NINA FOXX author of ISLAND SECRETS: A Queens of Kiawah Story

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Public Library Podcast. Sorry, here's your host
and podcast librarian, award winning poet, future bestselling author and
host of one of the most listened to radio shows
in America, Helen Little.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Hello, book lovers.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
I've got a very special episode of today's Public Library
Podcast that was recorded on location in Bali, So take
a minute and enjoy. I am speaking today with the
award winning author of Island Secrets, a Queens of Kiowa story,
Nina Fox.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Welcome to the show.

Speaker 4 (00:35):
Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
I'm excited about it. So let's get right into the book.
Tell us about your book.

Speaker 4 (00:41):
Okay, it's a mystery. Imagine your husband has disappeared a
year ago. You don't know where he is, so you
need to figure that out because without him, without a body,
without him being declared dead, there's no insurance, and you
can't move on. So that's where the book starts. Our
heroin decides to go as a clue that has led
her to Kiowa Island, where they have a vacation home,

(01:04):
this enclave of friends that go there together, and she
starts her investigation to find out what has happened to
her husband, where'd he go and where the money at?
What inspired this story a true story?

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Really?

Speaker 4 (01:20):
Yes, someone that I used to work with occasionally disappeared,
just disappeared, just disappeared. And this person was an upstanding,
we thought, family man and business owner, and we would
occasionally do consulting work with him out of the country,
and we started getting calls because people wanted to know
where he was and we had no idea where he

(01:41):
was because he disappeared, but so did his companies. For
one K money. Oh, and so that kind of rested
with me a while. And then I had a group
of women invite me to Kiowa Island and they were,
in my head the Queens of Kiowa. Originally I were
going to call them the Kings of Kiowa, but at
that time my agent said women campy kings. I now

(02:01):
know that to not featured. There you go, and they're
women who had lived their careers, done all the things
that we admire in corporate America, and now we're enjoying
the fruits of their labors. And they have vacation homes
on Kiyoa Island and it was just like this secret
enclave of black excellence. Kieboa Island used to be a plantation.

(02:22):
It's one of the Barrier islands off the coast there
in South Carolina. But the mystery of the island was
interesting to me. And the first time we went, we
were chasing. There's a show called Diners Driving, Yeah, and
there was a restaurant featured there, and we went. We
tried to go. It was just a shack over the water,
which is where you see the book opens, and it

(02:42):
was a cove and these willow trees were hanging over
this coal and the marsh, the sea marsh grasses were
coming up through the water. And I looked at my
friend and said, can you imagine there might be a
body flating, floating right under that water and you would
never know. She said, You're real strange. Somehow, the two
of those things came together with me as a perfect

(03:04):
starting place in my head, and I wanted to write
a mystery. I was like, here's the mystery, and this
is what happens.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
You had such rich characters, and I loved many of them.
But who was your favorite character to write?

Speaker 2 (03:15):
And why? And I really want to know who inspired Denise?

Speaker 4 (03:19):
Well two questions. So the first one I think was
Melika Devereaux was my favorite character to write because she
had such a perfect facade, like she floated into the
room and her clothes were together, but she had a secret.
She was the person that she'd created, right. Yeah, she
came to be Melika Devereaux because she changed to recreate
herself as such, and we could recreate ourselves so many

(03:40):
times in life. And she was very intentional about it
and I loved it, although you know, her ending wasn't
so great. Who inspired Denise? I think Denise was a
conglomeration of those queens, Okay, if they were the people
that I would say, oh, I have mentors. They are
those people and they're doing these things that are great
that you look at and say, I want to be
that when I'm that Auntie, you know, right right? But

(04:03):
they worked hard, they chose to be here, and I
think I combined something from all of those people to
make Denise.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
You have written in a lot of different genres.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
Yes, Was this the first of its kind in writing
mysteries or did you.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Do this before? And do you have a preference when
it comes to so.

Speaker 4 (04:20):
I kind of write what I feel like. I'm curious
about life. I'm a psychologist by trade. I'm also a coach.
So I'm curious and I write to the question. Okay,
So I wanted to write a mystery. I think there's
been elements of mysteries and other books. I wrote a
Simon Foster and I wrote erotic espionage that life interests me,
and so it was the first mystery. I've written two

(04:41):
others in the same series now that go with it
that are not published yet, but they're.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
Coming Cinnamon Foster, Queen and the Queens.

Speaker 4 (04:50):
It right, Do I have a favorite? I don't know.
It's like a whole big puzzle, okay, Like how do
I make the puzzle come out? And I'm curious, Like
I would love to write science fiction because I cut
my deep growing up on science fiction and thriller, but
I just haven't gotten there yet. I think I also
want to write in television because I like story. I
like telling a story.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
Story.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
Yeah, I asked these questions because that inspires me. I'm
a reader who likes to read a lot of different genres,
and I'm a writer who likes to write a different genre.
A lot of different genres, and so many times in
this business you hear stick with one and I'm like,
I don't want.

Speaker 4 (05:22):
To do that. I mean I do have written multiple
Like when I first started out, they said I was
chick lit and then women's fiction. I wrote a bunch
of those. They sort of had a maybe a comedic
twist to them. Then I did some ya young adults
and new adults because those were interesting questions to me
as a mother at the time of young adults and

(05:44):
some of the puzzles or the questions that they were
faced with. And then erotic espionage came up because I
honestly loved to travel. You're interviewing here, me here, and
and Bali and I did a lot of work out
of the country international simons, and at the time I
was traveling with my now husband, so it was like,

(06:07):
what happens in these international mysteries that or international espionage,
things that no one wants to solve? Like what are
the questions? So different things from the different cultures inspired me,
and I was like, well, what if? And that's what
made me write that serious So.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
I love that question. What if?

Speaker 3 (06:24):
What was the hardest thing about writing this particular book,
I asked, because you do wear a lot of hats,
and I want to talk about all those hats.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
You've talked about some of them. But what was it
that was hard about writing this book?

Speaker 4 (06:35):
For you? I was really interested in making Kiowa Island
as much a character as the people were.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
Okay I felt that.

Speaker 4 (06:44):
Yeah, so I'm glad you did it. It's so funny
because I was contexted by a book club out of
the area. They're like, oh, you really know the area
they want you to come. And I think they thought
I was a white woman. And you know, they were like, oh, oh, okay,
it's hilarious. But I don't know how they could think
that when you see how the characters talk. That was
something that reviewers talked about. They felt like they were

(07:06):
talking to a bunch of black women, and they were.
They were clearly taking because there are cultural things in
the book. Although they're affluent, it was clear what culture
they were from.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
You know, it's interesting you say that because I'd written
a book and I was querying and this woman told me, oh,
you need to add this into the query letter, that
the sisters are African American.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
I said.

Speaker 3 (07:32):
I didn't ask why. I just said I said thank
you and thought about it. I'm like, no, I'm not
going to do that. Well, the reason I didn't do
it one. I prefer the word black that part that
part two. Use your imagination that everybody isn't doesn't look
like you when something comes across your desk, ask questions.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Be open minded.

Speaker 3 (07:53):
I mean, if I say they grew up in the
Jim Crow South, that's just not relevant to someone who
isn't black, right, it would just be the South.

Speaker 4 (08:01):
I think it's so interesting that that would be asked
of us. When we read characters from the mainstream, mainstream
culture and you can't see air quotes. You know, we're
not asking them the right that they were white. You know,
we're not a monolith, and we can have all these
different experiences and nothing makes those experiences less black because
they don't take place in the stereo typical South. But

(08:23):
we have to make an excuse to say, oh, they're
living us, but by the way, they're black. Why yeah,
you know, I just didn't think that was relevant because
there are people that live like this and we are
especially when you talk about black Americans, I'm saying black,
not African American. For a reason, when you talk about
American descendants of slavery or American survivors of slavery, I

(08:44):
think that we have all different strata, strata experiences, and
all of them are ours and we should embrace them all.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
Yes, I agree with you. So we're not finished with
Denise and Tran just yet.

Speaker 3 (08:55):
Okay you already kind of mentioned that, but what is
next in the Queens of story?

Speaker 4 (09:00):
So there's a lot of things going on, and you
know it took me. It's an interesting thing going back
and forth with all the things that are going on
and publishing and not publishing. How should you do this?
Should you be self published?

Speaker 3 (09:09):
You?

Speaker 4 (09:10):
And I've been to everything. I'm a hybrid author, so
I've been self published, large press, small press, all of
the things in between. And I wrote a follow on
book called The Dead Don't Speak, and my agent gave
me some edits for it because some agents will do that,
and I took a long time getting them back because
now people were expecting the next book, right, and traditional

(09:30):
publishing can take a long time. We came to an
agreement what's going to happen? And now she's out marketing
that book. So in The Dead Don't Speak, you focus
Although Denise does pass through that book. She's in the book,
but it doesn't really focus on her as much as
a main character who comes to Kiowa, and Denise decides
to say after they solve the mystery of what has
happened to her husband and opens a business. So the

(09:52):
ladies in the Island Secrets form a full time chapter
of their social club, one that I made up. Now
they have this social club, they're going to have their
first chapter meeting. And in their first chapter meeting, which
Denise is hosting at this business that she is now purchased,
a woman shows up and she is gorgeous, gorgeous, just
face beat, hair beat, everything beat, you know, all down

(10:14):
to the ground. And after a few weeks she ends
up dead. Then after she's dead, they find out that
she was trans.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
So I want this book so if you.

Speaker 4 (10:26):
Can imagine all of the things that happened, first of all,
in the South, in the climate that we have. And
you know, we're not new to trans people or gay people,
we just don't talk about it in our community as much.
And so here you are in this woman's organization in
the Deep South, because it is still the South, and

(10:47):
I like to read in current events. And at the
time when I was writing this book, the United Methodist
Church was being sued because they had a thing where
you know, everyone is welcome, but you can't be clergy.
You can't be a lame minister if you were. Okay,
that's shaping the attitudes that people have.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah, when did you know you wanted to write books?
And when did you know you wanted to help other
people write?

Speaker 4 (11:10):
So I don't know, so that's interesting. When did I
know I wanted to write books? I think I was
always a writer, but I took me a long time
to arrive as a writer and art artist in my head. Okay, no,
give give my self permission. So you know, my I
was raised by my father, an older father. He was
born in nineteen twenty five, so he was an older father.

(11:31):
I was like a month the last set of eight kids.
So there were things that I was not going to do.
I was not going to be a dancer, he told me.
He says, we didn't go to have no book, dance
and niggas in our house. So forget that, you know,
So that was not allowed. I was not. He's like,
you need to get a job because you cannot live
on my couch. You need to study something that's going

(11:51):
to make you up a living. So you know, I
studied something science and engineering and Jason, that's what I did, right.
But when I was I was an avid reader always,
so I read everything. I read my father's books, and
I remember writing in middle school doing two things. I
would read. My dad would read the newspaper, so I
would read the newspaper, the New York Post, New York Times,

(12:11):
et cetera.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
And I can't so you're a native New York I.

Speaker 4 (12:14):
Am a native New Yorker. Yes, native of New Yorker.
So I can't remember what the editorial was. And I
responded to and they published my piece. I was in
middle school and it was it was it was about
being black, but I can't remember what spurred that. Wow, right,
how old were you.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
Thepaper?

Speaker 4 (12:34):
Yes, it was in the newspaper. And then I was like, oh,
this is interesting. And then so my mother died very young,
and I wrote a piece called the Last Christmas and
I submitted it to Catholic Digests and they rejected me.
But that was okay. And then I was like, Okay,
that writer thing isn't for me. And then I went
to Hunter College undergrad. I'm really in New York, you are,
and my my I wrote a piece in that intro

(12:57):
that writing class that they make you take as a freshman,
and my professor wanted to submit it for publication, and
I said no because I was too scared. So I
think I was always a writer, like I always journals,
I always wrote things down. But then when I was
in grad school working on my dissertation, by the time
I got there, I hated it the topic because you're
beating this thing to death for like four years. And

(13:19):
to make myself sit in front of the computer and write,
I would first write something fun for thirty minutes and
then switch over to what I was supposed to be
working on. But I had four hundred pages of fun
before I had dissertation, so and then I put it.
I put it in a desk and then think about it.
And then fast forward five or so years, maybe three years.
I was working at a computer company with this thing

(13:41):
in my this tone because you presupprint everything because your
computer would crash and you would lose word would crash
and you lose all your stuff, so you would print it.
And there was a big I lived in Austin and
there was a big community of artists there, and I
met a poet who I'm still friends with now. We
actually just produced a film together, and she said, I'm
going to write conference. You want to go. I was like, yeah,

(14:02):
I got this thing, I guess so, and so I
went to that conference and that was my first experience.
I remember my daughter was eleven years old. She's twenty
eight now, I mean eleven months old, she's twenty eight
ye now. And I pitched you get to pitch the
editors and agents, and a few of them requested it.
It was good. It was good because I didn't expect
to be there. I was like, oh, let's just go see.

Speaker 3 (14:20):
You know it's someone once told me that I'm an
author advocate. Now I'm going to say the same thing
about you. Tell us about the other things that you
do inside the literary world. We are actually recording this
right now here in Bali on location because of your advocacy.

Speaker 4 (14:36):
So it's funny. I never thought of myself as a
literary advocate, author advocate, author African. I never thought of that.
But last year in Mexico in Merida, at this event
where the Writing Sisters summit, Marita Golden called me a
literary activist. I was like, what, I never thought of
it that way. When I first became a published author.

(15:00):
There were not a lot of people writing books with
characters that looked like I mean, I think there was
Terry McMillan, and I think Elin Harris, and that was it.
I mean Mayangelo, but you know, that was it. But
contemporary fiction at the time that wasn't necessarily stuff they
made you read in school. And so at that time,
at the end of the nineteen hundreds, like in the

(15:23):
old days, back in the olden days, there were a
bunch of us because they said blacks don't read, so
it was almost impossible to get a deal. So we
all self published our books. There was a bunch of us,
you know, and then you'd go on tour, so a
lot of times self fundus. So all the black book
stores around the country, and you'd see each other on
the road literally, like I remember major books in Atlanta

(15:45):
had us an hour or two hours apart, and one
one of us would go in, the other one come out,
and you would see each other and you would get
to ask questions, Hey, so and so, what happened with this, Oh,
don't do that because they took my money, that kind
of thing. Wow, you know, then they decided that we
did at one point for borders books. African American fiction
was the largest selling genre, and so they brought a

(16:06):
bunch of us up, all the publishers.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
I didn't realize that, yes, and.

Speaker 4 (16:09):
It was all of us that have been self published
now had book deals. But then things change, technology change.
Amazon was only books mainly then and a lot of
the smaller book stores started to close. So we lost
that place where you shared around the water cooler, so
to speak, because it didn't exist anymore. And so there

(16:30):
used to be an African American book Club at SA
conference and I was asked to speak on that. That
went for five years and they went away. And that
was another place where you got to see the authors
because we were all friends and we would go together.
And I wanted to recreate that. As part of being
a published author for twenty years, I wanted that to
come back. I was like, I miss where people could

(16:51):
ask you like, hey, how do you do this? And
you could get information. They can give information and you share.
And I'm a firm believer that you learn things from
people no matter where they are in their journey. So
that's why I created the Writing Systems Summit. And the
idea was that authors, writers, people in this business could
come together and other people who wanted to go where

(17:11):
they had been could learn from them, and you could
share and create a community. And so that was in
twenty nineteen, and so other than the year that we were,
you know, pandemiced out, I've been doing this every year somewhere.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
But that's not all you do.

Speaker 4 (17:28):
I do have that. I spent some time being an author,
staying home writing, So I worked in tech, you know,
and have had a great career doing that. So I
help people help people figure out the path to the
goal that they have selected, whether that's writing a book
or having more executive presence, or figuring out how to

(17:49):
have more time in their day for themselves. And it
just fit with this, and it fit with work, and
I was already doing it. I helped people figure out
why they haven't completed their book really or figure out
what that pivot is is. I run another retreat called Unapologetic,
the retreat for Black women to help them learn to
embrace all of their talents and be intentional about what
they want.

Speaker 3 (18:09):
So, what's the most important piece of advice you can
give an aspiring writer who wants to develop themselves into
an author and a brand.

Speaker 4 (18:17):
Huh. Well, first of all, think about what that means. Okay,
you need to know where you're going so you can
make a plan to get there. It's not a haphazard thing.
And also think about the time in your day. There's
a lot of things that are going to be on
your plate. And you all know when a Thanksgiving plate
is overloaded out ever it gets, you got to make room.
We're only human something. You can't do everything all the time,

(18:39):
and so something's got to give. And what is that
going to be? And most of the time you can't say, well,
I'm going to give up my husband or my family
or my children to do this other thing.

Speaker 3 (18:47):
I don't think anyone chooses that, but sometimes it ends
up being.

Speaker 4 (18:51):
It ends up being that way. You have to offload
something to make room for the things that are important
to you. And hopefully those things that are important to you,
part of them is you.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
Yeah, so very important.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
So what's the last book that you read that really
moved you, that just made you go damn?

Speaker 4 (19:09):
So it made me go damn. Actually was Mariita Golden's
last memoir. Okay, but it was it was a very
literary memoir. I talked, talked, about her life as a writer.
But it was set in such great contexts over her
going to college post civil rights, and it you understood
the context for her, and it makes me understand her

(19:30):
calling me a literary activist because we are we can
be very active with our words in deeds, and she was.
And that I thought it was just so well written
and such a great example of what a memoir. You
think I'm gonna write a memoir and you're like, I
was born by the river. No, you know.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
Right right?

Speaker 4 (19:52):
She started in the middle in a way that was
great and they you see how all the things happened
in context. So I just loved that book.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
So it's next.

Speaker 4 (20:01):
So one of the things, there's a couple of things
I want to I love the intimacy of the writing
Sister Summit. I limited to fifteen attendees, okay, plus faculty.
I want to find a way to make a variation
bigger where there's actually two cohorts going at the same time,
there's two lead faculty. So that's an actually idea that

(20:22):
came to me, came to my husband this morning in
a discussion we were talking through. But I really want
to I've written some film stuff but I really want
to write for television. Okay, so whether that's taking the
content that I have and having my agent market market
it myself, but I really want to do that. So
I actually have written the whole plan on this, on

(20:44):
how this is going to happen, but I think that's
something I want to do first. So for me, when
I say I want to do this, I actually took
the Three Island Secrets Kings of Queens of Kiawa storybooks,
wrote out pitches for TV, a story, bible, season arc,
the whole thing. I've learned all the things and sent
it to my agent and that's why I wanted. The

(21:05):
faculty was like, why is she doing that? Because watch
because I kind of visualized all I wanted to And
then after the seminar that we had on screenwriting, I
wrote a whole series, our eight episodes like here's plotline A,
here's plotline being, here's the conflict, here's the out and since.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
Yesterday, yes, okay, I am underachiever.

Speaker 4 (21:26):
I was like, okay, nobody's I get focused on that
one thing and then I just do those things and it's.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
I love that.

Speaker 3 (21:33):
So if people want to reach out to you, if
they want to find your books, if they want to
be a part of any of your seminars and cohorts,
or if they want to connect with you in any way,
or they just want to follow.

Speaker 4 (21:43):
You on social So I'm on all the socials. Okay,
So Nina Fox with two two exses, I'm gonna switch
to Spanish those now, No everybody's seen those echis beer.
They won't forget it. So Nina Fox. Ninafox dot com
is my website. I'm on Facebook, I'm on Instagram, I'm
on TikTok, I'm on LinkedIn. They can also find me

(22:05):
in my community inc and Intention, which is where all
the things come together, and they can find out about
the retreats there. They can take recorded yoga classes.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
There for a yoga We're sitting in a yoga.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
Studio, in a yoga studio, and you are also a
yoga instructor. And this is what I'm saying people, this
woman really does do it all, but she does it
with grace and intention and enough room for everybody.

Speaker 2 (22:31):
That, to me is the part that I'm most impressed with.

Speaker 4 (22:33):
Well, thank you. All the things are in Incan Intention,
and you find that from my website. Ninafox dot com.

Speaker 3 (22:39):
Nina, thank you so much for taking time to talk
with us today. Thank you for all that you do,
and we've got to do this again.

Speaker 4 (22:46):
Thank you for wanting to talk to me. Thank you
for trusting me in Bali.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, suk Suma.

Speaker 1 (22:55):
Another show in the books. Join us for the next
episode of the Public Library Podcast, a place to check
out books.