Q&A with Bethany Baptiste, debut author of "The Poisons We Drink"!

Hello, I got a tattoo yesterday! 💜

I love this newsletter because I try to write them on Saturdays but as though it is Sunday. I manifest what happens on Saturday and then write about it as though it already happened…what a time!

Anyway, Saturday was rainy and gross but I gathered my courage and traipsed out to Ridgewood to get a tattoo! Check out the photo of it I posted on Instagram, lol. Also, hey, follow me on Insta if you don’t already? K thxxxxx.

This week was not my favorite, if I’m being honest. I feel very stagnant, and that’s because I’m still in about a million waiting zones and not getting traction in any of them is really messing with my head. But I (re)started a short story and I got some good progress done on that, and I’m putting my head down and charging through revisions of HEX, and I hope someday some good news will drop in my inbox.

This week, I’m so delighted to share a Q&A with author Bethany Baptiste. Keep reading for our conversation and to learn a little bit about her incredible-sounding debut, The Poisons We Drink!

Welcome to the interview 🗣️

Bethany Baptiste is a preschool inclusion specialist by day and a young adult SFF novelist by night. If she’s not writing an inclusion support plan or a story, she does retail therapy in Florida bookstores and takes scheduled naps with her three chaotic evil dogs. You can visit her at bethanybaptiste.com or @storysorcery on Twitter. 

When I first heard about The Poisons We Drink — a dark YA contemporary fantasy about a pink-haired Black girl who brews love potions — I was like…yes. And then everything I’ve heard since then (the potions make you fall in love with an idea! It’s set in DC because hello, power brokers of America! It’s dark!) has made me vibrate even more with excitement. So I was delighted when Bethany agreed to hop on a call with me to chat about it! The book releases May 7, 2024, and you can pre-order it now1 and then join me in counting down the days until it arrives! And now, without further ado: Bethany Baptiste!

Karis Rogerson: What inspired you to start writing?

Bethany Baptiste: 1. I started, I was in the third or fourth grade, I came home and my parents had bought a TiVo…When I got home, on the TiVo, I was fascinated by it — I saw that my dad had recorded three episodes of a TV show called Inuyasha. I was so fascinated that I sat down and watched the three episodes and I was so taken away by the episodes that I hopped on to the family computer and I started trying to find more information, does it have a manga…that’s how I stumbled upon fanfiction. I was like what is this? I started reading fanfiction alongside watching the episodes as my dad recorded them!

Over the years, that’s…I started writing fanfiction for Inuyasha. Originally it was in little ntoebooks and legal pads and spiral notebooks and journals, but then it evolved into…maybe I should start writing and putting it on fanfiction.net.

After a while, it kind of moved into other fandoms as I got older, I became obsessed with True Blood and The Vampire Diaries so I started writing fanfiction for that. I would like to write stories where the characters look like me. I was scared to make the jump, because with fanfiction you knwo the world, the story, inside and out. Someone’s already done it for you, so you get to play with it as you like. With writing original fiction, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to worldbuild…it was scary but I decided to give it a try.

I never looked back.

[Fanfiction is] great because I think a lot of it has to do with the community…people would comment on each chapter that you posted. You got your feedback, and you got your cheers or constructive criticisms from those free reviews. It’s a good starting point.

KR: Why do you write? Aside from career obligations, what drives you?

BB: What propels me to write is I have mental illness, PTSD, anxiety and depression, and I work in a field that requires a lot of devotion and time and it can be very very draining. Writing is a way for me to unpack things that I want to say but can’t, that I want to do but can’t, it helps me unpack or dream of worlds where I can put characters in and then just torment them. To put characters in worlds and put them through the wringer, that’s the fun part.

KR: Can you chat a bit about the impetus behind The Poisons We Drink?

BB: With The Poisons We Drink, it kind of started in a different part before it started. It started in 2016, election night. When I went to sleep, Hillary was winning and when I woke up, Trump won. It was a shock to my system. It was difficult for me to process. I live in Florida, born and raised, and it was difficult for me to process…things going on that made it even harder to swallow back then.

A few months later, life was just beating me up. I decided i was going to sit down and put in a DVD of Practical Magic and watch it, because it’s one of my favorite childhood movies and I wanted some nostalgia. I fell asleep and had a dream of a pink-haired girl doing something awful to someone else. I was so fascinated by the thing inside of her that was telling her to do this bad thing…one of the things that stood out to me was…in Practical Magic the catalyst of the story is a love potion. Love potions cause all the grief, all the drama, all the chaos in the movie. I was so fascinated by the idea of a love potion causing all of this drama that I was like, she’s gonna brew potions.

Once I figured out that this Black, pink-haired girl was gonna brew potions…I did not want to write a story where she brewed only romantic potions. What other types of love are there? It didn’t click for me…I went researching and the Greeks had everything figured out, they had their own names for each type of love. Familial love, friendship love, self love…then it was like, she’s gonna brew love potions where people can fall in love with themselves! People can make friends fall in love with them again in a friendship way. She can brew love potions that can mend familial relationships.

I found seven types of love that the Greeks had but I wanted one more — I had to think really hard. I needed something else, so I thought about it, and I was like…what if she brewed love potions where someone could fall in love with an idea. Once I figured out that, it clicked for me that she’s gonna be able to brew all of these other love potions, but the main one is fall in love with an idea.

Then I had to figure out the setting. Where would a pink-haired Black girl brew love potions to fall in love with an idea…where would I get the most bang for the buck…tied back into the 2016 election. Washington, DC, would be a powerful place. It’s gonna be in DC. That’s how the story idea spiraled and snowballed into what it is today.

KR: What aspect of this book do you most hope resonates with readers?

BB: What has resonated with most readers…I’ve come across quite a few different readers and I separate them into two categories. A lot of them fall in love with the world building. They really love the magic system, the brewing system…and how grounded the world building is that it reminds them of our world so they see a lot of realistic similarities. That was very itentional.

The other group of readers who have spoken…the concept of familial love. Even though the story talks about all different types of love, in the core part, the heart of it is familial love. A lot of people really enjoy the way that I played with the familial dynamics of all of the characters. All of the cahracters are very morally gray and selfish but what motivates them is their family, or something that their family has done…they’re trying to pick up the pieces that their family left behind.

KR: Is there anything about this book that may surprise readers?

BB: I know that a lot of people are very surprised by the twists and turns in the back half of the book. They’re very surprised by it, and that pleases me because I don’t think I’m very good at writing plot twists. I’m very insecure about plotty twisty things, so the last 50% or 30% was so twisty, that pleases me. It pleases me greatly that people think I’m smart. I appreciate that, that gives me confidence.

I think it’s the plot twists that people really don’t expect. They also don’t expect for it to be very very dark. A lot of people think that because the cover is bright and pink and pretty (it’s very deceptively pink) That’s why when people open up the book I warn them from — my dedication, the quote that opens up the book from Nelson Mandela, the content warnings page, extremely detailed. It’s very important for people to realize that it’s a very dark book. Reading the Content Warning page is very important! A lot of people have stated that they wished they had read it…educating yourself before you walk into the book so you know what to prepare for is absolutely key.

KR: Craft-wise, what was the hardest thing about writing The Poisons We Drink?

BB: The hardest thing was initially when I wrote it and when I queried it and took it on submission, it was a two-book series. I had the world building…the magic system, the large cast of characters was supposed to be introduced over two books. When my publisher bought it…I was told to turn it into a standalone. It was very hard for me to take 200,000 words worth of character and worldbuilding and plot and condense it into one book. The Poisons We Drink originally was under 100,000 words but now it’s a bigger book and it’s almost 500 pages so it was hard to figure out what to keep and what to throw away.

Some plot lines got cut, reduced, some characters got reduced time, cut, combined, some plots got given to other characters, it was a lot of Frankensteining. So now that it’s a standalone, it’s a big standalone. I’ve left it in a spot where it is a complete story so it’ll stay a standalone.

KR: What draws you to writing YA SFF?

BB: What drew me to YA SFF — it did start with the love that I had for SFF when I was growing up as a child. My dad loved video games, comic books, anime, so I consumed that. With those types of stories, 9 times out of 10, the protagonists are teenagers or children going on adventures. That always fascinated me. When I started writing my own stories, I got to explore that as well.

After a while, when I graduated college and became a teacher, I was looking at the kids that I was teaching, at the time…in 2015, there just really weren’t a lot of books that looked like my kids. That had characters that looked like my kids. I taught young kids. When I was going into the bookstores, it was predominantly white. One book that got me back into — that made me fall in love with YA SFF, even though it’s an older book, Shadow & Bone was like a shock to my system. I loved that book to the core. I was a very devout fan of that book all the way through when I was an adult. I loved that book, loved the series. I knew that I wanted to start writing YA SFF but I wanted to write it with characters that looked like the kids that I was teaching so they had books when they grew up, too.

After we get the story down that we wanted to write for ourselves, it’s important that we keep the current generation in mind. They’re not how we were. It’s important to refocus when you’re editing and revising so kids feel like the books are for them and not for an adult generation. A very big issue in YA, a lot of people have been saying that adults are pushing teens out of teen fiction, so that is something to consider.

KR: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

BB: My key advice would be: do not be afraid to advocate for yourself. Do not be afraid to stay firm about what you feel is important for your story. There are agents, there are editors, there are copy editors, proofreaders, who will want you to cut away pieces of your story that makes your story what it is…they don’t understand what you’re trying to do. If there’s something that you feel like is the heart of your story that is the soul of the story, don’t sacrifice it to make other people comfortable.

At the end of the day, once you get past the editors…and your book ends up in the hands of the reader, you answer to the reader. They should be at the forefront of your mind, not what makes the other people happy. That is important. Stay true to you.

KR: Can you recommend 1-3 books you’ve read & loved recently, and why you loved them?

BB: I got to read an early draft of Blood Moon by Britney S. Lewis and it is basically — if you love werewolves and vampires but you love Black girls being caught in a war between the two of them, that is your book.

Another one would be Dead Girls Walking by Sami Ellis. It is a Black girl horror. If you like slasher books and the type of books that are an ode to campy horror and Southern Black girls, that’s your book

The last book is that I really like is That Self-Same Metal by Brittany N. Williams. I would recommend it if you are looking for Shakespeare with Black girls is a very fun accessible way. There’s also fae.

KR: Is there anything else you’d like to add — something I should have asked, perhaps?

BB: No one ever asks me what type of potion I would brew, I’ve always wanted to say that. I would love to brew luck potions so that I can get lucky and pay my bills. That might be a grown-up answer. I would brew luck potions so I could always be lucky2.

KR: Thank you so much to Bethany for chatting with me, answering all my questions, and in general being amazing! Readers, you’re GOING to want to get in on this book when it first releases! Go ahead and pre-order so you can have a nice surprise in a month and a half when it shows up on your doorstep!

Alla prossima 👋

Palestine is still not free. This week, a video emerged of Israeli forces using drones to murder four youths a year ago. This genocide has been ongoing since before Oct. 7, and the time for it to come to an end is long past. Let’s do what we can to advocate for a free Palestine in our lifetimes.

That’s all for this week, friends. — Karis xoxo