Vulgar History Podcast
Author Interview: Avery Cunningham (Author of The Mayor of Maxwell Street)
February 7, 2024
Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. I’m your host, Ann Foster and today I’m bringing you an author interview with Avery Cunningham who has written… I mean, 2024 is young but absolutely one of my favourite books I’ve read so far this year, The Mayor of Maxwell Street. I have a real weakness for the stories of old-timey gangsters and 1920s Chicago and just that whole vibe so when I first heard about this book I was like, “Oh man, this sounds good,” and then I read it and was like, “Oh man! I need to talk to her!” Because the characters are fictional but it’s very much based in a real time and place and so we talk about that in this interview, just kind of the part of Black history that she’s talking about here with is about the Black elite of the 1920s but then also the diversity of Chicago in that era. It’s such a good book, I was really excited to talk to her so please enjoy this interview with Avery Cunningham, author of The Mayor of Maxwell Street.
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Ann: I’m joined by Avery Cunningham, author of The Mayor of Maxwell Street which is a new historical fiction novel that is set in the 1920s and has all the 1920s things that I personally look forward to in books like this; it’s got old-timey gangsters, it’s got the slang, it’s got one of those clubs where you have to give a password to get into the club. All the things I love. Welcome, Avery to Vulgar History podcast.
Avery: Hi! Thank you so much for having me. I’m really thrilled to be here and have this conversation with you. I love this podcast, so this is a real honour.
Ann: Aww! Wonderful. And I really loved your book so It’s just like, a mutual appreciation society going on right now.
Avery: Exactly. [giggles]
Ann: Well, I just mentioned, I love this time and place. So, can you talk about the setting? Not just in Chicago, other places are mentioned too.
Avery: Chicago was really kind of the main location that we spend most of our time in in the book and that’s really the driving setting of the book, Chicago in the 1920s. But our opening scene does take place in rural Alabama in about 1915, 1914. The essence of the setting overall is really around Jim Crow America and the Great Migration. Jim Crow and its history really goes back all the way to directly after the Civil War, to the Reconstruction era, but when you see it more on a national media stage in terms of how it’s being reported, that’s starting more in the early 1900s and of course into the 1920s and beyond that.
Ann: Can you talk about – sorry, just for everyone who may not know – Jim Crow, what is that?
Avery: So, Jim Crow is a system of oppression that came out of the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. During the Reconstruction in the American South, there was an era where there were a lot of policies and law changes to try and really create a more equitable existence for Black Americans, specifically in the South as we came after the cruel aftermath of slavery, and Jim Crow was the backlash to those roll-outs, those efforts at equality.
So, you would see what you might describe as off-the-books laws and regulations, in terms of there’s a certain… Black Americans couldn’t go in certain restaurants or couldn’t go in certain stores. If you were walking down the street and a white person was approaching you had to cross to the other side of the street, you weren’t expected to ride on certain trains, you weren’t expected to ride in certain train cars, you were prevented from voting if you couldn’t guess a certain amount of marbles in a jar. So again, off-the-books types of regulations but the consequences of not following these very strict laws of the day was violence and sometimes very often really, even death.
So, that is the essence of what Jim Crow is and even though it’s mostly associated with the South, the essence of Jim Crow really did spread all throughout the country, especially during this era as we go through the 1900s and well into the ‘30s and ‘40s.
Ann: So, you’re talking about… It came out of the Civil War, but it wasn’t until the early 1900s that it started being reported on or people knew it was happening. Is that what you said?
Avery: At least from my take on the research in terms of a national scale. Of course, people living in this environment knew what the stakes were with Jim Crow but with certain institutions such as the NAACP, there were a lot more active attempts to report and make known on a national and international stage, this is what African Americans are going through.
The newspaper that’s actually featured in the book, The Chicago Defender, was a really great advocate for reporting on the atrocities happening in the South. The Chicago Defender had an incredibly wide publication, their audience spanned the entire country and even other parts of the world, and they did an exceptional job on making sure that Black Americans in the South could see what the world was like outside of the South but also vice versa. For readers who were in what we may call progressive but truly it’s more of a superficial progressivism as we may talk about a little bit later with Chicago, but they could see what was happening in the South and that’s what people were living with, what people were dealing with, how dire the streets were. So, I feel as we went into the 1900s, the media attention on Jim Crow became a lot more prevalent, but of course, the essence of Jim Crow was existing in the 1880s, 1890s, 1870s.
Ann: So, the newspaper that you talk about in the book… So, we’ll talk about your main character, Nelly, she is a lady journalist which is a character I always appreciate. It makes me think of so many classic movies about [old-timey voice] “a lady reporter.” So, The Chicago Defender, I didn’t realize, I just assumed that you’d made that up but that’s a real newspaper.
Avery: Yes, yes! It’s still in circulation, still in publication. When you talk about the civil rights movement and then the history of social justice around Black lives and the Black experience in this country, The Chicago Defender is a foundational element of that. The way that they reported on the different facets of what it meant to be Black in America. And really, when you talk about the Great Migration… For those that might not be aware, there were two periods of great migrations where Black Americans in the South did in essence migrate out of the South because of the oppressive laws, because life there was just becoming so dangerous and difficult, where you saw Black Americans spread all throughout the country. Chicago became a kind of representation of what the Great Migration looked like, in terms of where a lot of Black Americans ended up migrating but you were seeing Black Americans going into the East Coast, you saw Black Americans going into the Midwest, and the far west just to really escape the terrible conditions that they were being forced to live under, that we were being forced to live under in the South at that time.
So, the Great Migration, when you’re talking about The Chicago Defender, The Chicago Defender was a great way for Black Americans in the South to read and see what kind of opportunities existed in places like Chicago. A lot of people do consider that newspaper to be one of the driving forces behind the Great Migration, just to give readers a view of what opportunities existed, what life could look like and really encourage people and give them places where they can go, people they can connect with once they’re there, to make the prospect of leaving the South all the more doable and realistic and achievable.
Ann: So, let’s talk about Chicago itself which, I mentioned before. It’s like, I love books about Chicago in the ‘20s but I’ve never read a book about Chicago in the ‘20s and the Black community there. So, that was a whole other side of things that really helps illustrate so much more was going on there than what… You know, I’m just thinking about old Al Capone movies or whatever. So, talk about the Chicago of your book.
Avery: Well, Chicago of The Mayor of Maxwell Street is, as you were saying earlier, it’s all the things that we love about 1920s narratives. It’s very flashy, very boozy, very provocative, beautiful clothes, fast cars driven by fast women but it’s also a… What I attempted to capture was the great diversity in Chicago at the time.
Chicago was incredibly diverse ethnically, socioeconomically, immigrant population in Chicago was vast and spanned a lot of different origin countries. In the book itself, we see the Greek delta which was a source for a lot of Greek immigrants that were coming to America at that time really before the 1920s, in the early 1900s but well into the 1920s as well. You see a lot of Eastern Europeans, you go to the actual Maxwell Street Market which was mostly known for its Jewish representation but also, the great thing about the Maxwell Street Market was that it was incredibly diverse, everybody was selling on that street. When you read narratives about the market during that time and prior, there’s a lot of discussion about how diverse that market was, that stretch of road, where it felt like anyone who had something to sell could sell there and actually make a way for themselves in a more equitable environment.
So, I really loved exploring the diversity in Chicago at the time and showing how vast the city was and how so many different cultures and mindsets and ethnicities really created the Chicago of the ‘20s but also the Chicago of the ‘20s was deeply corrupt, probably one of the most corrupt cities in America at the time and that was important to shine a light on. I didn’t want to ignore that. It’s what some people expect of course from 1920s narratives but it’s also very, very true. And the ramifications go beyond, you know, Al Capone and prohibition and booze and guns; that level of corruption had a direct effect on peoples’ lives, more often than not, on the lives of the poor, of the immigrant populations, of the Black and Brown population and that’s important to shine a light on as well, that the corruption wasn’t a victimless crime, that people were truly suffering under these types of administrations.
Ann: I found that that was part of what– Again, I’ve read the book and really loved the book. It was the sort of book, I was reading it during the workday or something on my lunch break and I’m like, “Augh, I have to go back to work,” and it was always some sort of cliffhanger where I ended and I’m just like, “What’s going to happen next?!” It’s a very dramatic book.
But yeah, I think what I really got in the book was the sense of the stakes and how scary it is. When I think about flappers and prohibition and speakeasies, it’s like, yeah, but it’s actually so dangerous and your book really makes that clear, just how dangerous it is.
Can you talk about the main character Nelly who… Actually, there’s so much I want to talk to you about Nelly. I loved her. She’s just brave to the point of just recklessness and just like, beyond but just such a fun person to read about. Just talk about her background because she’s so, she’s from this wealthy family, which also brings a different element of understanding about the Black American experience at this time.
Avery: Yes, of course. So, to give a little bit of a biography of Nelly Sawyer, her parents– And this is a fictional family, this is an entire creation, it’s not based on any real individuals from history. Her family became extraordinarily wealthy through the breeding and selling of racehorses in Kentucky and that does have its roots in history in the sense that Black Americans were a big part of the Kentucky Derby origin story in that sense. A lot of the first jockeys were Black, a lot of the best horse trainers were Black until of course, Jim Crow came about, and certain white Americans didn’t like seeing Black Americans in these positions where they were more visible, especially when they were winning and getting accolades. So, Jim Crow kind of put a stop to that rise.
What I tried to envision through the Sawyer family was what would happen if Black Americans were truly allowed, especially within the Kentucky horse space, to follow through on their legacy, what would that look like? And in that vision of the Sawyer family, they’re an incredibly wealthy family but they’re also new wealth and within the Black elite community at the time, new wealth was something to, not judge, but just a level of suspicion because as you learn about the Black elite throughout the country, throughout its history, it’s very much an insular community, about maintaining the defence against the oppression, against the racist policies. Where wealth and prosperity and education and business can be a way to protect yourselves from what so many are exposed to, what the essence of this country is really built on in terms of systemic racism.
When you start inviting new wealth into that picture, for these characters and the Black elite at the time, at least in how I portray them, that could be a threat sometimes to the wall that you’ve built to protect yourself. If you start showing cracks in that wall, that’s when you become more vulnerable, that’s when the world can maybe take a little more advantage of you. So, that’s a little bit about where Nelly is coming from in terms of her family history. She’s lived a very isolated life in this, you know, pretty well-protected, isolated environment. She’s always had what she has needed, she’s always been looked after.
This was also something I wanted to portray in the book because you never, or at least rarely see Black characters, specifically Black female characters in a position of prosperity. In popular media, Black female characters always seem to be in the midst of the struggle, in the midst of the terror of being alive as a Black woman and Nelly of course has not escaped that and that’s a lesson she has to learn, that wealth will not save you, prosperity will not save you, that you still exist as a Black woman in this world no matter where you come from, no matter who your parents are, no matter what your family does. But I did want to show readers an alternative to what we are conditioned to view as the Black female experience in this country. I wanted a young woman who was driven around in Rolls-Royces, who wore the most expensive designer clothes from Europe, who lived in a house designed by some of the best designers of the day, who went to cotillions and balls and art galleries because that’s just to change the status quo, just to give readers a vision of a Black woman that you might not see often portrayed in media and to kind of break down some of those stereotypes.
Ann: I love that. I love that about the book. Her character as well, I think, my assumption is based on the way she was raised where she didn’t want for anything, she had the things she wanted, she was exposed to very beautiful things, I think that’s part of, I would imagine, why she became as sort of, confident but also audacious as she is. She knows that she deserves the best so when she goes into these situations people are sometimes thrown into in this book that she is so self-assured which gives a whole other level to the people who she’s interacting with in the underbelly of Chicago.
Avery: Right. Exactly, exactly. You describe it perfectly, that dynamic. She does come from a position of privilege and that bias does feed into her interactions with many of the people especially when it comes to the underbelly of Chicago that she interacts with. I wanted to portray a young woman who I see represented a lot in the young people today where you’ve been brought up in this bubble of protection but you know that outside of that bubble that the world is falling apart and you want to do something about it, you want to be a part of it, you have this need to bring about change and that’s what Nelly has.
She knows that the world outside of her bubble is dangerous and fraught and filled with unfair policies and oppression and danger and murder and she wants to make a difference, she wants to be a part of that change but she also has to learn how to let go of the biases that make those oppressive situations possible, that create a sense of separation between the people who may be experiencing those things and those who read it in a newspaper and say, “Oh, how terrible,” then turn the page. And Nelly does have to come to terms with that.
Nelly’s been a bit of a controversial character. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about what you were saying, how she’s brave to the point of recklessness, and I’ve heard people say, “Well, she’s just insufferable and spoiled.” [both laugh] And I love that because I did want Nelly to be a character, I didn’t want her to be noble, I didn’t want her to be the one who was always in the right. I wanted her to make mistakes, I wanted the world that she grew up in to influence how she interacts with people. I wanted her to grow through that, I wanted her to come to realizations about “Wow, I can’t play with people’s lives. I can’t use real people and their situations just to further my own agenda. I have to be more aware and conscientious in how my actions are influencing the lives of people who… I just arrive on the scene in their lives, and I overturn them.” And that was something that I really wanted to explore, and I love that Nelly is a controversial character because that’s exactly what I wanted her to be.
Ann: I love that. And also, just in terms of this podcast… People who are listening to this know this podcast and you know this podcast, I love messy characters, I love complicated women who are… You love them or you hate them. So, Nelly really is in that sweet spot for me where I’m like, “Oh my god Nelly,” I’m not going to spoil your plot but there are some scenes where she’s pushed to a certain point and I assume she’s going to eventually give in or capitulate but she’s just like, “No.” And I’m like, [through laughter] oh my god! Where it’s just like, I admire her bravery but also, it’s like, there’s a point at which it’s just foolishness and she learns what that line is but especially in the first part of the book it’s like, “What are you doing? Oh my gosh.” But then the other major character is Jay. Can you talk about his journey?
Avery: Yes, of course. We first meet Jay in the Prologue, and the Prologue is set up as a kind of short story and introduction not only to his character but more what the world outside of the glitz and glam of the 1920s is. I didn’t want people to open the book and just think, “I’m going to be attending Gatsby parties for the whole of this book.” I wanted them to have an understanding that while we are going to have the glitz and glam and 1920s revelry, this is the reality for most Black Americans in the 1920s at this time. This history of Jay’s is foundational for him.
He was raised in rural Alabama, he’s a biracial man with a Black father and a white mother and having to deal with all of the implications of what that means for him and his life at this time, especially in the rural South, how he is at once ostracized but also understands that if given an opportunity he can rise above what he’s been exposed to and after a really tragic experience that you read about in the Prologue, he leaves Alabama and we don’t see him again until he resurfaces in Chicago under a completely new identity, as a completely reimagined person. He’s someone, as he describes in the book, who likes to make himself useful, he likes to know everyone, be of use to everyone, connected to everyone because he knows that that is how he, in his position because of who he is, who his parents were, his race, his identity, that’s how he can rise and achieve prosperity for himself.
In terms of his relationship with Nelly too, I really love those conversations where she would talk to him about how dangerous what he was doing was, how you can’t associate with gangsters, you can’t associate with mobsters, you can’t put yourself in these positions and he may say to her, “These are my only options. I don’t have the options that you have so don’t criticize me for having to do what I have to do in my life just because it doesn’t align with your sensibilities of what a good life is.” And that’s a lot of Jay’s essence of his character, making really controversial and conflicting and difficult decisions to achieve what he believes is the pinnacle of life; a peaceful, protected life, utterly opposite of the torment and the uncertainty that his parents and his family lived under in Alabama.
Ann: And I love the two of them, the two characters together. I want to emphasize, this book is not a romance novel, but the two characters have so many scenes together and just the way that they fire up against each other, they’re so similar in some ways, just in their stubbornness and that kind of recklessness but also just the way that they counterbalance each other. It’s so fun. Fun? I mean, yeah, I’ll say fun, the way that they interact with each other. It gets kind of fraught but the way that they challenge each other in so many ways and I appreciate that.
A long time ago, I read, I forget who it was but anyway, an author said that if you want to have a strong female character, you need to have a strong male character for her to be up against otherwise it’s just a strong female character and if you just make the men less so that doesn’t make her seem strong that just makes the men seem weak. So, I really felt that in your book, that Jay was giving as good as he got, the two of them were really challenging each other constantly and that really showed both of them, just kind of the strengths but also the weaknesses and all the characterization of each other. I think they really brought out different sides of each other.
Avery: Yeah, thank you. To go back to your point, this is not a romance novel, but it is in a way a love story. Jay and Nelly love each other in the way that young people who feel seen and understood for the first time love each other. Jay takes Nelly seriously enough to care about her, to challenge her, to push her to do better and to be better, where in Nelly, Jay sees someone who has all the ambition and drive that he’s been criticized for having his whole life. So, their love story is one that I think a lot of young people go through when they have that immediate connection but it’s also one that is built on a really terrible lie, not to spoil the book, but it is also incredibly fraught and controversial and complex. That’s one of my favourite parts of that dynamic, that they do love each other but it is a love that is built on a moment and they both come to realize as you get through the story that it may not be enough to sustain a lifetime. The connection that we have may not be the connection that we need right now.
Ann: And in terms of his name, we meet him, and his name is Jimmy at first and then he becomes Jay and I’m like, “Oh wait a minute… A person in the 1920s, he reinvented himself, his name is Jay.” Is there a little Gatsby inspiration going on here? Was that in your mind?
Avery: Yes, definitely. One of the initial inspirations for The Mayor of Maxwell Street was The Great Gatsby. I wasn’t setting out to do a direct retelling but there is this wonderful school of thought where especially African American scholars have presented this theory or this re-reading of The Great Gatsby where you can, in a way, read Jay Gatsby as a non-white man passing for white and that’s a really fascinating reading and I love that interpretation of him. It’s my preferred interpretation of Jay Gatsby and the entire novel now.
I wanted, at the time, to really see a novel that took that idea and really went with it, really explored it. What would it mean for a Black man trying to break into high society in the 1920s, when it felt like everything was possible? When all of these old regulations and the status quo around society interactions are really breaking down, in the aftermath of World War I, how could a Black man who wanted to break through the oppression of the American system, how would he go about that? So, that was a lot of the soul and the inspiration for The Mayor of Maxwell Street and that really comes through in Jay but I never really set out to do a direct Gatsby retelling, but I love the themes of Gatsby so much and I feel like they’re really just primed to the Black experience.
Ann: That’s so fascinating. I would love to learn more from you about that side of Jay’s story. You describe him, he is white-passing, he has blue eyes, for instance, and that really shapes some of the opportunities that he makes for himself, where he’s able to go into places where people assume he is white. But then Nelly, she has such feelings about seeing him do that and what does that mean for him? So, can you talk about that side of his character or that part of the plot?
Avery: Of course, so Jay is white-passing, and he does use that ability to essentially be a mirror. He can make himself into whatever people want to see in him. To be passing as a Black person or a non-white person, there are certainly individuals of all the BIPOC diaspora who are able to pass and still are, and that is such a complex existence. Nella Larsen’s book Passing really does explore this very well. Nella Larsen wrote a novel actually in the ‘20s about passing within the Black community with the focus being two Black women.
When thinking of describing that part of Jay’s journey and his story and his history, I really love to play up the idea that this is something that people do for options. There’s always this stereotypical belief that if somebody is passing, that means they want to be white. That is not always the case. As Jay himself says, “It’s not that I want to be them, I want their options. I just want to be free in this life and that is the only way that I can accomplish that in these certain spaces.” But it’s also very conflicting because he identifies as a Black man, he is proud of his legacy and his identity as a Black man but in certain spaces, he realizes he has to let that go in order to be seen, in order to be accepted, nor to just get the job done.
That is a hugely conflicting identity to dwell in, where you can never really know who you are, you can never be fully in yourself because you’re constantly trying to play to different groups of people, just so you can be allowed to exist among them and that’s one of the complexities of Jay and I hope that as readers go through the story and learn more about him, they add that to the tapestry of who he is and why he makes the choices he makes and especially how that brushes up against Nelly who, as you pointed out, has a lot of feelings about passing, who sees it as a kind of betrayal. And as she goes through this world in the underground of Chicago, she might herself come to understand why somebody has to make those types of choices and not to judge them for it but more to try and change the system that forces them to be that way.
Ann: I just wanted to, because we’re almost out of time… When this episode comes out, on your birthday, [both chuckle] so your book is coming out, it’s being published, is it January 31st when your book is published? What’s the date?
Avery: January 30th.
Ann: January 30th your book comes out, so it will have been out for about a week when this episode comes out. So, what do you have planned in terms of events and meeting with people and book launches and things like that?
Avery: Yeah, of course. So, in terms of after the February 7th date, we’re adding to these dates as we go but the biggest event after the February 7th will be February 22nd will be actually in Chicago at my alma mater, DePaul University, doing a reading room book signing and discussion around the book and I’m really excited about this. I am giddy at the idea of talking about a Chicago book in Chicago even though I don’t live in Chicago currently, it’s my second home, it’s where I came into myself as a writer, as a professional, and I’m ecstatic at the concept of really discussing this book with the people of this city and of this community that raised me and made me in a sense.
So again, that’s going to be February 22nd. It’s going to be at DePaul University on the Lincoln Park Campus at 6:00 and it’s free and open to the public. So, if you hear about this event, if you’re in the Chicago area, if you’re in surrounding neighbourhoods and you would like to come out and just join us for a really fun talk about the book and Chicago history then please join us.
Ann: Actually, I recently was just finding out, I was doing some investigation about whereabouts do most of my listeners live and there’s a big hub in Chicago and that Midwest area.
Avery: Oh great!
Ann: So, a lot of people listening are in that area. So, because I’m not there, you should all go on behalf of me because I wish I could go. [Avery laughs]
Your book is coming out, end of January but in February we’re into Black History Month. I wanted to get your thoughts about… I love your book, like I mentioned because of the 1920s of it all, but also, you’re really illustrating, you mention about the diversity of Chicago at that time. But I just saw on your website that you have an interest in these lesser-known pockets of Black history so I was hoping you could talk a bit about that and how you see this book fitting into that overall Black history oeuvre, I guess.
Avery: Yeah. Well, one of my goals with this book was to do a really… as thorough as I can (in the time that I have ,and the space that I have, and my knowledge) exploration of the Black elite of this time. You have a lot of cameos of actual individuals who were members of the Black elite, who were leaders in industry, who were leaders in the diaspora, in the Black experience at this time. And I’ve interacted with so many readers, white and non-white who had no idea that this aspect of American history even existed and I’ve spoken to other authors as well about how representation of Black life in this country is so often mired in struggle and oppression and racism and you never are allowed to really see Black Americans in any space outside of that, any space outside of the hardship.
In truth, the Black wealth of this country has existed as far back as the 1700s and it’s such a vibrant community with such incredible traditions and strides that they’ve made in the influence that they’ve had in this country, and I really wanted to just explore that, I wanted to give them a platform where they can be seen and understood by the popular reading public. And my deepest hope is that after people finish this book or in the midst of finishing, they read a name or a location or, you know, a company like Black Swan Records was one of the most prevalent Black-owned record companies at the time. They only existed for about three years but in those three years, they sold more record labels as a Black-owned record of any company well into the ‘50s and just little things like that. I hope you see that and you’re curious and you look into it and do your own research and educate yourself a little bit more about just how diverse the history of this country and this region is.
In terms of Black history, it’s an opportunity to just understand a little bit more about what Black history is. Black history is more than the civil rights movement, Black history is more than Dr. Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, Black history is the full exploration of what it means to be a Black American and this is just another aspect of what it means to be a Black American as it’s represented in this book.
Ann: What I really found you really captured so well in this book as well is that sense of, so they’re in the 1920s and you and I know that World War II is going to come, the civil rights movement is going to be decades after this, but these are people who are in that moment. I think part of what I really love about the 1920s in general is it’s such a time, I think you said this as well, the paradigm is changing, suddenly there can be new opportunities for people and it would have felt (and I felt this in your book) like maybe the options are there for people, they don’t know what the future is going to bring. I love that your book really sat there, you weren’t ever being like, “Little did they know, this is going to happen later.” You really let them live there and thrive in the moment and I thought that you captured that so well.
Avery: Oh, thank you. As you said, that’s one of the great things about the ‘20s. It was a decade where it did feel like everything was possible, that if you had the will to make something of yourself, if you had the will to leave the cast that you were brought up in, that you could rise above, but it’s also as you were saying, little did they know, that it was also an age of blatant revelry and without the acknowledgement of what happens when all of this falls apart? What happens when all of these incredible strides toward individualism that we’ve made are faced with the complete global economic downturn where all of this guild and gold is just going to fall away?
I did want characters to exist in that time, I did want them to feel hopeful because people in certain communities did feel hope but of course, that wasn’t the way it was for everyone. The roaring ‘20s did not roar for all individuals living in that time, and I wanted to explore that as well. We love the parties, we love the cars, we love the clothes, but the ‘20s was also an era of unprecedented violence in a lot of areas, unprecedented corruption and it’s important to acknowledge that.
I think in historical fiction, characters should be allowed to exist in the time that they’re in. I don’t want my characters to be oracles, I don’t want them to constantly be weighed down by a dramatic irony of, “Oh, in a few years the entire dynamic is going to change.” These are individuals living in a time and a place and the great thing about historical fiction is you can really step into the mind of characters in that time and that place and really imagine what they would be feeling in the moment, how the immediacy of this world is reacting on them. So, I’m really glad that that came through for you, I really appreciate that.
Ann: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
Avery: Of course!
Ann: I cannot recommend your book enough to all the listeners, I hope everybody reads it. I think everything we’ve just talked about, this is why I was so glad you agreed to come on the podcast because I really wanted to learn more about the thought process and everything that went into it and what the history was. But it’s such a page-turner, above that. There’s all this stuff that you’re talking about, but the book is these characters making these choices. I mentioned, my lunch break ended, and I’m just like, “How am I supposed to put this book down?” It’s so readable [Avery laughs] so I hope people appreciate that as well.
Avery: Thank you!
Ann: But yeah, best of luck with the launch. This is your debut book, right? Your debut novel?
Avery: It is, it is yes. It’s very exciting.
Ann: Yeah! I hope that you can really enjoy all the stuff that comes with your first book coming out and connecting with readers and all of that.
Avery: Yes, thank you. And this is one of my first podcasts, so I hope it went well, I hope I didn’t ramble or anything like that. [laughs] But thank you. This was such a great experience.
Ann: Rambling is welcome here. [both laugh] It’s a very conversational podcast. But yeah, thank you again for taking the time to talk to me and best of luck with your book launch.
Avery: Of course! Well, thank you so much and I really appreciate coming on.
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So again, the book is called The Mayor of Maxwell Street. When you’re listening to this, it is available. Avery has a website which is AveryCunninghamAuthor.com, she’s also on basically every social media. If you go on Instagram, she’s @AveryWritesBigBooks, there’s links to all her social media from her website, again AveryCunninghamAuthor.com. But also, she has various events coming up so on February 15th, she’s going to be doing a Q&A at Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee. On February 22nd she’s going to be at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. I know a lot of you are in the Midwest, so go there because I can’t go, is what I would encourage you to do. but also, everyone just get your hands on this book. You can buy the book from lots of places but also borrow it from your local public library. If your local public library doesn’t have it, there’s always a form you can submit to the library to suggest that they buy a certain book and The Mayor of Maxwell Street, honestly, it’s so good. It’s so good. The vibes are just off the charts. I’m like, oh my gosh it’s about a lady reporter in oldy-timey Chicago! It’s got all the things, just those things that I especially enjoy in so many books. Anyway, that is this week’s episode.
I’m going to be back next week with another episode as we continue to recognize that February is Black History Month in both Canada and the United States and maybe other countries, I don’t know. So, if you want to keep up with me and this podcast, I’m on Instagram @VulgarHistoryPod and also, you can support this podcast on Patreon at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. If you pay at least $1 a month you get early, ad-free access to all episodes, if you pledge at least $5 a month, you get access to bonus episodes of Vulgarpiece Theatre where we talk about costume dramas. We haven’t done any old-timey gangster 1920s movies, but I should rectify that. Anyway, I talk about costume dramas in this bonus podcast on Patreon with Allison Epstein and Lana Wood Johnson as well as there’s other Patreon-only exclusives there, there’s The After Show, So This Asshole… various different things.
Actually, there’s a new thing. So, you can become a monthly member to the Patreon for whatever you want to pay per month, basically. But if you just want to listen to specifically just one of the bonus episodes, it’s set up now so that you can just buy to own, I guess, a specific episode of Vulgarpiece Theatre for $5 each. You can find those to buy but also you can be a monthly member at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter.
Merch is available, at VulgarHistory.com/Store if you’re outside the US, the shipping is a bit better if you go to our alternate marketplace, VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com and you can always get in touch with me using the form at VulgarHistory.com or by emailing me at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com. Transcripts of recent episodes are available at Vulgar History.com, thank you to Aveline Malek for providing these transcripts.
Until next time everyone, 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:
Learn more about Avery and her books at averycunninghamauthor.com
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