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Maria Ingrande Mora
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- [02:07]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:12]
Rebecca Buchanan
Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host at New Books Network and today I'm here with Maria Ingrande Mora to talk about their new book, A Wild Radiance. Maria, thanks for being here with me today.
- [02:22]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:24]
Rebecca Buchanan
Could you start by giving a bit of a synopsis about your book and what it's about?
- [02:29]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Yeah, I would Love to do that. I will say I've been trying to do that in like a scripted way for the past four months, since it came out in January. And my brain just doesn't work that way. So I feel like I pitch it differently every single time. But A Wild Radiance is a queer young adult fantasy. It's about a girl named Josephine who at the beginning of the story, is graduating from essentially a magic school where she has been indoctrinated to believe that her electricity, like magic, is part of the March of Progress. And it takes place in an alternate Industrial Revolution era. So she believes she's really part of that Industrial Revolution. But she hasn't been the greatest student and she's had a hard time controlling her emotions. So she gets sort of the worst assignment upon graduation. She's sent the farthest from civilization. And it's only then, in that sort of different atmosphere outside of where she's grown up, that she is able to start to question how she was raised and start to rethink the things she knows. So it's really a journey of self discovery and learning that her magic may not be all that she believed it to be. And I sometimes pitch it as she has to save the world from herself.
- [03:47]
Rebecca Buchanan
So can you talk a little bit about how this idea came to you? Like how this kind of book came to be for you? Yeah.
- [03:54]
Maria Ingrande Mora
So this is my third young adult book and I had really been wanting to dig a little bit more into romance. So that was an element of it. My first book, Fragile Remedy, does have a romance element, but it is kind of a, maybe a deprioritized part of the plot. And I was traveling in the summertime with my kids and my mom in Rocky Mountain national park. And I'm from Florida. So big change of atmosphere for me. I really started thinking about our public lands and how they're preserved because there were choices made in the past to preserve those national parks. And that just got me thinking about the contrast of that being your kind of home environment versus growing up in an urban landscape. And there's an Elton John song called Burn down the Mission. That's a song I've always liked. And it was playing on the radio. And oftentimes that is the inception of a book for me. So all those things kind of came together and I actually bought a notebook in Denver before I went to the airport and started kind of jotting down the initial thoughts about this book at that time.
- [05:07]
Rebecca Buchanan
So can we talk a little bit about the world that you did create? In. And can you expand a little bit on this world and what it's like? Like, I thought it was really fascinating because it could be a world that existed. Like, you say it's sort of this alternate universe. Right. It could have existed well before our time now, or it could be something that exists after our time because we've, you know. Yeah. Done all the things we were supposed to do.
- [05:32]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Yeah. I did really want to ground it in a very lightweight late 1800s. And so I knew I was dealing with this sort of gas lamp fantasy aesthetics, but I didn't want it to be so rooted in that. That A, that I had to do a ton of research, but B, that there were, like, limitations to trying to remain historically accurate. Because this is a second world fantasy. It doesn't need to be grounded in, like, the full accuracy. But I wanted to capture that time in our lives that is very similar to what we're experiencing now, where breakthroughs in technology are changing the. We live the way we think about progress and also are having, like, tremendous impact on the environment at the time. Choices were made during the Industrial Revolution that eventually led to protecting workers, that eventually led to protecting the environment. But the kind of bleeding edge of it was just a rat race, and nobody was really being considerate about people's lives, about our planet. And so I really wanted to play in that space. I love the aesthetics of the clothing, love trains. I love old Manhattan and Chicago. So those were all sort of pieces of the world. As an author, I tend to cobble together a lot of different things. It's like I'm making a Pinterest board in my head, and I'm grabbing aesthetics from different films and different eras of history and different things that I know and different things that I'm researching. And that all came together to me in a lot of sensory ways, like the contrast of what is essentially like a pastiche of, like, London, Chicago and New York in the late 1800s versus the foothills of the Rockies, which in some places have not changed at all since then. And kind of capturing the wonder of moving from one environment to the other. The magic system itself. I knew I wanted to play with commoditization of magic, which is actually a theme in Fragile Remedy as well and probably will always be a theme for me, because I believe that if magic existed in our current world, we would exploit it, and folks who have the capability to use it would be exploited as well. And I think that we see parallels to that with AI and other technologies that are exploited to serve the ruling Class and not necessarily for everyone. So the electricity component felt very natural to me because that was a time which actual electricity was rising in our world. And you know, it felt like a nice parallel.
- [08:13]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. And I thought as you talking, one thing that I found really interesting too was that not only, I mean, magic's exploited and there's also a way to sell the magic you want to work like, or that you want to use as not being magic. Right. And then the magic that really scares people or the magic that people are afraid of is magic. Right. So can you. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that? That's fascinating.
- [08:39]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Yeah. Thank you for reminding me. I love, I love chatting with someone who has fresh eyes on this work because I'm like, oh yeah, I forgot about that. There's sort of this narrative and I'm really, I'm obsessed with authoritarian narratives and how they are used to control people either in the media or entertainment, folklore even. And so there's kind of these two parallel paths of magic in this world. One, the electricity type magic called Radiance. And then there's sort of this almost eradicated form of magic. And those folks are called animators. And they are able to control more like organic matter plants specifically. And they were deemed witches and they were destroyed or cast out. And to me, the story behind that or the theme behind that is that we, authority is afraid of wildness and of things that are hard to predict and control. And life itself is hard to predict and control. And so if you have that organic type of magic, it's harder to commoditize, it's harder to control. It's creative by nature. I would even say I would leap all the way to. It's queer by nature. And so, you know, those animators have been kind of thrown out of the picture and people like Josephine, our main character, have been led to believe that they're dangerous and it's good that they're gone. Rather than seeing the parallel between her magic and that magic, she's been led to believe she doesn't have magic. She has a birthright and she's extra super special and she's not like those witches.
- [10:23]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yes. And so can we talk a little bit about Josephine and who she is and like her. And I would love, I want to get to their. The relationship between your sort of three characters and the queerness in there because it's so fascinating and I think something that needs to be more in ya lit. Right. Like all these things. So. Or maybe an all lit. Right, right. Maybe I should say that, but, like, yeah, but let's talk about the characters a little bit and then let's talk about their queerness and their relationship and all of that.
- [10:55]
Maria Ingrande Mora
I always joke that Josephine at the beginning of the story really sucks. And I say that affectionately. She's my gremlin daughter. But we've. We've all either been or known that person who is so deep in a system that has indoctrinated them that their whole personality at that point becomes evangelizing for whatever that system is. So she's really shrank the Kool Aid about the house of industry and her radiance, being on this, like, bleeding edge of technology and very important and going to change the world for good. She has not been raised to use critical thinking. And I think that it's. That's something that we're seeing right now. It's issues with critical thinking and media literacy. So Josephine is media illiterate. She has not developed hobbies, she hasn't read books. She's just kind of been narrowly indoctrinated into this one way of thinking, despite the fact that, that, you know, she's ADHD cued. I have adhd. That really played into her personality. And it's the impulsive side of that. Less the inattentiveness, but more the impulsivity. And she has trouble regulating her emotions. And she's been told that human contact is forbidden, don't make good friends, certainly don't have romances. And the reason why is authoritarian regimes tell people that or try to do that is because we are stronger in community. And Josephine is someone who's been told that community is unattainable, toxic, going to make her worse. And so that's where we meet her at the beginning of the story. She's doomed to fail because her innate person that has been driven down inside of her is seeking community, is very emotional, has a lot of repressed rage and desire. And that's where we meet her at the beginning of what has to be kind of a long journey. And it was very important to me that by meeting people she can question herself, but they are not prescribing her a new way of thinking. Because that would be just as bad if the story was Josephine met some people and they gave her a new framework of thinking. Then all she's done is just applied a new framework. Instead, she has to do the harder and more painful work of kind of breaking down her own way of thinking, letting challenges create cracks in that and then see what grows out of those cracks. And So a lot of her journey is about playing against the characters of Ezra, this mysterious boy that she meets in Frostbrook, and her new boss, Julianne, who's only a couple years older than her, who is the senior conductor at this mission that she's sent to both of them. Their type of radiance, they function as conductors. And in this world, there's also transistors. They use their electricity for violent purposes, essentially as weapons. And then there's this more mysterious third thing. And these are these generators. They're the folks that function essentially as human batteries.
- [14:08]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. So you'll. In this world, you have these characters who don't really think about. I think often it's adults who get in the way of young people. Right. When we're thinking about gender identity work. Right. And so you really show that it's like gender is this. It's a fluid thing. Right. Sexuality is fluid. And we're in that. Young people given the chance to just kind of figure it out on their own, figure out relationships, and they figure out those relationships in different ways. So can you talk about that? Like writing that and really thinking about thoughtfully, about making sure that they had what some people would say, a very unconventional relationship, but for them. You know what I mean? But. But it's not. But because it's adults defining what conventional will be.
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Maria Ingrande Mora
Yeah, no, absolutely. One of the reasons it was really fun to play in this time, this fantasy time period, and I will probably always lean into fantasy worlds, with the exception of the immeasurable depth of you, which was a kind of more contemporary ghost story, is that I love seeing people fall into those kind of labels without having the language, because I'm actually very pro. Labels and micro identities and things. I think that our youth are so creative and so cool. And when I do school visits, like, something that I say often is like, who you are tomorrow and who you are today could be totally different. And you're so very much allowed to constantly change your mind, which is a big theme at the heart of A Wild Radiance. But they don't have autistic adhd, bisexual, poly queer, lesbian. None of those words are existing in this world. But those identities certainly exist. And so for Josephine, she's had this, like, frenemy ship with this girl Gertrude at her school, and they have kissed in the past, but they're not like even a situationship to them. They're just like, that's the thing. We did whatever. We hate each other. And I think that's a reality with teenagers is like their Feelings are really big and getting expressed rapidly in a lot of different ways. And they may not be ready to put a label on that or to settle into an identity, but they are figuring things out in real time. And that was important to me if, you know, for me to label these characters. Josephine is certainly bisexual, Ezra is bisexual, and Julian is gay, like gay gay, which was something I had to work with my editors on. To your point, they have an unconventional relationship. They do enter into sort of this poly triad, but it's an unconventional poly triad because you have Ezra and Julian as sort of ex boyfriend situationships. You have that bi for by side of the triangle with Josephine and Ezra. But what I wanted. The story I wanted to tell is that Josephine and Julian's queer platonic relationship is just as important as the romance. And their love for one another in the story and in the world is just as important as romance or a sexual relationship that's hard to define now with words. So let alone these kids kind of like stumble their way into it. And it was very fun as an author to get to play with their dialogue in terms of trying to define what was going on there. Because Julian kind of has to haltingly say, I care about you, but, you know, not the way maybe that you think a boy and a girl should care about each other. And that ability to express yourself, such an act of vulnerability. And I wanted to model that for young readers. Like, the best thing you can do is just try to articulate, you know, your beliefs or your relationships. And it's just there's no right or wrong answers. Like, no one's going to grade you on that. And so it was really meaningful to me to let them be very groundbreaking in their relationship, while also that running in parallel to the fact that they are breaking down systems of authority on a greater widespread societal level. I think resistance is often led by queer people explicitly and implicitly. And I wanted that to be a theme as well. That creative, revolutionary love is very much part of protest. It's part of community. So all of that kind of blended together. But I didn't want to make it so heavy that it wasn't just, like, fun when they were kissing. You know, like, I wanted to also bring in the romance tropes that I loved as a young person. Like, oh, they're stuck in the same carriage together and everybody's pissed off and their knees are brushing together, and it's like, I want to die, but I'm also feeling feelings. So it was important to me that this didn't Feel like a preachy slog. Either that it was, like, fun while also holding space for all these other things. This summer, serve up the cookout classics craft mayo and dressing. Toss green salads with delicious ranch dressing or zesty Italian. Serve smooth, craveably creamy potato salads with mayo. We all know it's not a cookout without Kraft.
- [19:20]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. And I do, like, love and really appreciate that. Relationship does not have to be defined by who you do or do not have sex with. Right. Like, you can be in a really intimate relationship with someone who you are not physically involved in in those ways. Right. And that's important to know and that's important to, like, talk about like that. Like that. If a physical attraction can be a relationship, but an emotional connection and attraction is a relationship, too. And that's okay.
- [19:49]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Yeah, no, totally. And in my interactions with teen readers, the number one thing they respond to is the queer, platonic relationship between Julian and Josephine, like, by far. And I've had teens come up to me at school events and. And at kind of conferences and conventions that are geared towards young readers and say, I've never seen a relationship like this on the page before, but this is how I function in the world. This is how I care about my friends and my friends. I love my friends. And we never get to see this representation. And so that was really validating to me as a person who has very important, weird, platonic relationships. I, like, on paper, I'm single. I've been single for over a decade. I'm a single parent. And I feel like that's such a limiting label because I have rich, incredibly fulfilling relationships in my life that are not sexual relationships. And they're not girlfriend, girlfriend, relationship, boyfriend, girlfriend relationships. Like, that feels now so reductive to me. And I do think that it's young people that we're learning from right now as not young people, because they're just like, screw it. You know, we're. We're. We're doing our own thing, actually, and we're going to redefine that. I also see that in queer family building, which is something very important to me. It's kind of a side quest. It's not obviously not part of this book, but is very important to me. And I think that queer people who are building families in lots of different ways are modeling that, like, we can raise kids and have families that are not shaped like the American nuclear family. And it's just as important and, you know, in many ways, maybe is just coming up with new ways to enrich Children's lives. You know, my kids have divorced parents and they have a stepmom. And like, the way I frame that is there's extra people who love them. And I think that that's also, you know, just part of this is what if that gentle reframing is like expansive love. It's just expansive everything.
- [22:02]
Rebecca Buchanan
And I feel like in your story, they needed that, right? They needed each other to be able to do what they. Like you've been talking about, they needed each other to be able to do what they wanted to do, what they set out to do. And without the three of them together, it wouldn't have worked. Right?
- [22:18]
Maria Ingrande Mora
When it worked. Yeah. And that's what I mean by community. Community can be three people. Community can be a hundred people, it can be six people, whatever that is. But we find so much courage in community, even if it's two people. And all three of them needed something that was coming from the group. And support sounds so trite, but that often is just what it is. A little bit of a scaffolding, you know, someone holding your hand when you're taking a leap and they take a big leap together. And, you know, without getting into spoilers, there's elements of that that I. That I bring into a more literal framework where they literally can't be alive unless the three of them are connecting in a certain way. And that is because I hold community and queer community so highly that I'm happy to dig into the metaphor. It's literally life sustaining, actually. And I think that, you know, we have these, these Covid kids that went through a really important part of their life and development in isolation. And for me, as an adult, telling stories for them, you know, it was really important to me to show that community and friendship being together in different ways is very life sustaining and can help you grow. And Josephine's case, give her the safety she needed to like, unravel a lifetime of manipulation and indoctrination. And like, I think that we see that with exvangelicals who entered a new community and had the opportunity to reframe the way they think. I went from 22 people in my graduating class to like 40,000 people in the freshman class at the University of Florida. And, you know, that's a journey. Suddenly you're exposed to a lot of other belief systems, a lot of different identities that you never had the chance to be exposed to. And that's such a beautiful part of adolescence.
- [24:17]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, 100% agree. Can we talk a little bit about your writing process? And like so did you. Did you. Do you start or even. I mean, I don't know if you. This was different. But do you start with, like, this is the character? Do you start with this is the world? Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about, like, sort of how you start? Yeah.
- [24:38]
Maria Ingrande Mora
I am not a very good outliner. I'm currently trying to write a project off an outline. But for a Wild Radiance, the outline was like three sentences in a notebook. And so I would characterize myself as a pantser. That means you fly by the seat of your pants on that first draft. It's not advisable, but I still run into a significant number of professional authors who do that. The flip side of that is we work a lot harder in revisions because we did not necessarily take a strategic approach towards the structure of the story. But I am a very. Character and world in tandem. Before plot, the plot is very Vibes. I kind of have a sense intuitively of the plot being part of character growth. But I very much have to fall in love with the people. They have to be sort of nurtured into full existence in my head. They have to become people who, when I'm at the grocery store, they're, like, commenting on things in my head before I can start writing. And that's probably sounds spooky and wild, but that's just how my brain works. And it has since I was a little kid. And then the world is very important to me, the setting. And that's why, for all my books, they're very rooted in a setting that I have a lot of sensory familiarity with, that I feel like set in his character in many ways. For Wild Radiance, there were dual settings, like the Sterling city being that kind of urban, gritty. And then our sort of, you know, fake outside of Denver, Colorado, foothills of the Rockies, very rural setting. And all of that kind of came together simultaneously. And then I started jotting things down like witches. They're gone. Julian's a jerk. Like, there are insane notes in this notebook that you'd be like, how did a book come out of that? But I do write in order. So chapter one on out, all the way through on a first draft. Getting in the weeds on process. I try to write five out of seven days a week when I'm drafting, I try to hit a 500 word count that's actually really low. I write really fast. So I would love for that 500 to be a thousand on a good day or more and just blast that draft out with minimal editing. And then I do a pretty tight revision pass where I'm just fixing the language and the sentence structure. And then the harder work starts of like, wow, the third act doesn't make any sense. Or like, wow, I didn't, like, really give this character enough agency. My hardest hurdle as an author is that I let things happen to a main character. On the first draft, it's just a series of things happening to someone. And then on my revision passes, I have to weave in so much more agency. And that's my. I know that's like my biggest weakness. That is very fixable, but it is just what happens. And A Wild Radiance is an outlier for me in that it had the biggest massive change between first draft and publication. The last about 30,000 words of the book were rewritten in May of 2025. May of 2025. And so that was literally deleting the final, let's say almost third of the book and rewriting in wholesale. It didn't change character arcs, but the setting and some major events changed significantly. So that was a new adventure for me as a writer to grapple with, you know, even just the lift of that, which was very, very hard. I'm so happy with how it turned out. And now I can't imagine, I'm like, wow, that other ending was really bad. So I'm happy I got the opportunity to do that hard thing that's.
- [28:41]
Rebecca Buchanan
I was gonna ask if there's any major, like, changes that you made. So now you'll have to tell me when we're not recording because it'll be a spoiler. But, like, so for you then, did you. When did you know for yourself that, like, okay, this is gonna be the plot. This is gonna be sort of my goal for this. Like, is there, you know, like, with this especially, like, were you just kind of like, oh, okay, here it is. It's come. I figured it out.
- [29:08]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Yeah. Well, I knew that. I understood all along that the bad guy was not, like, a person. And as much as I love a sexy villain and like, I love. I love really three dimensional villains, I have a hard time writing villains because I'm always like, they did nothing wrong. So for me, oftentimes I work better with a villain. That is the system that is, like, in this case, authoritarianism, capitalism. You know, it's like the amalgamation of all the kind of shitty tech bros that are having, like, a disproportionate influence on our world right now. So I knew it was like, queer youth take down the establishment, like, at the Heart of it. That's what had to happen. And so I did understand that. I knew that Julian was actually gonna die in the original draft. He was sort of there to function more as a person, to change Josephine in many ways. And I fell in love with him, and he got to stay and became, like, really critical to the story. I can't imagine killing him off now because he's so integral to her growth, and I also just adore him. But, yeah, pretty early on, I knew that they were gonna go on a magical road trip. I knew they had to kind of take down the bad guys, but I didn't know a lot of the details about that until I write, and I write very much as an actor doing improv on stage, I don't really know what's gonna happen until it's happening. I'm very embodied as a writer. If Josephine's crying, I'm crying. In fact, Josephine is crying because I already started crying, and I'm like, I guess we're crying now. One of my biggest notes on a first pass from editors is like, boy, they're crying a lot. Can we not have this person cry every single chapter genuinely? Just because I'm such an emotional writer? So I did remove about 75% of Josephine's crying from the first draft to where you were on the page. The immeasurable depth of you is just a cry. Bren is just crying for that whole book, and she's unwell, so we'll let her do that. But, yeah, I often wish I had an answer that was like, I carefully plotted these three acts and these beats and, like, how we were gonna do things. And a lot of writers are very successful at that. It's a struggle for me. I'm a very intuitive writer, and there's pros and cons to that. Sometimes I'm like, oh, wow, I did it. There are three acts.
- [31:35]
Rebecca Buchanan
Cool.
- [31:36]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Didn't mean to. And I think that's from being a reader from age five. We do soak up these things, and it's not that craft isn't important, and I want to always be pushing my craft, but I think the foundation of it is being a wide reader and liking all different kinds of media as well. Looking at the way that scripted television versus a novel versus a play, how are we building these stories?
- [32:07]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. So did you said early on that you didn't want to have to do a lot of research? Right. Do you. So did you do any research for this? Like, were there things. Can you talk a little bit about, like, some of that like amount, you know, with students are. Are often like, I'm just gonna write, right? And it's like no matter what you write, there's some kind of research can be fun, but it's involved.
- [32:29]
Maria Ingrande Mora
So yeah, I grew up reading the Clan of the Cave Bear books. I think they're called Children of the Earth. I think. What is that? The Jean M. Al's books. And I remember as a child reading her author's notes in the end and it was like I went to these caves in France and I got a PhD and I was like, oh, I guess I'll never be an author because that sounds like a lot of work. And so for a while I thought every book needed you to go on like a 12 month journey around the world, like looking in cave etchings. Simply not the case. But you certainly do, to your point, have to research. For me, it looks like hitting a wall midway through drafting a sentence and then spending an hour and a half in 16 different Google Chrome tabs, you know, Googling weird phrases and then reading Wikipedia articles or looking at photos. And I do this also with naming characters because I do try to ground all my names in the actual Social Security data that we have on the top. Like 150 names of any year. And that's not. I'm autistic. Like that's. Sometimes I go on an autistic side quest and I'm like, well, can't finish this sentence until I know what the top 90 names were in 1897. Even the immeasurable depth of view, the names of Brennan Schuyler. If the book happened in the year that it happened, they would have been names that kids would have had that year. Like, nobody cares about this but me. But it is something that I do. And for this book I wanted to learn a lot about Nikola Tesla and the sort of war of the currents and how electricity even functions. Things that I did not know. I researched a lot just about transportation in that time period and the Chicago World's Fair especially, which that happened in that sort of last bit because they did not attend the fantasy Chicago World's Fair in the first draft of the book. Thankfully it is my sister's number one special interest. So I have spent many years already kind of being info dumped about the Chicago World's Fair. And I've gone to all the places that the spectacle of progress in the book is very much rooted in those buildings in Chicago that still stand to this day. There's museums and parks and whatnot that were built for the Chicago World's Fair. And I did do that research. I went on an architecture or tour. So that was my Gene M. All moment, was like going on the river tour and literally looking at the buildings. So I think research can be a mix of experiential and literally getting in the weeds. And there's an Easter egg where Nicola's girlfriend is named Columbia, and that is the Latin name for a pigeon. Because Nikola Tesla had like a kind of strange platonic love for a pigeon that was like his sort of pigeon girlfriend. So there's these things that you can build in. But what I tell young writers is that the lived experiences that you have are research. So trying to go into a new environment, even if it's a walk in a part of the town that you've never been in before, like, you don't have to have the income and time to go to Australia and like go, you know, explore somewhere you've never been. But the act of putting yourself in a new environment and letting your brain interpret new sights and smells and sounds, that makes you a better writer. And it will inform your writing subconsciously. You won't realize it, but the way that your brain says, oh, that's a beautiful tree. Never seen that kind of tree before. Maybe your character's gonna see a tree they've never seen before. And you're not gonna intentionally make that connection, but they're gonna think things that you thought 15 years ago, whatever that is. So just kind of being a lover of experiences is part of research. But yeah, my editor was like, love this book. How does electricity work? Because clearly you don't know. And so a huge revision. Pass on adding a lot of details that were. It was a very. I am already a Vibes based magic system writer. Soft magic all day long. I loved Like Blood over Brighthaven. I was like, wow, I feel like I'm a computer programmer now. Like, this is a hard magic system of which I will never write. But I went a little too Vibe spaced. And so, you know, where I landed with was rooted in, you know, that lightweight research. I have so many photographs saved of old Tesla coils and what generators look like and just kind of the aesthetics of workshops and things like that. The carriage, there's such a. It's such a minor thing, but they're in a carriage like twice, two different carriages. And I needed to know the dimensions of them and like how they would feel, how fast they went. And that didn't really end up on the page, but for me, I wanted to know you Know, how loud would the road be on wheels? You know, like, acting.
- [37:27]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yes. How can you fit in there? How tall do you have to be? I mean, you have one character who's much taller. Right? Like, so.
- [37:32]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Yeah, yeah. I think two lanky boys are in here trying to avoid each other. How unsuccessful will they be?
- [37:40]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yes, that works. We're going to use it. It's. You know, you mentioned talking to young people. I have to ask you, like, do you get, like, what kind of feedback? Or have you gotten feedback about Also this idea of, like, is technology really all it's, like, cracked up to be? Like, do they glam onto that too? And think about, like, we need to kind of push against, like, the. The idea of AI, you know, eating every, like, all of that.
- [38:05]
Maria Ingrande Mora
My experience is that the vast majority. This is going to be a generalization, but it's just my experience kind of mid college, but especially high school and middle school kids right now hate AI. They're using it currently as an insult. What used to be like, oh, that's whatever. Now it's like, oh, that's AI. And so we're seeing this kind of pushback. And I think part of it is that adults are trying to frame the whole world around them before they even have a chance to. To become adults who have a say in that world. I think that young people are pretty dialed into current events, and I think that there's a threat of betrayal, that the world they were brought into is rapidly changing in ways that they don't perceive to be that good for them. And I have two teens, actually. One is 20 now, very recently, so I don't know what to call him. I have a teen and a newly young adult.
- [39:04]
Rebecca Buchanan
My teen calls her young adult brother. Just Unk. She's just like, he's unknown. He's 20, so he's unk. So yeah, so you can embrace that.
- [39:12]
Maria Ingrande Mora
I love that. I'm gonna tell him then.
- [39:14]
Rebecca Buchanan
Sorry to interrupt, but I just have to let you out.
- [39:16]
Maria Ingrande Mora
That is so cute. That is the funniest thing ever. I am seeing a lot of fear of, like, the career I thought I wanted since I was a little kid is getting replaced by AI. It's a rug pulled out from under me, and I don't know what to go to college for now. And I'm scared, you know, so when I'm doing panels at, like, events that are field trips, so the room is like, full of kids, you know, I'm. I'm a. I'm scanning always to make sure I'm not boring them to death. And those. You get the nods. You get the little fist in the air. And I'm like, okay, they're vibing with this. And honestly, I wrote the first draft of this in 2019, and then into lockdown. I finished it in COVID lockdown. AI was a very small part of our cultural conversation in 2020. We were really busy with the pandemic. And now I'm, like, shocked and kind of appalled at how the missions in this book are AI data centers.
- [40:18]
Rebecca Buchanan
Fully.
- [40:18]
Maria Ingrande Mora
I didn't know what an AI data center was in 2020, but it is a pretty watertight parable for that, because these missions are coming to these rural areas, and they're, you know, literally causing harm to both the ecosystem and the culture itself. And the economics of it just kind of everything in favor of the ruling class. And that's what we're very much seeing with AI data centers. So I am seeing kids vibing with that. I'm glad that they are. And this book explores both violent and nonviolent forms of protest in a very deliberate way. And that was probably the scariest thing for me to do as an adult speaking to young people. But I felt like I would be doing them a huge disservice if I took the posture of, guys, we gotta change the world, but, like, super politely. And, you know, thankfully, the Hunger Games was out there very early on, setting the tone for, like, Burn It Down. And even if you'd look at Star wars, you know, like, it's not like I'm inventing the idea that sometimes revolution is violent, but it felt very keen right now because of the world that we are in. And there is a scene with state violence against peaceful protesters in this book for a reason. And I think kids owe us, letting them see those things on the page in a slightly safe distance from our current world and not pretending like these things aren't happening, that they're not aware of them. I mean, we have kids walking out of their schools to protest ICE right now, you know, and just kids that are really thinking about and grappling with what. What am I willing to lose? Am I willing to lose my scholarship? Am I willing to lose my graduation for something that I believe in? And so this is like, taking that up to higher stakes, but honoring the fact that there are young people grappling with really scary decisions now in terms of standing up for their beliefs.
- [42:17]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. And if you don't let them see that, if you don't show that on the page, then they know it's not genuine. Right. Like, I grew up in Minnesota, I have family there. So, like, I see my, you know, my niece and nephew, if they didn't see that on the page, and they're witnessing that in St. Paul, right, where they're living on the ground, it's dungeon. You know, that's really disingenuous to young people too.
- [42:44]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Yeah, no, I totally agree. And I'm always trying to balance, like being genuine versus being preachy. Like, I. Kids don't want to read an issue book and they don't want to be told how to feel, but they also don't want their lives to be watered down or distilled down. I'm seeing like, what I consider to be a very problematic bleed over of the trad wife, whatever, into young adult literature right now and the idea that it needs to be clean and that it needs to be wholesome. And I saw the word virtue and I wanted to just like, lay on the floor and die. Like, we should not be applying words like virtue to certain lived experiences over others because they will always disproportionately not include the lived experiences of marginalized teens. And this kind of movement that's being driven by social media of this kind of tradwife, puritanical vibe and quite young people, folks in their early 20s, I will always take the stance of very deliberately pushing back on that in the literature that I write for young people, because I think that those frameworks are exactly the kind of thing that Josephine's, you know, was stuck in with the house of industry, where your whole life is limited by something. You don't see it. She would have never known. And there's a. There's an element of that book where essentially Josephine wanted to be a cop. She was like, this sucks. I hate my job. I could have been a transistor. I could have been out there. She would have been a cop and she would have eroded her sense of self. She would have died violently and she never would have lived and loved. And I find it kind of ties in another theme in this, and that is that we're pushing low income kids, particularly into vocational schools in the public school system in the United States. And that's essentially what's happening to Josephine here. Like there's not another vocation. She's in vocational school. She's going to do this job for her whole life. And I see that it concerns me greatly because as much as STEM is important, I want to see kids say, I want to be an actor, I want to be a writer. I'M going to be an artist. You know, the humanities are dying right now and when you're pushed into like automotive school and you're not even told there's another way to live, that's so problematic. So that was a theme that for me, as a parent of older school aged kids was very much on my mind. I don't even remember the question. That was like side quests at once.
- [45:20]
Rebecca Buchanan
But as you're no, like even the tradwise stuff, like I think and even what you're talking about, like we have this idea that it can be, it has to be one or the other, right? It, you, you have to, if you're going in the STEM world or that world, like we don't need all the other things. And it's like a really good grounding in liberal arts, in humanity. All of the things makes you a better person across the board, right? No matter what you do, if you read more, you have more empathy.
- [45:47]
Maria Ingrande Mora
You have more empathy. I saw the worst thing this month and it was somewhat. It was an interview with one of the AI CEOs, like a billionaire. And it was like, well, what are you telling your kids that they should do knowing that AI is taking over all these jobs? And he was like, oh, liberal arts, humanities, they should just explore art and do art and writing. And it was from such a place of privilege because it was like, you are a billionaire. These are trust fund babies. They don't have to worry about how to make a living. So you have kind of told on yourself by saying the privilege people should get to continue to make art and everyone else can become a little cog in the machine that's supporting my wealth. It was just like, do you hear yourself talking? And I think that we owe, oh kids, like directly addressing these things right now and helping them see where media, kind of derogatory, where media is, is influencing them to kind of become more conservative in many ways in their thinking, to not have critical thinking. As a parent, I still willingly say, I'll say that to all the kids. Like, the number one skill you need to learn right now is questioning authority. Every single kind of authority. And I want my kids to ask me smart questions. If I tell them I want you to do something, I want them to feel like they can say, why? You know, what's the outcome? Anything. Push back, Challenge me, challenge me. If these kids aren't challenging authority from their teachers to their parents and all the way up to the top, then they are just kind of getting shoved into this machine that is essentially the house of industry in this book. That's like really the thesis here.
- [47:29]
Rebecca Buchanan
Well, and I think too, it creates a space like it just creates a life of shame, right? Like, like a shame of like I can't think about that, I can't act that way because it's go right like that. That's one of the things that scares me the most about that trad. One of the things, the trad wife stuff that really scares me is it's like, it's like grounded in a shame based space.
- [47:53]
Maria Ingrande Mora
No, it fully is. And I really don't like this clean YA discourse that's happening kind of rapidly right now because it is demonizing sexuality. And kids, you know, older teens are having sex and if we close our eyes and go, la la la la la.
- [48:15]
Rebecca Buchanan
No they're not.
- [48:16]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Then we're not teaching them how to safely do that. And that is very scary to me. Especially in a no safe or legal abortions world that we live in right now. The stakes are actually very, very high. And so then the trad wife stuff becomes even scarier when you see that those narratives are even pushing back against birth control. So we're putting girls in particular in a place where their future could become extremely narrow very, very quickly because of a choice that in the past was reversible and is no longer. And that scares the hell out of me. And so this idea of clean YA and saying sex is bad and dirty, I'm like, oh my God, it's 2026. Like, whoa. I never would have thought. Yeah, I was a 90s kid. We were pretty much wilding out in the 90s and it was still pretty bad. But like, to see this backwards slide is scary to me. And there I, I don't. There's this narrative like, oh, ya has too much spice. I personally haven't seen that because it's, it's ya. There are not books with explicit sex on the page, but there's now a narrative that there is. And I'm like, do you mean queer people? Cause I think you mean queer people and that you think that's bad. So that's a whole other bucket here. But it was important to me to show that part of Josephine's evolution and journey was discovering her own desire both for Gertrude and Ezra. But there's also a scene that I was nervous to put on the page. And it's very tastefully lightly done, but you know, she has some self discovery moment. And that to me was almost metaphorical that like, if you don't have agency and Ownership of your own desire and your own body. And you're allowing other people to direct the narrative of how you even enjoy your own body and your own pleasure. That's, that's authoritarianism, you know, and that's this shame component. And I'm glad you used that word because I think our, our young people deserve to live free of shame and to have creativity be the number one thing that they could possibly aim for. Creativity and identity in love, in future possibilities. All of those things just endless. I think one of the last lines of the book is all the possibilities. Like if I could bequeath something upon our youth today, it would be possibility. Just open fields in front of them.
- [50:39]
Rebecca Buchanan
I love that so much. And we could probably talk forever. But I'm going to ask you. You're my right, because I'm like, ah, there's so much. But final question, so that we, you know, we have stuff to do. Promotion, self promotion. So anything that the book has been out.
- [50:56]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Right.
- [50:57]
Rebecca Buchanan
But anything that's going on with this book or anything else you're working on or what you want people to know. Yeah.
- [51:02]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Thank you. Come and hang out with me on Instagram. It's Maria Mora writes Wild Radiance is now out in hardcover, and Mia Hutchinson Shaw is the audiobook narrator. And the audiobook is fantastic. And you can get both of these at the library. So my number one promotion is requested at the library. I think that young adult books are really expensive for young people. Let's support libraries and library systems. So, you know, get out there, request it, check it out. I think that that's really important that librarians get those signals that queer books for young people need to be on the show. I know librarians already know this, but like, we, you know, I'm just like, yay, libraries and librarians, they're the librarians and teachers are saving the world.
- [51:51]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yes, yes. And we just need to save the libraries. Right. Well, thank you so much again, Maria and Grande Mora. Thank you for talking with me about A Wild Radiance.
- [52:02]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Thank you, Rebecca. This was really delightful.
- [52:05]
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- [52:41]
Maria Ingrande Mora
Sam.