Vulgar History Podcast
Author Interview: Claudia Cravens (Lucky Red)
June 23, 2023
Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster and today I’m bringing you an interview with author Claudia Cravens. She’s the author of a new novel that is called Lucky Red which is a queer reimagining of the American Western genre. It’s set in 1877 in Dodge City and it’s about a young girl named Bridget who winds up working there for a women-owned whore house, basically, and then she falls in love with a sharpshooter who is a really butch woman. And it’s such a good book and it’s also really interesting and when I read it, I was like, “I need to talk to Claudia and share this on the podcast,” because the way that she interrogates history, the way she looks at sex work, the role of women in American history, but also looking at queer women in history, it’s really interesting and I was really excited to talk to her about it. So, I hope you enjoy this interview with author Claudia Cravens about her debut novel, Lucky Red.
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Ann: So, I’m joined today by Claudia Cravens, author of Lucky Red, which is a book I devoured. I sat down to read it and could not– I just read the whole thing all in one go. Honestly, it was really good, I’m really excited to talk to you. Welcome, Claudia.
Claudia: Thank you so much for having me and I’m so happy you enjoyed the book.
Ann: Yeah! I’m really excited to have you on the podcast to talk about it. I invited you before I even read the book and then I read the book and I’m like, “Oh, I have so many questions.” So first, can you just explain to everybody, sort of, what’s the elevator pitch, what’s your book about?
Claudia: Yeah, absolutely. Lucky Red is a queer feminist Western. Every Western features this hooker with a heart of gold whose job it usually is to help someone else, usually a man, have an adventure. And in Lucky Red, she gets to tell her own story in her own words. She falls in love with a badass lady bounty hunter and then when everything goes terribly wrong, she and her two best friends have no choice but to saddle up, ride out, and sort everybody out themselves.
Ann: I have to say, first of all, women getting revenge is one of my favourite genres. [laughs] So, I was excited that element is there.
Claudia: [laughs] Yeah, it’s always a good time.
Ann: So, set the scene. It takes place in the wild west, Dodge City. Did you do any historical research to learn more about what life was like there?
Claudia: Sort of. Yeah, my research process is really from the ground up. My biggest priority when creating this historical setting was to make everything really feel real. So, I worked very much from the day-to-day sensory experiences that people would have and used that to build up. A lot of my research was around the weather, and the grass, and what people were drinking, and what it would taste like.
And then a huge component of my research was about clothing. My mom is trained as a costume designer and has this encyclopedic knowledge of historical American clothing. So, I asked her so many questions. I would, like, watch Westerns or do image searches or look at old advertisements and then send her in our text chain, like, a picture and be like, “Okay, what’s the texture of this shirt? Is duck canvas the right word for this kind of pants?” and stuff like that. All of that built up this wonderfully detailed present world. Because I mean, we live and die in the day-to-day, that’s where your whole life takes place, in the taste of your coffee and the way your keys feel in your pocket and how your clothes fit. So, I looked for historical detail that would help all of that feel really real and then sort of worked my way up from there.
Ann: And so, when you were first thinking of this story, I’m just curious, did it start from a character? Or did it start from a plot point? Or did it come from what you were saying, “The hooker with the heart of gold, what’s her story?” What was the first inspiration? Do you remember?
Claudia: Yeah, the very first thing I created was the character of Spartan Lee, the lady bounty hunter. My original pitch to my best friend was, “Okay so, like, Hans Solo but a really hot queer woman.” Because I love the trope of the mysterious stranger and the loveable scoundrel, you know. They’re always so much fun but they’re almost always dudes and why do they get to have all the fun? So, I wanted to create that character as a queer woman. And then once I had Spartan Lee kickin’ around in my brain, I was like, “Okay, whose life can she totally mess up?” And then I sort of tried a few different configurations and then I landed with Bridget and it all just took off.
Ann: So, tell everybody about Bridget, who she is, how does she start the story off?
Claudia: Bridget is our plucky narrator-protagonist. She starts the story off, she’s 16, she’s absolutely destitute, she takes care of her alcoholic father by doing odd jobs around town in their hometown of Fort Smith, Arkansas. One day he comes home from a bender and is like, “Sweetheart, guess what? I traded our house for some land in the West and this, like, rickety wagon. Let’s go.” And she’s like, “Oh my god. Okay, sure. Whatever, fine.”
And so, she starts out as this person who is like, she’s very down on her luck, and things only go downhill from there for a while for Bridget and her father. He does not survive Chapter 1. She’s down on her luck, been down on her luck pretty much her whole life but she’s got this real stubbornness. In order to have even survived as long as she has, to even make it to Dodge City, she has to be tough, she has to be scrappy, she has to have this, sort of, baseline optimism of, “Maybe I can make this work.” And you know, she’s impulsive and she’s got all this drive and this basic insistence that she deserves to live. That carries her forward all the way to Dodge City in Chapter 2 and that’s where she meets Lilah, one of the Madams of the Buffalo Queen brothel and saloon which is a fictional brothel that I made up that is owned and operated by women and the story really takes off from there.
Ann: So, reading the book I was like, “I’m so interested to know about your take on this.” So, she’s working in a brothel, she becomes a sex worker. And I really like the way that you approached that element of the book. And I don’t know, the word that occurred to me was ‘sex work neutral.’ It wasn’t like, “This is the greatest job she could have ever had!” but it wasn’t like, “This poor fallen woman.” It was just like, “Here’s her job.” And you approached it, to me, the same as if, like, she got a job as a farmhand, or if she got a job at a laundry. It was just like, “Here’s her job,” and I found that refreshing.
Claudia: I’m so happy to hear you say that because that is exactly how I wanted to approach it: she and her fellow sex workers are people with jobs. They’re aware that they have a good version of a potentially bad job, but they are people with jobs, they’re good at their jobs, they help each other, and they’re competent at their jobs. They’re, like, yeah, no different than farmhands, or seamstresses, or teachers, or any other jobs that, you know, I think those are just about the only three jobs that women could have had at the time, maybe homesteader’s wife.
But, you know, they’re competent at it, they’re good at their jobs, and that baseline competence also drives a lot of how they interact and how they treat each other because they all, at the end of the day, have this vested interest in keeping the Buffalo Queen a safe and profitable place, whenever there’s conflict between the women, it always comes back down to like, “Okay. But we gotta make this work because we gotta work together.” And I just really wanted to take that approach of, like, it’s work like anything else. And Bridget immediately discovered she’s good at it and she’s like, “Okay cool. I’m good at this job, I’ve got plenty of food to eat, and I get to hang out with some cool women who I get along with. Great.”
Ann: Yeah. And then for her, you were talking about the clothes and stuff too. When I was thinking about, you know, what if this book was about someone who joined a laundry? There could have been simpler plot points, but I think, for Bridget, going from such absolute destitution to a life of seeming glamour, I think there’s something about that too where she’s like, “I don’t just have a job and am being fed but I have these beautiful dresses and I get to live this, ostensibly, fancier lifestyle.”
Claudia: Yeah, absolutely. joining the Buffalo Queen is a major upgrade for Bridget and she’s really aware of that. One of the things that happens throughout the book is every time Bridget eats on screen, she tells us exactly what she ate because it’s delicious and plentiful and she’s really into it. And she suddenly is wearing clothes that fit and look nice. Early in the book, there’s a scene with her and Lilah the Madam where Lilah is showing her how to do her face. It’s the first time that she looks in the mirror and goes, “Oh, I look good!” and also immediately understands how there’s a certain power in that, in her line of work. And so, yeah, it’s all about how she moves into this lifestyle that suddenly affords her comfort and, you know, she’s not going to– Bridget is a very practical character so she’s not going to moralize herself out of a hot meal.
The other thing I would say about the clothes is that there’s a colour story that follows Bridget all the way through which is, again, something I learned from my costumer mom. Bridget starts out the story in faded light pink, and then she moves into the bright red of the dresses that she wears when she’s working at the Buffalo Queen, and then she ends the story in black and purple. The Madams always wear dark red. So, it’s this arch of, like, from naive to worldly, from passive to active; it’s all sort of reflected there in the colours.
Ann: Oh, that’s gorgeous. I didn’t even notice that but if I read it again, now I would.
You just mentioned her naiveté and that was something I also wanted to tell you that I also really love when books do this. Two examples; a book that I really love is I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, I don’t know if you know that book, but it’s similar to Atonement by Ian McEwan where the main character is a young teenage girl, and she misinterprets things. She doesn’t understand what her own feelings mean, and she doesn’t understand the romantic or sexual interactions of adult characters, often to detrimental effect. And so, you’re reading it as the reader and you’re just like, “Oh my god, no, you’re misunderstanding this,” but you’re there with her and you understand that she doesn’t get that.
Your book has an element of that too where I was just like, “Oh honey, oh no.” [Claudia laughs] Part of that is just like her coming to understand her own queerness, right? And realizing, you know, her experience of sex with men versus when she meets Spartan Lee and how that makes her feel but then also her understanding of other people’s motivations, she’s very trusting, which comes to bite her in the butt later on. So, I thought, for you as a writer, was it challenging to write? You knew the motivations of the characters, but she doesn’t, so how did you balance that when you were writing it?
Claudia: To be honest, you are giving me a little too much credit when you say I knew all of the motivations of the characters. [Ann laughs] For me, writing is really a discovery process; my brain is rarely more than 10 pages ahead of my keyboard. So, my process is I write for a while and then go, “Oh, that’s not going to work, I need a new idea.” Then I’ll outline a new idea and then write for a while and be like, “Oh, well that’s not going to work,” and throw out that outline. So, like, I know some far-off plot points on the horizon but how we’re going to get there… I have no idea, which is fun. I mean, it’s a really fun way to work.
But I think also, for some of Bridget’s naiveté, I’m going to be totally honest, is drawn from life. I’m a pretty credulous person by nature, I tend to believe people are telling the truth as my default assumption and that has had some consequences, but also brought incredible people into my life. There are pros and cons to every stance that you can take.
But thinking about Bridget’s naiveté, I also wanted us to go along with her on this emotional journey. And I was remembering that own time in my life, you know, Bridget’s discovery of her own feelings and desires is the part of the story that is definitely the most drawn from my own experience of just, falling in love for the first time and not with the person that I expected, and how that sort of rippled out through my whole life and the ways that, like… Part of what Bridget’s naiveté lets her do is really follow her heart. I think there are these times in life when what’s really in your heart has to come out, you have no other choice but to be yourself and I wanted to give Bridget that gift of, “You have no choice, but to do what your heart is telling you to do. This has to happen, baby.”
And I think that in order to make that happen, some of that does have to come from a certain innocence, a certain naiveté. If she was as savvy as the madams or as educated as her best friend Constance, I don’t think she would have been able to wind up with Spartan Lee, I don’t think she would have been able to take that plunge. So, her naiveté was also a great tool for me. It opened up some doors of like, “Okay, if you are not suspicious of every new person you meet, if you are not necessarily looking for hidden motives, you can kind of barrel forward and until things go wrong, they go really great.”
Ann: Exactly. And I think my impression of her is that she sort of stumbles into this work, but it turns out she’s good at it and then she feels… Growing up it was her and her dad and it was this toxic situation and then suddenly she has friends and a sense of community and family and she’s like, “This is great. My life is great. What could go wrong?” She’s not suspicious, wondering what’s behind the next door, she’s just like, “This is good, I could stay here forever.” There’s a part in the book, I don’t think this is spoilery, where she’s offered the chance to leave and she’s like, “Why would I ever do that? No, of course not, it’s great here.”
Claudia: Yeah, and I know the scene you mean. Somebody asks her, “Well, how do you feel about this work?” And she’s like, “That’s such a childish question. I’m well-fed, I’m warm, I’m with my friends. It has never occurred to me to wonder whether I like it. Obviously, this is great.”
Ann: Which I think, again, gets to what I was calling the sex work neutrality. She’s like, “This is my job, whatever.” Which I think is especially in the pantheon, I don’t know a lot about Western movies, it’s not a genre I watch a lot, but I watched things growing up like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, where there was a brothel and there’s a character there who eventually falls in love with a man and then she leaves the brothel. So, the narrative I’m familiar with is– Or, I have not read this book or seen this movie, but I know Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers is a very famous Christian novel about a sex worker who is redeemed by the love of a good man, it just came out as a movie very recently. But it seems to me that that’s one of the narratives, maybe, is that somebody’s in this job but if they’re a good person, they’re going to ultimately leave it, you know? And in your book, you’re showing, she’s “a good person,” I think again, it’s a neutral, objective book, but the fact that that’s not her goal. She’s not like, “I’ll do this until I can save enough money so I can leave.” That’s never her thing. She’s just like, “I’m in this job and it’s fine.” And to me, that felt kind of revolutionary.
Claudia: Oh, thank you so much! Yeah, that was really important to me to not have her waiting to be saved from sex work. As you alluded to before, there are these two stereotypes of sex workers, especially in historical fiction where they’re either like, the fallen woman who coughs into a handkerchief, and then there’s, like, the rootin’ tootin’ happy hooker. And those, I’m sure that people absolutely lived their lives in those personas as well, but I feel like a lot of it would have just been like, they’re well-compensated professionals.
So, I’m not a historian, and my research process, because it’s so ground up, is also somewhat chaotic. But one of the things I bumped up against a few times was that especially for women at this time who were doing higher-end sex work, the disdain between them and “respectable women” was mutual. They were like, “Okay, so you’re married, and you can go out in society, and everybody respects you and that seems very nice for you, sweetheart. But I have my own money and my own life, and you’re also having sex for bed and board, but your trick owns you, body and soul. I am a free agent.” There’s obviously… That’s an unbelievable simplification, obviously. Sex work is complex, marriage is complex, and the roles of women in the US in US history are very complex, but there was this touch of, like, women who were doing higher-end sex work being like, “Why would we want to be you?”
Ann: And I think that conversation, I think there’s a moment in your book where somebody mentions what you just said. One of the sex worker characters mentions, “Yeah, why would I want to just– It’s like doing sex work but for one person, and I’m much better compensated staying here.”
Claudia: Yeah. There’s the scene where Bridget’s best friend, Constance, takes her shopping in town. Constance is a little closer to a fallen woman; she was well educated, she was married and is now widowed, and came to sex work as a widow looking to survive. And there’s a scene where Constance takes Bridget shopping in town, and they encounter some respectable women who shun them and shame them very publicly. Constance is really upset and Bridget sort of drags her away, drags her back toward the Buffalo Queen and she says basically, “What do they have that we lack except for noses to wipe and shirts to mend and runner beans to put up before the fall?” Basically, Bridget is giving Constance a lesson in how not to give a fuck. It’s very much like, “What do they have that you want, girl?”
Ann: Exactly. And that’s what I found, again, just refreshing in your book. Bridget is coming into this from a very pragmatic point of view. She’s just like, “Here’s my job, great. I’m doing this job, I have food, I’m good.” She’s not coming into it with those preconceptions of those higher society women, or maybe someone who had been in a different– like Constance. And that’s a really good example of somebody who has… She’s absorbed those cultural concepts because she knows how people from another echelon view their work. So, I don’t know, I just found it really refreshing.
Even in your book– In other sorts of works written by somebody else, there might have been, like, a pregnancy scare or an abortion gone wrong, or whatever. And your book is kind of like, I’m sure birth control and pregnancy scares and abortions are happening but it’s kind of like, they’re good, they’re handling it, they know what to do, let’s move on. And I appreciated that also.
Claudia: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, those are definitely things that I thought about a lot and did some research on and thought about, like, how do I want this to be a part of the story? And at the end of the day, I was like, I just really want to focus on how they are pros, they know what they’re doing. So, it’s worked in early on as Lilah the Madam saying to Bridget, “You know how to tell if you’re pregnant. If you are, let us know, the sooner the better, we will figure it out.” But it’s priced in as a cost of doing business that this might happen.
Ann: I remember that part of the story and I’m like, “Okay, you’ve covered your bases and that’s fine, that’s not what this story is about.”
I do want to bring back, we’ve been talking a lot about her work and that’s really interesting to me, but the first thing you said, the first idea, the first spark of an idea for this book was Spartan Lee. So, I want to talk about that character as well, this lady bounty hunter, queer female, Hans Solo, love interest. [both laugh] So, when you were writing that character, were you able to draw– What sort of historical precedence were you looking at, or were you more looking at the concept of this character in a Western and approaching it from that direction?
Claudia: I started with the concept. Spartan Lee is basically a fantasy. I created her from a position of, like, just pure queer girl fantasy land of, “Here comes this gorgeous, capable, badass butch woman who is just going to turn your whole life upside down.” I really built it from there. Spartan Lee is sort of the most archetypal character in the whole story; she’s the mysterious stranger who rides into town. So, I started with that simple, but very potent trope of a character and I was just like, “But you know what? Let’s make her a girl and let it ride and see what happens.”
Ann: Mm-hm. And it’s a great name, by the way, Spartan Lee, oh my god.
Claudia: Oh, thank you so much! I plucked it out of the ether.
Ann: Yeah, no it’s the same sort of archetypal iconic name that a male character might have had in a similar sort of Western story, I think.
Yeah, so their relationship with each other is obviously a large part of the book as well, and how that helps Bridget develop and grow as a person. And then I’m not going to get into the whole third act of the book and the revenge angle, but just know that Bridget does learn how to shoot a gun and it comes in handy.
So, when you were thinking about it, the whole “Bury Your Gays” trope and stuff, was that something that you were concerned with? With, you know, the two characters, and I don’t want you to reveal if they have a happy ending or not but was that something you were thinking about, to have a tragic story versus not a tragic story and what that could mean?
Claudia: Yeah, I’m going to try and thread the needle of not spoiling but also, this is something that I’ve thought a lot about and really thought about in the course of writing the book because yeah, “Bury Your Gays” is such a trope but it’s so haze code, it’s so, like, pay for your immoral behaviour, like, old-school bullshit.
I think, for me, what I kept front and centre as I was thinking about the plot and as I was thinking in particular about the relationship between Bridget and Spartan Lee, was I knew that everything had to be taking Bridget toward total agency, everything had to be taking Bridget toward feeling like the master of her fate, feeling like she was the one who could decide the course of her life and what she wanted to have happen and how that was going to happen. So, every choice that I made about their relationship was all just, sort of like, what’s going to make Bridget feel the most like herself? Whether that’s winding up together in a happy ending or something else happening, it was all about what’s going to make Bridget the most fulfilled and powerful and filled with agency and a sense of self.
Ann: Your book is written, I believe, in the past tense, first person past tense? Am I remembering correctly?
Claudia: Mm-hm.
Ann: Which I will sometimes find reassuring to know that this character is going to be okay, because she alludes a couple of times vaguely to, “Oh, I met some people.” So, I’m like, “Okay, she’s going to go on and have further adventures, she’s going to be okay,” which, again, personally I find reassuring to know about a main character. But yeah, there are so many things in the book. It’s primarily a Western, there is a love story in it, it’s not a romance novel by any means, so yeah, in terms of expectations for the ending, it would be different if this was just a love story but that’s kind of one element of a bigger thing. But yeah, I was wondering as I was getting more toward the end of the book, I was just like, “What’s going to happen to these characters?” And then I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that must have been such a huge thing for Claudia to consider,” just telling this queer story and how it’s going to land.
Claudia: And I thought a lot about, how is this going to land… Because it’s a Western first and foremost, Westerns are always about, like, who the protagonist really is and so, everything, every choice that I made especially in the third act, was all about, like, “Okay, what’s going to make Bridget the most Bridget? What’s the most Bridget thing she could do right now?” just every step of the way.
Ann: The supporting character, I just wanted to give a little shoutout to this one character, is her name Sally? The one who arrives a little bit later? That’s her name?
Claudia: Yeah.
Ann: I love a bitch character [Claudia laughs] and Sally sweeps into this book and she’s bringing this Amy March from Little Women sort of energy where I was just like, “Oh. Oh, I enjoy this.” So, I like that you’ve got that as well. It’s not like Bridget comes into this world and everyone at the Buffalo Queen was nice and kind and helpful and supportive. No, no, there are people there with all different kinds of personalities. I don’t know. This is what I’m saying: I love a revenge book, I love a book where the main character is naïve and misinterprets something terribly, and I love a bitch character. So, I was just like, “This book has everything for me.” [laughs]
Claudia: Oh, I’m so happy to hear that. Yeah, yeah, you know, someone’s got to be a bitch, and not because it’s a house full of women but because it’s a workplace. There is a version of Lucky Red that’s basically a workplace comedy so, like, somebody’s got to be difficult. Then it always spins back to that issue, that competence of, like, Sally’s a bitch but she’s really good at her job. And Lilah is really tough but she’s an amazing boss.
Ann: Exactly. And then you were saying, like, how at the end of the day, they all know that they need this business to succeed because that’s how they can keep themselves getting paid and living pretty decently. So, exactly, in any workplace, it’s like, “We might not all always get along or like each other, but we’ve got to work together.”
Claudia: Yeah, and they’ve got to live together.
Ann: Yeah! [both laugh] So, there’s that element as well. There are so many fun and interesting things about this book, I think, I don’t know… For me again, I’m just sitting here flattering your book which I hope makes you feel good.
Claudia: [laughs] Yeah, thank you so much, let’s just talk all day.
Ann: Yeah, but I think that it’s an ambitious thing you’re doing but it goes down so easy. Like I said, I was reading it and I wasn’t like, making points to have an academic discussion with you, I was just like, “Hell yeah, what’s going to happen next?” It is just so readable and fun, which I think is what Westerns are. That’s what they’re supposed to be, that’s why people love them, right?
Claudia: Yeah, they’re supposed to be so fun! And I’m so glad you had a good time because that was the main thing I was going for. I wrote a book I wanted to read. I love awesome stories about cool people doing amazing shit, that’s what I like. So, that’s what I wanted to create, and I wanted it to feel real and lively so I’m so glad that that’s the experience you had.
And Westerns are such a fun genre. I’m not here to apologize for John Wayne movies or anything, it’s also a highly problematic genre, with capital P, and there are a lot of issues. But at the centre of it, there’s this really fun tension to play with where there’s this huge scope for massive emotional arcs. People can discover who they really are, fall in love for the first time, and seek true catharsis through vengeance, and all of these amazing huge arcs. But then it’s intentioned with this very, very demanding physical reality where like, okay, cool you can achieve total self-actualization but if you don’t know how to ride a horse, and build a fire, and shoot a gun, you’re going to be in trouble, like, today. I love that tension. And that is what I feel is really at the heart of Westerns is this tension between huge emotional landscapes and then a physical landscape that’s like, “Yeah, but I’m full of snakes and they’re poisonous.”
Ann: Exactly. It’s such a fun genre, like you said, there are a lot of problems historically with this genre, but inherently at its core, that’s a really fun area to play around in.
And your book, this podcast is coming out… What day is your book published?
Claudia: June 20th.
Ann: Yeah, so this podcast is coming out the week that it’s published so by the time people are listening to this, they can go buy a copy of it, whatever. And do you have a website or social media where people can follow? Because I’m sure you’re going to have events and things that week.
Claudia: Yeah, absolutely. You can find me at ClaudiaCravens.com or on Twitter @Claudia_Cravens, or if you also want to see pictures of my very cute dog, you can find me on Instagram @Claudia.Cravens.
Ann: Again, it’s funny because I’m talking to you before the book comes out, but this is coming out when the book comes out, but I’ll just say, best of luck with the launch and everything. Is it coincidental or intentional that the book is coming out during Pride Month?
Claudia: It’s intentional. We wanted it to be a part of the Pride celebration.
Ann: I think, again, just the fact that it’s such a fun, interesting book I think really adds to the landscape of queer literature. It’s a weird, interesting, new voice. I hope that lots of people come to read this book.
Claudia: Oh, thank you so much. I hope everybody who reads it really enjoys it. My big hope for the book is that anybody who has ever been told that you need to put what your heart is telling you behind good sense, I hope all those people find some kinship with Bridget and feel seen.
Ann: Well, thank you so much for joining me today, and best of luck with the book launch week event that is, again, as people hear this, currently happening.
Claudia: Thank you so much for having me.
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So, after hearing that interview, I have to assume you all want to go out immediately and read this book and guess what, you can! Because it was just released this week. So, there’s a book, audiobook, eBook. You can get it from anywhere you normally get books from including your local public library, potentially. If you buy it using the link that’s in the show notes at Bookshop.org then a little bit of money goes to support this podcast. But honestly, it’s such a good book. Like I said in the interview, I sat and read it all in one sitting, it’s just so propulsively interesting, fun, and feminist, and good. So, Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens, you should all read it.
If you want to keep up with me and this podcast, I’m on Instagram @VulgarHistoryPod. I’m on TikTok @VulgarHistory. I also have Patreon which is at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. So there, if you pledge at least $1 a month you get early, ad-free access to all episodes of this podcast and if you pledge at least $5 a month, you get the early, ad-free access as well as access to Patreon-exclusive bonus episodes.
I also have merch for sale at VulgarHistory.com/Store, the TeePublic store, that’s best for people in the US, as I understand it, in terms of shipping costs. If you live outside of the US, then sounds like it’s better to go through the Redbubble store which is VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. And we’ve got some new designs there including some that are reclaiming some insults given to me in reviews of my podcast. One of them says, “Very biased,” which I am. And another design says, “Rambling and unscholarly,” which, debatably, I could be. But anyway, those are all there in the merch store. If you want to leave a nice review to counterbalance people who call me things like “Rambling and unscholarly,” feel free to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, or now if you’re listening on Spotify, when you’re in each episode there’s a place where you can leave comments as well.
Anyway, thank you so much for listening to the podcast, until next time, keep your pants on and your tits out!
Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster and edited by Cristina Lumague.
Transcribed by Aveline Malek at TheWordary.com
References:
Keep up with Claudia on Instagram @claudia.cravens and Twitter @claudia_cravens
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Buy Lucky Red at bookshop.org and support Vulgar History with this link: https://bookshop.org/a/1419/9780593498248
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Support Vulgar History on Patreon
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Vulgar History merch available at vulgarhistory.com/store (best for US shoppers) and vulgarhistory.redbubble.com (better for international shoppers)
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