Tatler’s Arts and Entertainment Editor Lael G. ’25 recently had the opportunity to speak with YA novelist Nic Stone, who was this year’s Mark J. Bebie ’70 Memorial Lecture speaker. Before even the first question, when our photographer Brady L. ’26 introduced himself, Stone told him to never apologize for taking up space that belonged to him. It’s these kinds of words of wisdom that, for many, made her such an engaging and important speaker, especially at the beginning of Black History Month. Lael’s conversation with Stone — which covered everything from her break into the world of publishing to her writing process, her goals for the future, and fangirling over Jason Reynolds — follows.
Lael G. ’25 (LG): On your website, you share that you were born in Atlanta and then also attended Spelman there. But it also says that you traveled to Israel to mentor teens, which we didn’t get to talk about at lunch. How did that experience feel? Even though most of your stories take place in the United States, did that travel inspire your writing in any way?
Nic Stone (NS): A hundred percent. It’s interesting because this isn’t something I’ve talked about much over the past year and a half or so, for good reason. There’s a lot of reactivity when you even say the word Israel. I was intensely evangelical Christian when I was in my late teens and early 20s, so I originally traveled to Israel, Palestine, for the sake of visiting the land where the Bible happened. And while I was there I met this young lady in Bethlehem, which is in the West Bank in Palestine. She was the only girl in a family of five kids. Her name was Grace, and her greatest ambition was to go to university in the UK. I remember thinking, “Okay, so just do it, right?” I think it took being abroad for me to recognize how American I am, even as an African American person. Because, if you want to go to college, just go to college, right? However, she couldn’t, and when I asked her why, she said, “Well, I don’t have a passport. And I said, “Oh, get a passport.” She said, “I can’t get a passport. I don’t have a country of nationality.” And that was just mind blowing to me. Her family had been in Bethlehem for five generations, and she had no country because that part of the world is unincorporated. And there are many undocumented people who have that experience. That helped me to realize how many fascinating stories I wasn’t hearing or that weren’t being told. That experience is what made me want to become a writer. I was 20 when I met her and grateful for the time that I spent abroad — all that I learned, all the ways that my life and my faith unraveled and had to be rebuilt. It was a wild time, but a very pivotal one.
LG: I recently read “Dear Martin,” and I thought it was really great. There was a lot I liked, but I’ll save that for another question. I was reading the dust jacket, and it says that it was conceptualized around analyzing current events through Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s eyes. What was the process like in bridging that gap between the past and present? Are there any current writers that help you connect that to younger audiences?
NS: I have this giant compendium of Dr. King’s books: his speeches, interviews, and sermons. The scary part for me was that, as I read, I recognized it wasn’t hard at all to make connections. So many of the things that were happening then — things that he was standing against — are still in play. There’s a little known speech from 1967, where he says out loud that his dream had become a nightmare, how he felt like he wasn’t making any progress. He was striving and striving and striving, and people were so resistant to the things that he wanted to accomplish. They were so resistant to the idea of equality; of Black people and white people sharing space; of treating Black people and people of color like human beings. It got very discouraging for him after a while. But I had to look at what had been accomplished.
There’s an author named Jason Reynolds, who also writes children’s literature. He is a master, and probably my biggest hero in the space. And there’s a book called “Invisible Man,” by Ralph Ellison. Oh my gosh, that book. I remember reading it and thinking, this is terrifying, that this book was written all of these years ago — 1952 — and there’s so much in here that I feel like I can still identify with in the 21st century. It’s amazing how things will come together. You determine a goal point, and you move towards it, and things fall into place. None of “Dear Martin” was fun to write, but it was necessary.
LG: Thinking back on “Dear Martin,” I can see how it was easy to make those connections between past and present.
NS: I’m looking forward to that book being historical fiction. I would love for it to fall out of relevance.
LG: Still on “Dear Martin,” one of the things I loved about it was how it used so many different writing styles throughout: switching from the journal entries, to third person narration, to pure dialogue. Reading through your website, it seems like you also utilize different writing to express yourself in different ways: your essays, your interviews. When you’re approaching any kind of writing or storytelling, how do you utilize different writing forms? How do you decide how you’ll write something?
NS: I am very ADHD. I also really love science. I listen to podcasts and read articles about how our brains are changing and evolving over time. People do not recognize how much social media has changed the way our brains process information. It has changed our attention spans. It has completely altered the way that we learn. For me, the switches in writing style were very strategic. Every few pages you read in Dear Martin, you see something different, which mimics the Instagram model. We live our lives within a scroll culture. A lot of all of my decision making around form has to do with wanting the reader to keep reading. I also think it’s fun, you know? I don’t want to write boring books, and incorporating these different elements also helps me to stay relevant to the audience that I’m writing for, which is a young audience.
LG: That transitions so well into my next question. I was looking through all the books you’ve written, and you’ve written so many different kinds of books, styles, and stories. Did you start out writing for younger audiences and then move into writing for a variety of people?
NS: Totally. I started out focused on YA. And then my buddy Jason Reynolds, whom I keep mentioning, wrote a middle-grade novel. He texted me and said, “You need to write a middle grade novel.” If Jason tells me I need to do it, I do it. From there, I wrote a teleplay — a pilot for one of my books, since I was working with a production company — and then I got into screenwriting, and now I’m continuing to expand. Because the beauty of writing is: All stories are stories. The sole difference is the audience. I don’t like the idea of being boxed in. I don’t like rules. I don’t like restrictions. If I feel like I’m experiencing restrictions, I will run counter to them. If someone tells me, “Oh, you’re such a great YA novelist. You should stay here.” I think, “Okay, well, I gotta go write something else. What do you mean I should stay here?”
LG: You write for younger audiences, but not only do you write for them, you also bring to them topics of large, systemic issues. You talk about how these things might apply to their lives and make them feel. In “Dear Martin,” for example, you discuss police brutality, and how this makes him feel angry, as if he’s complacent. When you picture younger people reading your work, how do you envision them responding to it: How they might feel after reading it? Or how they might want to take part in these kinds of movements?
NS: Honestly, I don’t think about it. It still astonishes me that people read anything that I write, to this day. I’ve done my job when I feel satisfied with what I’ve created. What happens after that is none of my business. I love when I get positive feedback, obviously, but I don’t go into writing to provoke any specific response. My goal with my writing is to explore, to gain a greater understanding of things, to organize my thoughts around different topics. Every single book I’ve written involves a lot of research. The other piece is that I find it very satisfying to craft stories. I’m just thrilled you read it at all.
