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Narratives that feature the history and intrigue of Black Southern culture draw me in. De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s 2019 debut novel In West Mills featured characters mining the untold to understand their place in their small town and the world. The book gave a multigenerational look at secrets and revelations, and his second novel, Decent People, adds the urgent draw of an unsolved crime with a sleuth driven by love and a sense of justice.
A character in his first novel refers to another character as “blood but not family,” a clear insight that echoes through both books. Winslow likewise builds the bonds that are family but not blood, showing how people find and create kinship and support.
Decent People begins with Jo Wright, set to retire in West Mills after decades in New York. She is on the verge of completing the dream, finally sharing a home with her long-distance love, Olympus Seymore. That plan is upended when Lymp is accused of the murder of his three half-siblings. Their estrangement seems reason enough for the sheriff to assume Lymp’s guilt and stop investigating. This is where Jo begins the challenging task of finding the truth.
Winslow sets the story in the 1970s. The official markers of Jim Crow are gone, but the West Mills canal remains the divider between the Black and white communities, a parallel to so many remaining divisions. The town is a junction point that features Black characters seeking exodus, those returning, and many making do where they are. Queer characters search for community amid judgment. The reckoning between unacknowledged children and their parents becomes central. Adult friendships and intimacies are solidified. The family tensions coexist with the solace of chosen kin and unlikely allies.
We spoke via telephone and email about distance, unknowing, and returning to a complicated home.
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The Rumpus: While reading Decent People, I thought about the literary and mystery bones of novels by Walter Mosley and Attica Locke. In addition to Black Southern settings and migration, they show characters finding answers that can be hard to reconcile. In In West Mills, a central character wants to “unknow” what she has just heard. How does the desire to “unknow” work as an idea in Decent People?
De’Shawn Charles Winslow: Once the person learns something about their history or a close friend or family member’s history, they have to change the way they view themselves and their personal situations. Sometimes that knowing can become work, an opportunity, or a burden to face a bunch of realities they’ve been ignoring. Well, it forces you to face the fact that they are imperfect.
Rumpus: You set this story in the 1970s, so you had characters with a backstory during Jim Crow, and they’re dealing with the aftermath of major legal changes in America. The book is in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Loving decision, but you show clearly that changes are slow and challenging in West Mills. How did you balance that will to change versus the more general idea of progress?
Winslow: There was a continuity that I didn’t realize was happening. The town and the people weren’t changing. The town was changing physically with new businesses popping up, but the people’s mindsets were very much the same. Black people stay out of white folks’ way and largely vice versa, and you have the respectability politics of it all.
My mother is the second oldest of nine children, and she and the first three or four of them went to segregated schools. When her younger siblings graduated high school, it was integrated, but I also know that my aunts and uncles, the younger ones, didn’t have close white friends. Even though they were in an integrated school, things were still highly segregated. That speaks to what you just said about the will to change being there.
Rumpus: One way to find some change was through migration, and In West Mills centered characters who migrated. You feature characters leaving for educational opportunities. Queer characters leave to find community. The reasons for leaving were always central to character development. How did that movement away from West Mills become important as you shaped identity?
Winslow: Some characters from In West Mills definitely moved away to find more people, more community, and feel less like pariahs. I know education was available, and I won’t say a lot, but I know a fair amount was available to Black people in parts of the South. But so many people went north because they felt there would be less resistance and maybe access to more types of education instead of just becoming a schoolteacher, a nurse, or a nurse’s assistant. Leaving was about trying to protect themselves and succeed in a way they felt the South wouldn’t allow.
Rumpus: On the other side of that, Decent People shows the hopes and the challenges of returning. What factors shaped this reverse migration that’s central in the novel?
Winslow: The returning is about rest in a way. I would imagine that it was also work for them, leaving to go and pursue safety, community, and higher education, moving to these very fast-paced places with a lot of competition and a higher cost of living. By coming back home with some money and some education, they felt they could rest a little bit easier.
Rumpus: The mystery in Decent People is compelling, and I don’t want to ask anything that might disrupt that reading experience, but I want to ask about the sense of truth-telling that the characters manage. Someone in Decent People says, “There was no way out, so lies would have to suffice.” Let’s talk about lies and secrets as different literary elements. I’m interested in how you used the unspoken, unsaid, or untrue and how those are so necessary to the storytelling, especially when the lies and secrets are protective.
Winslow: As a writing technique, I think having secrets gives the reader a question that’s dangling out there. If they remember that, most readers grasp that question and carry it with them. Propels them through the book. It creates that suspense, but it also creates the opportunity for more bad behavior because people are trying to hold on to these secrets or these lies. They just keep committing these acts, whether big or small, to protect the lie or protect the secret. That creates suspense and a propulsive experience for the reader.
Rumpus: Jo returns to West Mills, but her closest ally and sounding board is her brother Herschel, who supports her from New York. How did that relationship become central to the storytelling?
Winslow: I wanted Herschel to be a little bit like a therapist to Jo. I kept him in New York the whole time because he was old enough when they left to know so much, and I didn’t want him to end up becoming Jo’s co-sleuth. I wanted him to be like, “Listen, I worked hard for this life, and I have safety here in New York as a queer man. This is your battle because you want this man, and you figure it out. Here is a little bit of advice I can offer you as someone who lived there and is older.” I wanted them to have a close relationship.
Rumpus: Herschel is a gay man who found some distance from judgment and hate, and we see that harm threatening the next generation of queer children in West Mills who are too young to seek the safety of exodus. How did you define that harm in both novels?
Winslow: I was showing a combination of patriarchy and religious beliefs—and then some people would say that’s the same thing depending on the religion. In small towns that are largely Christian, people uphold these teachings, these beliefs that a man should be supreme in the home or that he should procreate so that the family name can carry on. People who aren’t even necessarily religious can uphold these ideals of hypermasculinity, and sometimes I don’t even know if they realize it. Some will try to uphold those beliefs so much that they will put their children through different types of torture, whether it’s physical or emotional, to uphold an ideal.
Rumpus: The book gives us a sense of migration and return, and I’m also interested in how those journeys work in your life as a writer. Ernest. J. Gaines spoke about living in California while writing about Louisiana. Jesmyn Ward has touched on her return to Mississippi. What was your experience writing about the South from a distance?
Winslow: I was in New York, and then I went to Iowa. That’s where I started In West Mills. I was able to visualize my hometown so much more keenly, having not lived there in fifteen years. I believe it allowed me to write about the place with a little bit more compassion than if I had tried to write these books living there. I really do. It amazes me how vividly I was able to see the town of South Mills, North Carolina, and a lot of little details just came flooding in. I would write the name of the road down, and I’d say, “Let me change that. Let me make a name up for that because it was getting too real.” The distance allowed me to be able to write about the place with a little bit more compassion and with less tsk-tsk.
Rumpus: I’m thinking about the idea that writing and publishing mainly default to heterosexual relationships. Have you seen that at work in your experience?
Winslow: A little bit. Because heterosexuality is what’s given to us in the mainstream, sometimes I fear that if I wrote an all-out queer book, I would have a lower readership. That is a real fear that I have and something publishing needs to work on. There’s a lot of queer representation out there, but I have seen articles about how queer books by and about queer people are published at a much lower rate than books that center completely around straight people. I definitely want to acknowledge writers like Robert Jones, Jr. and his novel, The Prophets, because he took a really big leap to write about two enslaved gay men. I think that book is going to open doors for a lot of young queer writers, especially Black male queer writers.
Rumpus: The Prophets was groundbreaking work. Any upcoming releases you’re excited about?
Winslow: Maurice Carlos Ruffin has a forthcoming book, The American Daughters, that is historical and centered around Black women in New Orleans. So, I’m excited about that. Regina Porter is working on her second book, which might be linked to The Travelers.
Rumpus: You’ve shown the importance of a deep connection between place and identity, especially when we consider the historical period. In your teaching life, how do you encourage students and other writers to develop those links between setting and character?
Winslow: I advise my students who write realism to try to know a great deal about the place they are writing about. I believe that if a writer knows a place well, the characters will, too. That familiarity with place tends to guide characters’ decisions and/or the plot.
Rumpus: Do you care to share any news on the next project?
Winslow: All I’ll say for now is that I’m stepping away from the fictional town of West Mills for my next project. I’m going to use a real North Carolina town, and it’ll be set in the ‘80s. No murders this time, but there will be deaths.
Rumpus: What lessons from In West Mills were most helpful as you completed Decent People?
Winslow: Writing Decent People felt like the first time all over again, so I honestly don’t know, haha.
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Author photo by Julie R Keresztes
Felicia Chiao was working as an industrial designer at IDEO when A24 reached out and told her that Daniel Kwan, director of their highest-grossing film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, wanted to collaborate. The project was not a movie, but one of two picture books that Kwan had written (24 Minutes to Bedtime and I’ll Get to the Bottom of This), to be published by A24 as part of their expansion into children’s literature. Neither Kwan, Chiao, nor A24 had gone through the process of publishing a picture book from start to finish, which is perhaps why the final product is so strange and delightful.
Much in the way that Everything Everywhere All At Once layers dimensions in the multiverse, 24 Minutes to Bedtime layers dimensions of time. Each set of facing pages counts one minute closer to Winston’s eight o’clock bedtime. “Why can’t we stay up later?” he mourns, to which his dad answers, “Because . . . this is all the time you get.” With the help of a time machine, Winston fills every minute with chaos, as four different versions of him time-jump between pages, running from the inevitable. Chiao embedded mini storylines throughout the illustrations, and readers can choose to follow any of the Winstons, countless hidden easter eggs, or his frazzled parents. As Winston tries to slow the minutes, his parents wish they could fast forward. When he finally falls asleep in their arms though, they realize that truly, this is all the time they get.
Chiao has been drawing since she was a child, and thought of it not as a profession, but as a coping mechanism. Struggling to express her feelings, she drew in notebook after notebook through her school years and beyond. She began sharing her drawings on Instagram, but her account didn’t take off until the pandemic. When lockdowns began, she steadily gained an audience, and now has a following of over half a million. At the beginning of 2022, she left her job to become a full-time illustrator. On a phone call from Texas where she was visiting family for the holidays, she spoke with me about being part of this inexperienced yet brilliant team, working with Daniel Kwan, her own artistic process, and how her mental health has both shaped her work and transformed within it.
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The Rumpus: Looking at your body of work, one of the things I notice is the dreamy state it creates. There’s a sense of both mundanity and magic, a melancholy about the passage of time, but also humor and joy. Your art seems like a perfect fit for something that Daniel Kwan would write. How did this partnership come along?
Felicia Chiao: A24 had a list of people they were interested in working with, and Daniel had his own list. It seems I was on both, so they reached out to me. I knew A24 as the movie house, but I didn’t know anything about publishing or children’s books, and they didn’t really have a clear idea of how it was going to be done either, so it was new for all of us.
Rumpus: Traditionally, a children’s book author and illustrator might work separately, but it seems there was so much integration between the text and the images. Did you and Daniel work closely together on these things, or follow a more traditional model?
Chiao: I originally anticipated the more traditional model. I thought they were going to give me a storyboard and I was going to translate it into my style. But on one of the very first calls with everyone, they said, “We don’t know what we want the characters to look like or how we want anything done,” and they turned to me and asked, “Do you want to help us figure that out?” This wasn’t what I signed up for originally, but I’m glad it turned out that way because it gave me a lot more freedom.
Rumpus: As I was reading the book, I was thinking the family looked a bit like Daniel’s.
Chiao: I hadn’t actually seen a picture of his kid until later in the process, but, you know, every Asian child has that bowl cut. Originally, I’d drawn the dad as a bald man with a mustache, very stereotypical, and the mom with her hair up in a bun. They said, “Actually, we’re aiming for the A24 audience now—Millennials becoming parents—so the dad can be a little more hip.” I realized both dads on the video call were wearing beanies and had long hair, so I thought, “Well, I’ll take from life.”
Rumpus: What was the creative process of working with Daniel like?
Chiao: We would go through his stick figure storyboard online together and try to catch all the errors, because it’s a very complex book with connecting lines in different chronological orders. So there was a lot of conversation, a lot of back and forth. For example, triple-checking that the pajamas matched up on the right page, and that what each version of the character was talking about made sense in the time jumps. I didn’t really understand this book until I had to draw every single page.
It was also an interesting process because I work traditionally. I don’t do anything digital really. For a book, especially with the repeating imagery of this one, we had to tailor it to fit my process. I was able to make a few drawings and scan them, then I would Photoshop in the different elements and characters and move around the speech bubbles that I hand-lettered.
It was a very strange process because of the way we all work—the A24 team versus Daniel, versus my abilities and the tools I had—to make this book come to life. We thought we would be done in June or March of this year and we finished maybe August or September. It all started in November last year, before Everything Everywhere All At Once came out.
Rumpus: The book reminds me of Everything Everywhere All at Once in the way it plays with time and dimension, and how there are so many threads to track. I imagine it was a challenge to illustrate.
Chiao: Yeah, I was having a really hard time in the beginning figuring out the book. Then when I went to the screening and saw Everything Everywhere All at Once, all of it clicked. Suddenly, it made a lot of sense. I got what he wanted, and what he was doing creatively. After that, it made the book a little easier.
Rumpus: I can see how that would happen. Artists are often preoccupied with getting at deeper truths around the same themes, and there were many that crossed over between this book and the film.
Chiao: Yeah, there was that vibe of nothing matters, do what you want, but everything actually matters so much. Wrestling with that idea was inspiring. A lot of times, I think artists are paralyzed by the fear of making something bad, so they procrastinate or don’t start a piece at all. When I first started concepting the house and the characters for the book, I spent so much time agonizing over small details. I drew several versions of Clarence, the stuffed rabbit, and nothing felt quite right. Eventually I just said “fuck it” and made what we called “long Clarence.” Did the shape really matter in terms of the story? No. But giving the stuffed toy an irregular shape added to the overall vibe of the story.
Do what you can or want and have fun with it; you’ll be surprised how much impact something you’ve made can have on other people when you’re not stressing about how to do it the “best” way. I’m so used to consultancy life where you just deliver what you think the client wants. And Daniel is such a big proponent of saying, “Well, what do you think? What do you want to do? What’s interesting to you? Let’s make it happen.” It was a really lovely reminder that I’m going to enjoy the work more if I do what I think is best. They hired me for my work, so I should be able to push my ideas a little bit stronger.
Rumpus: The subtitle of the book is “a 4-dimensional bedtime story,” and its nonlinear nature invites the reader to revisit it again and again, even more than the usual return to a children’s book, because you can read it differently each time. You did such a wonderful job of creating these layered reads and offering something new to discover with each one.
Chiao: Well, thanks. In my drawings that are interiors, I always love adding little details and objects all around the page. I think it gets people to look at your work a lot longer, especially in the time of social media where you stare at something for three seconds and keep scrolling. People tell me that they stop and zoom in, and they look for all the pieces. When you spend twenty to thirty hours on a drawing, you want people to look at it.
Growing up, I loved Richard Scarry. He had a book about vehicles and all I remember is looking for gold bugs on all the pages. I don’t remember the story. I don’t remember the rest of the book. I just remember every night I would go look for the bug even though I knew where it was already. So, I like the idea of a kid being able to enjoy little elements of the illustration and the art, even if they’re not reading per se.
Rumpus: Can you tell me more about your influences? For this book but also for your work in general?
Chiao: I didn’t use too much for this project besides the vague nostalgia of the books I grew up on. I knew this wasn’t about reading a book front to back like adults do. It’s more of a journey. I knew whatever Daniel was coming up with probably wasn’t going to be a standard children’s book, and I didn’t want to have that gut feeling where I’d be thinking, well, that’s not how it’s done. I also felt that if I looked at a stack of children’s books now, it would influence me too much in a way that isn’t authentic to my style, which is kind of how I handle life, too.
I don’t like looking at too many artists or illustrators because I don’t want to inadvertently copy what they’re doing. A lot of my work is inspired through film and music and the world around. If a song I like has a strong emotion in it, I try to go off that feeling. I want to portray that in my illustrations. My biggest inspiration, I think, is the artistic process itself. I like making things, so how I feel while I’m making it, that’s what translates into the drawing.
Rumpus: I was sharing your work with a writer friend, and she remarked on how every image felt like being dropped into the middle of a story. When you create your own art, does it stem from a larger narrative playing out in your mind?
Chiao: I think I’m very lucky that there’s a storytelling aspect people can connect with, because that isn’t done on purpose. Images show up in my head. Then there’s a queue in my brain of what drawings I’m going to do next, and they stack up until I can get them out. A lot of times, it’s because I love the materials I use, which are alcohol-based markers and pens. I’m dabbling a bit with watercolor now. I know my tools well though. So I’ll think, “Oh, I wonder if I can make colors a certain way,” or “I want to draw this rounder shape,” and it’s just purely selfish. It’s the idea of, oh, I really want to draw a certain shape or certain lighting, or maybe sometimes when things are chaotic, I want to draw one point perspective interiors, because grids and perspective have rules.
Rumpus: It makes so much sense to me that during the pandemic, everyone found your work. The sentiments that I either read in your captions or find in your images signal that here is an artist who really has her finger on the pulse of what we’re all going through.
Chiao: It’s a little sad because I’ve been drawing the figure alone in interiors for a long time, and when the lockdown happened, my work blew up. I recognized, “Oh, suddenly everyone’s depressed at the same time.”
I think because I’ve had mental illnesses for a very long time; it’s not something I’m actively fighting against anymore. A lot of my work is about exploring what it’s like to live with it. There are still good days and then you’re having a bad day, and they’re both equally right. The little blob creature I draw that a lot of people seem to like is mostly anxiety. It’s a mix of things, but it used to be within the figure’s body impacting it. Now it hangs around in the house like a cat as a companion. People have interpreted it 100 different ways. I don’t actually know what’s right, because I’m not thinking too hard about what the drawing means. I do a drawing a week. So I’m glad people are finding meaning in it because sometimes I just want to draw a grid. I’ll put up a drawing that was done purely for technical reasons, and people will comment, “Oh my God, I feel this.” And I’m so curious: What are you feeling?
Rumpus: That’s part of what’s beautiful about your work. You leave space for the viewer to fill it with what they need. I noticed in 24 Minutes to Bedtime that there are multiple pages with illustrations and no words. In the beginning there’s an empty landscape, then the frame of the house being built, which I really only appreciated after I’d gotten to the last pages where you see the decay of the house. It was such a poignant way to show that this is all the time we have and it’s so fleeting. Was having these images without text part of the plan from the beginning?
Chiao: That was all Daniel [Kwan]. You just described exactly what he wanted people to feel. I’m so glad that came across because at first we knew we wanted the beginning scenes of the field and then the house showing up, but I did question the ending because I thought it looks like they’ve all died. We decided to stick with it though, because the story is talking about the passage of time. Even though the parents are so stressed and so tired, they recognize that this is all the time we get. Even if in the moment it doesn’t seem like the best thing ever, we have to appreciate this time.
I didn’t exactly have “this is all the time we get” in my mind before this project, but I had a similar thought in my work about “maybe this is all there is.” It’s the idea that so many of us are waiting for things to work out, for the next big experience or memory to define life by, but maybe life is really just about appreciating the day-to-day ups and downs that make up the majority of our lives. Stuff that seems simple now may carry a lot of nostalgia later, and I think the best we can do is to be grateful that we get to experience it all.
Daniel came at it from a film perspective of having opening shots and closing shots, and the text that comes in like credits. So it’s also been interesting working on a book with someone who normally does movies, because the vision is not what we’re used to seeing in books.
Rumpus: It feels full circle that you aren’t influenced necessarily by specific illustrators, but by film and by music. This partnership between the two of you seems like such a great fit for that reason as well.
Chiao: I still can’t believe it happened. I’m glad it’s done but I’m so appreciative of the opportunity because I don’t regularly freelance, which has been good and bad. It’s like a rubber band. It was stretched out when I was working for other people. Now I purely do only what I want to do. With freelance, I have to give up a little bit of control, but this was one of the first times genuinely working with another creative person that has expanded my idea of what good work is and how I want to work.
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Self-portrait by author
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