0:04

Gays reading where the greats drop by trendy authors. Tell us all the who, what, and why. Anyone can listen. Comes we're spoiler free Reading from politic stars to book club picks where the curious minds can get their picks. So you say you're not gay. Well that's okay. There's something for everyone. Gays Reading.

Jason Blitman: 0:34

Hello and welcome to Gay's Reading. I'm your host Jason Blitman, and on today's episode I have Eliana Ramage talking to me about her book to the Moon and back. And my guest gay reader is ML Rio, whose book Hot Wax just came out last week, uh, to the Moon and back. Is this month's Reese's Book Club Pick. I'm so excited for Eliana. I just announced my October book Club Pick with Stora. It is Middle Spoon by Alejandro Rela. I just released an episode with Alejandro talking about the book, which of course that conversation is spoiler free so anyone can go listen to it. But we talk about the book, we talk about, uh, some of the themes and stuff, and I. It's, it's so good. It's so interesting and I don't wanna say too much about it. But it's in, it's a book told through unsent emails to a recently ex-boyfriend and, uh, yeah there's. Themes of polyamory and heartbreak and grief and, um, yeah, it's super interesting and really prescient and I'm so excited. You could check out the link in the bio, uh, or in the show notes to learn more about the Alto Book Club. your very first book is only$1, which is great. So you can get middle spoon for just a dollar. What else do I need to share? Oh, of course. Eliana and ML'S bios are both in the show notes. You can follow us on social media. We are at gays reading over on Instagram. I, there is a gays reading Blue Sky, but I feel like the people aren't using Blue Sky anymore, so I've been less active over on the blue sky. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but. But we're there so you could follow us there too. There's also substack and merch and, oh, so much, so many things, so many gays reading things. And of course, if you like what you're hearing, please share us with your friends. We are just a super itty bitty indie podcast, which I know sounds crazy'cause there have been some really tremendous guests on the show, including today's, of course. But it's, it's an indie podcast. It's a labor of love and so any support. Is super, super appreciated and how can you support really of course you can join the Substack or buy merch, but even more so of course is leaving a review over on either Apple Podcast or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast. You can also all of the episodes are over on YouTube, and so if you wanna subscribe to the YouTube channel, that's a great way to support too. Just click the subscribe button over there or on your, your podcast platform of choice as well. I think those are all the things yeah that's everything. All right, y'all. Thank you so much for being here and now please enjoy my conversations Eliana Ramage and ML Rio. Eliana Ramage. Welcome to Gay's Reading. I'm so happy to have you here,

Eliana Ramage: 3:33

I'm so happy to be here.

Jason Blitman: 3:35

Here to talk about your book to the Moon and back.

Eliana Ramage: 3:39

There it is.

Jason Blitman: 3:40

This is gonna be one of my favorite books of the year. No Pressure.

Eliana Ramage: 3:46

It's very kind.

Jason Blitman: 3:48

And I was reading it simultaneously with a book called Indian Country by Show Bora. And this is a book that is not on anyone's radar, and I need it. I need everybody to be reading it because it is so good. And reading the two books simultaneously was it like, broke my brain and it was the perfect way to consume both books. I loved them both so much. They were cousins of each other. And I just finished them both yesterday and I'm like in a state of ecstasy because it is not always the case where you like. Read two books simultaneously and they both are gonna be among your favorites of the year. So I'm gonna, I'm coming to you from a very excited place.

Eliana Ramage: 4:25

Now, so I already, I think it was like last week that I heard about Indian country and I was excited about it. Now I'm like really ready

Jason Blitman: 4:31

Yeah. It is a cousin of your book and I think you're gonna like it anyway. For the people, what is your, I'm sure not very practiced elevator pitch of to the moon and back.

Eliana Ramage: 4:44

to the moon and back. It is a novel about one young woman's relentless quest to be the first Cherokee astronaut and the women she loves best, whose lives are changed by her journey. That is my memorized pitch.

Jason Blitman: 5:03

Very succinct. Perfect. I don't take this the wrong way. I'm shocked by how much I laughed.

Eliana Ramage: 5:09

How could I ever take that the wrong way?

Jason Blitman: 5:12

I don't know. You're like, what would I, did you think I wasn't gonna be funny?

Eliana Ramage: 5:16

It actually didn't used to be funny.'cause I think that might be like a little bit of a literary fiction thing that at least for

Jason Blitman: 5:24

allowed to be funny,

Eliana Ramage: 5:25

yeah. I was like, oh no. Especially, starting out, it's like they must be crying. And one of the ways I actually were off topic, but one of the, one of the ways I got into writing in general was in high school I was writing a lot of creative nonfiction essays and I realized that anytime I wrote a nonfiction essay about my grandmother, who was like my closest person in the world and was like, living with us and had Alzheimer's, like my mom and my aunt would cry and so I'd be like, oh, I need to like, writing has power. Let's like keep writing these like really deep sad things. Anyway, so didn't think I was supposed to be funny in books. And then I was lucky enough to end up with a US editor, Margot Sch Manter, and a UK editor, Bobby Must and Owen, who are both like two of the funniest people I know. And in the last couple years of drafts, it became like a within, how can I make them laugh? Like I really want them to laugh. They're so funny.

Jason Blitman: 6:17

Yeah, like literally on page, like page six in the galley is really page two and we're like halfway down. And I wrote LOL with an exclamation point, like page two. I'm laughing already. Anyway, that just surprised me and I wanted to tell you that Steph, the, our protagonist in the book, there's she declares that there's one thing that would hold her over until she could get to the rest of her life. And that a space camp, she decides that like she just needs to go to space camp.'cause that'll hold her over. What would your thing have been, or what would your thing be now even

Eliana Ramage: 6:56

Whew. Okay. I went through different phases.

Jason Blitman: 7:00

Yes. Tell me. I wanna know. Tell me all of them.

Eliana Ramage: 7:02

I wanted to be an actor, and then when I was, no, I wanted, okay, I wanted to be a doctor. And then my friends, I wanted to be a pediatrician. I was really into it. And then my, after three years of that dream, I was in second grade and my friend's mom said that what do you wanna be? And I said, obviously a doctor. That's my personality is that I wanna be a doctor. And then she said, no, you don't, because of the malpractice insurance.

Jason Blitman: 7:28

The,

Eliana Ramage: 7:30

She said, people are

Jason Blitman: 7:30

that is a good point To, but like, why are you telling a 6-year-old

Eliana Ramage: 7:35

I dunno, but it killed the dream. I didn't know what it was, but I was like, people are gonna sue me, whatever that is. And then I wanted to be an actor and then I went to a week of acting camp and I was we had to audition in like first grade and the part they gave me was a chair and people sat on me and a table and people ate on me. This is for Alibaba in the 40 Thieves. I wanted to be a sign language interpreter, but I didn't know sign language and I wanted to be an Arabic interpreter and his fashion interpreter, like there were all these really intense phases with writing on the side, but like all these really intense dreams that like died.

Jason Blitman: 8:13

fascinating it like makes sense that you've become a writer though, because you can live out whatever dream or fantasy you want now.

Eliana Ramage: 8:23

Yes.

Jason Blitman: 8:24

Oh, that's so interesting. Was there something where you were like, I am desperate to. Blank as a kid. So if Steph was, I'm desperate to go to space camp, you were like, I'm desperate to have a dog, or I'm desperate to dye my hair. Or was there something that you were like, I need to do this, or I'm gonna die as a child.

Eliana Ramage: 8:46

I needed to win the Reading Rainbow contest that I never won.

Jason Blitman: 8:53

Oh, devastating. Wait, tell me more about this contest,

Eliana Ramage: 8:57

I don't remember if it was called like the Reading Rainbow Story contest or book contest or what, but it was like you the children, every, you can do, every year you write a, like a book, a children's book.'cause you're a child, you write a book and you like color each page, you're like making the actual thing. And then you mail it into your local PBS station and they choose the winner and then you don't. I mean, I guess some people win. I, I lost over and over and over and over again.

Jason Blitman: 9:24

The story did not have Happy ending.

Eliana Ramage: 9:26

Yeah. But at one point I, and my last year doing it before, I think I aged out, I plagiarized what I don't even, maybe it was Ella Enchanted. I just took I was like, okay, fine. I'll do a book that like other people like, and I wrote did a 10 page handwritten version of that and that didn't win either.

Jason Blitman: 9:43

Oh man. Maybe no one went. Do you know anyone who did?

Eliana Ramage: 9:46

My brother got honorable mention

Jason Blitman: 9:48

my God, of course.

Eliana Ramage: 9:51

but because he won, we went to the local station for PBS and they had a magician

Jason Blitman: 9:56

What was the magician doing there?

Eliana Ramage: 9:58

he was the prized for the good writing kids and like their siblings who were tag alongs.

Jason Blitman: 10:04

The prize was go to a magic show at the local PBS station.

Eliana Ramage: 10:07

It's pbs, like

Jason Blitman: 10:09

That's so rare. I was not expecting any

Eliana Ramage: 10:13

they can't throw around like giant prizes.

Jason Blitman: 10:16

No, but I don't a certificate. I don't know. I was not expecting.

Eliana Ramage: 10:20

You also got a certificate with LaVar Burton's, like a copy of his signature, which was like A squiggle, like a big circle. Squiggle. Squiggle, yeah.

Jason Blitman: 10:28

Cute. I would like to meet him one day.

Eliana Ramage: 10:30

Oh yeah.

Jason Blitman: 10:31

He's maybe a dream guest.

Eliana Ramage: 10:34

could. You could, that would be great.

Jason Blitman: 10:37

My previous dream guest was Rosie O'Donnell, but she has since been on the

Eliana Ramage: 10:40

Yes.

Jason Blitman: 10:41

so now I think it needs to be LaVar Burton.

Eliana Ramage: 10:44

I was gonna say, you should make your dream list and have all your dreams come true.

Jason Blitman: 10:48

I know. Oh my God. Now we need to do that for you. I'm like, I'm devastated that this little dream for little Liana did not come true.

Eliana Ramage: 10:56

I know. I know. And now there's no illustrations in this one. And nobody wanted to see my art.

Jason Blitman: 11:03

So many words, no illustrations. Okay. I'm like, excuse me. As I was prepping for this, I was like, this is all over the place because the book was just like swirling inside of me and I didn't really know where I wanted to start or what I wanted to talk about, but it's, there is this like intersection of this young woman's Cherokee ness and queerness and growing upness. I don't know what the right word for that is, but there is

Eliana Ramage: 11:38

Coming of age.

Jason Blitman: 11:39

coming of age. Oh my God. Yes. Thank you. Remember I said it's early

Eliana Ramage: 11:42

one of my prepped words. I.

Jason Blitman: 11:44

right? Buzzword coming of age. Take a drink. Right intersection of coming of age, queerness, Cherokee ness. What was putting pen to paper of all of those intersections? Like for you?

Eliana Ramage: 12:31

I have not thought of it like that before. It took a long time.

Jason Blitman: 12:37

Yeah.

Eliana Ramage: 12:39

So maybe the experience of it I was like, I wasn't sitting down thinking I'm gonna take these. I didn't think, one of the things that's been interesting about publication world is that, like before it, you're not really asked to like, answer questions like, what does it mean? Or

Jason Blitman: 12:55

right.

Eliana Ramage: 12:56

and so just in the last three months I've been sitting down and thinking about this and talking about it, and like understanding after the fact that there are things. Queerness and Cherokee is that like there, there are things about her identity that were always gonna be there, that were there from the beginning, but the way, the specific way in which all of these different parts interacted was just many years of let's focus on this. What if we were in that situation? Let's focus on that. Like all of these different things. And then trying to understand how they could move together while I was also like growing up at the same time.

Jason Blitman: 13:32

sure. So like you were intersecting Eliana's coming of age With Steph's coming, with Steph's coming of age and these other pieces of her. So as you were discovering it then, or as it got itself on the page and you were like, oh, this is what my book is about, what was that? Maybe reflecting, what is your experience like now being like, oh, this is what's on the page. What does that mean to you? Because these are also pieces of you.

Eliana Ramage: 13:58

Yes. I think the biggest way. That I've started to think about it in a way that I didn't, as it was happening, was the coming of how much older I had gotten, and the time it took to write this.

Jason Blitman: 14:10

That's interesting. Say more. What do you mean?

Eliana Ramage: 14:13

It took 12 years and I started it when I was in like, what it, the first sort of spark of it was my first few few weeks of college. So my first time out of the house and my experience of that was like, oh, I know exactly what's gonna happen. Like I'm gonna major in the Arabic language even though I have never taken a class in that like I just, you have some, or I had like pretty certain under a pretty certain understanding of what was gonna come next in like many different categories. And here we are, like 12 years later I didn't expect anything that happened.

Jason Blitman: 14:48

Uhhuh.

Eliana Ramage: 14:49

And that's like a, now from this distance, I can say that is like a very very familiar path. You grow up and you change. And that is not a bad thing. Even if bad things are happening as part of it, this is just like the arc of growing up is something that I appreciate at 34 now. And so one version of that, in terms of what it means is that when I started writing this book, I had an understanding of this is like an ambition story. We've got like a straightforward, like somebody wants to be an astronaut and then let's add like the, add any cost concept. And then over the years the people around her became so much more important than that, and her idea of belonging became the heart of the book. So it became so much more of a family story and like a humanity story than what she probably thought it was about when she would've been my age.

Jason Blitman: 15:39

Sure. So you, as you've just explained didn't have that one singular dream your whole life, but you did have maybe big dreams that changed. I'm curious, like seeing her journey, How, what is the Eliana parallel like you. Obviously are very ambitious. You had like lofty goals and dreams and how did, how do you see your queerness and Cherokee intersection intersecting with the journey that you went on?

Eliana Ramage: 16:19

Oh, that's so interesting. First off I know I had these really intense phases, but those were all my like backup to being a writer. Dreams.

Jason Blitman: 16:27

you also said writing on the side, so you made, so there is something very interesting about people who have decided that is not a realistic journey. So they're gonna put it on the side or put it on the back burner.

Eliana Ramage: 16:38

Yes. And it's like something that I enjoyed and it's something that I wanted to get better and better at, but yeah, like that was not that job.'cause it's still not a it's like such an imaginary thing.

Jason Blitman: 16:50

But so is being an astronaut.

Eliana Ramage: 16:52

True. So I think that's one in terms of when you asked me to compare myself to her, there's so many ways we're different. But one way, just in terms of ambition and career is she's a child who, like, when we first meet her announces like, this is what I'm gonna do. Nothing else matters as much. And I'm willing to throw other things away and I don't know, do some things that I would never, ever do. And then for me, writing was always second to other, other people how, how I always wanted to be, I don't know. Like I wanted to have a job that I loved that was stable, that I didn't have to worry about and have kids someday and spend a lot of time with friends and family. I don't know. I like was thinking about the day to day and I would, and I was not interested in like the agony of your job is writing and yeah, actually that's not fair. It's, sorry. It's not about the agony of that, it's more just that's just didn't, I would not have thought of that as that's not a job you can go get.

Jason Blitman: 17:51

Sure.

Eliana Ramage: 17:51

Yeah. Like not, I wanted something I could apply for.

Jason Blitman: 17:55

In a weird way that is like that, is that makes you the opposite of Steph.

Eliana Ramage: 18:00

Yeah. And I, it feels weird to talk about ambition that way.'cause I really like, as I'm a parent, I'm like, not trying to say that you like can't be a writer and a parent. I just think that from like my childhood dream was I had these things that sounded like really ambitious, but I would never have put them above other people in the way that she does. Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 18:27

So one of the. to me, moments in the book is I, ambition has been a theme running through my own life too. When I was a kid at theater camp, I got a certificate at four something at the end of this session.

Eliana Ramage: 18:48

Good job.

Jason Blitman: 18:49

the thank you and on the certificate said, shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars. And that has been a mantra throughout my whole life. And when I think about ambition, it's okay just try your best and then worst case scenario, you're still like amongst the best. And then of course the Mala Prep in. The book is Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stairs, which I basically peed in my pants which was not a typo. It's supposed to be that way in the book. So it's just interesting to hear. I think I'm so stuck on this like ambition and comparing, not comparing you to Steph, but hearing your journey and your life story. Because I was so stuck thinking about me and my journey and who I was and what that trajectory is. And I think, thinking about a person wanting to be an astronaut, you're like, what does that even mean?

Eliana Ramage: 19:47

Yeah. I love that. It's like an impossible dream.

Jason Blitman: 19:50

What was that like research experience like for you? Because there's a lot of like sciencey, very official stuff that comes up in the book.

Eliana Ramage: 20:02

I'm so happy you called it science sciencey, because that was.

Jason Blitman: 20:06

sciencey. I didn't say

Eliana Ramage: 20:08

Because it's not science, it's sciencey. It was

Jason Blitman: 20:11

yes.

Eliana Ramage: 20:12

I love I as basically this is like very writer of me, but I like have such veneration for science and scientists as like a concept in the universe as a metaphor.

Jason Blitman: 20:25

Uhhuh.

Eliana Ramage: 20:26

Cannot do it. There's math, I

Jason Blitman: 20:27

My husband has a degree in chemistry.

Eliana Ramage: 20:29

Oh wow.

Jason Blitman: 20:31

Me, I like I does not compute to me.

Eliana Ramage: 20:34

No, but it's so beautiful, So happy other people are out there doing it. So the way I approached science was I thought back about, I thought back on the way I connected to science as a kid and the story is that I loved science when it was a story and then once it was like eighth grade physical science and they brought in the math and it was like dead to me forever. Or at least I could never. Do it. I can never understand it in the same way. Yeah. So it was always story first, and then research was like the rule. I don't hold myself to the standard of I need to understand everything there is to understand about being an astronaut. But if I figure out, okay, there's in a previous draft there was like a NASA Christmas party. So I realize this isn't a science example once I say it, but I was like, okay, I'm gonna look at all these YouTubes of the decoration contest at, Johnson Space Center, do all of the research, like for that thing that has already appeared in the story, but I'm not gonna get into the textbooks.

Jason Blitman: 21:33

Sure. A little bit of reverse engineering.

Eliana Ramage: 21:36

Yes. And then a little bit of other people check your work.

Jason Blitman: 21:40

sure. Sure. And then say, okay, this is how it would actually happen, or this is the sciencey portion that you're missing. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. It's so interesting to hear you say that you understood science best when it was story, It was story because when you said you wanted to be a sign language interpreter, I took sign language in college and it came so easily to me. And I, I think part of it is because I gen I generally talk with my hands and I have a background in theater and in movement and needed to learn choreography. And so there was this sort of synchronicity of like brain and body moving together. And it came naturally. So it is, it's interesting that I don't know that we as humans lean into that enough, that thing where we're like, oh, this is. I'm so good at this because how my, of how my brain works.

Eliana Ramage: 22:37

I really like that. And I've been when you said the thing about. Indian country being like a cousin book just in, in the last few months I've been thinking about about fiction and nonfiction. I'm reading more nonfiction now than I did before. And how much fun it is to like, link those two together, figure out what you're interested in a fictional way, and then move from there. Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 22:59

It's, so I was just talking to an author friend of mine and I was, and long story short, I was sharing that some of their, the work of theirs that I liked the most was their fiction that is truest to them.

Eliana Ramage: 23:14

Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 23:14

And I was like, really? I think the answer is you need to be writing nonfiction. And that it was this interesting unlock, I think for both of us to be like, oh, we need to we can't we shouldn't be fitting ourselves into the thing that we think we're supposed to be fitting ourselves

Eliana Ramage: 23:27

Yeah. Absolutely.

Jason Blitman: 23:29

It's letting the storytelling of science come naturally to us, because that is how, that is who we are.

Eliana Ramage: 23:34

Yes. Yeah, I really like that.

Jason Blitman: 23:36

Speaking of metaphor, I say speaking of metaphor as though you just said the word metaphor. You said it like four minutes ago, but speaking of metaphor the word alien comes up a couple times in the book, and I, it feels like one of those things where it happened naturally as you were writing, and then upon reflection you're like, oh, this holds such a deeper meaning now than it did when I was putting it down on the page, but Right. The idea of obvious like space. Alien, Also alienating as a young person or in general being new, different is a sort of theme throughout the book. Are you, how do you relate to that? What does that, what does that mean to you To fit in a space where you perhaps don't feel like you're supposed to fit in?

Eliana Ramage: 24:27

I think it's a, it's fun answering questions about other people's, like inner lives.'cause you don't really know what's going on. But my assumption is that's something that, that like a lot of people, maybe most people I don't know, also feel and I talk to a lot of writers who, who feel it and talk about it and even if that's something that was a bigger thing in childhood or, even if they've come into their own in a different way as adults, that's something that they're still interested in for themselves, for other real people, for other fictional characters. And I think my experience of that was this is in, I think this is in a previous draft in it, and I don't remember if it's still there, but my experience of it is something where I always had like a smaller group of really like really close friends, but the, like a smaller group when I was growing up. And especially when I went to college, I had this like self-consciousness and this feeling of everybody is like being cool without me. And then you realize after the fact, whether that's like through, going back for a reunion or just getting older and experiencing the world more you realized, or I realized that that was in my head. There were so many times when people outside of my, like immediate friend circle, so many people had invited me to be in their lab group or come to lunch with them or people. People are kind and they're either just not thinking it, it just doesn't, they're no one's trying to be mean.

Jason Blitman: 25:57

We're all just trying to survive.

Eliana Ramage: 25:58

we're, yes. Yeah. And I think it's a younger person. Oh, that's not nice to young people everywhere. Okay. That's an Eliana as a younger person thing

Jason Blitman: 26:09

Honestly, I think more adults try to assimilate or To fit in a way that we don't even realize. And did you watch the TV show Overcompensating? I,

Eliana Ramage: 26:22

No, but it sounds already like the title.

Jason Blitman: 26:24

yeah. So upon first initial watch, you're like, oh, this is a little cringey. Because all the characters are overcompensating and it's these college students, but the more you watch, the more you're seeing everybody is overcompensating. The cool kids, the nerds, the parents, the teachers. Everybody, we are all just trying to figure it out and fit in and be liked and all of that. And so it's so interesting, like just thinking about the idea of alienating and thinking about, alienating and isolating are two different things, but I think as an author, writing is such a solitary experience and now to be talking about your book and coming into the come, coming up for air, coming up to the light. It's gotta be such a jarring experience that you can connect dots with plot points in your book as well, which for you in particular is very specific. But so I'm just think that's where my brain was also.

Eliana Ramage: 27:30

yeah. It's, no I agree. It's so the book is not even out yet, and it's already so strange to me that you have it.

Jason Blitman: 27:38

I had it, I read it. There are things that are underlined and things marked in the margins. Yeah,

Eliana Ramage: 27:46

And it's not about the author, but it also feels so personal because it's I grew up writing this,

Jason Blitman: 27:53

was that like for you?

Eliana Ramage: 27:54

Writing it while I was growing up.

Jason Blitman: 27:56

You, it's funny you just changed the phrasing.

Eliana Ramage: 27:59

I did.

Jason Blitman: 28:01

up writing it and writing it as I was growing up are two different things because I think,

Eliana Ramage: 28:07

it.

Jason Blitman: 28:07

Because it, I think the first way you said it makes it sound like it taught you.

Eliana Ramage: 28:13

I agree. I think it did teach me a lot. And the biggest thing it taught me, I think, yeah, I think the biggest in terms of the experience of writing it so worked on and worked on it. Went to grad school, worked on it, finished grad school stopped writing for two years. And I think. I came back to it for a lot of different reasons. But the short version of that experience of going back to it was an understanding of okay we're planners, or I'm a planner. It would be nice to all of those years. It, I was like, I'm, I'm working towards something. I'm planning something. And then not giving up on that plan, not writing for two years, realizing how much it meant to me like the actual writing, how much it meant to me, and realizing how much I wanted to tell this story and I wanted to like, see these characters through and see it through for myself. It was like my, because it was my first time not writing, it was my first experience of of this is what I want to be doing. Just like this act of writing with no one reading it. This is what I want to be doing with my life.

Jason Blitman: 29:18

That's major.

Eliana Ramage: 29:21

I am glad it, it was hard not to write for, that, that part before was hard, but I'm glad it happened.

Jason Blitman: 29:26

Yeah. The beginning of the book, knowing like your age and knowing just a little bit about you maybe this is accidental, but the beginning of the book is very little mermaid coded.

Eliana Ramage: 29:40

How? Wait.

Jason Blitman: 29:43

I should have first asked you what was your favorite Disney movie as a child? Because that would've been hilarious.

Eliana Ramage: 29:49

It was a problematic phase. It was Beauty and the Beast.

Jason Blitman: 29:51

Oh, but I love you. Beauty the Beast is so good. The whole Stockholm Syndrome thing. Big

Eliana Ramage: 29:56

Mermaid.

Jason Blitman: 29:57

And parent not wanting the kid to follow the dreams, wanting to be the world out there is scary. And they think that, king Triton thinks the way to protect Ariel is to not let her go.

Eliana Ramage: 30:09

You're right.

Jason Blitman: 30:10

That's the beginning of your book. Sorry.

Eliana Ramage: 30:12

Wow. Wow. This is my favorite reading of it.

Jason Blitman: 30:16

So basically this is a retelling of Little Mermaid. You're like, I want people to read my book. So I'm going to just like with Ella Enchanted when I was a kid, I'm gonna rewrite The Little Mermaid. Yeah. What does that mean? Hearing me say that to you?

Eliana Ramage: 30:29

Very fun.

Jason Blitman: 30:30

Yeah.

Eliana Ramage: 30:31

Yeah. And I have a lot of empathy for the mom character in terms of that like journey I was talking about earlier, of like just focusing on my energy on Steph when I was younger and then expanding. So I think even as a young person, my King Triton reaction was like, you manie and I get it.

Jason Blitman: 30:49

Yeah. It's like I see memes these days where it's like Mrs. Doubtfire and everyone was like, as a kid, you're mad that the mom was a spoil sport and was like mad that there was a pony in the house and the birthday party was a mess. And now as an adult, you're like, no, I totally side with the mom.

Eliana Ramage: 31:12

Definitely.

Jason Blitman: 31:14

Yeah, that's what that feels like. Going back to the research component, you, talking about science, but also a big part of the book is the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Eliana Ramage: 31:25

Yes,

Jason Blitman: 31:26

can you share a little bit about what that is, what that means?

Eliana Ramage: 31:30

sure. It is a really important federal law and it establishes standards for the removal and the placement of native children. The like, easiest way I can say that as a non-lawyer is that like when there's a native child who is being placed with another family, then it's like step one. That placement would be with a member of their family, step two with someone from their same tribe, step three with someone who's from a tribe, like who's native, but who's not from their same one. And step four is then we go to what would happen in a non Iqua case. And it was passed in, I believe, 1978 but not passed like just for kicks like passed because it came out of this really long, really dark history of native children being removed and not just from their families, but also from their nations. For a long time without any sort of check on that.

Jason Blitman: 32:26

Yeah. So much of the book too is about the sort of dynamic and relationships of being native and what that means to some of these characters. What is, what's your relationship like with being a member of the Cherokee Nation?

Eliana Ramage: 32:46

my relationship it's just a fact of my life as I've always known that I'm Cherokee Nation citizen, that's what my family is. We also don't live in like northeastern Oklahoma where Cherokee Nation is also the majority of Cherokee Nation citizens today don't live there, which is not to say that that's an insignificant place, or that most people, or that a lot of people don't live there. It's more to say that when I was writing this I think I was just as interested in. What does it mean for someone to go to space? As I was in the question of what does it mean for like us and other tribes, but I'll just speak to ours. Like for us to be a people who, at first there was some understanding of who we are based off of like Cherokee, homelands, and then we have removal. So now there's like an understanding of you're in this jurisdictional area I was just talking about on a government level. And now not only what does it mean for me to grow up in Nashville with two other native students in my high school, one of them Cherokee, one of them a different tribe but also like Cherokee's on Mars. What do we do with that? I don't think that the tribe is defined forever by location. Location is really important, so is language. So all of these different things, but to me it like boils down to connection. And belonging and story and all of these things that are just so hard to define that it was like, I guess we're just gonna spend a few hundred pages thinking about that in this novel without answering it for anyone.

Jason Blitman: 34:17

Sure. And it's interesting'cause what I'm hearing you say is we all don't have to be, how do I wanna say this? We all don't have to be defined by the things that we think define us, and yet we also are not who we are without the things that define us.

Eliana Ramage: 34:37

Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 34:39

That's

Eliana Ramage: 34:39

that makes sense.

Jason Blitman: 34:40

does that make sense?

Eliana Ramage: 34:41

Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 34:41

Right?

Eliana Ramage: 34:42

Mm-hmm.

Jason Blitman: 34:43

Because I think there can be this ex exploration of Cherokee ness, as I was saying earlier and being in Oklahoma. But what is that doesn't have to quote unquote define steps aspiration.

Eliana Ramage: 35:00

Yes.

Jason Blitman: 35:01

And so how can, and she could redefine it by being the first Cherokee astronaut on the moon.

Eliana Ramage: 35:08

That goes. Into this story that was like, I think of as like the first spark of the book. Even if it wasn't the first day that I started writing it. And it was that I was so Dartmouth College has it's where I went to undergrad and it has a really great native student program, native studies program, like all of the, that it's just a great place to go if you're native. And so we were all in, in this room as freshmen talking about research projects. It was like an extracurricular independent study thing. And one day all of our conversations over the whole session of just freshmen with two sophomore mentors, all of our conversations were set in the past. And it was this like tone in the room of each of us had maybe decided, there's a point in history where there's, nobody was using the word purity'cause that's gross. But there's some point in history of tribal purity. And then all these bad things have happened and it's just like you get farther and farther away from what it means to be whatever your tribal nation is. So like a definition of self based off of loss. And so I was a, I was 18 and that was like freshman fall really early. Not only into like me leaving home, but also me being not only just with like other Cherokee people or people I'm related to, but like all of these native people from all of these different tribes with different experiences around the country. And one of them was a sophomore and he stopped the conversation and was like don't, you guys are like, don't keep thinking of your your tribes as what they were at what point in the past. Like why are you choosing 1850 instead of 1720? There's no like point at which you could choose that. And so his next step of that equation was like he actually said if one of you were to become an astronaut, that would become a part of the story of your people.

Jason Blitman: 36:56

Oh my God.

Eliana Ramage: 36:56

yeah, thank you. Winter Fox. So none of us became astronauts. But it was so cool that he was one year older than us and felt like he had something to teach us on such like a kind of vulnerable level that just that sentence just kept, like playing over and over until we got the astronaut novel.

Jason Blitman: 37:22

I love what a good story.

Eliana Ramage: 37:24

I'm, yeah.

Jason Blitman: 37:25

you could write a little nonfiction article about that. Thinking about my own life and how that relates to being

Eliana Ramage: 37:33

Hmm.

Jason Blitman: 37:34

I see so many parallels with sort of elder gays who are alive now, who are not anti-gay marriage, but who don't see the necessity and the way that a younger person might because to them gay history is something else. And being gay means something else. And to your point, why are we only thinking about what it was like to be gay in the sixties, seventies or eighties, or, particularly pre HIV and aids. And it being this like underground and subversive lifestyle in quotation marks. But why are we not thinking about what it was like to be gay in the 15 hundreds or in the 13 hundreds, right? So there is our history is long

Eliana Ramage: 38:24

Yes.

Jason Blitman: 38:25

or the history is long and our memory is short.

Eliana Ramage: 38:28

That's so true. And Steph, the main character of this character, of this book, she's gay, born 10 years before I was born. And

Jason Blitman: 38:36

She was living a very Gail life at a time where I was like, good for you girl.

Eliana Ramage: 38:41

but it's like astounding to me to, in terms of when what is this like historical point of gayness that we would think of like even just 10 years off on the timeline from my own experience, we're talking about her having a very different childhood than I did. And so it's what's exciting is all of these different experiences of that similar identity.

Jason Blitman: 39:02

yeah. Okay. Related, but unrelated. And this is leading somewhere. So not to put you fully on the spot. What? What was your dating life like when you were Steph's age when she was going on so many dates?

Eliana Ramage: 39:17

Oh.

Jason Blitman: 39:18

You don't have to get into too many details if you don't want to, but What was your

Eliana Ramage: 39:21

When she was going on her, like Tinder rampage,

Jason Blitman: 39:24

Uhhuh? Yeah, what was your Tinder rampage?

Eliana Ramage: 39:27

I never had a Tinder rampage. The, yeah, I got married when I was 20 and to someone very kind. And then when I was maybe 28 we got divorced. And then I did a few more dates and then I got married, no Tinder rampage.

Jason Blitman: 39:48

I am.

Eliana Ramage: 39:49

And when I say a few more dates, sorry, I don't mean I like met someone and went on three dates. I mean that like,

Jason Blitman: 39:56

I am not gonna lie. So I'm a little disappointed only for my follow up question to that, or what I was hoping, and maybe this was a fantasy experience for you, and I'm curious, and we could talk about this. There is, I don't wanna say my favorite section of the book, but I,'cause I loved so much of the book, but there is a moment where Steph shares, or on Steph's Tinder profile, she includes quotes and reviews from previous people she's been on dates with. So I was gonna ask you what do you think in both ways, what are some reviews that you think you would've received and what are some reviews that you would give?

Eliana Ramage: 40:45

Oh my gosh, man, I'm, this is so disappointing for you.

Jason Blitman: 40:49

I am so disappointed. Okay. You went on a couple days. What are some reviews that you would give those people?

Eliana Ramage: 40:56

That's a great question.

Jason Blitman: 40:57

Here's one for me.

Eliana Ramage: 40:59

Okay.

Jason Blitman: 41:00

You were super nice wished you'd brushed your teeth after you had dinner before we made out.

Eliana Ramage: 41:06

Hard agree. Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 41:08

Remember where I was. I remember exactly who it was.

Eliana Ramage: 41:13

Oh, I'm sorry you had that experience.

Jason Blitman: 41:15

That's okay.

Eliana Ramage: 41:16

I think that ev any review of me would be too colored by how, and any review I had for someone else, I was just like very, I was not, the review would be like, not enough Tinder, rampage, just

Jason Blitman: 41:29

go on the rampage, right?

Eliana Ramage: 41:31

Our before, a long time before we got married, like our first, one of our early conversations had to do with oh, you want children? I also want children. Let's let's have that conversation on the first date. And that's not in, in terms of the thousand ways that like my life and Steph's life are not the same. It's not her path.

Jason Blitman: 41:50

Yeah, no, that's not her path. She couldn't let anything get in her way of her dream. So that, like the dream was the priority I, when I was dating. I never wanted to waste my time. So even if they weren't gonna be my forever person, I wanted to know that there were enough similar interests, enough similar trajectories or dreams or aspirations for it to be worth my while to con, to go on more like dates with those people.

Eliana Ramage: 42:20

Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 42:21

But to have a little fun is a different thing. To go on my little, to go on a rampage is a different thing.

Eliana Ramage: 42:26

Exactly. Every rampage is very fun to write about.

Jason Blitman: 42:30

Uhhuh. Oh my God. You need a substack called the Ramage rampage. You're welcome. That was free. That was a free idea. There are so many like big questions in the book that like, break your brain and it just makes you feel small and at the end of the day, we are all just teeny tiny specks of dust in this galaxy, in this universe, and what is it all for? This is ridiculous. And the question of what if we get hit by an asteroid comes up, what wa Did you face any of that thinking bigness while you were writing the book?

Eliana Ramage: 43:13

Yes.

Jason Blitman: 43:15

Yes.

Eliana Ramage: 43:15

yes. No, I've thought about it forever. There, I think there's two categories. So I've thought about it forever in terms of the choice of optimism or sim cynicism. The where are we headed? Like just on our, too much talking with my hands. So I've thought about it forever in terms of what are we doing just left to ourselves on this planet? This is us. What are we, where are we? What direction in which direction are we headed? What is our responsibility to one another big theme of the book. And then interrupting that I have had the occasional fear of asteroids after watching the movie. Don't look up.

Jason Blitman: 43:54

Oh, I didn't watch it.

Eliana Ramage: 43:56

I don't think you should.'cause it was too upsetting. So I've quieted part two in my brain. I think I've partly quieted it out of more focus on part one and when we go, if we go back to the coming of age stuff we were talking about earlier the older, especially like in that leaving high school era in the twenties you start to read the news more, you start to understand more of the terrible things that, that not just are happening in the world, but that like we are doing or we are allowing to happen. And so it gets harder and harder to ignore that there's a decision to be made there. Are you gonna have this bumper sticker that like was one of the sparks for the book where I was like driving around and I saw someone, it was like I was in the middle of the book, but it was some someone's bumper sticker said it was an election bumper sticker and said like giant meteor, giant asteroid now, or something like that. Instead of this candidate or that candidate, it was like, just kill us all.

Jason Blitman: 44:53

was like calling for the asteroid. Oh,

Eliana Ramage: 44:55

Which is funny. And I immediately hated it. And so I think this book was like, the characters in it. And I, as someone growing up have to be like, okay, like we are going to continue to read the news. We are going to also make a choice to stay hopeful. Stay engaged, not like hopeful. It's all fine, but like active, hopeful,

Jason Blitman: 45:17

What is, how do you define active hopeful?

Eliana Ramage: 45:19

Not ignoring things that are happening. So not being like, I don't know, like things are fine and like this house so not, being informed, being engaged with what's going on. And also whatever. Ways there are for each person to improve the world, to like, be aware of what those ways are, know that they're always changing. Choose to do them. Choose to think that even if they are small, they are worth doing. And so in this book, Steph thinks that the way to do that is to become an astronaut so that we can be an interplanetary species. And like the one, those of us on Mars will continue. And then Kayla, her sister, thinks that the way to do that is to be like a native activist slash social media influencer. And really lean into to whatever happens with this planet, like our land and our traditions must be protected. And those are two really different, equally and legitimate things.

Jason Blitman: 46:18

Yeah, I steph is basically the world is fucked. Let's jump off while we can.

Eliana Ramage: 46:22

Yeah. I guess when I say equally legitimate, I don't mean that, I think that like just some of us should survive on Mars. I'm not pro.

Jason Blitman: 46:30

No. In terms of no, I, she is oh, let's. If we're gonna make change, like the change can't happen here. It has to happen elsewhere. Let's, it has to be bigger than what we know.

Eliana Ramage: 46:42

Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 46:43

Yeah.

Eliana Ramage: 46:43

And she gives herself space for ambition, Which as we were talking about earlier, like there's a line between ambition and selfishness and just how are you using your power?

Jason Blitman: 46:54

Yeah.

Eliana Ramage: 46:55

the book is interested in, in.

Jason Blitman: 46:57

The book is about big questions of the world and the universe and the galaxy, and it's about small questions like just family and siblings and, you joked not just in this house, but in, in the world or in the universe at large. And I think the book really covers the ground of both this house and the universe. And so it's I think part of. Part of why this conversation is so difficult for me is because I don't wanna spoil anything in the book. And it really covers a lot of ground in the, how many pages is it, barely 400 pages, under 450 pages. And I think I am on my own journey of figuring out how to be, what did you say? Actively hopeful and I think, yeah. Yeah. So I'm surpris surprised at how hard this conversation is for me.

Eliana Ramage: 47:57

I think it's hard for a lot of people and it's hard for me and it's, it, I think it's almost it's a daily question, especially now. Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 48:06

It's rare that I finish a book and I'm like, oh, now I have to talk to the author about these things. And I am. And I am hold and I'm sitting with a lot of it myself. So I don't know, it's just very, it's interesting

Eliana Ramage: 48:23

and I think

Jason Blitman: 48:23

took me by surprise.

Eliana Ramage: 48:25

I appreciate that. I think the world kinda takes me surprise by surprise and I. The, that ev everything. I'm like, remember what we talked about an hour ago? So to go back to that like thing where I was younger and you're like, figure, like getting older and like understanding that other people have like inner lives. So a friend was texting me this morning about, something really hard that was had just this morning happened to her personally. And, I was talking to her about what had happened to her personally, and she was like, yes. And also, I, the thing that I like can't get out of my mind is like, what's going on in the news? And she's it's ongoing. And also right now it's like really, it's like extra hitting me now and. It made me think about how often these conversations are either like really happening, like this is a conversation that actually happened between friends and how often it's like, it's just in your head that maybe you're like figuring out your own ambition or you're like just trying to go to work, you're trying to do whatever it is you're trying to do. And then there's that constant choice of how much do you actively engage with the outside world. If that's like in this book, it's like Family, tribal Nation, world, universe. It's a lot to hold on, whatever day it is today.

Jason Blitman: 49:43

Yeah. Yeah. It's all so big and I think it's cool and the book makes you think, and it makes you want to call your sibling if you have

Eliana Ramage: 49:54

Mm

Jason Blitman: 49:55

And, take care of your community and remember where you came from, even whatever that means to you,

Eliana Ramage: 50:08

Yes. landing on that every time I talk about this as like it's a book about families, I'm like families. Whatever that means to you, or like kids, whatever that means to you friends, whatever that means to you. It I feel like I as I got older, writing this book, just everything it has just gotten, it's just expanded life and the book. And I think queerness is a part of that too. I came out when I was writing the book and that changed things. cause in, in one, I mean in a lot of ways, but one of the ways it changed things, it was just this understanding of that when you write a book about family that there, there's just so much possibility for what that can mean. And so it was like helpful and affirming and joyful. Like it was all of these good things for me to get to figure out what belonging and what family meant to each of these different characters. Particularly'cause this is book with a lot of queer characters.

Jason Blitman: 51:03

You dropped such an interesting factoid at the literal one hour mark of our conversation. Can you unpack that a little bit more? The book is so Queer, queer in a very cool and exciting way. What can, do you feel comfortable talking a bit about what that journey was like for you?

Eliana Ramage: 51:23

sure I can. I think I'm most comfortable talking about my takeaway from it because I was I used to say that I came out like later in life. I don't know when people come out.

Jason Blitman: 51:35

Yeah.

Eliana Ramage: 51:36

So I think. That my, the biggest part of that for me was what I was just actually saying about family. I think it stood out to me as someone who, like when we think about ambitions, picture me as I'm like seven and I know that I want to, in, in addition to all of these other crazy things. I'm like, I wanna write and I wanna have kids. And so a, I think the most the most important, not important, that's not fair. The most unexpected. Maybe that's not fair either. I don't know. Let's insert an adjective.

Jason Blitman: 52:10

sure. I don't know what you're trying to say, so let's, we can, let's reverse engineer it.

Eliana Ramage: 52:14

something. The way in which queerness like most shows up in my life today is queer family building. It's what does it mean to be a queer person with a queer family? And this understanding that like, I didn't have when I was younger, that like, when. Not everyone wants to have kids, which is also something the book is interested in. But if you do know from an early age that you wanna have kids and you come out, then nobody gives you they're not like, congratulations. Here's the handbook on like, how do we define family? In terms of like kids and where they come from and chosen family and friendships and I don't know, like stepparents and the many different kinds of families that this book is like gathering

Jason Blitman: 52:56

Champions and showcases. Yeah.

Eliana Ramage: 52:58

yes, champions and showcases. It's just not an understanding of that journey to family is not what I thought queerness was. It's not that I didn't think it was what queerness was about when I was a kid. It was more just that I just didn't think about queerness in that way. Like queerness to me. The way I saw it with other people is that my mom would always take us out of school once a year for like the day on the hill at the Tennessee State Capitol Building. And we would go from office to office and be like, please, gay marriage. So I knew about that. But what does family mean was the part that was like the closest to, to my particular queer experience.

Jason Blitman: 53:43

Yeah. Thank you for sharing all of that. I think that's so cool and so important, and I think a good reminder to. Both queer and non-queer people in general for queer and non queer experiences, right? Like we are as a society, so stuck in what we believe is quote unquote supposed to be.

Eliana Ramage: 54:12

Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 54:13

And it just isn't true for anyone.

Eliana Ramage: 54:17

Yes. Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 54:18

And I am like, I'm such a champion of humans living life truthfully and authentically in a way that works for them. And they don't even know. Maybe they need to write a book to untangle some of those things just to realize, oh, I was wrong, or I misunderstood, or I didn't even think about that.

Eliana Ramage: 54:43

Yeah. There's just more out there.

Jason Blitman: 54:45

There's more out there. The universe is vast.

Eliana Ramage: 54:49

You were so fast.

Jason Blitman: 54:50

Yeah. What a beautiful way to end this conversation. Eliana Ramage, thank you so much for being here. To the moon and back is out now. Everyone go get your copy. I'm so excited for you and have a great rest of your day.

Eliana Ramage: 55:04

Thank you so much for having me.

Jason Blitman: 55:12

ML Rio, welcome to Gay's Reading.

M.L. Rio: 55:14

Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here.

Jason Blitman: 55:16

I am delighted to have you. Thank you for being my guest gay reader today. I I'm trying to, I'm just, I'm debating on the order in which I want to talk to you about things. But I guess just to kick us off, I just have to know what are you reading?

M.L. Rio: 55:29

so right now I am reading two things. I usually read fiction and nonfiction at the same time.'Cause I like being able to. Jump from one world into another. And I'm usually reading something for research, for whatever I'm writing. And right now I am reading a history of gunpowder. cause that's the rabbit hole that my brain is going down right now.

Jason Blitman: 55:50

Is it for a project or is it just because you're curious? Oh

M.L. Rio: 55:53

both. It's a little bit of both. I'm a history nerd. I did a PhD in literature, but it was partly a history degree. And so I

Jason Blitman: 56:01

YI can't handle it.

M.L. Rio: 56:04

But it's funny, I'm like such a dad in the way that I read. I read like histories of gunpowder and like books about geology in my spare time, like just for my own enjoyment.

Jason Blitman: 56:16

That's so interesting. Are you typically drawn more to nonfiction in general?

M.L. Rio: 56:21

Ooh. It actually really depends on the format. Like I'm learning to get more into audio books because I spend so much time in the car now and a lot of driving on tour and for research. I have a really hard time listening to fiction as audio books.

Jason Blitman: 56:35

Me too.

M.L. Rio: 56:36

I don't know why. It's just like I, I want to hear the writer's voice in their own voice, which is what I feel like I get when I'm reading on the page. But when I'm in the car and someone else is reading it to me, it just doesn't click in the same way. But nonfiction just feels like listening to a long lecture. And if it's something I'm interested in, I can do that for hours and hours.

Jason Blitman: 56:56

Okay, so you're reading about the history of gunpowder. This is your nonfiction right now. You said you read simultaneously. What is your fiction that you're reading?

M.L. Rio: 57:03

So I'm also reading John Ray's book, gone to the Wolves. I am doing an event with him at The Strand for my own book launch, and I have to just shout out this book because it is one of the best books about fandom and music and live music in particular that I've ever read. And I'm a music writer, so I spend a lot of time reading that sort of stuff. But John really gets it, what it's like to be a young person in a bad situation, and for your love of a certain kind of art or music to become your whole identity and how that can be problematic when you become an adult and you're like, oh, that's the only identity I have.

Jason Blitman: 57:41

Oh my God. Yeah. As I get older, I both feel so stuck in my ways. But also like I need to expand my identity because I don't want to be stuck in who I've been forever.

M.L. Rio: 57:58

Yeah. And you're a theater person. I'm also a theater person.

Jason Blitman: 58:02

I know.

M.L. Rio: 58:04

I feel like when you grow up in that environment and just learning to be a new character every, like six months or whatever it is, I've definitely co-opted that in my adult life in that my entire personality shifts with whatever I'm working on creatively. But I think that's fun. It doesn't bother me to be a little bit of a chameleon.

Jason Blitman: 58:21

It's interesting because I imagine as an actor you're shifting from project to project, and as a writer you're shifting from project to project, whereas a podcast host I am. I'm leaning into more sort of big picture books, like My Life, what My Personality Was, theater. Now my personality is books. So it's there's it's less specific than maybe what you're talking about, but I I am jealous of it

M.L. Rio: 58:50

So I have to ask, do you have a podcast persona that is different from your personality off the microphone or is this just unvarnished you? Because I know different people do it different ways.

Jason Blitman: 59:00

Yeah, no, this is a hundred percent me. For better or for worse, I dunno.

M.L. Rio: 59:05

I think it's absolutely for better. I definitely have to put on my like author persona hat when I'm gonna do events.'cause I think my undiluted personality is far less. Charming.

Jason Blitman: 59:17

interesting. What do you need to do to turn into that or to turn that part of you on? I.

M.L. Rio: 59:23

It's honestly a lot of costuming. I really like to dress the part just'cause, and this was a thing that I learned actually when I was an actor. I spent many years in drag on stage because I did a lot of Shakespeare. I did a lot of shows where there were a lot of male characters, but not a lot of male actors. I'm tall, I have a relatively low voice, so I think I went four years playing men on stage without ever playing a woman. But I actually didn't mind that'cause I got to play a lot of cool parts. I wouldn't have gotten to play otherwise. And when I was first getting into this, when I was like 16 or 17, I figured out that the thing I really needed was the shoes. I like, couldn't find the character until I had the right shoes because it actually changed the way I walked. And literally stepping into a character that way became like my starting point. So when I'm gonna go on a big book tour, like I'm about to do, I try to stay on theme with the book.'cause that makes it fun for everyone. Plus it's a book that's about vintage clothes. So

Jason Blitman: 1:00:20

So what are your shoes?

M.L. Rio: 1:00:22

I, so I have a couple of different pairs of shoes. I have. A pair of vintage Mexican snake skin cowboy boots that I wear all the time.

Jason Blitman: 1:00:32

Okay, those are gonna be your hot wax shoes.

M.L. Rio: 1:00:34

those will be one pair of my hot wax shoes. Yeah. I did also, my, my treat to myself was I bought the sluttiest pair of boots I've ever owned. They're Steve Madden, like bright red leather. They're gonna be real fun.

Jason Blitman: 1:00:48

Amazing. That's so fun. You mentioned history of Shakespeare. And I'm obsessed that we both have a background in theater, but also Shakespeare is scary to me and I think a lot of other people too. So in fact, my first job out of college and my first professional job in general was at the public theater in New York City,

M.L. Rio: 1:01:11

Oh, that's amazing.

Jason Blitman: 1:01:12

and I worked there for three and a half years, and I almost didn't even apply because their official name is the New York Shakespeare Festival. And I am like, I don't wanna work at a place called the New York Shakespeare Festival, which of course the public theater is how it's colloquially known produces free Shakespeare in the park. They're also the home of, and the birthplace of Hamilton, the musical and fun home and, incredible plays that have withstood the test of time forever. But, yeah, I almost didn't apply because of the Shakespeare in the name. So I'm very curious, like if you have a, if you were trying to convince a person who's afraid of picking up a Shakespeare play or going to see one, what would you say to them?

M.L. Rio: 1:02:00

I would say go see a play before you try to read one. Because these are, these plays are not really designed to be read sitting down and throughout the early modern period, they did start publishing plays that were designed for reading. Which is partly why sometimes you'll get scripts of plays. Like the uncut Hamlet would take four hours to perform, but nobody ever performs Hamlet uncut. And seeing Shakespeare performed by actors and directors who really know what they're doing makes it so much more accessible. Like I did my master's degree at King's College, London and the Globe across the pond, which was really lovely. And they do a thing every year with Deutsche Bank. I think they still do it. Where they do a Shakespeare play cut down to a tight 45 minutes for like the equivalent of eighth graders. And it's always very much, it's great. It's so much fun'cause it's very much geared towards that audience. And it is fun. It's so much fun. Like one that I often will start people with if they've never been to a Shakespeare play and they're like, I don't think I'm gonna enjoy this. The Bridge Theater did a production of a Midsummer Night's Dream. That was one of the best productions. I've ever seen. It's so accessible. It's so delightful. There's Beyonce, there's, it's just like you can't not enjoy it. So it's a great like gateway drug. But I think the thing that people get scared of with Shakespeare is thinking, oh my God, I have to understand all of it right away. And you really don't. It's like learning a foreign language because the grammatical structure is different. The poetic meter is different than what we're used to. You don't need to know all that to enjoy a Shakespeare play, but I think we scare people away from it, particularly when we teach it like in high school, in middle school, because what we do is we teach the plot, we teach that in Hamlet, spoiler alert, a Danish prince dies. We don't teach how to actually read the language the way you would if you were in a Spanish class or a French class. And that actually makes Shakespeare, I think, so much more fun because it becomes like a little literary treasure hunt. Like when you learn something as simple as the difference between you and thou, when those words get used you like the formal Ted in Spanish is a much more respectful way to address another person who's a higher rank than you. Whereas thou is someone who is usually of a lower status or someone you have an intimate relationship with. So as soon as you know that listening to which characters are using those words on stage just makes it that much more interesting. So it's I think of it as like a delightful kind of literary treasure hunt. And the other thing that I'll say is people mistakenly, I think, treat Shakespeare as highbrow when Shakespeare was popular. Entertainment in his own moment. Macbeth does have all these big, amazing speeches about life and death and guilt, but there's also an entire scene that's made up of knock-knock jokes.

Jason Blitman: 1:04:46

Yeah. You have, I feel like, have lived many lives, theater writing, but also like Shakespeare and also like villains, and also, swaying into hot Wax. If this chapter of your life right now had a title, what would that title be?

M.L. Rio: 1:05:07

Oh gosh. Go big or go home. I think it would be, I, between villains and Hot Wax, I went on such a weird journey with this, with these books when villains first came out, and a lot of people don't know this, it actually didn't sell. When villains came out, it flopped. Nobody read it. And my own publisher was like, Nope, we are not interested in anything else from you because this is not making money. And that was really tough.'cause I was really young. I was like 25 and. Experiencing this crushing reality that the lackluster sales of my first book were gonna make it impossible for me to ever get published again. Which is how I ended up pivoting back to academia. It was like, oh, okay. Clearly the clearly the writing thing is not gonna happen. And then happily, for us villains became this like surprise sleeper hit in 20, 20, like three years after the book had been published. And I was at this weird crossroads of what do we go out with? Because suddenly people were like, oh, okay, where is the next novel? And I was coming out of the dissertation being like, sorry, what people actually do wanna see a book from me? And the safe thing to do would've been to write something very, like if we were villains because it was doing well and publishing loves a sure thing. But I was 10 years older. I'd had some, I'd lived some crazy life in between. I was not the same person who wrote that book and I never wanted to write the same book over and over again. So I said to my agent, I was like, okay, let's take a risk. Let's go out with the rock and roll book that already died on sub four times and see if we can make some magic happen. And I just gave it my, all with that book. I swung for the fences even though it was really risky and we actually managed to get one over the wall. Found an amazing editor who has been so cool to work with, and especially just like with the way the world is going where everything good feels endangered. I'm in a place of, I don't wanna spend a minute doing something that doesn't feel worth it.

Jason Blitman: 1:07:00

What is your elevator pitch for hot wax?

M.L. Rio: 1:07:04

Yes. The elevator pitch for hot wax that I gave to my agent was, this is Spinal Tap meets Thelma and Louise.

Jason Blitman: 1:07:10

Do you wanna unpack that a little

M.L. Rio: 1:07:11

yes.

Jason Blitman: 1:07:12

That was like a really succinct, quick elevator ride. And now what if someone got off of you and said, let me walk you to your office. Tell me more,

M.L. Rio: 1:07:18

Tell me more. That's always the goal

Jason Blitman: 1:07:20

right? Yes, exactly.

M.L. Rio: 1:07:22

is leave them wanting a little bit more, show business. But yeah, so it is a book about two westward road trips. It's two timelines. One in the summer of 1989 and one in the summer of 2018. And on the first timeline, we have a 10-year-old girl named Suzanne who is on a disastrous concert tour with her father's rock band, and then 29 years later, she is on the run from some stuff in her personal life and finds herself kind of retracing the steps of that concert tour 30 years ago and unpacking a lot of what happened that changed her life forever. Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 1:07:57

So what was this living in your car research trip like for you?

M.L. Rio: 1:08:03

It was. It was awesome. I loved it. I finished my PhD program in May of 2023, and it had been a really rough couple of years because graduate school is like rough period. I was also living in Washington DC during the first dump truck administration COVID was happening. I had some real serious personal tragedy. I had a terrible health crisis. And I was just in a bad place. And by the time I was done with that, I was like ready to chew my own leg off to get loose. And I had this experience one day of driving out of dc I don't remember where I was going. And it felt like an anvil was coming off my shoulders. And I realized with this like lightning bolt of clarity, I was like, oh, I hate it here. I hate it here and I need to leave and I need to be traveling.'cause I've always traveled a lot in my life and I didn't realize how much I was missing that. Being in the same place for six years. So I sold most of my stuff, put the rest of it in storage, and then spent 18 months living out of a two-door Honda and broke my leg in the middle of that, which

Jason Blitman: 1:09:06

Oh my God.

M.L. Rio: 1:09:07

a little more complicated. But I got into this great rhythm of, I, I love a road trip, especially when I don't have a precise time that I need to be in a particular place. So it was a lot of me just driving to research locations and. Living as much like the people in the book as I could. I unfortunately could not afford to buy a vintage trailer, although I did go stay in a couple for that reason. But yeah, it was a cool rhythm of like I would get up and get in the car and drive for four hours and take weird little estate and country highways'cause the interstate is where fun goes to die. And just anytime I saw something interesting, I would pull over. There's a circus in town. There's a weird museum over

Jason Blitman: 1:09:48

ball of Twine.

M.L. Rio: 1:09:50

The giant pistachio in Alamogordo. I have been to see that pistachio a number of times. And then I'd stop at a diner in the middle of nowhere and sit and write for two hours and then get back in the car, drive another four hours and crash for the night and wherever. And just absorbing so much life around me in so many different places. Made it so easy to. Put that on the page. A lot of the conversations that you see are real conversations that I overheard. A lot of the locations that you see are based on real places I went. Just'cause I am a method writer.

Jason Blitman: 1:10:22

Yeah, I see that.

M.L. Rio: 1:10:23

yeah. Which I think is a result of having been an actor for so long.

Jason Blitman: 1:10:27

Yeah. It's so funny that you say that because it goes back to the shoes, right? That's

M.L. Rio: 1:10:32

It's all about the shoes.

Jason Blitman: 1:10:33

yeah. No, really. So what is the process like then coming, for lack of a better term, like coming back to earth? What is after? After such an intense. Time to then let the dust settle and now what's, what does this feel like?

M.L. Rio: 1:10:52

I'll let you know when it feels like the dust is settled, because technically I have lived in this in this house for. A little over a year, but it's still very rare that I'm here for more than two days in a row. I'm still not fully moved in. I'm so glad you can't see this corner over here because it's literally just like boxes of books to the ceiling and I am getting ready to leave on tour again in 10 days, and I'm going to 40 cities in three, four countries in two and a half months. So I'm still very in this kind of like on the road touring life mode. But I am looking ahead to 2026 when I'm ready to like, settle down a little bit for a little while. I do have some residencies lined up, which I'm really looking forward to because increasingly email is like the modern hydra. Like you answer one and it grows five heads. There are five replies, and you just can never get away from it.

Jason Blitman: 1:11:45

Yeah.

M.L. Rio: 1:11:46

that cuts into my creative time so much that unless I actually take dedicated time away from my desk, I don't get anything done.

Jason Blitman: 1:11:55

Yeah. All right. So it's very, it's almost cyclical.

M.L. Rio: 1:11:59

yeah. Very

Jason Blitman: 1:12:00

now you could pay attention to this. Now it's this, now it's putting on the costume and doing this other thing. Yeah. Circling back to books for a minute. Was there something in particular that really had an impact on you as a young person or, with a background in theater to then transition into writing? Was there a thing that sparked that for you?

M.L. Rio: 1:12:26

The funny thing is my writing and my theater stuff moved exactly in tandem. I started writing really young. I also started acting really young. I think I, the first play that I was in was a little community theater thing. I think I was like six. Oh, that's not true. Actually, I was in a Huggies commercial as a baby.'cause my baby.

Jason Blitman: 1:12:43

knew I recognized you.

M.L. Rio: 1:12:45

I've actually been topless on tv. Fun fact. Yeah. When I was a toddler we had a babysitter who like really wanted to be a movie star and she used to take me and my brother to auditions for commercials and things and pretend that we were her kids. But yeah I started writing at a really young age and got serious about theater at about the same time. I discovered Shakespeare by accident in my parents' library when I was like nine, which I remember very vividly, and most of it went straight over my head. But something about the language like felt really important and something I wanted to understand. So I got weirdly obsessed with that. I was a voracious reader. I did not have a lot of friends. I was like, an angry queer little punk in Catholic school, and all of my friends were imaginary in one way or another. But I think that learning storytelling in the theater really did influence the way I learned storytelling as a writer, which is partly why my books are so dialogue heavy. I learned how to tell stories with almost nothing but dialogue'cause that's what you do in the theater. And all of my stories are ensemble stories. I rarely have one main character. It's a bunch of different people playing off each other because I've been part of a troop my whole life in one way or another. And I did eventually become a performance studies scholar and that informs all of my work because rock and roll is every bit as performative as Shakespeare. It's just a different kind of performance and

Jason Blitman: 1:14:07

It's a version of drag.

M.L. Rio: 1:14:08

Yeah, exactly. Oh, it's like the gender stuff in like seventies, eighties, rock and roll is absolutely fascinating the way that gets negotiated on stage. And I love reading performance like that. So even though I'm not really a performer in my own right anymore, except, when I put the boots on and do the author

Jason Blitman: 1:14:25

Yeah.

M.L. Rio: 1:14:26

That vocabulary is always there and that structure is always there of how I think about narrative and character.

Jason Blitman: 1:14:32

So you say you were a voracious reader when you were a kid. Is there something that sticks out as just like a book that you've always cherished?

M.L. Rio: 1:14:40

Yeah, I mean I, I did get very into campus novels because I was addicted to that kind of academic environment because that was one of the few things I was good at as a kid. I remember vividly reading John S's book, a separate piece when I was in sixth grade and it was the first book I read that really upset me on a deep, visceral level. Just'cause it was so cosmically unfair and it's just devastating what happens in that book. But I was obsessed with it and I reread it every year for a bunch of years and just, it was my first encounter with fiction that. Felt so real. I was having a, like a physical response to it. And I'd had that experience with live performance before, but I was like, oh, this is the kind of book that I wanna write is a book that can feel like it just punched you in the gut. Or like it just kiss you in the mouth. If it's a good thing. If you get that like warm, fuzzy feeling. Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 1:15:34

you feel something, right? Oh, I love that. It's been a very long time since a separate piece has been in my universe. Maybe I should crack it open and.

M.L. Rio: 1:15:45

It's short, it's a quick read. It's a, it's worth revisiting. I've revisited it as at a bunch of different ages and I get something different out of it every time.

Jason Blitman: 1:15:52

Yeah. Oh, that's so cool. I know. I, at this, in this chapter of my life, I don't have time to reread

M.L. Rio: 1:16:00

No, I don't get that.

Jason Blitman: 1:16:01

It's funny because one of my favorite books of the year is Broken Country by Claire Leslie Hall, and I am doing an in-person event with her in a month, and I've had her on the podcast. So I, I like read the book a long time ago, but now I have to reread it and to interview her in person. So I'm like excited that I have an excuse to reread the book.

M.L. Rio: 1:16:21

Yeah.

Jason Blitman: 1:16:22

No, it's, that's. Really fun. ML Rio, I am so happy to have you. Thank you so much for being here. Everyone go get hot Wax, which is out now, wherever you get your books and have a wonderful rest of your day.

M.L. Rio: 1:16:35

Thank you. You too.

Jason Blitman: 1:16:37

Eliana ml. Thank you both so much for being here. Uh, everyone go check out their books to the moon and back and hot wax, both of which are out now, and I will see you next week. Have a great rest of your day. Bye.