Myth, post-truth and empathetic villains – from an ancient fantasy world to Kellyanne Conway: Live at the San Diego Book Festival

Episode 17: Book Festival Transcript

[Applause]

Julia Dixon Evans: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the inaugural KPBS San Diego Book Festival here at the University of San Diego. We're really, really glad you're here. And you are part of our very first live taping of The Finest. If you've heard it before, make some noise.

[Applause]

Evans: Love to hear it. And we have two incredible local authors here with us today, Moses Ose Utomi and Emily Greenberg. Welcome to you both. And if you have heard the podcast before, you'll know that we start each episode with kind of an introduction and we've written that in advance. And you're all gonna pretend like you're in the recording studio while we read it.

All right, we rolling?

[Music]

Evans: Moses and Emily's books both tackle truth and myth in ways that might seem worlds apart, but are surprisingly connected. Together, we'll look at how myths are made, in real time — from events still unfolding — and over centuries of storytelling.

Fiction might seem like an unlikely place to explore truth. Fiction is an invention. Fact is fact. But fiction's origins tell a different story. One of the earliest forms of storytelling was myth used by pre-alphabetic cultures to pass down beliefs, traditions and, yes, to entertain. But packaged up in those stories were values and instructions essential to how those societies worked.

The thing is, for centuries writers have used imagined worlds to understand the real one. You can see it across genres and formats: horror, comic books, science fiction, short stories, fantasy. And two writers doing exactly this work are right here in San Diego.

Emily Greenberg is a writer and filmmaker whose debut book of short stories, "Alternative Facts," captures an unraveling of truth in American politics. It spins real events and public figures into absurdist fiction, poking at the scabs of modern life with insight and dark humor. The book opens with a single, mammoth sentence inside the head of former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway. Other stories take us to George W. Bush's childhood, or a meeting between Paris Hilton and Thomas Pynchon and explore the false missile alert in Hawaii. Emily, welcome.

Emily Greenberg: Thanks for having me.

Evans: Moses Ose Utomi writes fantasy, including the YA novel "Daughters of Oduma" and the adult novellas of the "Forever Desert" trilogy, which begins with "The Lies of the Ajungo" and concludes with the brand new "The Memory of the Ogisi." As a first generation Nigerian American, his writing explores West African history and culture. Each book in the trilogy takes place 500 years after the previous one, spanning 1,500 years of history. This means characters in one book become myth in the next. As these societies grapple with oppression and unthinkable cruelty, we see how those in power control not just resources, but also the way history is remembered. Moses, welcome.

Moses Ose Utomi: Thanks. Thank you, good to be here.

Evans: From pop culture and politics-inspired, experimental fiction to fantasy rooted in West African mythology, these writers' work explores how societies — both real and imagined — wrestle with truth, lies and the stories that we tell.

From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest. A podcast about the people, art and movements, redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.

[Theme Music]

Evans: Nailed it.

Moses, I wanna start with you. This is such a rich and devastating world that you've built. What drew you to centering truth and myth in these stories?

Utomi: So it largely came from when I was in my 20s, I got to travel a lot and I lived in China for about a year and a half. And I think part of the reason I wanted to go to China was to kind of escape the anglosphere a little bit and see what the world was like from a different perspective. And when I was there, and I saw those clashing perspectives — being as a Nigerian American — it was very similar, this idea of like the narrative of one place and the narrative of another place and how to reconcile them. And it starts as like, which one's true, which one's not. And you start to realize it's not as simple as that. It's a much more complex interaction between these two narratives. And so I wanted to not just tell a story about that, but try to make the reader feel that. And that's when the idea of these books being five or three years apart was really boring 'cause I think the characters don't feel that, right? They're just living in their lives. But you as the readers start to feel that as you see history distorted — sometimes deliberately, sometimes incidentally — over the course of time.

Evans: And Emily, what about you? Your stories pierce right into the current state of the world through pop culture, politics. What draws you to this kind of study of truth?

Greenberg: I've always just been really drawn to writing about current events. And for some reason for me, fiction has been the ideal form to explore that. I've done some nonfiction writing, I've done some journalism in the past. But fiction allows me to play with language and play with form in a really different way. And so particularly, I realized that I was sort of drawn to writing about these post-truth figures, so to speak. I didn't set out to necessarily write about them, but when I was looking over many things I had written, I realized there were some commonalities in that many of them were connected to post-truth in some way. And so for me, in the same way that these characters — who are often lying and sowing disinformation — they're using fiction to divide and manipulate us. And so I'm trying to sort of turn the tables a bit and use fiction to have a deeper conversation, forge connections, stuff like that. So for me, it felt really meaningful to almost fight fire with fire in a way.

Evans: Love that. And this question's for both of you. What is myth to you? Emily, let's start with you.

Greenberg: What is myth to me? I mean, I guess sort of the myths that my book is sort of dealing with handed down histories, mainstream narratives. And my book is sort of wanting to ask questions of that and to say, there are alternative perspectives. There's no such thing as objectivity or universalism. And so I think that shows up in my book in a lot of different ways, including these myths about what America is and what our history is.

Utomi: Myth is such a complex word. I think myth is often kind of used as a pejorative in a way. We call 'em Greek myths because we're not ancient Greeks, right? Otherwise we'd call it religion, you know? And so I think part of the word myth is kind of describing an understanding of the world that one doesn't accept. To some extent you might find it useful. I think there's a spectrum between useful and useless myth. But I think it's a rejection of a worldview, you know? And I think that's often what we believe to be a myth. The books kind of grapple with the idea of — and me as an individual also grapple with the idea of — how quickly should I be rejecting other worldviews? How does that affect me and the people who I'm rejecting? And how do I feel when my worldviews are rejected by others?

Evans: Yeah.

So your writing is on the surface quite different. I mean, we have experimental stories of Trump's inauguration night, just from a couple years ago, and then we have epic journeys across this fantastical world thousands of years ago. So how do you lean into your chosen writing style to tackle these bigger issues? Moses, we can start with you.

Utomi: I mean, I have some Kellyanne Conway type of people in my book. It's not so different. Part of it, you know, fantasy allows, all fiction allows for abstraction. You know, I think we'd agree on that. And I think fantasy allows for the making concrete of abstract things. One of the things, for example, I did in the series the whole approach of it was to be able to make — post-truth is a fantastic phrase — make post-truth literal, you know? So in the third book — spoiler for people who didn't read the first two — but in the third book, they exist in a world where essentially they have a version of the internet where everyone using magic can kind of tap into memories of the past. The problem is, everyone's getting different memories of the past, right? So everyone's getting their own version, their own little echo chamber of history. And so when historians come out with studies — and the main character of the third book is a historian — they're kind of disrespected a little bit. They're kind of not taken seriously because everyone can just use magic and find their own version of history that makes sense to them. And that was one of the values of fantasy is being able to take what I feel like something maybe I'm living through and make it literal.

Evans: And Emily, the same question for you, but also like, maybe dig into that term post-truth. Like how do you, what is that to you and how do you use it to tackle all of these topics in your writing?

Greenberg: Sure. So I guess I'll start with the former question first. Why short stories, why these sort of experimental forms? I also work in other media, so I'm just constantly asking myself, OK, should this be written? Should it be a film? What should it be? So I have a story that is basically one long run-on sentence about Kellyanne Conway. And the reason I chose that forum is because that's kind of how she speaks.

And then… I'm sorry, I forgot. I already forgot the second part of the question.

Evans: Oh, it was talk more about that term you used: post-truth, and what it means to you.

Greenberg: Sure. Yeah. So this term, I guess, became popular during the first Trump administration as a way to sort of talk about just all the lies that were happening, all of the misinformation. It's very related to Kellyanne Conway of course 'cause she started using this term, alternative facts, even though what she was saying, it was not factual in any way. It was a lie. So using it as a sort of euphemism. This term became popularized. Oh, we're living in this post-truth society. Everyone is siloed into their own little internet information bubble. We don't all see the same reality. But actually, even though the term became popular, we've been living in this world for much longer than that. One of the stories in my book, it's actually about George W. Bush. And Stephen Colbert came up with the term truthiness to talk about all of his stuff. I mean he lied about WMDs. So yeah, this term post-truth, I use it a lot 'cause people know what it is, but I actually don't like it because it goes much, much further back.

Evans: I wanna talk about some of the other elements that you bring to your writing.

Moses, you draw from West African culture and we see that in some big overarching ways as well as little details. Can you talk about how you bring this background into your work?

Utomi: Yeah, I think it's probably most present in the rhythm of the storytelling. I'm Nigerian American. I was born in the States, but a lot of my time as a kid was spent listening to my dad's stories. My dad's a great storyteller and he's always telling stories about his life and folk tales he was told growing up. And so a lot of the rhythm of the book is kind of me trying to channel his voice in a way, and his manner of speaking. There's obviously some more visual things: the clothing they wear, the construction of the buildings. But I think, mostly, it's the actual movement and the rhythm of the story and the concept and the use of stories within stories and the function of stories. I think it's a big part of it.

Evans: Love that. And on that note of storytelling and the structure of it. Emily, your story “Lost in the Desert of the Real” imagine some of the inner lives of people who are experiencing or causing or trying to crisis manage that false missile alert in Hawaii a couple years ago. And this is an event that we could probably say became instantly mythologized in culture. So can you talk about that story, that event and how it connects to myth to you.

Greenberg: Yeah. In 2018, there was a false missile alert in Hawaii. And people had no way of knowing it was false. And so they thought, they were about to die. And so it's interesting and also horrifying because even though it wasn't something that was real, that it was really happening, their experiences of it were very real. Someone even suffered a heart attack as a result. I was drawn to writing about this event. In terms of how it relates to myth, it's like the way it unfolds in my telling of it, it does have this mythic quality to it. It's like we're kind of on the outside. We know that it's OK, that the missiles aren't really coming, but the people who are in the event, they have no way of knowing that. And so for them, they're not able to see it with this distance that we're able to see it from. It's not the story, it's really happening.

Evans: Emily, when you approach a story and building it, putting it together, you're looking at not just these like fantastical spinoffs that you have created, but like the real circumstances and probably some extreme research. Can you talk about how you pull all of that together?

Greenberg: Yeah, sure. My stories are fact-based, but they are fictional. And so I do do a lot of research to put them together. I'm aware that… I take a number of creative liberties and I put these people in circumstances that they wouldn't necessarily be in otherwise. 'Cause for me, that's really interesting. So for example, in the last story, Thomas Pynchon and Paris Hilton meet. I don't know if they've ever met in real life — probably not. But I like to be able to be in this fictional mode. Even though they're based on research and facts about the people, it's sort of like I get to play with that. And so it's a mixture of the audience is coming with their own understanding of these people and these situations, and so I have to work within that. I can't just totally make stuff up that isn't in keeping with those characters or those situations. So for me, I tend to start off pretty research heavy and pretty adhering to the facts. And then once I kind of get more into it, and I feel like I've really developed these characters — and they are characters. They're fictional characters. They should not be mistaken for the real people. I make them fully fictional characters. I go into their heads. And at a certain point, once I feel more immersed in them, then I feel more at liberty to invent and to take them in a more fantastical, fabulous direction.

[Music]

Evans: Moses, I wanna talk about your process specifically starting with this 1,500-year timespan. Can you talk about how as you're writing each installment, you're crafting not only a character that we root for right then when we're reading, but someone who will essentially become myth in a future story?

Utomi: Yeah, it's a balancing act like anything else in writing. Some of it is when… I'm very conscious about kind of the structure of this series and knowing where things are going. At the same time, I try to treat each book as if it's that character's actual life and they need to make decisions that make sense for them in that moment. They're not, they don't have the purview that the reader has, so they're not thinking about things with the context that the reader has. And I think that's, I hope for the reader it starts to feel authentic in the sense that that's largely how we live our lives, that we don't — of course we're aware of our ancestors and aware that we will have potentially descendants — but there's only so much we can do to forward the future or reconcile the past. I think a lot of it is trying to figure out day-to-day how we need to move forward.

Evans: And Emily, what was it like for you being inside Kellyanne Conway's head for the amount of time it took you to write that story? Did you have to take breaks from her?

Greenberg: Yeah. Yeah. So that one I worked on for a couple months, which, for me, that's actually really fast. I just spent a lot of time immersed in her, like watching videos of her, listening to her, reading about her, so that even when I wasn't actively writing, I was still kind of thinking about her, in a pretty obsessive way, which was scary. And then, there was a certain point in time where I felt like I could hear the character of her just like talking in my head.

Evans: Oh, wow.

Greenberg: And that was, that's not where you wanna be. So I tried to get the story on the page as quickly as I could after that. It's quite hard to revise something like that because you don't want to go back into that space.

Evans: Go ahead.

Utomi: Can I ask a question? Because I've read that story and I'm fascinated by it. Do you think it’s like doing an impression of that person versus drawing a picture of that person, if that makes sense? Like where does it sit?

Greenberg: Yeah. When I've heard people talk about method acting and really getting into the role, it's not quite that, but I do feel like there's something similar where I just try to saturate myself with her. I just kind of went into this obsessive mode about her, but then I would try to turn it off and go about the rest of my life. But it would just be kind of when my mind was wandering like I'm walking the dog, taking a shower or something, I would just sometimes hear her echoing in my mind. It's quite immersive, but also it's not like I'm not actually trying to live her life or impersonate her as a performer would.

Evans: Did you ever feel a sort of empathy or understanding? Was there any spark like that?

Greenberg: I mean, yeah, there's got to be for me to write about her in that way. I dislike most of the people in this book. I often choose to write about people I really disagree with and sometimes even hate. But in order for it to work as fiction, there has to be something I can connect with them about. Not sure I really got there with the Donald Trump character in the book, which I'm OK with. But for Kellyanne Conway and George W. Bush, I did have to look for parts of their background that I could relate to.

For George W. Bush, for example, he has this terrible episode as a child where his father destroys one of his drawings. And I had a moment where I had an art teacher destroy one of my drawings, and so I could channel that in order to feel for this character and to write that scene.

For Kellyanne, there were aspects of her background. She's dealt with a lot of sexism and misogyny over her career. And so there were aspects of that where I could feel sorry for her. She's somebody who doesn't come from a privileged background, and so I can sympathize some of her trying to prove herself and to get where she is. There are moments where I can either sympathize with her or I feel a connection with something that I've been through. It doesn't mean that I excuse that character's actions and I don't.

My hope is that the stories will not be read as apologies for these characters and their awful deeds. To me it's also kind of a reflection of us. I think we like to let ourselves on the hook and be like, oh, well I'm not like that. But I can see aspects of myself in some of these characters, too.

What does it take for somebody to cross over that line? That's something I'm very interested in.

Evans: And Moses, you write some really incredible villains and the way that evil and monsters are in this world is, it keeps you on your toes. Would you say that you connect to the villain characters as much as you might connect to your heroes?

Utomi: I think so, yeah. Yeah, 'cause I think I do think of evil a lot as systemic. I think systems are inherently inhuman. I mean, that's why it's a system, right? Not a person. And so I do think there's, whether you call it the banality of evil or kind of the indifference of evil that I think feels particularly terrifying when someone isn't hurting you because they hate you, they're hurting you because they don't really care that what they're doing impacts you. I think, to be frank as an American, I think about a lot is that my life is pretty comfortable. There's a lot of suffering I don't have to go through. The materials in my phone, somebody suffered to get that, you know? I haven't stopped buying phones. There's someone out there to whom I'm a pretty terrible evil and I need to… I grapple with that a lot when I'm writing, especially with fantasy. I have a magic system that is a resource. It requires sacrifice and it bestows power. And so I think about, well, the power that protects me, how does that affect the people who it doesn't protect? I try to examine how scary power is and how evil it feels when it's not protecting you.

I think often villainy is a, for 99% of people, it's a product of circumstance. I think there are those people who, for whom you put them in a desperate situation, they prove to be heroic. But I think most people are following orders and most people go along with it. And I'd like to think I would've been the person that would've bucked whatever social trend of oppression existed at the time — all the different ones that exist throughout history. But statistics show I probably wouldn't have been, and I don't know what to do with that and so I write books obsessively.

Evans: You've both touched on this in some way, but I want to talk about the ways that your writing is similar. And I want to ask that of you both. What do you see in each other's work that resonates or with the way that you write, particularly in terms of truth?

Utomi: You'd mentioned how finding the empathy in the characters, and specifically the Kellyanne Conway story, I remember when I got to the part about the misogyny she's dealt with and yeah, growing up poor and what she would've had to do to get to where she is and what that would say about how much she's willing to sacrifice her position was extremely astute.

And I think when I'm writing the bad villains, evil systems, whatever, in my book, that was something I really connected with. I was like, yeah, she definitely found the point of empathy. Mustache twirling is like an artifact of the ‘50s for a reason. We don't want to do that in modern storytelling typically. And I think you really found a really smart entry point to that.

Greenberg: Thanks. So in thinking about your work… In the first book, I feel like the characters kept commenting, this is a lie, this is a lie. We didn't believe each other because we were labeled as liars and our city was labeled the City of Lies. That to me was such a perfect encapsulation of this phenomena that I've been reading about called the liar’s dividend, which is when there's so much false information out there that a liar can actually take advantage of that. For example, Donald Trump can say about the Access Hollywood tape, oh no, I didn't really say that. That was a deep fake. And because there's so many deep fakes and false things kind of swirling about, it actually benefits him. And so I saw that a lot in the first book.

And then in the second book, it was really fascinating because it starts off basically with this almost summarization of the first book, but everything has been shifted. And you just kind of recognize certain names and you're like, oh, that's not, that's not how it was. It's like this game of telephone where everything has been, by the time it gets to the end, it's like, well, there, OK, I recognize a little bit, but it's really twisted. For me, that one was super fascinating because the main character has been told these are the bad guys. And then at a certain point he goes off and he interacts with them and he is told, well, no, this is what your society did to us. There's this constant sort of flipping back and forth between that. And I loved your note, the author's note at the end where you're talking about 9/11 and America in response to 9/11 went and did some really terrible things. And I really felt that, that complexity of something I was working through in mine as well.

Evans: Well, thank you both so much. And we actually have a couple extra minutes, so we want to allow time for maybe two audience questions. If you have one, come to the microphone so that we can hear you and record your voice properly. We got you, hold on.

Naomi: My name is Naomi and I have a question for Moses. Was it fun creating a new world?

Utomi: That's a great question. It was. When you make a new world, you get to… I heard a quote once that said that being a writer is the only job that lets you use everything you've ever learned. And I think world building is a really good example of that, is that any interest you have — whether it's in dance or science or history or culture — you can find a way to embed it into a world that you make up. And it becomes this really fascinating experience. At some point, you create it and then it's its own thing. And now you're having to like write and obey the laws of a world that you made up. It's a really cool feeling. You should do it. Are you a writer? It sounds like you are.

Naomi: I started writing a book.

Utomi: Good, good. Yeah. Keep with it and you'll enjoy it.

Evans: Thank you, Naomi.

Rodney: Hi, I'm Rodney. This is also a question for Moses. I haven't read any of your books yet, but what I've learned so far is that they're set over 1,500 years and each one was an extremely different project. I'm wondering if when you wrote the first book, you had the idea that you were going to write all three, or if not, how they sort of developed into this continuous world.

Utomi: Yeah, good question. The first one, when I first wrote it, it was a standalone. And then I met with the publisher, and I realized that I like money and I need money to pay my bills, so I pitched the trilogy. I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve if I were allowed to tell the story more extensively. I imagine it's like, people who write for TV talk about how you don't actually know you're necessarily going to get renewed for a second season, so you try to tell the best story you can, but you know exactly where you would want to take it more but you don't know if that'll happen.

Thankfully my publisher was super down. I definitely thought they'd reject it, but they were totally open to the idea and we got to go from there.

Rodney: Very cool. Thank you.

Utomi: Thanks.

[Applause] 

Evans: All right, a big thank you to Emily Greenberg and Moses Ose Utomi for joining us today and sharing their stories. Special thank you to our live audience at the 2025 KPBS San Diego Book Festival.

[Applause] 

Evans: You have made this taping really great. Thanks also to the teams at KPBS and the University of San Diego for helping bring this panel to life — it definitely took a village.

This is our 16th episode of The Finest. We are a podcast that explores San Diego's culture and how the stories we create and consume connect our community. And we've covered everything from a local tea shop to the history of Our Lady of Guadalupe, to birding, the music economy, romantasy, a Kumeyaay comic book — even Blink-182. If you haven't already, please find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe. Or you can go to KPBS.org/TheFinest.

And also please leave us a rating. It really helps new listeners discover the show and if you leave as a comment or a review, we will probably print it out and read it aloud to each other at our desks. So please do that. And best of all, if you can think of anyone in your life that might like The Finest, please share it with them and tell them that you were right here.

I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer is Anthony Wallace, who also composed the score. Ben Redlawsk is our audio engineer, and today we're joined by Adrian Villalobos helping with the live show. Our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.

Thank you so much for being here.

[Applause] 

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.