Bookmarked by Reese's book Club is presented by Apple Books.

Hey, Bookmarked listeners.

Before we dive into today's conversation, I have some really exciting news to share.

It is almost time for the gathering of the brightest female founders, thinkers, writers and creatives at Shinaway.

Shine Away is more than an event.

It's a two day celebration of connection, creativity, and the power of women's stories.

I've been lucky enough to go since its inception, so this is our third year, and this year's programming invites you to step into a world of joy and depth and discovery, surrounded by voices that are shaping culture and truly shifting conversations.

Talent announcements are now live and we have an amazing author lineup for you.

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Okay, tickets are selling so fast, so buy yours now.

Hi.

I'm Danielle Robe and welcome to Bookmarked by Reese's book Club.

So earlier this month, we checked in with Ellianna Ramage, the author behind the September Reese's Book Club pick, on her very first pub day.

I'm so excited to be back with Elliana today to get into all the juicy deats of her novel, To the Moon and Back.

This family saga takes us across the decades, across states, and even into outer space.

And I'd asked questions that all of us have wrestled with.

It's home, a place, or a person.

How do you look towards the future while carrying your past?

And what price are you willing to pay for achieving your goals?

We're getting into all of that and more.

You know you're in the right place, So let's turn the page with Ellie on a Rammage.

Ellie Anna, welcome back to the club.

Thank you exciting to be back.

Well, we're excited to have you back because when I spoke to you, I think it was basically the end of summer.

Now it's fall, it's back to school season, and I heard you're obsessed with school supplies.

Yes, it's the best part of all, Like even as a non student who's not even getting school supplies in the.

Fall, like the school supplies are in the air.

I have PTSD from going school supplies shopping, and my mom would never let me get new stuff.

She was big into reach using, which in hindsight I appreciate, but at the time I really wanted new folders.

The green one for science in the new stickers.

Anyways, when I heard you were obsessed with school supplies, I knew I had to ask you about the school supply that you are still obsessed with as an adult, because I will never get over gel pens.

Ooh, that one's so much more fun.

Okay.

So I am obsessed with colored index cards that you can cut into tiny little pieces for storyboarding, and so each one of them will represent a different thread, whether it's like a chapter or a novel.

Or story like whatever it is.

When you see like the pink slivered index card, you know that you're tracking.

Like the love story aspect of the book, I like that you color code everything that's so teacher of you.

So if you had to boil to the moon and back down into keywords, I think it would be sapphic, indigenous family, saga in space.

So out of all those threads, family, identity, queerness, the cosmos, what felt the most natural and the most you to write, what parts poured out of you.

I'm torn between family and queerness.

And the reason I'm torn is because in this book they're like the same thing.

And what I mean by that is that we have.

A pretty central love story in this book between Stephan Della and I don't think that that's the most LGBT aspect of the book.

I think it's the way this book it understands family what it understands family to be.

I think that when I was writing it, I was not out when I started it, and I was when I finished it.

And one of the biggest things I learned in that process was how good the queer community is at thinking about family.

And again, when I say that, like that could mean talking through thinking through the decision to not have children, or to have children in this way or in that way, or to think through what is chosen family mean to you?

Do you want to be like a really really involved aunt, Like there's so many there's such an openness and an intentionality to creating and really nurturing those connections.

That sort of was always key to the relationships in this book.

Were there any threads that were difficult to work through?

I spent the longest time thinking through and trying out different versions for where to take the love story, because with these two characters, we have two characters who meet when they're very young.

They really need each other, and sometimes that's good, sometimes that's not good.

Sometimes we get through that, sometimes we don't.

And particularly for Della, she had such a hard start in her early childhood with this tested adoption case and all the ways that her story was told for her, I just felt like if there was one character I needed to do right by, it was just sort of like shepherd Della to some kind of place where whatever happened with her, like whatever she felt in the moment, if we fast forward her way into the future, A much older version of her.

I wanted her to feel at peace with.

The direction which she decided to take her life.

One of the things I was thinking about reading this is that the amount of research that you must have done about space seems like a huge undertaking.

It's famously infinite.

But I am curious what that process looked like for you.

Where did you even begin?

Where I started was thinking that I needed to learn everything there is to know about space, and that's like such a classic place where people will struggle is feeling like, oh, I can't write this.

I can't give space to what I really need to give space to, which is the relationships and the connections between these characters until I am an astrophysicist.

So I had a few solutions.

One is I told myself that I wasn't allowed to go deep with a particular setting or a particular aspect of space or even science until the story first arrived in a place where I needed it too.

So, for example, I learned a lot about this Mars simulation project, but I didn't know I was going to need to learn about it until the story took itself to the Mars simulation project.

I also read the memoirs.

Of astronauts, but I was surprised by how extra helpful it was to read the memoirs of scientists.

Oh interesting, Yeah, there's one I really loved.

Called lab Girl, And I realized that astronauts they don't spend that many hours of their lives in space.

They're primarily scientists, so I wanted to learn more about that.

And then the last thing that I'll say is that I really really leaned on other people.

I had a biologist who read the bio parts from college, and there was an astrophysicist who was kind enough to correct my mistakes.

Who did you write to the Moon and back?

For?

When I set out to write it, I was writing what I wanted to hear at the time, So I thought it was going to be a really fast and simple and straightforward story of ambition, Like you want to write a book and you're like twenty and you write it.

So that was like the original intention, and it wasn't that at all, And I'm really really glad it wasn't, because as I got farther in the story and life got more complicated, in the book just expanded more and more and more outwards.

When that happened, I came to think of it more as like I'm writing to my younger self, to my past self.

I'm writing kind of a reassurance that those feelings of uncertainty are okay.

So I eventually it got to the point a few years in where I was like, anything in this book has to feel true to my past self, and it has to feel true to whoever I am as i'm writing it.

But now that I know how much we all change and that that change continues, I can't ask myself to write it towards a future self because I don't know what the future is going to look like.

Like if I read this in ten years and some of the ideas, like if they no longer feel true to me, then I'm telling myself like, that's I want that to feel like a good thing.

Is there a part of.

You that wrote this story for a person or a young girl who felt exactly the way you did, And if so, what did you want them to take from the story.

So the answer to the first question is yes, maybe not at first, because at first I was so full of just ambition, just excitement about like do this project get it done?

That it was like a slow unraveling of a story of discovery for staff and for myself.

And then your second question was what would I want them to take from it?

I hope that reader would be left with the feeling of what it means to belong and all the different versions of connection between people that make a family, and what that looks like.

In this story, we see that in so many different ways.

We have mother and daughter stories, we have chosen family and tribal nation, and again that expands outwards.

That's like a never ending thing, that connection we feel to one another.

So my main thing.

I hope is that a reader would understand themselves as part of a greater whole, as an individual who shaped by connection, and that with that feeling like understanding themselves as part of humanity, as this group that's always been shaped by connection, they would feel pushed to act on behalf.

Of future generations.

So Steph is your protagonist, and she makes some messy choices Eliyana sometimes some really bad ones, and you kind of want to reach through the page and just like yell at her sometimes even but somehow you're still rooting for her, And I'm wondering how you pulled that off.

How do you write a character who's infuriating.

And lovable I secondly infuriating.

It was important to me that even if I didn't agree with her, I wanted to understand her.

I want to just understand all of the characters in this book across different parts of their lives.

With Steph, it helped me to understand her as someone who was searching for her place, and she was searching for her place as a Cherokee person and as a queer person who didn't have models for what that would look like to become an adult who's a queer adult, a Cherokeean adult, or like an astronaut.

One place that that became really.

Clear to me was the scene early ish in the book where Steph is a kid and she auditions for this school play that's like written by the children, and it's a really really like melodramatic kind of insane play about the trail of years.

Of course, no boys audition, and she gets to play the husband of her.

Big crush, who's a girl.

So she and her big crush are like in love on stage and they're kissing behind the curtain after the play, and she's so happy.

But what sticks out to me and what really hit me after I had written that scene, was that the only way Stuff was able to live out that identity at that point in her life was through this queer future that was set in an imagined past.

I think that got me thinking about how stories can carry us across generations.

It got me thinking about how heritage can be a lifeline, and what Steph was trying to do in that moment.

Sometimes she does it successfully over the course of her life.

Sometimes she really really doesn't is to write herself into a story that includes her.

There's a quote early on in the book where Steph dreams of how nice it would be to quote be an astronaut, to be myself without the weight of everything that came before.

And that idea of wanting to be weightless is so alluring.

And yet there's this tension in the book because Steph would actually benefit from some grounding.

Anyone reading this is going to think about their own familial complication.

Why can't we escape family drama?

We can't, We really can't.

But it makes literature.

I know.

It's like a universal tie in.

We can all connect to it in some way.

Do you have any idea of why you think we're drawn to them?

I think of like Succession, every TV show that has family drama at the center of it really makes an impact on culture.

I completely agree, you know, whether it's it's books or TV or movies, those are the stories that I'm drawn to.

And even in real life, I wouldn't love to hear like a friend of a friend's like, what's going on with your family?

I need to hear these stories, even if I'm not involved.

Part of what's interesting to me was this idea that with Stephan her mother, for example, they are trying so hard to love each other, they share so much, and at the end of the day, when it comes to their maybe similar core values and then take that next step with them, they're moving in two different directions.

That tension was really interesting to me.

More interesting, of course, than if two strangers disagreed.

Well, I want to dive into the tension between the two sisters.

So Steph and Kayla really embody this duality of experience when it comes to connecting with your culture.

Kayla embraces it and Steph wants to run from it.

Yes, so you were a Cherokee woman who grew up in Nashville and not on the reservation in Oklahoma.

What was it like growing up indigenous in Tennessee.

So this is something that I didn't appreciate until I grew up.

And I grew up, I mean until I left home I went to college.

I didn't realize even though like, definitely we were not living around other Cherokee people.

They're just in terms of like Native people in general.

I was at a school with sixteen hundred kids and there were three Native students, So like, even though that was the environment, that Cherokee identity was really really nurtured for me in a way that like I didn't have to think about it.

It was like I lived in a house where not even just Cherokee identity, our family, My parents were intentional about storytelling, about sharing so much about our family and where we had come from on both sides, and that gave me this foundation that was wonderful and kind of opened my eyes once I left that house to the idea that now you know what's next, like now I'm in charge of my own identity moving forward, and I sort of appreciated the gift afterwards.

Well, when we spoke last month, you talked about how you were sharing the language with your seven month old daughter who's now eight months old.

So it sounds like you're trying to sort of plant the same seeds I am.

And what was unexpected for me is how much the journey of this book correlates with that journey of different waves of how I think through Cherokee identity for myself.

So I talked about the childhood and I talked about when I got to college.

What I didn't say is when I said what next, there was a bit of anxiety, like what is it going to look like or what is it supposed to look like for me to now like go forth in my adulthood as a Cherokee person.

Some of the ways I was asking myself.

That were inauthentic, like the anxiety that maybe I needed to learn how to wave baskets when like, that's never been a way that I connect.

But I will say that it wasn't a.

Ridiculous question, because when we ask ourselves things like that, then it makes us hone in on what does really matter.

And that was when I started getting more interested in learning the again, like very little of the language that has come to mean something to me.

And as a writer, my way in was exploring these different characters and saying to myself, like, if I have all of these different Cherokee women and I'm in my early twenties and I just give them space to see where they take that and how they show up in the world.

That ended up giving me a lot of these different possibilities.

And so I was surprised in a good way when the baby was born to realize very quickly I had a lot more understanding for the mom character, for how what she was trying to pass along wasn't confining but enriching, and that if I want my daughter to feel free like these characters, to take who she is and you know, go forth wherever that takes her, hopefully not mars, I first need to provide what I can of that foundation.

So I was looking up the hallmarks of Cherokee storytelling to see if there were sort of any touchstones that I could recognize between your novel and like sort of these hallmarks of indigenous storytelling and for Cherokee storytelling, it said, there's a lot of origin stories that explain natural phenomena, animals, diseases, healing, plants, balance, which are stories about harmony with nature, community and self, cyclical structure, mirrors, natural cycles, not linear plots, community purpose, humor as teaching animals as teachers, and this was very specific.

But Rabbit the trickster, so clever, greedy, often punished lessons through humor.

Do any of those strike you as something that showed up.

In your novel?

The first thing that stood out to me is the word storytelling, And it reminds me of how when I talked about that period of anxiety of questioning in my early twenties.

There was a period where I thought, you know.

Do I need to be taking Cherokee traditional stories and like retelling them in a contemporary manner, which is like a wonderful thing for anyone to want to do.

But again, like that wasn't my way in, and that that wouldn't have felt authentic to me and what I cared about.

So I was really really happy about ten years ago when this show Mohawk Girls came on the air because it was this really really messy show billed as like the Mohawk Sex and the City where these Mohawk women were like having messy relationships and their friendships were falling apart, and like it was so exciting to me to see these indigenous women navigating the same world that I was living in.

I also want to say that when you talked about storytelling, I credit my interest in stories to my parents in two different ways.

It kind of depended on who was doing the night routine.

My mom would read us books, and when I got older, I would ask her to like work shop my stories for me.

When I was really young, and that was amazing.

My dad would tell stories of his childhood in the mountains in Kentucky, and so I kind of was getting constant input of stories and what they can do and why they matter.

So I love asking our guests what they've bookmarked this week.

It can be a weird fact, a fun quote, something you saved on Instagram, something you texted your best friend about Eleiana.

What have you bookmarked this week?

I bookmarked the last like six minutes of the audiobook for Claire Lombardo's Same as it ever was, because I've been listening to it while driving around and I've already read it in book form when it came out.

I loved it the first time.

I want to be clear, I loved it the first time, but the way I emotionally experienced it as a wife and as a mom as someone who's just like a little, tiny, tiny bit older than the first time.

I just sat in the car and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed through the last five minutes and came inside the house and just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

I was so so moved by it.

It's just a really really beautiful ending in the way it holds us in a space of family and a relationship between two people.

This book definitely hits intimately at mother daughter relationships.

I'm sure you were mostly finished writing when you gave birth.

Is there anything that you change now that you've been a mom?

Are there any characters that you have more or less empathy for.

I definitely feel more empathy for the mother character now, but I wouldn't change your story.

And part of that, I think is a reflection of how long it took to write the book, how long it took to become a parent.

There were many, many years of waiting and fertility clinics and sort of being in that emotional journey of becoming a parent before I was a parent.

And that matters because it means that even when I was writing this book and I felt like I was really far from becoming a parent.

I was still really interested in what it would mean to be a parent for myself, and what it would mean for any of these characters, because it's not just Stef's mom, like any of these characters to form their families, the ones who choose to be parents, the ones who don't choose to be parents, and the ones who choose to be parents in ways that we might.

Not expect at first.

I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you for some book recks.

Are there any Indigenous authors that inspired you while writing this?

Okay, So there's actually.

Two nonfiction books that I think are really really great companions to this book.

One of them is called By the Fire We Carry, The Generation's long fight for justice on need of Land.

It's by Rebecca Nagle.

And if there are readers who are interested in specifically the history of removal and what that means for Cherokee Nation, like specifically Cherokee Nation today, then that's the book for them.

I'm very excited about a book by Joseph Lee, and it's called Nothing More of This Land, Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity.

He's a really, really talented Equina Wampanogue journalist, and what I like about his book besides just that it's brilliant, there are so many hyper specific issues of not just like this more symbolic idea of belonging, but like, what does it literally mean to be a Cherokee citizen or to be a citizen of another tribe, or to not be like who belongs who doesn't?

And when I say that, of course, I mean in terms of a legal identity, a political identity, historical identity.

Those are really really thorny, very interesting to me issues.

And because this book is fiction, the characters are wrestling with them, but they don't get to go too deep in a way that would distract from the story.

I feel like, because he is a journalist and he has the freedom to ask that question of so many different tribes and so many different indigenous people all around the world, it's a fascinating deep dive that takes something you might just be like a little bit interested in, and it explodes it to make it much more complicated.

You've mentioned belonging so much in both of our conversations.

What about belonging is at the heart or at the forefront of your mind.

I think it's like the center how I understand, like the universe, and how I understand people and what we're doing here.

Can I tell you a story about my grandfather which is like a little context, Yeah, of course I would love that.

So my grandfather on my mother's side was born in nineteen oh seven, and that's significant because before that point he would have been born in what was Indian territory, but the nation was denationalized, and so when he was born, he was born an American citizen and not a Cherokee Nation citizen.

It was like Cherokee Nation in that sense of what it was was gone.

So from there he ended up roaming the Southeast, living in all these different places for work.

He was in Europe for World War two, transporting young men, like very young men, to the front lines and coming back and just doing that.

So he lived this life not where he was from, and he never forgot.

It's not just that he never forgot Cherokee Nation, it's that it was central to his understanding of himself.

And when he had three daughters, it was central to their understanding because that was something that mattered to him.

And he made it very clear that he wanted to share that with them.

So he died in the nineteen seventies, and he died within a few months, I think, right before Chokee Nation was reconstituted again.

It's not like the nation was dead like as a political entity.

It was reconstituted, and that means that what I now understand is he lived his life within this what we could think of as a last generation, Like his whole life was in this gap of history where your political identity has been taken away, and for him specifically, he was today the majority of Chraoke Nation citizens don't live in northeastern Oklahoma.

He was not living at home and he never went back.

What that speaks to for me when I think about belonging is how enduring it is to belong to your people, belong to your home.

Your home doesn't have to be the same place forever.

People began in the southeastern US, and now you know the government is in northeastern Oklahoma.

I feel primarily moved when I think about his life and how much that mattered to him, how he was able to pass that down to the generation and then passed it down to me because outside forces and this is definitely not just a Cherokee story.

Like outside forces can try to convince a people that they are not this or that that doesn't matter, like now you're American.

But for so many of us, we went to continue our stories.

We went to pass down what matters to us.

Okay, now it's time to turn things up a notch.

We are doing the speed read.

So here's how it works.

We're going to put sixty seconds on the clock and we're going to see just how many rapid fire literary questions you can get through.

Okay, are you ready?

Okay, let's go three?

Two?

What is one literary trope you would ban forever?

It was all just a dream?

The Desert Island author?

Who are you reading for the rest of your life?

Highly read?

You have ten minutes at a bookstore.

Where are you going first?

Just released fiction?

What's a book that you give most often before the MNGO ripens by F Y J.

Korean?

What fictional character do you secretly think you're most like?

Ooh, okay in this book, I think I can be Adella, but I want to be a Nadia.

What's the first book you stayed up all night to finish?

I think Ella Enchanted?

Do you ever peak at the last page.

First, No, what's a book you wish you'd written?

Show Don't Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld.

Oh, that's a great one, Ellie, Anna, that's it.

Thank you so so much, thank you.

It's just a huge honor to be here.

Okay, friends, Before we wrap today's episode, I'm bringing back our monthly audiobook recommendation segment brought to you by Apple Books, called Turn Up the Story.

Apple Books editors are always reading and listening so they can bring you the best new books every single month, including brilliant new voices.

This month, Apple Books editors are spotlighting Little Movements by Lauren Morrow.

This gorgeously written debut novel is about navigating the intersection between life, creativity, and expectations.

Lifelong dancer Layla has recently discovered her love of choreography, so when she wins a position at Briar House, a Vermont artist residency program, she's overjoyed and overwhelmed.

Lauren Morrow elegantly explores the conflicts that come with Layla's once in a lifetime gift, from scandals within the program to the strain it puts on her marriage.

Not to mention Briar House's all white administration, assuming that Layla's dance performance will directly reflect quote the black experience without even asking her.

Marrow's vivid descriptions of the dances capture the artistry of movements so strikingly it's almost like each piece plays out before your eyes as you're listening.

There's so much to feel and discuss in this gem of a novel, it's sure to be a book club favorite.

For a limited time.

You can get the audiobook of The Little Movements for just nine ninety nine only on Apple Books.

And if you're curious about what Inspiredmorrow to write this tenderhearted debut, you'll find that too.

Head to Apple dot co slash Debut Listens to listen in and while you're there, don't miss the full collection of debut audio books that the Apple Books editors love, all chosen with bookmarked listeners in mind.

And if you want a little bit more from us, come hang with us on socials.

We're at Reese's book Club on Instagram, serving up books, vibes and behind.

The scenes magic.

And I'm at Danielle Robe rob a y Come say hi and df me And if you want to go nineties on us call us.

Okay, our phone line is open, so call now at one five zero one two nine, one three three seven nine.

That's one five oh one two nine, one three three seven nine.

Share your literary hot takes, recommendations, questions about the monthly pick, or let us know what you think about the episode you just heard, and who knows, you might just hear yourself in our next episode, So don't be shy, give us a ring, and of course, make sure to follow Bookmarked by Reese's book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your shows until then via in the next chapter.

Bookmarked is a production of Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcast.

It's executive produced by Reese Witherspoon and me Danielle Robe.

Production is by Acast Creative Studios.

Our producers are Maddy Foley, Brittany Martinez, Sarah Schlede, and Darbi Masters.

Our production assistant is Avery Loftis.

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