Hingepoints and Speculative Fiction w/ B.L. Blanchard
Spirits
Multitude
4.8 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2022
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’re joined by author B.L. Blanchard to imagine a North America without colonization. We talk about map-making as world-building, returning home, and dancing the rice.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of murder, imprisonment, colonization, climate change, death, heart attack, and estrangement.
Guest
Brooke Blanchard, who writes under the name B. L. Blanchard, is a graduate of the UC Davis creative writing honors program and was a writing fellow at Boston University School of Law. She is a lawyer and enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. She is originally from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan but has lived in California for so long that she can no longer handle cold weather. Pre-order The Peacekeeper today!
Housekeeping
- Merch: Pick up your Spirits major arcana tarot deck and get our first sticker of the month at spiritspodcast.com/merch
- Recommendation: This week, Amanda recommends The Anti-Racism Daily newsletter.
- Books: Check out our previous book recommendations, guests’ books, and more at spiritspodcast.com/books
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Transcripts are available at http://spiritspodcast.com/episodes. To buy merch, hear us on other podcasts, contact us, find our mailing address, or download our press kit, head on over to http://spiritspodcast.com.
About Us
Spirits was created by Julia Schifini, Amanda McLoughlin and Eric Schneider. We are founding members of Multitude, an independent podcast collective and production studio. Our music is "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy diamond to mythology, legends, and folklore. |
| 0:11.2 | Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. |
| 0:14.9 | I'm Amanda. |
| 0:15.5 | And I'm Julia. |
| 0:16.5 | And this is episode 286 with Brooke Blanchard. |
| 0:20.9 | Brooke, welcome to the show. |
| 0:22.3 | Thank you so much. |
| 0:23.6 | We're very, very excited to have you on and to talk about your book, which just came out. |
| 0:28.5 | If you're listening to this, the day of its premiere, The Peacekeeper. |
| 0:32.9 | So, Brooke, can you to kind of entice our listeners, obviously, if they're listening to this, |
| 0:37.3 | we want them to go pick up the book. Can you give us a little summary, maybe a little teaser so that they get a little taste? Oh, absolutely. It's an alternate history novel and it's set in the present day. It's technically set in 2020, but in a different 2020 than we experienced in our timeline. And it's set in a world where North America |
| 0:55.1 | was never colonized. And it takes place in a Great Lakes region. So it's an Ojibwa nation |
| 1:01.6 | that kind of surrounds the Great Lakes. And it takes place in two parts of, one is in what we |
| 1:09.2 | know is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is where I'm originally from. |
| 1:12.6 | We notice who St. Marie in the book, it's called by its original name, Bauitigong. |
| 1:16.8 | And then the rest of it is set in what we know as Chicago, or Chicagua, as we call it, in the book. |
| 1:22.3 | And it involves a detective in that small town whose mother was murdered 20 years prior to the events of the novel, |
| 1:30.1 | and his father had confessed to it and received the harshest punishment available, which is |
| 1:35.4 | imprisonment. Chibinashi, our hero, has been raising his younger sister ever since. On the 20th |
| 1:41.3 | anniversary of her death, which is on the night of the Minoman Harvest, |
| 1:46.0 | her mother's best friend is also murdered. And it is, it happens in such a way that it looks |
| 1:51.3 | like there may be a connection to his mother's murder. And so he doesn't want to go to |
... |
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