Join Javier and Mickey as They Welcome M. E. Torrey, Author of the Historical Novel Fox Creek

A plantation owner writes about rain, cotton, and daily chores then, with the same calm pen stroke, describes whipping people like it is routine. That single detail cracked our conversation wide open, because it forces a question many of us would rather avoid: how do “good” and “normal” people learn to live inside a cruel system and still see themselves as decent?

We’re joined by author Michelle Torrey, who publishes her adult historical fiction as M.E. Torrey, to talk about her novel Fox Creek and the 30-year path behind it. We dig into the moment a Louisiana plantation tour erased enslaved lives, and how that silence pushed her into deep research across plantation records, personal diaries, slave narratives, and the Federal Writers Project interviews. We explore what primary sources reveal that textbooks often smooth over, including the everyday logic that upheld slavery and the painful reality that so many voices were never allowed to be written down.

We also go personal. Michelle shares the depression that came with reading horrific accounts, the faith experience that gave her permission to hold joy, and the fear of publishing as a white woman writing about slavery in a time of heightened tension. From there, we talk about defensiveness, guilt, civil discourse, and why honest conversations about race can be healing instead of performative. The episode closes with her humanitarian work through Orphans Africa in Tanzania, and what long-term empowerment looks like when you build systems that outlast you.

If you care about American history, social justice, historical novels, and faith-informed conversations that don’t flinch, you’ll get a lot out of this one. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves thoughtful dialogue, and leave a review so more listeners can find Compass Chronicles.

Transcript

Introductions And A 30-Year Novel

SPEAKER_03 0:21

Hello everyone, welcome to the Compass Chronicles Podcast, and we are welcoming you here today. We thank you for showing up, for listening. Uh, we are excited. We have an amazing guest on our show today. We're gonna be talking about a few interesting things. Uh, again, uh, thanks my host Mickey for coming on as well. And uh, we look forward to a great conversation, Mickey.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

Hi, everyone, welcome back to Compass Chronicles. Again, always a pleasure to be here and excited for another great episode. And I'm looking forward to um diving in and talking about um some amazing books that I've been researching on, and I'm excited to get to have an opportunity to talk with this author, Michelle Torrey. So, Michelle, would you like to introduce yourself today?

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Yes, as Mickey said, my name is Michelle Torrey. My author name is M.E. Tory, and the reason I did that is because it's my first book for adults, but I have 12 books under the name Michelle Torrey published for children, and I didn't want the two to get mixed up, especially if children got a hold of my adult book. So M. E. Tory is my um um pen name for my uh adult novel, Fox Creek. Awesome.

SPEAKER_03 1:37

So uh question for you. Uh so your novel Fox Creek was 30 years in the making, which is amazing. That's a long time. What was it about this story that stayed with you for as long as and wouldn't let you walk away from it? Like 30 years and not what made you not walk away from it after 30 years?

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Right, right. Well, I think um, you know, I didn't write on it for 30 years. I think people, you know, assume that that's what happened. But the genesis of it was back in the 90s when I took a trip to Louisiana and visited some plantations there. And I had never been, I live in Washington State and am very much a northern girl. When I went to visit those plantations, I was taken aback when the um tour guides would only talk about the white families. And I was um disappointed and part of me was um angry. Um, so I came home on fire, just wanting to tell that story. I've always had, I think God has always placed in me just this sense of justice, uh, especially when it comes to marginalized communities or uh people who don't have necessarily the voices that the um non-marginalized communities have. And I've always, always been interested in social justice. So I came home and I thought, well, okay, I'm going to write a book that has the intersection of the white narrative and the black narrative. Um, and so then I started doing my research, and I was three years in research and wrote half my book before the year 2000. But then what happened was kind of the rest of life kind of takes over. You know, we've got that saying, uh, life is what happens to you while you make other plans, right? Um, my intention was always to finish that novel. But um then I had uh a number of contracts come up with in my children's writing, contracts with Penguin, with Random House for series with uh middle grade and young adults. And so I had to shift. I had to put Fox Creek on the back burner, I completely shifted, and also at the same time I got a master's degree in religion. So um I had a lot of balls in the air at that point. Um it's interesting because you know, come 2008, I think, or 2007 probably. Now it had been seven years since I'd worked on it, and part of me was feeling like, will I ever work on that again? Or is it just something that, you know, I don't have the voice for anymore, you know, that I've forgotten too much. And I was really very fearful about it. And since this is a program on faith and on those, especially those experiences that like redirect us in our lives, spirit experiences. There was one point when the spirit spoke to me and said, You are to pursue this with all diligence. And it was such a powerful message that for the next year and a half, I set my alarm for 5 a.m. every morning. And let me tell you, in the bitter winter in South Bend, Washington, which was where I lived at the time, that was really hard to get myself out of bed. But every time, every time I thought to myself, oh, I could just sleep for another hour, that word diligence would just pierce me. And I would get up and and I finished it. So that's kind of what happened then. And then the rest of the time between then and now was all about marketing.

SPEAKER_03 5:49

That's that's the I think the toughest part is the marketing where you get to.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Research That Changed Everything

SPEAKER_03 5:53

Writing sometimes is not as difficult as the marketing part. I know. You know, it would be able to just write the book and then let it market itself in a way.

SPEAKER_02 6:01

Um, Mickey, I don't know if you have any questions or um, no, I I'm enjoying what what what you're saying. I love that um you actually went to the plantation and you were able to identify that, that there, that there is such um, you know, I've I've gone on tours before, and they there's a separation in in certain things in certain communic communities where you're like, yeah, but just what about this and what about this? And I I'm glad that you were able to um be cognizant of it and just go back and be like, hey, I want to I want to shed some light on this. And so I'm I'm excited to hear more because I know I know his questions, and so I kind of want to wait for the answers before I say anything.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

So excited to hear what you're doing.

SPEAKER_03 6:46

Uh bounce off of those. Um so uh another question for you is you spent years studying plantation records, slave narratives, and personal diaries. What was something you uncovered in that research that truly shocked or changed you?

Seeing Slaveholders As Ordinary

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Oh my goodness. So, yeah, when I start research, I always start at what we call prime, uh sorry, secondary sources. Secondary sources, an example of that would be um the big coffee table book, let's say about the Civil War or about the South, um, life during those times. And it might be written by a scholar who's compiled all different kinds of information together. If you look in the bibliography of those secondary sources, that's when you start to uncover what is called primary sources. And primary sources will be your actual letters, your diaries, the journals of people who lived and breathed back then, whether white, whether black. Um, and and those are the sources that really, really dig into the dirt of what happened back then and really uncover different worldviews. So you in in reading all of those letters, diaries, and so on, I um I would became aware that there was, you know, one no one personality type on either, you know, white or black. You know, like humans everywhere, they were all over the board. Okay. So um one plantation uh journal that I based, I based my main one of my main characters, William Genzi. He's the plantation owner in my book, Fox Creek. I based him heavily on this character. And and the name of the book is Plantation Life in the Florida Parishes, 1843 to 1846, written by a man named Bennett Barrow. And it was just his day-to-day journal as he's trying to run this plantation. And actually, the plantation was not in Florida, it was in um Louisiana, and they were just called the Florida uh parishes back then, because that Florida panhandle, I think, was even bigger back in those days. But anyway, so he'll, you know, on a Tuesday or whatever, he'll write, you know, the weather is cloudy, it's rainy, you know, I sent the hands into such and such field to hoe or to plow or to pick cotton, whatever it might be. And so you have a lot of mundane, everyday tasks, but that really gives you an idea of kind of the rhythm of life. Okay. Um, and that was important to know. But but then you'll turn the page and with the same stroke of the pen, with almost no emotion at all, he'll say, Well, I had to whip, you know, an entire whole gang because they only did a half day's work. And, you know, he's he's saying it as if it's nothing, you know. And by the way, he did not have his own overseer. He did not believe that an overseer would be as emotionally or certainly financially invested in the enterprise as he would be. So he did all his own plantation management. He meted out all of the punishment, which was unusual, but I decided to use that in Fox Creek. I thought that was really amazing. But what struck me across the face like a slap was the day that he wrote in his journal that he had a conversation with his wife. And he said, I asked her, Do you think I'm a good man? And she pondered and said, Yes, I believe you are a very good man. And then he said, I don't believe I've caused harm to anyone in my life, and that for me opened up this huge book on his worldview. I don't know if I truly understood his worldview until he said that. Because in his mind, he was a good man. He loved his family, he loved his wife, he provided for them, he helped his neighbors when they were sickly, or in the case of two women who lived alone, he'd send over people to help hoe their fields or harvest their crops, he did his civic duty, on and on. So he had this list of things that he considered I'm a good man. If you were to meet him, you'd go, man, I really like that guy. But then there's this other side of him that can perpetrate cruelties upon an entire race of people and not think that that affects who he is as a person. That blew me away. And I think that was very representative of how slaveholders perceived themselves. They weren't in their minds monsters, they were ordinary people.

SPEAKER_03 12:30

You just answered actually, that was my next question off the book, like how uh, you know, they uh portraying slavers as ordinary people rather than the villain. You know, why was it important for you to tell the story that way?

SPEAKER_00 12:43

So right, right. So I think you know, Hollywood and a lot of the novels out there, when they do talk about slavery from um the slave perspective, we often hear about worst-case scenario. So, you know, I'm sure you everyone listening is familiar with a bell curve. You know, the bell curve, the human humanity is on the bell curve at one side of the curve, clear at the one end, we're going to have psychopathic people, people who are cruel because they love being cruel, or people who it doesn't bother them to be cruel, you know, and then all the way over at the other end of the spectrum, we'll we're going to have the very, very kind-hearted, the very benign people who wouldn't hurt anybody if they could help it. But most of us fall in that bell curve in the middle. And in the middle would be okay, we're considered to be good people. But you know, if we're surrounded by what we would call this per peculiar institution of slavery where everybody thinks it's okay, we might be, you know, persuaded to do that also, especially if you're born into it. You see it every day. It's normal. Okay, so I don't think um Bennett Barrow was outside of the bell curve. I think he was smack in the middle, and he was as normal as normal could be.

unknown 14:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:20

That's the question I was gonna ask you is in his journaling, did it talk about his upbringing? Because I'm wondering if, you know, this is what was demonstrated to him. This is how we, this is how we live. We, you know, we raise our family, we have a plantation, and this is um, these are people that work for us, and if they don't work for us, kind of like when you whip the horse, there are workers, we're gonna whip the horse. And so I'm wondering if that was just taught behavior, and there was no emotion or um even a knowledge of cruelty taught to him in that upbringing. Did he talk about any of his um, you know, childhood in his journalism?

Enslaved Voices And What We Lack

SPEAKER_00 14:56

He talked about some of his family history, as did the editor. So an editor got hold of his journal and then um produced the journal in its entirety, but then had footnotes and things like that. So would expand on what was known about Bennett Barrow, and that was very, very helpful. Bennett Barrow was the son of a planter, and his dad was the son of a planter, and so on. So he had grown up in that plantation environment, and his father had taught him to not use an overseer, to do everything yourself, because overseers couldn't be trusted. Overseers were sometimes too cruel. Overseers would sometimes uh sleep with uh the slaves, and then they would have what they called a passel of mulattoes running around. And his father taught him that the amalgamation of the races was like a disgrace, that you could not have an amalgamation of the races because there was a superior race and an inferior race, and that was basically mandated as like truth. Okay. So if you were to mix the races, you're going against that truth. And he believed that firmly. Um, he also believed that there had to be a superior race, uh, and he likened it to the Romans. So, you know, he's I give the example in my book, Fox Creek, when when my when this slave owner's talking to his son and he's trying to instill in his son this idea of the superior race. He likens it to the Romans. He says, Imagine if Plato or Aristotle had to like clean their own home or empty their own chamber pots or cook their own meals, they would not have had time to like investigate the mysteries of the mind or write all these works. That it it becomes um critical to the superior race, to have an inferior race to do all those things so that humanity can be advanced. And that was his argument. And I found it a compelling argument, all wrong at its core, but but that's what's so interesting to be able to make this compelling argument so that he convinces himself that it's right that he keep an entire race of people in bondage.

SPEAKER_02 17:37

I've got an opposite question, real quick, for you. Did you find any writings from the slaves, from the worker?

SPEAKER_00 17:45

Absolutely. Um, and of course, I read as many primary materials on them as I could because I wanted, as a white woman especially, to represent that black voice as authentically as I could. So I read um autobiographies, people like Jacob Stroyer. Um, I think he's the one who wrote Twelve Years as a Slave, Henry Bibb, another one who was a former slave who escaped, and then um people like Frederick Douglass, who also former slave escaped and became an ardent abolitionist and speaker in the North. Um and then I also read a lot of oral history, and the oral history would have been given to us. Um a lot of that was given to us in the 1930s from something called the Federal Writers Project. And that was started by Franklin Roosevelt, who during the Depression hired a bunch of writers, and some of the writers were sent to interview ex-slaves. So um these slaves would have been uh children during the Civil War, because that ended in 1865, and now you're in 1930, so we're 70 years later. Um, and so their recollections would be mostly as children or as very young adults. Um, and so with both of those, you have to be careful because um it's it's kind of that bell curve again. You have escaped slaves, and that's one subset of an entire population, and then you have people who were children, and again, that's another subset of an entire population. What we're missing in that is people who were born, who lived, and who died on the plantations. They were for the most part illiterate because it was illegal to teach slaves to read. So we're missing this vast volume of voices, which were um the majority of slaves. Um, so I I I did my best, but scholars also are doing their best, but really we're missing that enormous voice from the middle.

Faith Joy And Publishing Fear

SPEAKER_03 20:15

I I it's I mean, being a minority myself, um, and sometimes seeing the uh that separation, you still see that in society today. It's just very subtle in a way, it's in the back. You really don't notice it, but it's there. Uh especially in today's society and everything that's going on in this world today. Um and I think it's very important that our young people understand that where they're coming from or where they where their history is from, uh, not to take that for granted. It could be black, Hispanic, white, Chinese, whatever. There's a a a source of that to have it. And I think by you by you doing that, well, uh it's opening up people's eyes to understand, like, you know, uh, this was real, this is in a storybook, this is in, you know, the real world happened here. So my question to you is, and it's weird because I never uh asked kind of, but as uh a person a white person, how did you uh uh uh look at that from your perspective, dealing with the black culture and the slavery and all that?

SPEAKER_00 21:21

Um, well, I think when I did have the Genesis for this book, um something like uh, you know, the phrase cultural appropriation, at least for me as a white woman, I'd never even heard of it before. And I wasn't aware of my own white privilege. I just saw this, you know, gap in literature um and in awareness, and I wanted to fill that gap. And then um it wasn't until like the 2014 um that I really started to wonder, is this something that I even have the right to put out there? Because my research, as I uncovered the research, I certainly at that time became aware of my own white privilege. I mean, it was just pretty obvious, you know. Um the especially as I read about Reconstruction and Jim Crow and all of that, it was just so clear to me how privileged I was in my life. Absolutely. Um and I even I'll I'll back up and say I even uh during those three years of research, which would have been in the late 90s, I had a period of about one year of deep depression because I was uncovering such horrific cruelty which had been perpetrated. Upon the slaves. And some of it was incredibly difficult to read. And I thought, how can humans do those, do that to other humans? And I was just distraught. And I thought, what right do I have to joy? And it was this question I kept asking. And at the same time, I knew it was kind of an illogical question. I mean, it was like, of course, be joyful. But I couldn't be joyful because the question wasn't answered. And um then one day I remember I'm in my kitchen. I'm going to make myself a cup of tea, and I'm reaching for a cup. And the spirit just rested on me, and I just knew that it's God's will that all people have joy. All people have joy. And that there's it's not for some and not for others. It it's never that equation. It's all people should have joy. And what happened back then, the perpetrator, the cruelty, whether we're talking slavery, the Holocaust, whatever, what happened is never God's will. Okay. It was done by humanity upon humanity. And the joy that was deprived of them was not that was never God's will. But it was God's will that I have joy. And so I felt like I had permission to have joy, even as I studied all of those things. And so you put all these pieces of the puzzle for me together as a white woman. And then back in 2024, I must admit, I had a lot of terror in publishing this book. And I thought the black community would just, as one friend said to me, they're going to crucify you. And I thought, oh, you know, that's going to be, that's going to be hard. And I thought, do I have the right to do this? And it just, it just felt like it felt like the spirit was saying, it's okay. It's okay. You have something to say. Your voice needs to be part of the dialogue. Okay. I'm doing this in in good faith. I've done my best in representing the black community, their worldview in times of slavery, as well as the white community and their worldview in times of slavery, and how those worldviews clashed. And I'm doing my best. And this will be a jump-off point for discussion. And the discussion is vital for today's worldview and how we view ourselves, our race, um, the discussion of race, that it's vital. Um, and so I went ahead and did it.

unknown 25:41

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 25:44

So sorry. So Mika, you had a question.

SPEAKER_02 25:48

Yeah. So the question I want to ask you was um, I'm trying to remember what it was now. Um at what point, like when you're doing all this and your friend's telling you, like, oh my gosh, um, I was thinking about that as you were saying it. Um, did you, how did you get through feeling like that intimidation? Like, oh my gosh, this is almost intimidating for me. But there's such a need, that gap, that there's such an importance. And I honestly think that um that gap is gonna be more appreciated than you think, you filling in that gap for especially for for you know people that have come from families on plantations and have worked in the fields. And I have an aunt that actually worked in the cotton fields, and she talks about, I mean, I have pictures of her little shack that they lived in, and I'm like, oh my gosh, you know, and and so it's interesting to me to think that I can see how you'd be so afraid at a certain point, but how much how important it's gonna be to release that information to people because people don't know, people don't realize that that part is missing. Like, I mean, I've seen like I'm I mean, I've watched like the color purple. I'm sure, I'm sure you know that movie. I love that movie, by the way. And actually, one of your pictures on your website looks like the house from that movie. I was gonna tell you that too. But anyhow, um, I was thinking about when I think about those kind of movies, and I think about like how is this unseen? You know, like you're saying, it's unseen, it's not known. Like these people don't get any education from birth to death, none at all. And I know and I've seen some movies where books are snuck in and there's one person that can actually read it and they're learning from one person in the candlelight in the middle of the night. And if they get caught, they're getting whipped for that, you know, because they're trying to learn, they want to learn. They have a we all have a desire to want to learn. That's what we're equipped with. So I can't even imagine. But go ahead, I'm gonna ask you that.

Defensiveness Civil Discourse And Healing

SPEAKER_00 27:38

Yeah, so when my friend told me that, it was it, it stopped me in my tracks. And I will say I I kind of put on the brakes um really fast and thought, is he right? And um I had to think deeply about that. But then I kept going back to all the times in my novel where I felt directed by the spirit, and um, you know, not just uh, you know, in 2007 and 2008, you know, the you know, to be diligent, uh, you know, every morning, be diligent, be diligent. And I didn't know why at that time that it was so important that I finish that book urgently. Looking back, I know exactly why, because my life was about to explode again and I wouldn't have had time for it. And we can come back to why it exploded later. But when I did finish writing the novel, you know, I'm like the end, and I go and I sit on my bed, and I always kind of am when I finish a novel, I'm very quiet and I just kind of empty everything, my heart, my mind, and I just sit with it. And again, the spirit said, just kind of put the last scene in my mind. And I didn't know there was even, I thought I'd already written the last scene. And suddenly, yeah, there's another scene still to come. And I got up and wrote that last scene, and it was a shorty, I mean, it was not long, but it was exactly what it needed. And I was like, okay. So that was another example of just feeling led. And so when my friend said this to me, what kept coming back was, no, I have something to say, and my voice is important, and my view in the world in terms of social justice, equality, that needs to be heard. I think almost especially by white people, you know, we need to hear that, and we need to hear how do we start discussing race? Because white people are really afraid to discuss race. You know, we're we're frightened of it. We're we're frightened somebody will call us a racist, you know, um, if we say the wrong thing or or it's not quite perfectly said. So we're quite frightened about it. Um, and I do think it's uh, you know, white people are also very defensive, you know, uh if if we start talking about race, we're very defensive. And why is that, you know, and and so it's important that I can reassure white people that um it's okay. It's okay. You don't have to be defensive. Um, in fact, being defensive is might be a cover for the guilt that we feel, for what our race actually did and the privileges that we have had. Um, defensiveness is uh just a knee-jerk reaction of, well, that wasn't me. Well, I didn't do that. Um, and so it's important that we see it for what it is. And as anyone knows in therapy, if you have something that's causing you guilt, you don't get rid of it by denying it or by covering it up. You get you get rid of it by talking about it, by uncovering it, by looking at it fully. So it's okay that that white people talk about race. It's okay. In fact, I think it's imperative that we do for the healing of race relations. White people have to be willing to talk about it. And we have to be willing to be vulnerable and to be open and to look at perhaps the little ways that we haven't realized that we're still not quite sure about and be willing to heal along with the black community.

SPEAKER_03 31:53

I I um coming from the side where I live, I live in New York City, one of the most uh liberal states in the country. They're very open to pretty much anything and everything. And uh that whole uh idea of the race and and the uh the separation stuff, I've never personally ever dealt with that. I I I guess in New York it was just such a melting pot that everyone you know just deals with everyone. And I I never it's funny, I never really knew about racism until I moved to a place where I was the only person of different color. That's when I realized, oh, and this was uh to bring us short, I I lived in New York City in the projects, which is a low income, and mostly were African Americans that lived there. So when we moved, we were the only Hispanic family that moved into that building. So obviously there was a lot of I I think for the last three years I fought my whole life every day there because unfortunately they were racist towards us being Hispanic. And I never got that because I'm like, but we're you're the same color as me. What's going on? But I see where you know, um, but I've never ever really ever got any racism or just truth from any white person per se. I got it more from the people that were either minority or Hispanic. I've gotten that more than I have from uh any uh white person to say uh so I can see where both things can become wild, uh especially now. Um we see all these debates, all these discussions, DEI, uh, you know, affirmative act, all that stuff that's either being taken out or being replaced with something else. Um it's scary now. It and the people don't want to talk about it. Um especially unfortunately white people and and white women. I think that they're so targeted sometimes. The poor white women, like they they make they you know, that whole Karen and the whole thing, it's just it bothers me. It totally bothers me. Um because it's reverse racism. You you're you're being racist to another world, and you hate it when it's done to you. So that's always had me a little bit um how you call it angry at that. Uh you know, I never understood why would people uh even consider that. Like, and I think you writing that book and telling people, listen, this is real, this you know, everyone has their side of the story. Right. And I think black people won't don't really want to hear what the white person did because all they think about is the trauma that they had. But they like you just said, it was a normal situation for them. They didn't understand that this was wrong, it was normal everyday life. So um that's kind of tough. I I guess when reading all those diaries and everything, like how did you emotionally deal with that? Like, how did it not eat you up? Because it would eat me up reading this stuff, right? You know, right.

SPEAKER_00 34:42

Well, I think the depression that I suffered was, you know, coming out of all this stuff that I was reading. It was very, very difficult. But I also um have a very analytical mind. I'm creative, but I'm analytical. Um, I try not to be both at once because that doesn't work. So, you know, I I create as I'm writing, you know, and I try to get that analytical part out of, you know, over there on the shelf. But when I'm researching, I am very analytical. And um, I have a science background also. Um, so you know, that helps in creating some distance between me and what I'm reading, to have that analytical mindset and be able to go, um, you know, to be able to chart things and, you know, make an outline, whatever it might be, that helps create some distance for me. And then when I have all the information and I put it in front of myself, that's when I'm trying to synthesize it and then create something from that that speaks uh to a truth, a deeper truth.

SPEAKER_03 35:52

That's it's I think as a writer, it's difficult to try and get those on paper the way you want to. Uh, I know I've gotten absolutely bonkers writing three lines on a book. Like it's it's there and you want to write it, and it's you know, until you get that, you you go crazy. You you just your mind is moving. Like, I need to finish this, I need to write this, and um so that's the creativity part, right? And then that's the analytical, like you said, and sometimes I tend to do this, I put it all together and I create a whirlwind of stuff. Um and then you know, things happen. So uh Vicky, I know you were you were asking a question before and or discussing something, so sorry.

SPEAKER_02 36:37

Yeah, what I was saying, I I I forgot we took a little break there, but um what I was saying was that um I didn't realize that even in my own family that there was some prejudice, and um until I was in high school and I I brought home um uh a boy that was, you know, black and I liked him. He was a good friend of mine. He sat next to me in class anyway. Um my mom was so distraught about it, like she pulled me in the house, shut the door, and made him leave. And I was so embarrassed my husband died. And I was like, What are you doing? This is my friend, and I was like, oh my gosh, and he he understood. He was like really cool because he was like, it probably happens to him all the time, but I'd never seen that before. And then she literally went to my high school and told the principal, I will not allow this. I don't want my daughter hanging out with him. I want him to stay away from her. And I was like, oh my god, I was so embarrassed, and I didn't even know what to do with that. And I was like, oh my, you know, and and I didn't even realize, you know, even in at my age and in my generation, that it was still happening. Yeah, and I was like, Mom, I never knew that you were prejudiced. And she's like, she's like, I'm not prejudiced. I we just don't mix. And I'm like, well, that's being prejudiced. Like, what do you call it then? You know, I didn't understand. Yeah. So I don't know how, you know, I didn't know how to deal with that. You know, like I'd then I'd go to school and people are looking at me. And I was like, because my mom made this scene, and I was like, oh my, you know, I was like this. Now now I'm like, now I'm being targeted because now I'm prejudiced. But I wasn't. I mean, I was hanging out with you know all these people. And it was so hard to overcome that. So I can see how there's that that that fear factor, like there's people that feel like they're privileged, and then there's just people that that just I'm a I'm kind of a social butterfly. I like everyone. I don't care if you're green, black, purple, whatever, you know. I love everyone because that's what the Lord commands us to do. We're to love one another. Doesn't talk about that. And so, like, I can only imagine the like like I was talking about before, the intimidation that you had to go through and the depression and and everything that you're reading. It would tear me up. I could just imagine myself being just completely obliterated with reading the journals that you read. Um, I I don't know, I don't know if you did this or not, but did you do much weeping? I mean, I could just see myself just weeping, you know.

SPEAKER_00 38:45

Not that I recall. Um, I did weep uh writing my book in certain sections when it was too traumatic or too sad. And then I was weeping. But I I don't weep easily anymore. I used to when I was younger, I used to cry all the time, and as a young woman, all the time. But as I've gotten older, I'm a little more stalwart.

unknown 39:11

I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 39:12

I think we all do after a certain age, we start getting a little bit like, eh, we don't need to get so emotional over certain things, you know.

SPEAKER_02 39:18

But yeah. So that's interesting.

SPEAKER_03 39:21

Yeah, go ahead, Mickey. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to.

SPEAKER_02 39:22

Oh no, go ahead. I was just saying that's really interesting because I I just could see myself being that way.

From Writing To Orphans Africa

SPEAKER_03 39:27

Yeah, yeah, it's it's I I know I I wouldn't be able to. I'll be there'll be teardrops in every word I write because I'd be feeling it. I'm very empath, empathetic, so I take it really in. Um, so what you were saying, Mickey, about your mom doing it, my dad did it to me. Um you know, we're Puerto Rican, so he wants us to stay in the Puerto Rican obviously. And I brought home an African-American girl, black girl, and he literally said, uh, no, this is not gonna happen in his own Spanish way. And and I I told him, you know, Pop, you're being you're being racist. She's just as dark as you, Pop. What are you doing? No, and it's exactly what the thought is they don't mix. I said, but dad, we're mixed, we're all mixed, none of us is pure, we're all mixed, and um you know, I that made me realize that there is racism within our own people, our own kind, you know. Um, and I seen that worse in relationships. I see that a lot, and um, it's just a sad case because like Mickey said, I don't care if you're green, orange, blue, purple, wear a nose ring, wear a forehead thing. If we're gonna talk, we're gonna talk. And if you get something out of it and I get something out, thank God. And you know, I think that's what's been lost, civil discourse. There is no such thing as conversation, it's yelling. Who can yell the loudest? Who can get their point across the most? And I think that's what what's needed now, like what we're having now, we're having a uh a discussion about race, with and that most people can't have it because of it. Well, why you know I I just I never felt racism in a way that I never hated white people, I never hated black people. I hated when they were put in situations that became what we call ghetto fabulous, you know, where you become a ghetto person or become real nasty, then I will not associate. But I've never really looked at color in that sense. I just looked at attitude and how you acted and how you stood yourself, and you know, if you were a bully, I don't care if you were green, yellow, blah, me and you're gonna go at it. I don't care. But you know, so that's my little here and there. But yeah, so I have another question for you, and then we'll uh go to our last question. Um, so you've written for children and also done humanitarian work around the world. How did those experiences shape the way you told this much heavier adult story? So, you know, from children's book to adult story, that's a really kind of big jump.

SPEAKER_00 41:53

I don't know if I can do both, but so uh, you know, the children's books I I've written are for middle grade and then also for young adult. And the ones for young adult were pretty serious novels. They're also historical novels, um and uh 60,000 words for um all four that I wrote. Wow. Um, and those that's substantial, you know. My uh Fox Creek is about uh hundred and sixty thousand, and it's considered a fat book. Okay. So a really big adult book will be a hundred thousand, and then a really fat adult book, 160. A normal adult book, 60. And so they were as long as adult books. Um, so you know, writing those young adult novels, I pretty much, you know, use the same techniques um and uh the same kind of narrative structure as I did for Fox Creek, although um, you know, my thematic materials get a lot darker in Fox Creek, and I'm able, I think, to um use uh a more um uh literary prose um with Fox Creek as well. So yeah. Um, so my humanitarian work, uh, you know, I was saying how I finished Fox Creek, finished writing it in 2008, and then my world exploded, and I had wondered all this time why is the spirit pushing me so hard to finish the book now? Well, in 2007, I did a trip to Tanzania and uh volunteered for a nonprofit uh organization there, and then came back home and started my own nonprofit here called Orphans Africa, and we're a 501c3. Um I was one of the co-founders, and we're still operating. You know, um 19 years later, we're still operating. And what I didn't know in 2008 was that Orphans Africa would basically become a very large organization. Um, and we have six campuses, we educate hundreds of children, uh ages two through 22. We have nursery schools, primary school, high school, and a vocational technical college. Well, during the you can imagine in starting in 2008, 2009, 2010, 11, we're still putting uh you know structures together in our nonprofit to handle donor um donors as well as donations, and as well as handling how do we Then manage our funds as they're sent to Tanzania? How do we manage the schools there so that we know our funds are being appropriately used? So we have to have transparency from top to bottom. And so going to Tanzania repeatedly, repeatedly, and visiting those schools and visiting the infrastructure as it's being developed, that exploded. And I actually had to take a sabbatical from all my writing, starting in, I think it was 2012. I said, I can't do both at once anymore. So I said, I'm going to take a sabbatical from my writing. And I took a sabbatical and I said two years. And at the end of two years, I wasn't ready to come back to my writing. So I just kept doing Orphans Africa. And Orphans Africa, I it's one of the proud the things I'm most proud of in my life. We have literally educated thousands of children in Tanzania who otherwise would have died. They would never have gotten an education. They would have been street children, prostitutes. It would have been a very bleak outlook for all of them. Unlike the United States, Tanzania does not have social programs. There's nothing for these kids. And really, an entire generation, which would be these children's parents, have been wiped out by AIDS, malaria, uh, tuberculosis, and cholera, those kinds of diseases that are prevalent there. And I just I feel like we have not only educated, you know, a generation of children, but we have empowered them. And not only have we empowered these children to act for themselves, but we've empowered the adults who have been involved in running the schools, in running the nonprofits that run the schools, in being part of the school boards. And they're just so empowered at this point that now when I go to visit, I feel like they're just like, oh, hi, Michelle. You know, like it's great to see you, but we really don't need you at this point. You know, other than, you know, we still need this classroom built or that classroom built. But as far as solving problems, they've got it handled, they're doing it. That's I just feel really proud of that.

SPEAKER_03 47:21

It's like uh when your child leaves, right? After you've grown up, they leave and they do stuff on their own. They don't really need you, and that's the way you know, you you uh struggled, you were there in the beginning, you gave birth to it. Uh as uh, you know, metaphor is birth is pain, and I can't imagine the the stress, the the old thing to get anything anything done with paperwork and anything outside of the country. I can't even imagine the amount of paperwork. But when God has something, I believe, in his plan, there's no matter what paperwork, what it's gonna happen. You know, it it could be the biggest wall in front of you, but he'll make that little crack or the wall will just go and you won't even know. And you know, and that's the way I see things, and and I believe that God, whenever he puts that in someone's soul, uh they can't live well unless they do it. Right because it's gonna be eating at them for the rest of their lives. That's what I tell people all the time. Just take a step, man. Just you want to be a podcaster? Pick up a mic, your phone. Hello? Nowadays the cameras are better on your phone than they are on in your laptop. Or if you want to write, write a poem, write something, anything that comes out of your head. Right. Sometimes that's where God directs you to. And one thing I always say, you know, we make plans and God laughs. You know, He you know, He has His own way, He has a place where He wants us to be. Uh, sometimes we deviate and we learn our lesson, but I think like He put that in your heart to start um that that uh the books and to start the the foundation and all that stuff. That had to have been something in the spirit just saying, yeah, you gotta do this, or it's gonna eat you up.

SPEAKER_02 48:59

Absolutely, absolutely. I think it's amazing because um that you said Tanzania, because um the church that I went to in Uva City, California before I moved here, we're huge um supporters of our orphan. We have an orphanage in Tanzania, and every year we put on a great big, huge weekend event to um get people to um um sponsor the children there. And um lots of sponsors sponsorships happen there. Um we bring a lot of, you know, we we they they make a bunch of jewelry and crafts and beautiful artwork that we purchase to help support that orphanage and all kinds of stuff like that. And I absolutely I I love it. I think it's wonderful. And and and we also support a place in Kenya as well, but Tanzania is one of my favorite places. Um I've always wanted to go there, so now I'm a little envious, but yeah, I would love I want to go there so bad on a you know on a mission trip and um just to be some kind of support. But um, yeah, that's wonderful. I think that's absolutely beautiful that you've done that. So God bless you for that. Thanks amazing.

Where To Find Fox Creek

SPEAKER_03 50:01

I you you gotta have a backbone to deal with that stuff. You gotta have a strong faith and a strong foundation to start something like that because they're gonna be the haters out there, right? The people that doubt you, the people that say, What you're a white woman, what are you talking about black people for? You have no idea what they're feeling. And I hate that because feelings aren't color. You know what I mean? Feelings are emotion inside. You know, I cry, you cry. I mean, why can't you feel pain? Why can't you feel honest? You know what I mean? It's and I'm so happy when I speak to people like you and I speak to Mickey and stuff like that. Well, they know that that it's the truth, and we know what we God has called us to do. And uh we just honor to be doing what at the end will be well done, my good and faithful servant. That's all we want to hear at the end. So, you know, all we do, the podcasting, your books, your I think that's all amazing. And I'm excited to hear even more. Uh, we're definitely gonna have you on here one more time, uh, as many times as you want to come on. And if you have anything new coming on, hit us up. We'll bring you on. You know, you decide to write a new book, a new series, or whatever, we'll be more than excited to uh show. Uh, all your stuff will be in the show notes. Michelle's stuff will be in the show notes. Michelle, will you tell them where they can find you, how they can find you, or your social media stuff?

SPEAKER_00 51:23

Yes. So the best place to go is to my website, and that's www.metory t-o-r-r-e-y dot com. And they can read more about me. Um, they can um find links to buy my book, Fox Creek, or read more about Fox Creek. There's even a first chapter excerpt there that they can read if they want to. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 51:48

Oh, wow, that's great. Again, people, everyone who's listening or watching, everything will be in the show notes. You can reach out to Michelle if you want to talk to her. She's like you see here, we had a great talk and a great time. Um, we definitely want you back on the show. We thank you for being on.

SPEAKER_00 52:05

Um, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_03 52:06

Sorry for the butt, the little disruptions here and there. Uh, it happens with life. But uh again, uh, Mickey, thank you again for being on with me.

SPEAKER_01 52:15

And yeah, thank you, Mickey.

SPEAKER_03 52:17

The crazy of Javier who I am, which is insane. I do crazy stuff all the time. Um, that's why I have a Patrick tattoo on my arm because my kids call me Patrick because I always do stupid stuff. So, but uh again, Michelle, thank you so much for being on. Again, everyone, thank you for listening and watching the Compass Chronicles podcast. We thank you for your love and your trust, and we hope that you leave a comment and follow because God has a lot of things working in this podcast, and we want you to be part of it. So, thank you so much, guys, and God bless.

SPEAKER_00 52:48

Thank you. God bless.