Sneak Peek: Tiya Miles Podcast

Tiya Miles: I think that we, as academics, trained to do a certain kind of thinking and writing can become locked into ways of writing our articles, into ways of writing our books. And, and being locked in can make it much more difficult to take up projects that require a kind of creativity and flexibility in their methods. But I had written a novel which had already really pushed me, really challenged me, really tested me when it came to writing narratively, to writing creatively, to trying to imagine the inner worlds of characters. And when I came across this wondrous artifact, Ashley's sack, and then recognized through some early research that I was not going to be able to find the kind of sourcing that I would need to really put together a tight reconstruction of this artifact, which was an antique cotton sack, and of the women who used it and passed it down, I knew I was going to have to turn to some very creative methods that already practiced those. And so, even though it was scary, I'm not going to lie, Josephine, and say that it wasn't, you know, even though it was scary to take up the project where I knew I would not have the typical sources that a scholar of history would turn to, I already had, you know, a sense of the capacity to take something like this on and I already knew that fiction could be a colleague of mine along the way.