Journalist-turned-novelist Patricia Hudson discusses Traces, a novel about Rebecca Boone

Patricia Hudson  has been a freelance writer for more than 30 years. She's written for magazines ranging from Country Living to Women's Sports and Fitness, but her favorite assignments focus on historical topics. She was a contributing editor at Americana magazine for more than a decade, writing about historic preservation, folk art, and travel destinations for history lovers. As a frequent contributor to Southern Living magazine, she traveled extensively in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, profiling people whose passion for those regions matched her own. She's a long-time member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Her book credits include: Inns of the Southern Mountains, and Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia, as well as The Carolinas and the Appalachian States, a volume in the Smithsonian Guide to Historic America series. She lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with her husband, photographer, Sam Stapleton.

Transcript

0:27

Welcome to M FFA Payday, where we talk with people about how they make their M FFA pay. We're your host dream of Drudge and Barry Drudge. If you'd like to be a guest on our show and you're an MFA graduate, or someone in the publishing industry, go to our website, mfa payday.com and reach out to us on our contact forum. And while you're there, why don't you sign up for our newsletter so you'll know all the happenings that are happening. You won't be disappointed. Hi, this is Barry. I want you to know while Dreama is gone for the moment that I can just talk about her book for a second. She has a wonderful new book out that came out at the end of January called Southern Fried. We're going to get together soon and, and talk about it. I will be the interviewer and she'll be the interviewee. And we have the ability, since I've been around it a little bit. We'll, we'll just dig right in and, and get to the meat of it and, and her desires and her goals and, and what she wanted to do with the book and how it has been such a, I don't even know the word. It's experimental, but at the same time it's highly readable. So tune in with us as we talk about Southern Fried Wolf. Today we have a really special guest. I'll, uh, we'll disclose right now that someone that I went to class with at, our Spading University MFA program. Uh, her name is Patricia Hudson. Let me read her bio to you. Patricia has been a freelance writer for more than 30 years. She's written for magazines ranging from country living to women's sports and fitness. But her favorite assignments focus on historical topics. She was a contributing editor to Americana Magazine for more than a decade. Writing about historic preservation, folk art and travel destinations for history lovers as a frequent contributor to Southern Living Magazine, she traveled extensively in the Southeast and mid-Atlantic profiling people whose passion for those regions mastered her own. She's a longtime member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. And already as I'm reading this bio, I'm going, I'm kind of jealous. I like amazing. I, I don't know what kind of bio I have in comparison, but we'll go on Uh, her book credits include Ins of the Southern Mountains and listen here. Women Writing an Appalachia as well as Carolina said, the Appalachian States a volume in the Smithsonian Guide to Historic American Series. She lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her husband photographer, Sam Staple. Welcome, pat. Thank you. Thank you. It's nice to be here. I usually start, and I don't know if this is how you all want, is with sort of the introduction that I have because it kinda explains what I'm doing and why. This is the author's note. Great. When I open a history book, I hear whispers. Women call to me from between the lines, they perch among the footnotes and clinging grimley to the margins. Their hold is tenuous, a careless shake of the book, and I fear they'll tumble into the void. Their stories forgotten entirely. Rebecca, Susanna and Jemima Boone are among those women whose words have been lost. There's only a trace of them in the tales Told about the celebrated explorer, Daniel Boone. Daniel became famous during his lifetime when a man named John P Journey to Kentucky collected the Frontiersman stories and printed them in a book called The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone. P didn't bother to record any of the women's names. The story about the Boone women that have come down to us are largely rumors interwoven with a handful of glimpses from those who actually knew them. The most commonly repeated tale is that Daniel's younger brother fathered one of Rebecca's children, a story that impacted all three of the women's lives passed down through the years. The story often ends with this observation. It might be true or it might be a lie, but that baby's a boon either way. Oh wow. Other forgotten women appear in these pages as well, including a female slave named Dolly and non Helena Ashani woman, who was her tribe's peace chief. They are seen through the eyes of the Boone women whose attitudes reflect the 18th century morays of white. As well as the brutality of life on the frontier. And yet when these women were given a chance to know each other, the record suggests some of them were able to see beyond the clash of cultures and recognize their shared humanity. For nearly 300 years, these women have been little more than historical footnotes defined by the words of others, but once they had words of their own. So that's kind of the, the, uh, the intro to the book that I felt was kind of important for people to understand that, um, the impetus for the book was that these women had really been ignored and possibly slandered. Uh, you know, it's hard, it's hard to know. I, I did as a novelist have to make some decisions about whether these rumors were true or not. Um, But pretty early on, I decided whether the rumors were true or not. And I'm not gonna say whether I thought they were or not. Cause that's a spoiler, but uh, um, that it didn't really matter whether they were true or not because the women lived with the rumors, you know, their most of their lives. And that was sort of the assumption that was floating around, uh, around them. but my own personal, in my humble opinion, and my, my personal opinion is like, there's such a, a rich, um, amount of writing to be done on, on those who had no voice. I was thinking about that. Biblically, you've got all of these, these biblical leaders, and yet the the spouses are, are generally, yeah. They're just there. You hear the name and they're just kind of drug around from point to point. And it's the same thing. Um, we've got a friend who has a, classical music, personality or person who the husband is in the cannon of classical music, and yet she wrote as well. There are just such, fertile stories to be had. Well, I think women, um, often I, I call 'em the stories between the lines and that's what I, I love to find and love to look for, uh, because I mean, for so much of human history, most women were illiterate. I mean, actually most men were too really But, but of the, of the few folks who could actually record their own history, it was almost always male up until fairly recently in, in our, in human history. So, uh, those voices, the women's voices are just, uh, missing and so, so, so many places. And doing some of my research. What I found really interesting is that it, it hasn't changed as much as we would like to think it has. Um, there was a study done in 2016 and 75% of the actual biographies that were published that year were about men. That's that's pretty astonishing. Yes. Yes. But it's because the records, the actual historical records are so lacking for women. I, I really might have done, uh, a biography of Rebecca Boone and her daughters if I could have found enough source material. Oh. But pretty quickly, anything that you would write as non-fiction becomes Daniel's story again. Yes. Cause that's, that's where the records lead you. Yes, yes. And not trying to be salacious, but that was just something that you said a minute ago that really impacted me. These women had to live, with rumors. Whether the rumors were true or not, if they were out there, they had to live the consequences. And I loved in your novel, I, I love how you handle that subject. And I, again, I, I won't spoil it either, but you do such a beautiful tender job of that Barry and I live in a small town, and nothing can happen without somebody knowing what's going on and you know, how things can be misconstrued, um, and, and misinterpreted. And as you said, you know, we don't know the truth of the matter. But yeah, just having to live with that assumption that's being made about you, that must have been very difficult. And that it impacted her children as well. Yes. Um, you know, one child being viewed as illegitimate, Uh, and, and the other, uh, daughter, sort of the rumors about her mother then were rather quickly applied to her, whether her own behavior, you know, uh, indicated that that's the case or not. So, I mean, and that's how it goes, right? You know, a family in a, in an area gets a reputation of some sort and it just sort of does trail after them. And I, I'm actually in the, uh, editing process of a, uh, a piece for Appalachian Journal where I lay out all of the research that I did because I really don't want anybody else to ever have to go back and sign all these, all these citations again. Um, and, and I hope that that will at least give people, um, you know, some people. Want only facts. And some people don't care about the facts. They just want a good story, you know? Yeah. So traces I hope is a good story that I felt compelled to stick to the facts as closely as I could. Um, but I also wanna leave because, you know, my original job was a reference library at university Reference Librarian. So of course it, it's in my dna n a to want to, to get the facts right too. So, uh, this academic piece will hopefully cover that end of things as well. So if people read traces and they wanna know, okay, what, what, you know, what, what do we know? Absolutely. For sure, they can go to that piece, uh, about these rumors. And it's called Searching for Rebecca, is is the title. I have a question for you on that, because Rebecca came to life, her voice so much in, in our workshop. I mean, the whole family, it seemed like, um, like we were right in the middle of it. I really, I think you had a, a really, a live voice. You know, you've got a, a great writing style. I thought, boy, this is like gangbusters. That was, that was my, my initial thought. And then we met up another year at one of the Spalding events at the Brown Hotel in Louisville and asked at that time, and You had tried to get it published so can we talk a, a moment about the journey that brought it to life? Yeah, certainly. Um, well it, it was interesting. Um, my agent decided that, first of all, um, the time period, the times being what they are now, that I needed sensitivity readers for, you know, for the African American voice and for the, and I wasn't writing in those voices, but those characters are certainly there. Uh, the, the, the Shawnee woman, uh, the Cherokee, some of the Cherokee, uh, warriors, and this one enslaved woman. Uh, at, at who was, uh, a part of cutting the road into Kentucky and it has never gotten her due at all. Uh, and so, um, so that was the first step. The agent goes, okay, uh, before I start sending around, you've gotta find sensitivity readers. Finding a shawny sensitivity reader is quite a, quite a str It was a struggle and, um, and I won't go into all of all of what happened, but I did eventually find a, a, a Shawnee Elder in Oklahoma who was willing to, uh, look at how I had created a scene and, and then, uh, helped me use Shawnee Language. Which he was so excited to have that in, in the book because his, his goal is to try to keep the Shawnee language alive. And of course, as with many native languages, they're very much, it's in danger. And so, um, that really added a richness to the book. And so for anybody who's writing, you know, pretty much anything anymore, you do have to be aware of, of different voices, different, you know, um, different sensitivities that probably 15 years ago, 10 years ago even wasn't an issue. And then the, the agent, my agent said, okay, now I'm gonna start shopping. And, and this was just a little bit before covid hit. And because I'm not known as a novelist, this is my first novel. I had a long career as a journalist. Um, my agent sent it out to a few people, and it, you got, we were getting comments like, oh, I just never liked frontier stories. You know, I mean, it can be something as basic as that. That's just not, and my agent's been an agent for a very long time, so she wasn't just like scattering it like, you know, uh, scattershot. She, she was being fairly pointed, but that was one comment. Um, there was, I, I'm certainly not gonna ever reveal who some of these comments came from but one comment was, um, well, one of the daughters, could you make one of the daughters gay And I was like, no, I don't have any objection if there was any indication, but there's no indication. So no, I I can't do that. Well, it would've been more interesting they said, you know, so, okay, um, let's see. Uh, one of the men thought that Daniel came across stronger than the women. Daniel was never actually a point of view character in, in the novel. And I thought to myself, I think, think that's your your perception. You're listening to the men and not the women. So, you know, you get that kind of thing too. So, uh, when Covid hit, uh, my agent said, I'm gonna pull this for a while because not much is, is moving right now. Um, unless you're already an established author. And so, so we pulled and sat on it, and about the time that she was ready to start sending it out again, I wrote her and I said, you know, I, I really think I want to go in a direction where, um, where people will understand, uh, the, the importance of this story and the fact that it, I, I believe it really will resonate with, with people from my area of the country, may be in ways that a New York House might not even, you know, realize. And so, um, she, to her great credit said, go ahead, uh, um, but let me look at any contract that. Sign and I said, well, you're not gonna make much money probably ever by what I'm thinking about doing. And she, she was just great. I, I love her to death. So, um, so I decided to send it to the university, uh, press of Kentucky, Kentucky subject. Sure. And, um, and I did not realize that, I knew they had a new fiction imprint, but I did not realize who was the editor of the fiction imprint. Cause at the time it really hadn't been announced. And it's one of our Spalding buddies, Silas House is the editor for, for this, this new, relatively new fiction imprint. And so I, I actually emailed him and. Silas, you know, what do you know about this fiction imprint? Um, known Silas a lot. I've known Silas a really long time and, and I said, you know, do you think that this, this material, because it is about Kentucky, you think they might be interested? And he emailed the editor, you know, so that, that was just wonderful. Good luck. Uh, you know, you can't really account for that because obviously when I started writing this novel spa, um, um, university of Pres of Kentucky didn't have a fiction imprint at that point in time. It's, it's relatively new. So, uh, sometimes the stars just align, you know, for you, with writers, oftentimes they don't, as we all know. But, uh, in this instant in instance, it just, it all worked out and, and, uh, and so, uh, yeah, I was just very fortunate. Yeah, it struck me when I saw who had published it, that that seemed like the perfect. Place for that book. Now we're ready to hear more. Please, if you don't mind. Let's see. What, what I would choose here for this. Um, this is, from chapter three. And so the opening of the novel is where the Boone family is having to leave North Carolina, the place that they have settled, uh, because there's a, a Cherokee. The Cherokee have finally had enough of people moving into their land and they are determined to, to push the settlers, uh, back out of their territory understandably. And so this family, uh, has to pack up and, and, and leave. And so the family ha have become, for all intents and purposes, refugees. And, and it's that moment I, I believe in the marriage and in in their, the couple's relationship that things really changed. And so Rebecca and, and the family are living as tenant farmers in on a, a friend's farm in Virginia. They've left their own home, their own property. Well, what they believed was their property. Of course, the Cherokee thought differently and, and are, have been uprooted. And, and in that time period, women really had to depend on other women for the, just the, the just unending very physical chores and things that needed to be done. So for a woman to be uprooted from a community carried a lot more difficulties than even we would think of now. So in chapter three, this, this excerpt is when they are now in Virginia having been uprooted. One morning, not long after their arrival in Cu Pepper, Rebecca woke before sunrise with her stomach churning. She slipped off the pallet, pulled on her cloak, and felt her way outside the cabin and ran her hand along the rough log wall that led to the necessary. She sat in the dark confines, retching, and shivering. By the time she made her way back to the cabin, the sun was just breaking over the horizon, bathing the bare limbs of the apple trees that marched in rose across the hillside in pink hued light, she climbed the rickety porch steps and leaned on the railing to catch her breath. The Boone family friends who had taken them in had offered them the use of this tenant cabin, but despite the aura of friendship that surrounded the arrangement, it was clear they were expected to work the surrounding fields just as any other tenant would. Rebecca turned her back on the first raise of light that shown above the orchard, crossed the porch, and East opened the cabin door hoping the rusty hinges wouldn't. The interior of the cabin was beginning to grow lighter. When she laid back down beside Daniel chilled to the bone, he opened his eyes and looked at her quizzically. I'm expecting she said, when the look on his face hold her. This was unwelcome news. Late October, maybe early November, she tugged on the blanket and turned her back to him to hide the tears that pricked her eyelids. The first two times she told him she was pregnant, his response had been to lift her in his arms and whirl her joyfully around the room. Now she lays stiffly in the dark, her mind racing. After a bit, Daniel slid across the pallet and spooned his body against her back. Draping. Draping his arm over her side so he could rest a hand on her stomach. He let out a longside. You know, I love Young and Becca, but another mouth to feed his voice trailed off, and that was all he said. As Daniel began to breathe deeply, his arm heavy on her side, she lay awake listening to the wrestle of the boys as they shifted in their blankets. Since their arrival in cold pepper, Rebecca had felt Daniel growing more distant from her. With each day that passed, their abrupt uprooting had changed him, and though she wanted to unburden her heart to him, she knew she no longer knew how to start. It had been a shock for all of them to go from being in charge of one's own homestead to scraping by as hired, help farming someone else's land. Culp Pepper County was a good deal, more civilized than the forks, and here they reviewed as refugees from the back country. Rebecca watched a shaft of light trace a slow course across the cabin wall, and a girlhood memory came to mind the time her brothers had found a crow with the damaged wing she'd watched as they fashioned a cage and carved a splint, then helped them scour the barnyard for worms to feed the glossy bird. The injury healed nicely. Yet one morning they'd found him lying stiff and glassy-eyed. Wild things can't be caged. Her father had told them. Rebecca shifted uneasily as she realized the expressions he she'd seen on her husband's face in the thin morning. Light was a look of a wild thing, desperate to make his escape. Wow. beautiful. Now I'm just all wrapped up in that. What else am we gonna talk about? I don't know. We're just living, living in Virginia at the moment. It's interesting that you chose that passage because that was something I wanted to ask you about, but I was afraid it was too Daniel centric but you pointed that. In, in your, um, research, did it seem as if he really was like a restless soul? It seems like he just didn't wanna be home whole lives. didn't wanna be home. He, he had a very, very strong pull towards wilderness and discovery. And his job, if you wanna, her, his career we would call it now, was as a trapper, uh, and a hunter. And that was how he made his living for the family. And so in, at several points in the book, he would say something like, well, this is the only way I can feed us. And you know, and she would come back with, no, we've got plenty of land if you would just farm, you know, There was a, obviously a certain segment of the population that were known as long hunters. That was what they did. They went off into the wilderness sometimes for years at a time. And he was one of those. But his brother was very much farmer. And, at one point in the novel, I do have the women sort of talking about how. All of their, all of these three women that were talking, their husbands were all long hunters. And, and one of the women says, do you think we marry them again? You know, if we and, and, and there's just silence after that, you know, so, right. It would've been a very, very hard way to live because these women, as I say, the workload for these women is just staggering, just staggering. Hmm. Well, thank you for sharing all of that. You've spent so many years looking at your bio, um, writing journalistic things. What, what caused you to decide to, to pick a MFA program? Well, I had. I had as, as I think I say in the book, I'm pretty sure I say, uh, it, this, not, this manuscript was 25 years in the making. Um, and so I had, had gotten this idea, uh, I was interested in, in the Boone women. And so I had gotten this idea, I had started research, I had done sort of a, a, a basic draft and then I'd stuck it in a drawer, um, partly because I was still doing a lot of magazine. Had young children, you know, all that, everything pulls you in a thousand directions as it, as it does for every writer. And so, um, it had been in a drawer, and then I had kind of quit writing almost entirely because I co-founded a, an environmental nonprofit and was doing legislative work, trying to get a bill passed. And that took up the better part of 10 years at the same time that I also suddenly became, um, enmeshed in elder care for, for aging parents. So that was, that was a, and so when I applied to the M F A program, I, I didn't really wanna go back to doing so much magazine work. You know, I'd done that already, you know, and I'd had this sort of long break. And when you get a long break like that, you start to think, well, what else do I wanna do? You know, I've been doing this other thing for a long time, what else do I wanna do? And so I pulled the manuscript out of the drawer and I thought, A couple of things. One is a, my writing community had always been editors and people in distant places. You know, I didn't have Ari, uh, uh, they were voices on the phone. Really, for the most part. When you do magazine work, your editors are in New York or, or elsewhere. And, um, and edit, uh, being an editor of a magazine is, uh, it's musical chairs. They're always moving, you know, so continuity was, was an issue. And I think that the nail in the coffin was, I've been writing for Southern Living for I think about 12 years and Time Warner bought out. The company and they really did an a, you know, they asked a lot of the editors that I had worked with and, and, um, and it just suddenly became very corporate feeling and didn't it, it wasn't fun anymore. So I began to look at M f A programs thinking, okay, I need, I need a writing community. Um, and, and I, this, this novel had nagged at me and I thought, you know, okay, let, it's time to get serious about that. So I, I did look at a, at several MFA programs, I won't name the others, but I chose Spalding because what I felt there, and it's really, really been true, but I felt there from the very beginning was, this is a, a place where community is important. Yes. And that was what I was looking for. And, um, and so I, and when I applied, I applied both in fiction and non-fiction cuz I really, you know, I was kind of up in the air as to what I really was gonna pursue. And, and they didn't help me out much cuz they accepted me in both So then I still had the figure Um, and so I decided to focus on the fiction and, and I told them from the very beginning, I'm only gonna go one semester a year cuz I still was doing some of these other things. I had my, still had my hand in several other things. And so, uh, they said fine. And I thought, okay, that's a good sign, you know? Um, and, and so I could really immerse myself in the fiction for part of each year and then go back and do the other things I, I needed to do. And it was a perf, it was perfect for me. And I think an awful lot of programs would not have been nearly. As, you know, welcoming to that sort of ability to sort of make it your own program the way you wanna do it. And I think that's one of the enor of, of many things. That's one of the enormous beauties of, of the Spaldings program. And I remember saying to Kathleen, well I, I don't even know if I'll ever finish cuz the degree itself is not what I, you know, really need at this point in my life. You know? Mm-hmm. and they were like, oh, fine. And kind of smiled, you know, So I, I, I did finish I did graduate. And, um, and for anybody out there, the thing that really made this manuscript pull together was all the commentary all along the way from various people in various workshops. But the thing that solidified it was taking the book length manuscript workshop, which Spading offers periodically. and that was such a help cuz then you have people who have read the whole thing so they can see the arc of the story. It's very hard to have really very helpful commentary when you're only seeing just a small slice of a novel, you know? Yes, yes. But with the book Link manuscript, workshop, everybody had read every, everybody's whole novels and that was just, that was an amazing, amazing help in getting this pulled together. So one of the things we, we like to do on the show here is talk about different ways people earned their living through writing. And I believe you're our first, uh, journalist freelancer. So as if we're doing hypnosis, let's take you back in time a little So how did you get into that? It's, it's kind of an odd story probably as most, as, most things in life tend to be. But, um, I was a history major. You won't be surprised in, in, at the university. And, um, I had started in journalism actually, and this is gonna date me, but I started in, I started college in 1974. And if you can think of the history that was going on in 1974, it was Watergate, right? Oh, yeah. And, and so I, but I just left to write and I had been encouraged by an English teacher to consider, you know, going ahead and figuring out a way to, to do the writing. So I had, I had gotten accepted into the, the school of journalism at the University of Tennessee. And everybody and his brother suddenly decided they wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein And I was a president freshman. I was a freshman and I couldn't get any of the classes. I kept getting bumped cuz the classes were full and, and I had always left history and I thought, I'm never gonna be able to graduate if I can't get the classes in my major. So I segued over to history and, which I loved. I didn't regret that, except that as I got near to graduation, I thought I can't make a living you know? Right. So, so I, uh, applied and was accepted into library school. Into the library school. So my, my plan, you know how you always have plans. My plan was that I was going to finish the library degree and then go straight on to a program at William and Mary where you combined. Uh, working in an archives with getting your master's in history. And I really did intend to get the doctorate in history and try to teach at the college level. That was my young 20, early twenties, you know, plan. But I had a health, uh, uh, issue that came up and, um, and I had to take a year's leave from working while I worked through this health concern. And during that period of time, um, I, I was writing on the side and I started submitting over the transoms they used to call it. Nobody has Transoms anymore, but that's That was the, that was the phrase, um, meaning, you know, it, it got shot through the, through the transom, you know, nobody was expecting it kind of thing. And so, um, and I started, I got a, I got, was getting in some acceptances and there was this magazine in New York outta New York called Americana, and they called me up and said, I had sent a piece in just a cold piece, and they accepted it, and then they said, but, um, the editor called me one day and said, um, I, we would really like for you to go to Baton Rouge, uh, and interview this 32 year old bachelor millionaire who restores plantation houses on the Mississippi River and spends his winters in Europe, uh, buying antiques to furnish them. And, uh, and I was, I was stunned. I was quiet so long. The editor I knew for the editors said on the phone, you did travel outta state, don't you? You know? And so, um, my now husband, we, we had just started dating just a few months before this, and I called him up so excited about this, you know, it's like, guess what? I got this assignment to go, you know, and there's dead silence on the end of the line. And then he goes, I'm coming with you. So, and he did, and he's a photographer, so he wound up taking some photos during that trip. Just, you know, we sent 'em in and the magazine loved him. And so then they started sending us out as, as a couple and, and, which was great. It was a great, great gig while we had it. Oh yeah. So I didn't go back to Academ, I segued off into, into being a freelance writer and, uh, and managed to, I kind of laughed and said, well, I married, I married my husband for his health insurance. That's been our joke between But, uh, uh, but yeah, it's, it's worked out really well and, uh, uh, it has been a lot of fun and it's given us a lot of really wonderful experiences together. Nice. So tell us the name of your book again and where they can find it. And where we can find you. The name of the book is Traces. Uh, it can be found at Amazon if you are an Amazon shopper. Uh, I always encourage folks to look@bookshop.org because that, uh, supports indie bookstores. Uh, it can be ordered directly from the University Press of Kentucky, if that's your preference. I have a website, um, and it's uh, patricia hyphen hudson.com. And, uh, one of the things, and I should mention this on the website, I've had a, a local artist do a map of the Boone sites that are mentioned in the book so that you can download A P D F, can print it on a regular sheet of of paper and have, and set that with the book so that as you're reading, you can figure out where you are in the story and a trip. Yes. Yeah. Field's a road trip. And also I, uh, I have what's called the Boon blog. And the blog is a way to see behind the scenes of, of the writing of the novel. Um, and, and that's just my journalistic side coming out. Cause you know, that's what I did for so long that I see stories at each step of the way, even in the research. Go to sam stapleton photography.com and take a look. He's, he's got, he's, he's, he trailed around and did the kind of, um, documentary kind of stuff that I needed when, when we were working together like that. Well, thanks so much for your time, Patricia. Thank you. You're welcome. We want, we urge everyone that's listening to, to go out and buy your book. Thank you. Thank you. Oh my goodness. Well, thank you so much. We adore you oh yeah. It's the kindest and the sweetest, most supportive person, Oh, well you all are wonderful. And, and, uh, I'm just so glad that we wound up in the same MFA program because we all know it's the best one out there. So until next time, we all thank you for listening and just keep writing all of the things.