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Interview with Mik Everett, author of Turtle: The American Contrition of Franz Ferdinand

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Tell us about Turtle: The American Contrition of Franz Ferdinand.
The first thing you should know is that this book is not about rape. Everyone thinks it's going to be about rape. You read the excerpt on the back cover, or the first few pages of the book, and this girl tells her mother that her grandfather raped her, begs her mother to believe her. And everyone thinks the whole book is gonna be about rape.

No. It's about a mother who doesn't listen. In Turtle, both the mother and daughter come from another culture; specifically, the rural Creole of the Deep South. And they’re living here, in this normal sort of middle-class Midwest picket-fence suburbia, and they’re essentially suffering from culture shock. You take the values and habit that make you a good woman, a good wife, a good mother in one culture, and those same values and habits don’t necessarily make you a good person in another culture. And that can be very disappointing, very heartbreaking, especially if you’ve sacrificed a lot of yourself to adhere to those values.

What genre is it?
It’s non-fiction. No one wants to hear that. They’d rather it be some sort of dystopian novel.

What kind of readers will it appeal to?

It probably won’t appeal to the readers who are militantly feminist. It appeals more to the reader who sees injustice but feels powerless to stop it, to the reader who gets through life by laughing at dark satire, to the reader who wants a strong female character because that reader doesn’t believe that she can be one herself.

How long did it take to write?
Turtle took about seven years to write. I wrote and rewrote and rewrote, and eventually cut more than 100,000 words to publish this rather short book.

What was the most challenging part of your creative process?
The biggest challenge was that I essentially had to transform into a spider. I had all these stories, all these anecdotes, all these facts. I’d collected them painstakingly. I had to do research, in county records and in old newspapers, but more importantly I had to get people’s stories. And no one wanted to talk about it. No one would have ever talked if they knew I was writing a book. I had to be sneaky. So eventually I had all this information that I’d worked so hard to get, and none of it matched up. People’s accounts didn’t match newspaper accounts. People’s memories conflicted with county records. That became a major theme in the book. But still, I had to reconcile all this information, and weave a cohesive story out of it.

Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m 21 years old. I have a 3-year old daughter and a 3-year old son. I have a mixed-breed dog, mostly Catahoula, with webbed feet. My better half and I are Kansas natives, but last summer we decided to leave, so we packed up and drove to Colorado. We lived in a tent for about three weeks, and we moved all over Colorado, until we found a place to settle down. Now we live in Longmont, where we’re opening a book store, but it was an incredible experience. Neither of us had jobs or anywhere really to be. No responsibilities other than our children. We got up when the sun came up and cooked over a fire and sometimes a moose would just wander into our campsite and we’d just be like, ‘Hey.’ And we were always moving. We went up and down both sides of the Rockies about four times. It’s almost strange to be in the same place for a while now.

Have you got a blog where readers can keep up with your work?
Readers can check out my page on Facebook, on Twitter – @MissMikEverett – or on tumblr.

Where can we buy your book?
My book can be purchased on Amazon, where it also available as an e-book. You can’t walk into Barnes and Noble and buy a copy, but you can order it on their website and pick it up in-store.

It can also be bought at a handful of independent bookstores in Kansas and Colorado, like Watermark Books in Wichita or The Written World in Colorado Springs.

What’s next?
My better half and I are opening a bookstore called Brainfood in downtown Longmont. Our intent is to carry, you know, actual good literature no matter where it comes from, but our main focus is on providing a retail outlet for independent authors and artists. If you’ve self-published or independently-published a book, you know how hard it is to convince a real brick-and-mortar store to carry your work. We don’t believe that anyone should be blacklisted just because they had a smaller publisher. We’re dedicated to showing readers that independent publishers can produce great work, too. You can check us out on Twitter (@BrainfoodVenue) or on Facebook.

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  1. My better half and I are opening a bookstore called Brainfood in downtown Longmont. Our intent is to carry, you know, actual good literature no matter where it comes from, but our main focus is on providing a retail outlet for independent authors and artists. If you’ve self-published or independently-published a book, you know how hard it is to convince a real brick-and-mortar store to carry your work. We don’t believe that anyone should be blacklisted just because they had a smaller publisher. We’re dedicated to showing readers that independent publishers can produce great work, too. You can check us out on Twitter or on Facebook.

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