to a time where she actually gets to see the cave.
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Alana K. Arnold
Yeah, yeah, I went and saw the caves. We went on a trip, my husband and I, a research trip for this book. I got to go to St. Alban Surly Mignel. I got to go to this, you know, to the sanctuary, the sanatorium. And it's not open anymore, but I got to take a tour through some of it. I kind of talked my way into that, which was Amazing. And we went to the caves and I honestly found it to be even more impressive that we have remade the caves than the first people made the caves. Like, I just. I find reproduction to be fascinating, which fits so well with this story of cyclicality and time travel and repetition and, you know, so that was really neat for me. But it is. It's an incredible feat that they did. They did the caves in the first place. It's an incredible feat that we did the caves again. When I found out they had to close the caves because people's breath was ruining the art, was like, oh, you know, breath, you know, and Covid. So there were just. Every time I turned a corner, there was like the jewel that I would find that was like a gift. They feel like gifts from the universe. These jewels that are like just sort of flung in front of you that you walk around picking up and they let you know, like, you're on the right track. He said, I don't really believe in any right track. You know, I think I could turn in any direction and find those jewels. There'd be different Jules, you know, there'd be a different story, but the process would be just as interesting. And that's what I would love for other, you know, writers to think more about, is to let go of the idea of the one story or the one way to do something and instead really embrace that there is no one route. It's, you know, the process. I could write this book now I would write a completely different book because I'm a different person who's interested in different things. That's pretty cool, I think.
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Alana K. Arnold
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Rebecca Buchanan
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Alana K. Arnold
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Alana K. Arnold
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hey NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network Audience Survey and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most, and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries and institutions we partner with when we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users. It opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing. If you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Support. Now go take the survey.
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Rebecca Buchanan
No, it's awesome and I I love that idea of thinking about too how we recreate memory. And for me I appreciate without without any kind of like spoilery stuff but really thinking about. We often think about this time travel as we go back and often it's like this tale of if you change one thing, then the whole world is gonna change right? This like it's this dangerous thing and you for the like. I don't think Holloway does that. I think it's like this idea that like we Find out more about ourself and who we are and the spaces that we kind of can or, you know, or want to exist in through this time travel. So it's this different take on thinking about going back in time and remembering
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Alana K. Arnold
something is time travel, you know, and each time you return to a memory, you are different, and so the memory is different, and that's a big part of this journey. Is Nora remembering and then re remembering with more knowledge when she knows more and being able to reinterpret things in a different way, which again, has that cyclicality and that, you know, going back to come forward in a new. In a new way, which I think is a lot of being a person, just in general. I always say that writing and humaning are the same things. So.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, I love that. One thing I really also appreciated is that you allow. I mean, Nora is allowed to have. Feel like, to be sexual. Right. And to really think about that and what that means and that experience. And I think we often, well, you know, shy. We often shy away from that sometimes in thinking about what does that mean to be a sexual being, especially if you are neurodivergent. Right. And how do we look at that? So can you talk a little bit about that and thinking about Nora and thinking about sexuality and sexual identity and sort of being.
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Alana K. Arnold
Yeah, I mean, my sexuality is a big part of who I am. My experiences with my own body are, you know, reflected in a lot of my young adult work. It was a pleasure to get to reflect some of the positive experiences that I've experienced in this body, as opposed to tread retreading some of the sort of more fraught stuff that appears in books like. Like Damsel and what Girls are made of. So, yeah, I think again, I mean, Nora is me. You know, I've also, you know, always, you know, been at my core, someone who is interested in bodies, other people's. In my own. I find women's bodies to be interesting and full of curves. And, you know, I'm. I mean, I'm definitely bisexual. It's, you know, I'm a married woman who's been married, the same guy, since I was 17. So I'm, you know, more monogamous creature than I am anything else. But exploring what it is that I love and what attracts me and what makes my body feel certain ways is the same as art, you know, thinking about that with other, you know, and I don't see any reason why anybody should have to make a decision or limit themselves to what they find to be beautiful or Erotic or interesting. So, yeah, I think that Nora's appreciation of. Of sexuality and the sensuality is right along this. And she talks about curves and lines, you know, and what's. What's interesting to her, both in art and in, you know, the forms of bodies. So, again, you know, Nora was a pleasure and very simple for me to write for so many reasons, because I just got to say she's more like me than any other character I've ever written. In many, many ways. It was really. Her voice was the easiest part of the book.
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Rebecca Buchanan
So one thing I would love for you to hear more about is, you know, you talk about, like, and you mentioned this, like, her mother dies of COVID because she chooses not to believe in vaccination. Right. And so you are talking and throughout this. And then you sort of also look at how it relates to some of the things that were going on in the 1940. Right. Like, you know, the world changes and the world stays the same. Can you talk about, like, bringing that in writing about things that are. That can be looked at as sort of controversial, um, you know, or, you know, or political, you know, small P political or even big P political, some people might think. And. And how do you bring that in and weave that into a story without making it like I'm going to hit you over the head with this idea and concept?
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Alana K. Arnold
Well, I mean, again, like, I don't think about my reader very much, if at all. I follow the ideas that are interesting to me. I've had people tell me that I'm brave, which I think is so funny, because bravery seems to be like, you know what you're doing and you choose to do it in spite of or whatever. I just. I'm selfish. I'm so interested in writing the thing I want to write, and once I get my hooks in it, there's no way I can let it go. I don't. It doesn't matter to me, you know, like, what? I'm lucky that I have a career at this point and an editor that supports me in following my interest, where they go. But I've always done it. I think it's probably why my books are so scattered, especially in the young adult world. You know, I have. I wrote, you know, my first three books. My first two books were about Jewish mysticism. They're out of print. I have two books that I call my Embodied Female Shame books in Fandis and what Girls Are Made Of. And then I have my rage books, which are Damsel and Red Hood. And then I have my like, people are complicated. Let's dig in. Books, which I think are the Blood Years and Holloway. And so I just. I mean, it was. Everything is political. I'm not the only person to say that at all. There's no way to separate people's decisions from the politics behind them. And there's a cyclicality, too, in the sort of science refusal and the. The bad faith arguments, you know, even. I mean, I don't talk about, you know, eugenics per se, but, you know, the desire to kill, you know, all the Ashkenazi Jews in Europe because of bad science, you know, and bad beliefs and. And using science as a wedge issue. That's when it's not real, you know, like, that's not a opinion, you know, that's what happened, you know. And so I think it's interesting when people talk about believing in science, like, no, it's accepting, you know, science or choosing. Choosing not to believe in something that's true. So to me, it doesn't feel political. I have very. I think I have sometimes very black and white thinking. I'm very. I just. I'm. I just block. Boggles my mind that people don't think the way that I do, which I sounds. I know how that sounds, you know, but it's. It's part of my autistic brain. I've realized, you know, like, it seems so clear to me that this. These things are connected, that I doesn't feel political. It feels just sort of interesting and obvious to me. Yeah.
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Rebecca Buchanan
So you talk about Nora as being this character that was so easy to write. Which characters were like. Was there a character that was really hard for you to write with this one?
- [26:24]
Alana K. Arnold
I mean, Penela is Ramany, and I'm not. And so I had written another book many years ago with Romani characters, so I had done a lot of research, and I did a lot more
- [26:37]
Rebecca Buchanan
to
- [26:37]
Alana K. Arnold
make her as accurate as I could. None of the characters were especially hard for me, though. They all felt like they fit together in a puzzle, I guess. Making sure that Beryl and Penell as characters had enough depth and that they weren't sort of just a mirror, sort of. For Nora to bounce her own identity off of was a challenge, and my editor, Jordan Brown, helped me with that. You know, the hardest character, actually, of course, and I'm thinking about it, of course, was her mother, Gillian. Many drafts of this book, there was no understanding of Gillian or why she did what she did, really. Her backstory didn't come out until draft, like, 11, like, right before the book was Going into copy edits, finally, like it was. It was very hard for me. I wanted to have Grace for her. I wanted. Because I did a bunch of research about how people get like, black pilled or whatever. And I did a lot of research into what happened during the 80s, after Reagan made it so that news didn't have to be objective, and how the rise of talk radio and the radicalization of a lot of people with Rush Limbaugh happened and the cyclicality of that sort of radicalization and people being separated from their family members because of it. And so I felt empathy for the people I was reading about in those books. I was having a very time accessing empathy for Nora's mother. Because I don't have a mother that is good or a caretaker or, you know, healthy. I don't have a mother at all, actually. She died about three weeks ago, but I mourned her about 20 years ago and many, many times between then and now. So, honestly, writing a book, this is kind of funny. Writing a book in which the mother is sort of seen as a whole person. I think I resisted it on the off chance that my mother might read it while she was alive and see it as redemption or me offering an olive branch again. Writing and humaning is the same thing, which is such a weird thing to say and such a weird thing to think about. But she died, so now I don't have to worry about her reading it and coming to incorrect conclusions about things. I do have empathy for her, especially now that she's dead. It's much easier to have empathy for people when you know they can't hurt you anymore. Which is, I think, is also why Nora, it takes her until she is where she is to be able to process and fully feel what happened to her. She had to be in a place where she had some distance and had some safety to reflect on herself and her relationships in an honest way.
- [29:27]
Rebecca Buchanan
So, I mean, for you, like, you just mentioned, like, you know, 11 drafts in or so because, like, you kind of said this idea of. And I love it that you know, if you wrote it now, it could be a very different story, right? You read a different story. So do you get to a point where for you, that you're just like, okay, we have to be done? Because you keep finding those different things, like, can you talk a little bit about that and drafting. I mean, I really love thinking about craft and process. So that drafting process for you with the. With that idea and thinking about those things.
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Alana K. Arnold
Oh, my gosh, the ending of this book the ending moment has always been the same, but how the character got there in the third. I guess you call it like the third act. I don't know how many acts are on my book. I don't really think about it that way. But, you know. You know, what happened in, you know, the last quarter or so of the book, that didn't exist for many drafts. And I think if you read the book now, it feels like it's one piece. And it feels like, of course, that's where the book. To me, it feels that way. Like, of course that's where the book had to go. It was always going there. It's, I think, surprising and inevitable. It makes me very proud. It was not. It was definitely surprising, but it was not. And maybe it was inevitable, but I certainly didn't get there on the first many drafts. I went through many iterations of what the ending looked like and how the characters interacted. And again, it was really through the partnership with my editor, Jordan, that this book found its path. But it was very stressful, I think. I think I kind of. I don't think I had a mental breakdown, but I was a wreck. You know, I mean, we were up against a deadline. It was supposed to go into copy edits. I was rewriting chunks of the book again, like, massive new scenes, like all this stuff with Feather, you know, it's a character in the book, brand new in, like, draft 10, you know, that didn't exist at all. Any of it. And so it was very stressful. And yeah, honestly, the morning that it was supposed to go into copy edits, I was writing the chicken and the egg scene, and my editor called me. He's like, so has already been pushed back. Pushed back, processing, Think almost. My kids give me one more hour, and we sent it into copy edits. And I hadn't read it all the way through in one piece, which is never done before. Luckily, there was a long time between copy edits and, you know, first pass pages, so I had time to. Because I went back and I found a bunch of, like, inconsistencies, and so did my copy editor, and so did Jordan, and we were able to solve those, I hope. But it was very chaotic feeling and stressful. And, yeah, you.
- [32:05]
Rebecca Buchanan
Can you talk a little bit about why you chose the Holloway as the portal? Right. Like, there's so many portals. And, yeah, that choice. And. And that is a portal.
- [32:15]
Alana K. Arnold
Yeah, I think that was kind of the click moment. So I have, like, three things. Like, I'm thinking about the Holocaust. I'm Thinking about Outlander. I'm thinking about autistic brains. And then I was on some dumb. Some dumb email I get where it's like weird things or something and upcoming. This picture of this hallway, you know, and I was like, oh my God, it looks like a portal. And that was like the, like the click. The thing that like tied those other things together. And so I knew that the portal, the hallway would be the portal. Yeah. It just seemed like it looks like a portal. You know, it's an ancient path that people have walked down again and again and again and again causing this, you know, passage in the earth. It's ancient and at the same time it still exists and it still can be used, which just felt. It tickled my brain in a very pleasing way. Yeah.
- [33:04]
Rebecca Buchanan
And how about Nora? I'm jumping all over. But like Nora's relationship with her grandmother, right. Like, Nora also had, like, there's, you know, big Nora, little Nora, and she has a really a relationship with her grandmother. And her grandmother looks at her and who she is in a very different way than her mother does. So can you talk about the grandmother in kind of contrasting her maybe, I don't know, with. With her mother?
- [33:30]
Alana K. Arnold
If you took out the word Nora from that sentence and you replaced it with Alana, you would have spoken a truth. My grandmother saw me very differently than my parents did, especially my mother. She was my benefactress in every way. She was delighted by all of her grandchildren. She was so interested in us. She was completely non judgmental, just delighted that we existed and that she got to be part of our lives. Um, which is how I feel about my children. Um, and so in their first many drafts, Nora's grandmother was a much bigger character in the memories than Jillian and a lot. It's funny that we're, you know, half an hour into this discussion, we're just now mentioning Big Nora because if we were talking about one of the book's earlier iterations, we would have been talking about her first thing. So that was a real challenge too. Speaking of challenges is dialing back a character that I loved so much in service of what the story wanted to be and allowing a lot of. Of what happened between her and her grandmother, shifting those scenes so they happen between her and her mother and. And the implications of what happens when those she scenes go from having Big Nora to having Jillian in the. In that space is really interesting revision work because it changes everything, you know, and the scene was still good, but the angle was completely different then. So it's a Completely different draft. But yeah, I love my Nana. She is my person. And Big Nora, that was an easy relationship to draw because it's so connected to the way I feel about. About my Nenna.
- [35:01]
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- [35:51]
Rebecca Buchanan
So, I mean, you talk about why 19, like, 46, why you put it during this time, but during your drafts or thinking about this, did you ever think, maybe I'll send her to a different time? I mean, you mentioned it not, you know, France came later, you know, but did you ever think, like, do we go to a different time? Or was it like, this time makes so much. There's so many parallels here. It relates that this is the time we are.
- [36:14]
Alana K. Arnold
Absolutely. I wanted to go to this time. And also I just finished, like I said, all this research about that time, and I, you know, I don't like anything to go to waste. I had all this. I was like, my head was still in the 40s, so that was a good time to write. I don't have a very good memory. I have to hold onto it while I have it. And then it kind of goes away and my brain gets filled up with new things. And so I. I knew if I was going to write about that period again, it should be right away, when I still had all that fresh in my mind. Yeah, 46 made sense to me. What's funny to me is that when I started writing it in 2021, the world looked very different than it did when I finished writing it in 2025. When Nora is writing this book, it's a post, you know, post Covid, post Trump world. Nora in 2021 has no idea that even as she talks about cyclicality, there's another cycle in the future, you know, so that was super interesting to be like, oh, Nora, you sweet summer child. You've come through all this and you have no idea, like, what's waiting for, you know, you on the other side. Which I think is super interesting, you know, but no, the time was one thing that stayed the same. 2021 and 1946.
- [37:26]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, no, I was thinking too. You know, I always think it's interesting because there are more and more books, of course, that are coming out with this. Thinking through Covid or thinking about COVID Right. And it's this, like. I don't know if sweet spot is the right way to say it right now, but like she's at this sweet spot where it is, like, what would happen if it was 2026. Right. Like. And, yeah. And dealing with. With what is going on right now.
- [37:55]
Alana K. Arnold
Yeah, yeah. It would be a very different story because I needed her practically to be. I wanted it to be an adult novel. I wanted her to be 18. I wanted her to be old enough to travel by herself, but still young enough that all of this is fresh. And so it had to be. And I wanted her to live through online school and, you know, the stay at home orders and her mother's obsession with breath work and that sort of, you know, I don't know. I'm not going to call that pseudoscience, because it's not. But the, the things that people replaced with science, you know, replaced for science. I had a lot, I knew a lot of people sort of tangentially, tangentially, who sort of went around the corner from vaccine denialism as like a far right thing to vaccine denialism as a far left thing. Sort of crunchy granola moms who were refusing vaccinations for different reasons, but at the same, in the same way. It was so interesting to me how, you know, you take any extreme and you go far enough and you find a meeting point. So, yeah, I knew that those were the times and it was very interesting. So I had. It had to be 2021. It couldn't have been 2025, or she would have gone through school too many years, you know, schooling at home too many years ago. Also, I started in 2021, so I had no idea it was going to take me as long as it did to write it.
- [39:09]
Rebecca Buchanan
How about, you know, the other thing I really appreciated was the complexity of thinking about people living in an asylum. Right. When we often think about asylum and we at least Americanize this idea, I think one threw over the cuckoo's nest. There's all these different things that craft or create this. So can you talk a little bit about this asylum? Because that's what it was called. But how it became really a home and a space for sort of radicals that sort of Pushed against some of what was going on during this time.
- [39:45]
Alana K. Arnold
Yeah, I mean, this place, St. Alban Sirlum Neel, was an asylum. I don't know if you know this, but during the World War II, over 40,000 French inmates, you know, at asylums were starved to death. The government just didn't feed them. Everyone sort of decided to let them die, which was like a different kind of, you know, holocaust of mentally ill people. And St. Albans, for Livingel, I believe, was the only asylum where no one died of starvation. And it was because of Francois Tuscal, who was a psychiatrist from the Basque region and a communist who was brought during the war to come help another psychologist or psychiatrist run this place. And he turned it into a refuge. You know, he made it so that the patients and the. The doctors and the nurses and everybody were equal. Everybody had a vote. There weren't locks. If someone wandered off, they went and found them. If, you know, they went into the town and. And worked on farms, farm people, you know, town people came to the asylum. They sold, you know, art from some of the asylum inmates that the inmates, you know, for their own, you know, good. So they got to, you know, benefit from the sale of their things. He said, you know, it's not the world that is sick. It's not people that is sick. It's the world. In order to heal, to heal people, we must first heal the world. And I just. It feels so, like, fresh and modern. And he was one of the first people to sort of use. To believe in sort of art as therapy, sort of in living as therapy, you know, that in order to be a full person, you have to have a community and you have to have meaningful work and support. And so I just found that, you know, the word asylum means two things, you know, which I think is pretty great, too. And this place was an asylum in both meanings of the word people. You know, they hid, you know, Jewish dissidents there during the war and. And gay people and, you know, communists. And they also had, you know, the mentally ill living there together. And these they lived in. You know, I'm sure it was not as perfect as one might think from now, you know, but from the research I did, it's a pretty special place. And I did all the research I possibly could, including, you know, going there. So that was mostly just for my own pleasure. So anyway, yeah, I just found that to be very, very interesting and rewarding to get to use that real place and hopefully help people to get to know and, like you said, want to do more and relearn more about this really special. This really special place.
- [42:31]
Rebecca Buchanan
No. Yeah. I thought it was super fascinating. I guess maybe also reading it from a 2026 brain and thinking about asylum in the ways that. Right. In this. In this term, that we should be like. I guess I should say, I believe we should be thinking about what does it mean to be a space for asylum seekers and to create home and to create a family and a community for people. And that seems like that's what Nora found there. Right. And that's what this was doing. It was really thinking about what it means to be a place, an asylum for those who need it.
- [43:09]
Alana K. Arnold
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And everybody needs it, you know, in one way or another. But people who are on the fringes don't find it in the typical places, you know, they don't find it in a sports team or a fraternity or a popular crowd. They find it in a sort of a mishmash of interesting characters. I certainly have. The community that I've been able to build in my adult years is because of the work that I do. You know, all of my best friends now, which is thrilling to have them, because I never had best friends, except for one in high school who I adored. They're all interesting people. They're all writers and artists and curious in the same ways I am. And I found them through my work, you know, which is pretty great.
- [44:01]
Rebecca Buchanan
So I'm gonna. My final question, because we could probably talk all day, is the book came out. The book came out today. It's out now. So self promotion. What do you want people to know that's going on with the book? Anything else you're working on, things you want people to know?
- [44:17]
Alana K. Arnold
Yeah. So, I mean, I'm just thrilled that Holloway is in the world. I hope people will read it. As far as promotion, I. I mean, by the time this podcast comes out, my launch party will have already happened. It's going to be tomorrow night. I'm very excited to be speaking with Nina LaCour, who's a good friend of mine. She's going to come out today, actually, and we're going to have this launch party tomorrow. I have a great dress. As far as other things that I'm working on, I'm very excited to have been able to continue the Bat series. My younger books about Bixby, Alexander Tam and his skunk friend. Book six is coming out next year, which has just been a really wonderful thing for me to get to continue that series. And I've gotten to visit lots of schools and talk to lots of kids, both autistic and neurotypical and lots of families. It's been the most meaningful work of my life, actually has been able to go. And over and over again I meet parents who say, you know, my kid brought this book home and told me that he's just like bat. And we ended up talking about disclosing that he's autistic, even though, you know, we hadn't disclosed that prior. Or kids in the audience, when I say that, you know, like that I'm also an autistic person. Kids who are sitting in the corner and looking down and, you know, maybe flapping their hands, they look up suddenly and they go, I'm autistic. And it's just such special rewarding connections that I, like I said, I never think about my reader. I never thought about any of that happening. But wow, what a gift it is to get to. To do that now. I don't really know what's next for me in the young adult space. I have an adult book right now that's out on submission, so if you know any, any adult editors who might be interested, please send them my way. We have gotten a number of very kind and thoughtful, whole near, you know, passes, but near hits. But it's rough out there in the publishing world. That's something else I can tell you is that that is cyclical too. Like there when it comes to making art, it is not a clear, straight path from, you know, nothing to something. And it's humbling when. When things cycle back. And the good thing is that, you know, we've survived it before. And right now publishing is kind of rough. You know, only young adult publishing world is kind of rough. And there's a lot of pushback from extremists to limit access in public institutions to works like mine and that of many other creators. Right now, I'm part of a lawsuit with the ACLU to sue Utah for its statewide banning of many books, including three of mine.
- [46:50]
Rebecca Buchanan
Oh, yeah. Yes. I have to talk to students about like they actually have put on the book. Right. It's not just like the library. It's like the state has put this in and written like these, just like. Yeah, yeah.
- [47:03]
Alana K. Arnold
Not only are they not allowed to have the books, but they must be destroyed, it says, and any student who's caught with one of my. Those three books on campus can be punished. It doesn't say what the punishment is, but like, what kind of language is this? You know, like it's mind blown. But, you know, that affects the the whole marketplace of access too. So it's. It's a strange, you know, time in the publishing world. I feel incredibly glad for the support I've had from my publisher. I'm glad I have, you know, people who want to read my books. I hope people want to read Halloway. But the good thing about going through it before is that I've done it now, so I know I can do it again. You know, that's why I always say people should finish a book. It's proof of concept, you know, if you want to write a book, you have to get to the end so that next time you can say, well, I did it before. I don't know how I'm going to make it to the end, but I've done it before, so I know I can do it again. That proof of concept. Concept has been so. Proof of concept. Concept has been so important to me as a writer. Like this book. If I tried to write this book a few years ago, I would have, I'm sure, given up many times, but I was like, well, I got through blood years. And that one was so hard in ways I couldn't have anticipated. And I'm so grateful that I did it so I know I can do it again. So proof of concept. Yeah. We all just need to keep trying things that make us excited because why else, you know, like if times are rough, especially, you gotta do the things that bring you joy.
- [48:32]
Rebecca Buchanan
I love that. Yeah. So thank you again for talking with me on New Books Network again. Elena K. Arnold on her latest, High Holloway. Thank you.
- [48:41]
Alana K. Arnold
Thank you so much.