Finding Home Through Life, Love, and Loss Featuring Denise Nicholas

This episode features our conversation with author, actress, and activist Denise Nicholas, which was live-streamed on January 17, 2026.

Nicholas's memoir, Finding Home (Agate Bolden, 2025), chronicles her time growing up in Detroit, her trailblazing acting and writing career, her personal journey, and familial loss. With eloquence, vulnerability, and resolve, Nicholas mines her six-decade journey through TV and film stardom, the complexities of her three marriages, and her reconstituting her creative life to become a celebrated novelist, reflecting on the personal, professional, and societal pressures that buffeted her throughout. Constructed of episodic reflections from both personal and professional high points and low points of her life, Nicholas navigates the intersections of love and identity, exploring how her experiences in Hollywood shaped her understanding of success, intimacy, and commitment. Her narrative is rich with anecdotes from her career in Hollywood, as an actor and, later, a successful screenwriter for television and eventually a novelist, providing a backdrop to the struggles and achievements that marked her path. She outspokenly discusses the challenges she faced as a trailblazing actress of color, shedding light on the systemic barriers and biases within the entertainment industry.

Learn more about Denise Nicholas by visiting denisenicholas.net. 

Purchase your copy of Finding Home: https://bookshop.org/a/114101/9781572843530

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

I I didn't want to do a memoir for that reason. Um I I had started working on a love story, and uh I had shown some of it to my publisher and he loved it. But he came and I say this line. If anybody's watched my interviews over the two months, I probably said it 40 times. But um it it he said, I think you should do a memoir. And I said, Are you I laughed? I said, Are you afraid I'm gonna croak anytime soon? Is that why you want me to get this memoir out? And he started chuckling. He said, No, but it is time. And I said, Okay, I get you, I get what you mean. It is time. So, but I must tell you, it was uh, it was hard because of the because I am so private and I didn't want to put all that stuff out there, and I tried to balance it so that people did, I didn't want people to read a book by me that was lashing out at everybody whoever did me wrong and I didn't do anything. I participated in my life. And when I had struggles and troubles, I was a participant. And if I wasn't a, if I didn't want to be a participant, I could have walked my happy hips out the door. So it was hard because I had to be, I had to reveal my innermost thoughts and my my uh my successes, my failures, and uh you have to put it out there, but you have to you have to find a lane that's comfortable. It was hard though. I kept stop I kept stopping and my publisher would call me said, How you doing? I said, I'm not doing, I'm not doing. I'm staring at this computer screen and I cannot discuss these marriages. I said, But you must. I said, I can't. Then I figured out a way to kind of do it. That was um that got the gist of the truth from my point of view, but without tarring and feathering anybody else. But I participated, so you know, I have a part in all this. Even when I made my mistakes, they are my mistakes. They're not somebody else's mistakes. So, you know, you have to own it. You do it, you own it.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Hello, and welcome to Black Writers Read. My name is Nicole Young Martin, and I'm the founder, producer, and host of this podcast. Thank you for tuning in for episode 14 of season six of the series. Launched on Juneteenth, 2020, Black Writers Read was created as a platform to showcase, celebrate, and honor the words, work, and traditions of Black writers from across the country, across genres, across experiences, and across the Afghan diaspora. Black Writers Read is a behind the scenes conversation into the crowd and what it means to create as a black author in today's society. Since starting the series on the summer of 2020, we've hosted almost 100 authors representing 15 plus genres from six countries and 26 states. This episode features our conversation with author, actress, and activist Denise Nicholas, which was live streamed on January 17, 2026. Denise Nicholas has enjoyed a prolific career in television, theater, and film, reaching national fame as a series lead on the groundbreaking ABC television show Room 222, a role that earned her three consecutive Golden Globe nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series and her work on the long-running NBC CBS drama series in the heat of the night. Nicholas also co-starred opposite Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier in several films. Nicholas is also the recipient of three NAACP Image Awards and two local Los Angeles Emmys for producing and narrating the 1981 PBS special Voices of My People in celebration of Black Poetry. Selected as one of the best books of 2005 by the Washington Post, the Detroit Free Press, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Newsday, and the Chicago Tribune, her debut novel, Freshwater Road, received critical acclaim, including the 2006 Zorono Hurston Richard Wright Award for Debut Fiction and the American Library Association's Black Caucus Award for Debut Fiction. Her work is also featured in a gathering of voices stories from the Longwood Writers Workshop, which highlights her time with the Free Southern Theater in Mississippi and Louisiana during the most violent days of the civil rights movement. Nicholas attended the University of Michigan and Tulane University. She received her BA from the University of Southern California. During this episode, we chatted about her memoir Finding Home, which was released in November of 2025 and published by Agate Publishing. Finding Home chronicles her time growing up in Detroit, her trail grazing acting and writing career, her personal journey, and familial laws. With eloquence, vulnerability, and resolve, Nicholas minds her sixth decade journey through television and film stardom, the complexities of her three marriages, and her reconstituting her creative life to become a celebrated novelist, reflecting on the personal, professional, and societal pressures that buffeted her throughout. Her narrative is rich with anecdotes from her career in Hollywood as an actor and later a successful screenwriter for television and eventually a novelist, providing a backdrop to the struggles and achievements that marked her path. She outspokenly discusses the challenges she faced as a trailblazing actress of color, shedding light on the systemic barriers and biases within the entertainment industry. The biography and book description here are only a snapshot into a brilliant mind and career. Learn more about Denise Nicholas by visiting her website at denisnicholas.net. That is D-E-N-I-S E N I C H O L A S dot net. It was such a privilege to have an opportunity to chat with someone whose work I've loved for a long time. I worked on a production of her play, Buses, while I was a grad student at Wayne City University back in the mid to late 2000s. I was a tour manager for that production, and we took buses to schools and community centers throughout the Metro Detroit area over the course of an academic semester. Being able to witness others experiencing Miss Nicholas's work brought wonder to my eyes each and every time, so many opportunities to recall and celebrate how brilliant of a writer she is. We talk a little bit about this play during our interview. I also appreciated Miss Nicholas's candidness about her writing process revolving the book, including the importance of finding community for a writing group and being willing and open to receiving feedback from that group. Like with every guest of the podcast, I learned so much from Miss Nicholas that I have incorporated into my own writing process. And I hope that you'll learn something as well to either adapt it to your own creative practice or just the way you move through life. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode, and I hope that you'll enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

SPEAKER_04 7:41

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Thanks. That was great. You puffed me up really nicely.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Thank you. And I hope that you hear this a lot as someone who, because I am pursuing my own theater career and all these things, and still face a lot today as a black woman from the US in 2025. Like this book needs to be read by all of us who are in this path. Because and it's sad that like you've done all of this work and we are still facing problems.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Yeah. I know, I know. Yeah. It doesn't. I think I think I wrote a line in the book that um the undertow of racism in this country never goes away. It's like a river that has no beginning and no end. It just keeps going, keeps going. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

So I would love to turn it over to you to read an excerpt from your book. I'll go off screen. I'll come back on to interview you. I mean, so excited to talk with you about your book. So happy reading, and I'll be back to chat.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

Here goes. We insomniacs thought we heard in the middle of a night in 2009 that Vera Fawcett had died after a long battle with cancer. By morning, we drank our coffee. The news was confirmed. We hadn't had a rim sleep nightmare as we tried to find sleep's comfort. She fought the good fight. Practically every family in America has suffered losing someone to one cancer or another. We're terrified of its pervasiveness. She was such a bright light. We began to believe that she might win. We wanted her to win, flashing her gorgeous smile on all of us. She was only 62 years old. By late morning, the new shocker of Michael Jackson's death began seeping out. As if we harbored disbelief, the news began to blast out of all televisions, all radios to remove all doubt from our minds. As we tried to absorb this news, it dried on our disbelieving lips. We fought the news in our minds and hearts. How could this be? He's down there at the Staples Center rehearsing with his musicians and dancers and background singers. But the news doesn't stop. They go deep, wall-to-wall retrospectives of his monumental career and some mention, too, of his troubles. On this day, the brilliance of his accomplishments as an entertainer were all we wanted to hear. He's gone. Leave the troubles over somewhere else and let us enjoy these memories. It felt as if a black feather quilt hovered over the city. We were at a loss for words to even describe how we felt. Two minutes before that news hit, we were delighting in the fact that he was preparing to take his new show on the road, thrilled that he'd be center stage again with his astonishing talent. He was 50 years old. I sat on my patio staring at the yard, the pool reflecting the sky as the clouds parted to reveal the blue of loose. In the quiet, my head kept wagging side to side, thinking, what in God's name is going on in the world? The rumbling thunder of a helicopter approached steadily, that remarkable noise that sounds like a large living bird beating its wings against the heavens. Helicopters are a part of LA life. Police have them, as do banks and hospitals, the sheriff, the athletes, and other rich people. That sound to this day takes me right back to the Vietnam War footage from the early 1970s. It was Pavlovian for me. Hear that sound, remember that war. I sat back in my chair and stared up, recognizing the markings on the bird from the sheriff's office as it rumbled across my sky. Michael was going home. I knew by the timing that it was Michael on his last journey from UCLA Medical Center to the coroner's office downtown. It's a fairly straight shot right across the LA sky from the west side to downtown. I stood up, I nodded, and I waved goodbye. Though he died quite young, his awesome productivity gives us many different Michael periods to listen to as often as we like. From his little boy prodigy time to the brilliant creator he became. But we won't ever see those grateful, graceful, elegant moves, the sensual teases, the hardcore rhythms, as his feet seemed to be enjoying a dancing life of their own. We gasped, applauded, and cried. It was so beautiful. He really did take our breath away.

SPEAKER_00 12:33

Wow. Thank you for starting today's because the second question I have for you is about loss, but like and and and I remember when Fair Fawcett died, and I totally forgot she was that young. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:51

I had to, you know, I researched it because it all I did take notes on that day. I didn't know then that I was gonna write about it. But I had the notes, and uh I had, you know, I didn't follow her illness, but I knew she was struggling, knew she was fighting, because it was often reported that she had had gone and tried some new therapy or some new treatment, and it worked for a little while, then it would stop working. So um I had a close friend who was in a similar situation with a different kind of cancer, but he would have, you know, go get special treatments in Europe or different places, and there would be a little improvement, but in time, and not a whole lot of time. Uh he had uh pancreatic cancer, he passed. So the cancer thing is it should be big in all of our minds because it certainly is big in the world. I mean, we probably don't want to think about it, but we have to. I mean, it's it's knocking us upside the head all the time. We have to.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

And then what's sad, and I guess we can get into the interview questions. What's sad is we have the money to do the research and we have the expertise to do the research that's needed to keep these people alive. But folks in this country choose not to.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Choose not to, they choose not to. Yeah, we're in a we're in a bit of a pickle, I'd say.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

Especially now, especially now. Yeah, yes. Yeah. So the first question I have for you, Miss Nicholas. So I, in prepping for today's interview, I watched other interviews with you. And one of the themes that was throughout was that you were, I cannot believe this. You were like really introverted and shy as a child, and you were a bookworm. I'm like, I could see the bookworm, but the shy. So what sparked your interest in writing? And what do you remember your very first writing project?

SPEAKER_01 14:42

You know, I started writing. Um, I would say in high school because I love my English classes most of all. I certainly did not like chemistry because I couldn't do it. And I could barely do, you know, geometry. I struggled, really struggled in the math and sciences, but I was always pretty good with the you know, political science or English and things like that. And that's who I am. So um, you know, I think that's where it began. But it also, even before that, it I think had to do with reading a lot of books as a kid, just all the romance novels of the 18 and and of the 1800s and the movie and seeing all those movies on uh the show, the stations that do those old Hollywood movies. And I was just would just stare and just watch all of it over and over and over. I think I've seen Wuthering Heights 45 times. But so that I wasn't thinking about writing when I was reading all those books, but those books laid some things into my head uh in terms of style and in terms of uh, you know, knowing that some of those writers were ladies in England, you know, the Bronte sisters and things like that. Well, maybe you know, there's a little possibility over here kind of jiggling around in your brain. So I think I was looking for a way to be creative. And the first thing that hit was acting, but the other thing that hit later writing was the more profound one for me. So that's it. I mean, I love writing, I love sitting right at this desk and at five o'clock in the morning with my coffee, and this is where I work every day, every day.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

Yeah, and thank you for that reminder. Because myself as a writer, it's like I have to remind myself I have to get into the routine of getting up early and do the so thank you for reminding me of that routine.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

Yes, it works.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Yes. In finding home, some of the things covered include familiar loss and grief, which you did share, um, an excerpt that talks a little bit about the loss that we experienced as a culture. Um, you open the book talking about your mother who passed away before the book's release, and you close the book talking about your brother who recently passed as well. You also, this is a lot, you also mentioned your sisters passing back in the 1980s. Why was it important to you to mention these moments in your memoir? And how does grief shape who you are today?

SPEAKER_01 17:15

Well, I think it's um, I mean, I didn't I didn't start out start start out even slightly imagining that there would be this much loss so close together. I think when we lose family members and it's gotta spread out over long periods of time, and uh you get a you get adjusted to that one before the next one happens. But in my family, they were coming so fast there was no adjusting. So I I think that makes recovery much, much harder because it's so much. It's it's like you didn't lose one person, you lost half your damn family, which is what happened in my case. I mean, it didn't happen all at the same time, but it seemed to be happening so close together that it felt like everybody was. I got I got scared, I said am I next? And then and then I thought, well, I didn't, I was alone. I'm alone in this world now because my brother's gone, my sister's gone, my dad's gone, my mom's gone, my aunts, my aunts and most of my cousins are gone. I have a couple left, you know. So it's been it's extraordinary. I couldn't have guessed that it would play out this way, but it has, and I have to deal with it. Wow, wow.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

And I'm someone, I'm not alone, but I I'm in my mid-40s. I lost my parents in my 30s, and I have my brother with me. But I still have like a pretty big extended family. But when you lose those pivotal people, it's like, who, it's like, who are you today? It's like every day I wake up and I'm like, who am I? Like, because I lost the key people for myself. Yeah. So I really, especially opening about your mom, I like I needed that. I really needed that. Yeah. Yeah. You are also known as an activist, having grown up in Detroit during significant turbulent times in the civil rights movement that started to emerge across the country. You were also involved in the free southern theater. How does your identity as an activist show up in finding home? And why was it important to you to become an activist? And before I turn it over to you to answer the question, one of the things that I want to point out for folks who are watching, because I typically have a lot of students who watch, is you were an actress during like a big trailblazing time, the 70s and the 80s. And people don't realize, like, like when Cheryl Lee Ralph is interviewed about her time on like Dream Girls, and we know all of you as really big actresses, but then to hear about all of the things you had to go through to do the work, I'm like, wow. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

At times it got pretty snarly. But you know, I think actors are always uh my memories of my time being an actor, we're always so so happy to get the work, you know, and and you know, you you vie for it, you compete for it, you pray and and carry on, and you know, you may get the job, you may not, you get the job. And then, you know, then there are all the other things that you have to deal with. I don't think um, you know, I I know lots of white actresses, they don't have to deal with the stuff kind of stuff I've had to deal with. It's not even, it's not even, it's not even an imaginate in their imagination to have to deal with the kind of crap, you know, that black people have to deal with. But, you know, you do it as an actor and you smile because that's what the business requires. It does not require, and it does not allow complaining. It really doesn't. So you take your little complaints and go somewhere else, and if you don't like it, you go start your own. I mean, that's basically the attitude. You know, that's the that's the bottom, the core of it, even though it might be dressed up in nicer, a nicer moment. It's it's uh the business is very, it was. I mean, it feels like it's slipping, but it has been a very powerful part of the culture of this country since you know the 1917, 19, 18, 19, 19. So it's um it's powerful and it has shaped thought for generations. And that's an issue that we, you know, we had start started dealing with in the 70s and 80s. There's a little bit of a uh kind of a wake-up call for Hollywood. And uh, you know, it it woke up for about five minutes, then it went back to sleep. But now, you know, there are people, they're there are people doing good stuff. Ryan Kugler and others uh have uh taken it to a new level, and it is you just want to cry with joy because it's I mean, his work is stunning. And there are others. I'm I named him because he's always he's Doing a lot of press stuff right now, and I see his name everywhere, which is great.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

So um, yeah. Yeah, which thank you for mentioning Ray Coogler, because I'll never forget when I went to see um Black Panther for the one I I took people to say, I went like 10 times in the theater, and it was right around the time my father passed, who was a huge comic book head when he was a child. And I still get chills thinking about watching it for the first time, and each time seeing the Marvel title card show up on the screen, and I was like, that's our story in mainstream culture. I was like, this is how like every time I like ride, I was just like, this is really happening.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

Yes, yes, it was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:46

Yeah. In Finding Home, you explore some very vulnerable times in your life. How did you, and this is for me because I'm starting my memoir and I'm going through writing about a lot of things. Um, how did you check in with yourself, someone who has been able to maintain a fairly private life throughout your film and television career as you were writing? I didn't hear the last part. Yes. Um, I'll repeat the whole question. Okay. In finding home, you explore some very vulnerable times in your life. How did you check in with yourself? Someone who has been able to maintain a fairly private life as you were writing. So as you were writing and you're like, I'm telling this. Should I tell this story? Should I not tell the story? Why am I telling the story? So can you talk a little bit about that process in terms of because you are very vulnerable in this book?

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I didn't want to do a memoir for that reason. Um, I I had started working on a love story, and uh, I had shown some of it to my publisher and he loved it. But he came and I say this line. If anybody's watched my interviews over the two months, I probably said it 40 times. But um it's he said, I think you should do a memoir. And I said, Are you I laughed? I said, Are you are you afraid I'm gonna croak anytime soon? Is that why you want me to get this memoir out? And he started chuckling. He said, No, but it is time. And I said, Okay, I get it. I get what you mean. It is time. So, but I must tell you, it was uh it was hard because of the because I am so private, and I didn't want to put all that stuff out there. And I try to balance it so that people didn't, I didn't want people to read a book by me that was lashing out at everybody who ever did me wrong, and I didn't do anything. I participated in my life. And when I had struggles and troubles, I was a participant. And if I wasn't a if I didn't want to be a participant, I could have walked my happy hips out the door. So it was hard because I had to be, I had to reveal my innermost thoughts and my my uh my successes, my failures, and uh you have to put it out there, but you have to you have to find a lane that's comfortable. Uh I did not, as I said earlier, I didn't want to, I'm not about tearing anybody else down. Um so it was hard though. I kept stop I kept stopping and my public recall, how are you doing? I said, I'm not doing, I'm not doing. I'm staring at this computer screen and I cannot discuss these marriages. But you must. I said, I can't. Then I figured out a way to kind of do it that was um that got the gist of the truth from my point of view, but without tarring and feathering anybody else.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Yeah, and thank you for doing it because that's one of the things that I'm exploring with my book coach. I'm just like, I'm all about accountability for myself. And I'm like, I don't, I don't want to write something where it's like I'm shifting the blame and pointing the finger at everyone else because for me that's not responsible. And it's also it's good writing, but I don't like doing that sensational stuff.

SPEAKER_01 26:04

Yeah, that's that was my thinking exactly. You know, I participate at so you know, I have a part in all this, even when I made my mistakes, are my mistakes, they're not somebody else's mistakes. So, you know, you have to own it. You do it, you own it.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

Yes, I love that quote. I'm taking it as a quote. You do it, you own it. Okay, you got it. You're gonna have it. Thank you. I just have a couple more questions for you. Um, your novel, Freshwater Wrote, received critical acclaim. How were writing styles and writing processes different between the novel and the memoir? And how are they similar, especially since memoir is considered creative nonfiction?

SPEAKER_01 26:50

Yeah, well, I think that Freshwater Road to me is probably the best thing I've ever written. Um, it took a long, long time to write it. And it was um, and because I was writing about the civil rights movement, it was extremely important to me that I get it right because I didn't want in any way to offend or lessen the extraordinary contribution that all the people who are involved in the movement have made and lost lives, lost families, all kinds of uh horrible things have happened in this process. So uh it wasn't anything I thought you could just kind of you know dally around with. You had to get down and you had to get serious and you had to do your research and you had to make it work, you had to make it work in uh in a be for me, it had to be beautiful because I'm not writing uh political science history of the civil rights movement, I'm writing fiction. And so though it is fiction, it is it is uh a fictionalized um telling of that particular story, the summer of 64 particularly, uh it was, I had to get it right. I had to, I had to not only make it beautiful, I had to find the the horror and the pain and the beauty in that situation. And I think I had stored a lot of that up since I had been in Mississippi for two years, off and on, during the civil rights movement. So I had my I had many, many memories, not just memories of uh horrible incidents or negative incidents, I had memories of flowers and trees and and highways and streams and the the whole context of it. So that is there too, and that was very important to me to to paint a picture that was full and whole, that it was not snark, you know, snarky. And the same thing with the memoir that we were talking about. It's it's finding the the beauty and the truth in the moment. And it took a long time to write that book. And you know, Freshwater Road came out of a workshop. Janet Fitch uh had a workshop that I was in for three years, and that workshop was so tough. Um, that's where Freshwater Road really came to life because the critiques that you got from the other writers and there were, you know, it wasn't, it was not fun and games. And I used to say, I used to come home and drive up this driveway out here and sit in the car and cry because I would get some critiques from those people that go, oh God, I'm never gonna get this, I'm never gonna get this. So, but I kept working and working and working. I think I must have done, God, maybe five complete dry-ups of that book. Because when I started changing things and rewriting, I just throw the whole thing away and start all over because I knew it would affect everything else. So it was, it was like sweat in your armpits work. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

You mean to tell me because for folks, novels are like 200, 300 pages. So you mean to tell you wrote almost 2,000 pages. I did.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

Yes, I did. You know, if I had if I got notes um that affected something on page 150, and I had to do a rewrite there, then I had to do the lead-in to that to make it fit, and then I had to do the departure from that moment because there's now a new energy, because this has changed, and that's what pushes the next to the next scene. So yeah, I think uh I probably wasted a lot of paper, but it was I was a beginner and I thought that was the only way I could do it. Uh of course I wouldn't do that now, but I sure did it for that book. Oh my god, I think the paper companies would they love me because I bought so much paper.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

Yes. And for folks who don't know, and for folks who are new, thank you for joining us. Black Writers Read, because I'm a writer and I'm an instructor and I'm involved in so many things. This is about the craft of writing. So thank you so much for sharing that insight into the writing process because many people don't know. Yes, writing is solitary, but when you consider the business of writing and when you want to publish something for the public to consume, you go to writing groups, you get feedback, you have better features, you have like you get all this feedback thrown at you. And it's a lot to decipher.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

It is, it's very, it can be very, it can be painful. You know, uh with the group that Janet had assembled in her house for this workshop that I was here now with them, everybody was pretty supportive, but they were also very serious. So, for example, there's a love scene in Freshwater Road. Uh, the main character, Celeste, has a romantic sexual moment in the car outside on Freshwater Road. Um and the first draft of it, I took it in and I read it in class. And I hadn't ever read written a love scene before, so I didn't know what I was doing. So there was one guy, one writer, one writer in the class said, see, it takes place in the car. So he said, This is not in a car, this is at a hotel, and it's a lovely hotel. He said, You this is not rough. This is not, this is not a car. This is a nice, big, comfortable bed you wrote. So you go. I said, he's right. It's not down and dirty enough to be in a car in the night in Mississippi in the 1960s. They made it so I made it so comfortable and pretty, you know. It ain't pretty. Now, the moment, the passionate moment between these two people is beautiful. That's there, but the circumstance and the environment that they're in, please. You know, he said, uh-uh, uh-uh, you gotta go back to the drawing board. I did. I went back. I said, okay, elbows here, knees here. So you have to get there. You have to, you have to not be afraid to go there. You have to, you have to.

SPEAKER_00 32:53

Yeah. Nice. Skirt in the front seat and leg over the bench, front seat, and yak steering wheel, somebody whatever.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

So you're talking about, you know, those are the in the book, they're all young people, so you know what kind of sexual or sensual energy they have. It's you know, it's it's up there near the top of the list of energy when you're that age.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

So yeah. Yes. What is the favorite part of the writing process for you? And what is the most challenging part of writing?

SPEAKER_01 33:35

I I you know, I think the this memoir was much more challenging in a way than Freshwater Road was, because Freshwater Road is an exterior story. You know, it's not me, although it's coming through me. Uh the memoir is is much harder because I was, as we talked a little bit earlier, I was trying to hide. I just didn't want, and I really did not want to put my mistakes on blast. That's what I kept saying to myself, sitting right here. I don't know if I can do this, I don't want to do this, I can't, oh this. And then, you know, then you get a call from your how are you doing, your publisher, how are you doing? Oh, I'm coming, I'm home. Okay, let me get this scene. Let me let me let me just let me just let me just do this and grit my teeth and just do it and stand up for yourself. That's that's what it is, you know. I have a point of view on all the mistakes I ever made. And my point of view is my point of view, and somebody else's point of view is theirs, but I do have a point of view about the things that I have experienced. So that's what I had to kind of get get into that. It's like taking skin off of something and getting down to the core, the real down to the seed, down to the seed.

SPEAKER_00 34:55

I have two more questions for you. Um given that you've now written about your life and you have a pretty big canon of work as an actor and screenwriter, what would you like your legacy to be?

SPEAKER_01 35:17

Well, I I think I like the whole thing. That's my legacy. It's the whole kit and caboodle of my journey. You know, I mean, from I wouldn't exchange the two years I had in the civil rights movement with the Free Seven Theater for anything. It was as frightening and scary as it was, it was the most important thing I've ever done, I think. And so that helped to shape who I am as a human being. And I am grateful that I was allowed to do that. As difficult as it was, I wouldn't have known Fanny Lilhamer, I wouldn't have known Bob Moses and Rudy Lombard and all these people who were active in the civil rights movement. These are extraordinary people. And I was, because of that decision to go with the Free Sutherland Theater, I was able to at least be in the same room with some of those people and listen to them and understand their seriousness and their dedication to making changes for us in this country. So it was the best. So but I also felt great about being in the Negro Ensemble Company in New York in the first company. I mean, that was huge. It was huge. And I think when I look back on that, I'm much more proud than I was in the moment, because in the moment I think I was terrified. You know, I thought, oh God, I don't know if I can do this. And, you know, you you do it step by step by step. And uh and then my television career kind of picked me up and dragged me out of New York so so quickly. Um so it changed everything. I had a whole change of aesthetics almost, a whole change because television work, series work, and work on stage in a live theater are pretty far apart. Very yeah, not a whole lot of similarity there. But but that world the television world and is for the the film world to me is more like the the theater world. It's it goes deeper, it takes more time, and it's more it's more about a thing. It's about a pro solving a problem, getting over a hump. It's all of that. And so, you know, series television can be, and I guess it's gotten to be in some respects. Um, there's some great shows. I'm I'm hooked on Mobland from England. I don't know if you've seen it. I love the show. And it's gangsters, it's it's total gangsters, and it is a great, great show. Yeah, there's nothing literary about it. It's just it's like cops and robbers. Well, it's not even cops, it's more robbers. Tom Hardy is the lead, and uh Helen Mirren is in it. I mean, the cast is incredible, incredible. Pierce Brosnan, and I mean it's just a great gangster show. I mean, there's more guns and violence and people die than she says, The Godfather. I love it. I love it. I always love gangster movies, though. I think I've watched, I think I've watched Godfather One and Two, maybe 15 times.

SPEAKER_00 38:39

There's such great movies, and I totally I need to start watching Mobling because I'm trying to find new shows to watch because when I'm not working, which is rare, I I watch a lot of things in repeats. I've been watching a lot of Fraser, Golden Girls, all these other things, because I need a guaranteed laugh.

SPEAKER_01 38:56

And so that's what I do with two and a half men. I watch it off. I thought I was gonna have a nervous breakdown this week. I kept trying to find it and it's not there anymore. I watch that every night before I go to sleep because it makes me laugh. And I go to sleep smiling because it, I mean, Charlie Sheen was brilliant, the whole cast was brilliant. Uh, I love that show. It's hysterical. And now I kind of watch some of um uh Carol and All in the Family because when it was on TV, I didn't watch it because I just I don't want to see a show about a racist. I just don't, I don't, I don't at that time. Because remember, I was fresher from the South at that point. Now I can watch it and enjoy it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 39:38

Yeah, and speaking of, before I go to my last question, speaking of the racism, so like re-watching The Golden Girls now, because I in like my plays and things like that, I explore satire. And Blanche as a character cracks me up even more now. Like now, when I was younger, I didn't understand the episode about her wanting to join the daughters of the South and finding out she has like Jewish lineage and things like that. That episode is now one of my favorite episodes of anything on television. She's like, I'm a saleman, damn it. Oh my gosh, that episode is hilarious.

SPEAKER_01 40:16

I was just like, you know, I'm thinking the show, the comedies of that period seemed to have more depth than the ones, the later ones. Uh, you know, I could be wrong, it's just a personal opinion, but it was, I mean, even with Charlie Sheen's show, they they touched on a lot of things, even with silliness in the in the you know, in the presentation, but the stuff was underneath it, there was seriousness, you know, the way he lived and his his alcohol and his running through women like you know, like a river. And like a river. The mother character was terrific. And that that that difficult relationship between her two sons and her, which was they made it comedic, but it was, you know, it was great. It was good stuff, good performances, good performances. Even that little boy with the little cheeks, yeah. Yeah, two little cheeks. I loved it. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 41:14

So before I get to my last question, an amazing question came in, and I love this question, and I would like to share it. As a trailblazing actress and writer, what are some of the best pieces of advice you have for individuals who want to break into the industry? I find that which is true. I find there is still a ceiling in gatekeepers.

SPEAKER_01 41:34

Well, that is true, and um I don't know how to tell a person to get into this. You have to work, you have to, you have to you have to get involved in areas of work that will bring attention to yourself so you have something to show when you go in or try to get an audition. So maybe you do a theater piece or um uh or help a student who's making a film do something, say at USC Film School or UCLA. There's these are small things because there's so much competition to get in the door, or there has been over the years, so much competition for people who want to be in Hollywood. It makes it very difficult for newbies, new you know, people coming in who have not been seen by somebody and then kind of brought in. Um so I think uh I'm sorry I'm not being very helpful here because it's it's uh it's a hard business to break into generally speaking, but then you can find someone who does one role and it attracts some attention, and their whole career is set for the next 10 years. So it's there's no one way, there's no one answer. There really isn't, and I wish I could be more helpful on that.

SPEAKER_00 42:51

Yeah, and me, I'm somebody who when I was an undergrad, I was like, I'm gonna graduate and go move to New York City and do the page program at NBC and all these things. And I'm like, I grew up in a working class family. Page programs didn't pay any money, nobody's gonna pay my rent. And so I had to, and I'm still in my mid-40s, explore mid to late 40s, exploring how like what is the break? But at the same time, it's like I do have a career. Like, I do independent theater producing here in Franklin, I've done shows, so I so it's like, and then I've self-produced a lot of things. So a lot of times, you have to be the one to put the work on. So do an Indiegogo campaign, fundraise, put on your own show and invite people a lot of times. That type of work is going to be more rewarding because you are going to have a foot in the process at every step, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

Exactly. Exactly. I mean, even for my writing life, when I started the Long One Writers uh workshop, I was in a lull. You know, I was kind of, I didn't know what to do with myself. I was I wasn't working out. I was, you know, I had kind of wanted to write this. Love story, I wasn't sure. And also, before I moved mom in here, I was living in here alone and I was lonely and the house was empty and blah blah. So I set up the workshop, and then I had six people in here every Saturday, every every other Saturday, talking literature and books and writing. And we became like a little, you know, quasi-family, and we still are. But I created it because of my own loneliness and my own inability to have a healthy social life. I'm not that social. If it's about work, you can find me there. But just kind of like a party for party sake, not so much. So I mean, I did when I was younger, of course, but now I'm like, hey, I'd rather just sit here and watch TV or sit out in the backyard and drink some champagne.

unknown 44:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 44:48

Yes. And the last question I have for you, Miss Nicholas, what is next for you and how can a Black Writers Read community support you on this journey?

SPEAKER_01 45:00

Thank you for that. I think here for the next six months it's just going to be about this book. Um, because it did take three years to write it. So now um paying bills. True fixed. Got some other projects around here that need doing. Oh yes. So yeah, I'm going to write one more book. And it is a love story. And I found some notes that I made years ago. And I just I was, I don't even, they just appeared somewhere. And I read it and I said, Oh my God, this is it. Was the whole story in about a page. I had made it into a one-page thing. And I thought, oh my God, I was, I said, this is beautiful. This is beautiful, Denise. You wrote this. So I'll get to work on that.

SPEAKER_00 45:53

Nice. Well, Miss Nicholas, our time together has ended. I I am so beyond honored to have you on Black Writers Read and also to finally meet you because which I will find. I still have the article in my portfolio upstairs from grad school. I wrote an article on the experience of working on buses. On buses. Yeah, that play. It's so my God. It's a bit for folks, it's about if Rosa Parks and Mary Ellen Pleasant, who are two women of their respective civil rights movements, were to meet at a bus stop. And it, oh my God, it's powerful. It's it's an amazing work.

SPEAKER_01 46:34

It was my my um my goal was to go back to it and fill it out some more, make it a little bit longer. I just haven't done it yet, but I I fell in love with Mary Ellen Pleasant years ago. I went all up and down California doing research on her life before I wrote that piece. And um there were stories I w I I went to the library at Berkeley, the California library in Sacramento. Um I went all up and down California trying to find every little tidbit of information about this woman that I could find because I had never heard of her until I had somebody handed me the book. There was an early biography on her, um which was the first, and that was like somebody gave me that book in the early 70s, but I didn't start writing about her until much later. But I never, I couldn't forget, I couldn't get her out of my mind because she was such a there was there was no other character like that in my study of our history. We have, you know, we have many, many, many extraordinary black women over the course of our history, but none was quite like Mary Ellen Pleasant because she was really uh she was a gangster. Yep. She basically was a gangster, she was a female gangster in the 1800s. She had a gun in her pocket, yep. That's right. And and and she was serious. I mean, she was not taking no mess off nobody. She had more press in the San Francisco newspapers than celebrities get today. I mean, she was the talk of the town.

SPEAKER_00 48:08

Yeah, and ironically, um, you mentioned and and this, and and then I'll definitely wrap up. But ironically, so there's another connection in your book to buses. So St. Stephen's Annie Church in Detroit. Dear friend of mine, amazing actor, um, Tony V. Walker, who passed away a couple of years ago, she was fairly young. She actually played Mary Ellen Pleasant in the production that I worked on, and her family went to that church.

SPEAKER_01 48:38

Oh, wow. Yeah. My grandma's church. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:42

Because when I was like, say scale. When I was around, I was like, why does it sound familiar? And I googled it and I was like, yup, that was Tony's church. I remember she took me to a weekend bazaar there and I bought some glasses from my mama. I remember, I was like, Yep, I know the city.

SPEAKER_01 48:59

It was a big church in that community. It was it was strong. It was very strong. And what I do in the book is I put uh my grandma's church to in counter counter point with mom's church because mom was Lutheran, so she was very quiet and very, we'd sit there and then we go to St. Stephen's. It was like holy roller time. We went woo-hoo.

SPEAKER_00 49:26

Yeah, and same for me. My paternal grandmother, every big holiday, because so I had my own church home, but my paternal grandmother, we all, my cousins and I, we always spent the night and we went to Nazarene Baptist Church on all the big holidays. And and still to this day, I have memories. We'll be like, service starts at 11:30. We ain't getting out to five o'clock, y'all. Get ready. And we were small children. We would sit there, draw on our Bibles, fall asleep, and be like, they pass in the 20th collection plate. Y'all, what is happening? Or like the pastor would get the Holy Ghost, be like, Yep, we're gonna be here at five o'clock today, y'all.

SPEAKER_01 50:02

We we used to sneak, I write it in the book. We used to sneak out and go down, you know, pretend we're going to the bathroom downstairs and sneak out and go to the candy store down the corner because church was long.

SPEAKER_00 50:15

That was bad. And it's so funny because here in New York, I've been in New England now for 20 years, but I haven't really gotten into the culture here. And I I did some work recently in Springfield Mass. And Springfield Mass is a lot like the east side of Detroit, very much so. And I'm like driving through town, there's a lot of churches there too. Driving to it's 12:30 on a Sunday, all the parking lots were empty. I was like, wait a minute. And I right, and I asked a friend of mine, and she's like, Yeah, we in church early here. And I was like, Y'all ain't seen nothing until you have to go to church and literally be in service sitting on the hardwooden pews for your all day. But I passed like three church parking lots, and I was like, It's 12 30 on a Sunday. Why are they empty? I was like, wait a minute.

SPEAKER_01 51:07

You have been brainwashed.

SPEAKER_00 51:10

Right. I was like, I should have grew up in New England, not Detroit. That's funny. Well, Miss Nicholas, thank you. Oh my gosh, this was such an amazing afternoon. Thank you so much for making time to chat about your book.

SPEAKER_01 51:28

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed our conversation very much. Thanks. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 51:38

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