ICW: J.T Williams, Author of Lizzie and Belle Series

Brianna (TBP)
Okay, so let's, let's talk a little bit about your book, shall we?

J.T Williams
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Brianna (TBP)
So this is a sequel to your first one. And I'd love to know, did it feel a little bit? Did it feel easy to come back into it? Or did you feel a little bit of pressure now that this is, you know, people have seen these characters, they've got to know them a little bit?

J.T Williams
Absolutely. No, that's a really good question. So. So the first book, drama and danger was written from the perspective of one of the characters, of Lizzie Sancho. And I was really sort of - I'm really taken with this idea of like, you know, Black women sort of telling their own stories. And what I decided to do for the second book was then kind of flip that perspective and have Belle tell the story from her point of view. So I think what that meant was a real kind of rethinking in terms of the voice and their perspective on the story. And, and on the one hand, that was a deliberate choice, because I think I really wanted to draw attention to the fact that, you know, the histories that we learn are always kind of somebody's version of events, there's no kind of like hard and fast version that kind of speaks to everyone's experience. But doing that really was such a sort of challenge, I think, more of a challenge than I'd anticipated, like, you know, getting inside the head of a different character, and kind of thinking how, how she would experience this adventure from her perspective. And I loved I loved that journey, because each of the characters I have, like, I feel like they've got different elements of my own personality depending on sort of different stages of my life, or different things that I've observed. But it did mean a whole new challenge there for me, definitely.

Brianna (TBP)
So which character would you say is more like you? Is it? Is it Lizzie? Or is it Belle?

J.T Williams
I think, I think instinctively it's Lizzie really. And I think that's why the first book I wrote from her point of view, because whenever I was thinking about this history and about these stories and about these adventures, I was kind of thinking back to myself as a youngster. I was just I liked running about, I was a real kind of reader there was a part of me that was a real kind of reader, and a real sort of home girl in many senses. But also physically I was just very sort of active. And when I thought about Lizzie and the way that she came to the world, I thought about myself as a young girl. And then with Belle, I suppose there were elements of Belle's personality, or elements more of her lived experience that sort of spoke to me. So I grew up in a very small family, I was an only child. And for a while an only child with a single mum as well. But I spent a lot of time when my mum was working - my mum used to work night duty over the weekend, she was a nurse -and I often used to stay with other families. And so those kinds of experiences that Belle has sometimes of sort of being sort of inside a family, but inside a family that is not your own, sort of slightly looking in from the outside. That aspect of Belle's experience kind of appealed to me as well. And I was really interested in exploring that, especially in the second book. So in portraits and poison, I do really try and think about the different ways in which we build family around us. And sometimes we build family out of friends, and what does it mean to have a family because I think for Lizzie, you know, she lives in this very big, joyful, harmonious family with lots of people in the household. And in a way that's such a sort of place of strength for her, it's a very grounded centred place for her to be coming from. And that's something that Belle has really sort of missed out on. So I really wanted to explore that.

Brianna (TBP)
I love that it's one of my favourite - I kind of hate the word trope, but - like one of my favourite tropes is like the found family trope. If that's done well, I will eat it up every single time. And I think you do it really well.

J.T Williams
Oh, thank you. Thanks ever so much. It really was a challenge I have to say. It was but, you know, I'm sure I'm sure the most rewarding experiences are aren't they. They're kind of tough in the making.

Brianna (TBP)
Definitely, definitely. So personally, I love a mystery that's set in this kind of time period like Georgian England, Victorian England. Why do you think it is that readers and kind of even TV audiences, film audiences, why do we love this specific era so much?

J.T Williams
Oh, that's a great question. I do think that there's something about the Georgian era that's still quite genuinely sort of mysterious to us and it's quite hidden from us. I feel that it's not something until the last couple of years, it's not really a time period that we saw on our screens often. And when we did I feel we never really saw, you know, people of colour in that space, we didn't see black and brown faces in that space, so I feel there's still so much to be explored. And when I was doing the research for these books, obviously, my way in was through these figures of Ignatius Sancho, Lizzie's father, his incredible life story, and Dido Belle. But it was, I had so much work to do in a way to start to really sort of try and visualise these black families and groups. And I will say communities - there seems to be like between historians, there seems to be a little bit of a dilemma as to whether we talk about them as communities. But genuinely, from the research I've done, I really do want to use that word, because I've got this really strong sense of people coming together, looking after each other, looking out for each other, in the ways that we know black people so often do. Especially under these really difficult circumstances that people were living in at the time, really dangerous circumstances. But I do think that when it comes to sort of TV dramas and films and adaptations, quite often the people making those choices about who we see on screen when it comes to period dramas, haven't really shown us the whole picture. So I think there's so much more still to come for us. And so there were so many different groups of people, especially in London, so many different communities living in London, it was actually such an international space, in many ways. Sometimes, you know, often for very complex reasons, sometimes for quite traumatic reasons - obviously, you know, the background to these books is also, you know, the transatlantic slave trade. But I feel that if we don't, because I think I have wondered is that maybe why people haven't really wanted to delve too much into the 18th century. But I feel that if we lose that, and if we don't go into that history, and if we don't confront it, we also lose all these other stories of, you know, joy and familyhood and love and the ways in which people did manage to survive and thrive under these very challenging circumstances.

Brianna (TBP)
So you just mentioned there that Ignatius Sancho who is a real man, he's a real man who features in your books, I'd love to know why you decided that you wanted to feature kind of real people, because that does add an extra level of kind of challenge to writing it. But also why specifically him and Dido?

J.T Williams
Yes. So I mean, it really did happen that way around for me. So I was working at the British Library as a researcher, and Ignatius Sancho's letters, his original letters had sort of come into the library, so I had the opportunity to see these beautiful letters and to read them. And you can buy them in a book as well in printed format. And so when I started reading these letters, there's something about them, you know, letter writing was really big in the 18th century. And sometimes it was described as sort of talking on paper. And when you read Sancho's letters, even though you know, the language is obviously sort of quite old fashioned and quite florid. But it's also really, really vivid. And he talks not just about all the amazing things that are happening outside his shop and outside his shop window. But he talks about his family and everything that's happening sort of in the back room, he talks about the joy he feels when he sees his son, Billy taking his first steps, or when Billy first grows his teeth, he talks about how the girls are coming along with their music practice, he talks about how much he loves his wife, and you get this really, really vivid picture of this, this loving family in the heart of Westminster, in you know, the 1760s 70s. And I just thought, in a way, actually the real - those real life details are so, so special, actually, and so captivating, that I really wanted, I really wanted to sort of start with, you know, this real family and this real man, he also had such an extraordinary life journey, you know, we think that he may have even been born on a slave ship. He was enslaved as a very small child, lost his parents young and managed to, you know, taught himself to read and to write, became a classical composer, became a published writer, you know, gathered this beautiful family around him, and was just full of joy. You know, he was just this really kind of compassionate, funny, warm, lovely man. And I kind of thought actually, I couldn't even invent a character who could sort of top that really, you know, he was so vivid in my mind really already. I just thought actually, let's start with that and sort of see where we get to. And with Dido, similarly, there's a portrait of her - there's a copy of a portrait of her in Kenwood House with her cousin, and it's really unusual. And, you know, she's smiling. She's pointing to her face. Her, she's painted sort of on a level with her cousin, which was a very rare portrayal of black people at the time, to be sort of painted at that level. And, and so I kind of think that actually, there's so much about her real life story that's really, really intriguing. That fiction, you know, fiction alone couldn't even come close to.

Brianna (TBP)
So I want to ask a question about pictures, but I'm conscious of time. So I'm going to ask what I would normally end with just to make sure I get it. And I ask everyone I interview this. And the question is, what does being black mean to you?

J.T Williams
Ooh, okay, that's a really, it's meant so many different things at different times in my life, and actually, at the moment... So in terms of like, my blackness, if you like, where that kind of comes from my mom came from Sierra Leone, she came to England in 1960, on her own in her early 20s. And settled here, and actually, there were elements of her story that reminded me of Sancho's story, because she was, you know, raised by grandparents, rather than parents, she had a very sort of difficult early life, but still managed to settle here, she worked really, really, really hard, built a family up around herself. And so for me, I suppose, finding ways in which to sort of honour that and honour all of those people who have done that, who've made that journey for me and sort of made new lives for themselves. At the moment, I think that we're also in a situation whereby the extent to which blackness can also be Britishness is constantly sort of being challenged. And the more that I discover about the extent to which people of African descent and Caribbean people have actually been in this country for centuries, the more I feel compelled to find different ways to reveal that in my writing. So I kind of feel that at the moment, my blackness stands for really kind of showing that there are lots of different ways to be a British person in this country. And I say that...I say that sort of conscious that I probably wouldn't have said that a few years ago in quite in this in the same way. But I think it's really important for us to understand that there are these sorts of multiple identities that coexist. And it seems to me like even using the word Britishness on its own, it can have so much, much more complex, difficult sort of connotation. But if we understand how inclusive that term can be, and that actually, I think, what makes even even the words nation, I think there's all these words are so sort of charged,

Brianna (TBP)
They really are.

J.T Williams
what what could be, and what has in the past been really beautiful about this country is actually the the sort of multiplicity and the variety of people that live and breathe here and who have been coming here for a long time, and I hope can continue to come here into the future.

Brianna (TBP)
Thank you. I love that answer. And it is such an important, it feels almost more important a conversation to be having now than kind of anytime in like maybe even the last 10 years. So yeah. So I think this will be our last question, because we have to wrap up, but back to the vivid pictures, the illustrations in these books. Gorgeous. When I opened the post and saw that cover, I actually gasped. I haven't reacted like that in a while. How did you - look at it, it's just stunning. How did you find your illustrator? And how kind of involved did you get to be in the guidance for what you actually wanted in these illustrations?

J.T Williams
So I, you know, I feel I got really lucky with Simone Douglas, the fantastic illustrator. So really, my thanks to Farshore, the publishers and story mix, who were instrumental in finding Simone to illustrate the book. And with the first book, drama and danger, you know, it was my first book and Simone's first book. So for us, that was the first time we've been on this journey of going through this. It's a collaborative process, but the collaboration is kind of, it's sort of separate, it's very sort of back and forth. So we're not in a room working together. It's kind of you know, text and pictures going backwards and forwards in conversation if you like. So that was really amazing. Because for me, the challenge as a writer is that I have these pictures in my head. And these characters are very, very vivid in my head, and how do I somehow translate them into words on the page for readers, but also for an illustrator to bring them to life? And as you say, I just think Simone has done this amazing job. And with the second book, I should say, I had some really sort of, you know, genuinely spine tingling moments where there were certain scenes that I had sort of tried to imagine and get down on the page. And then when I saw the illustrations, I just felt as though Simone had been sort of creeping around in my head. Like, I don't really know, she did it. But there's a scene in particular, where the two girls have to creep into a house, and spy on a scene in a dining room, sort of from a balcony up above, it was quite a complex sort of setup, really. And Simone, just literally, when I saw her illustrations, it was exactly as I'd seen them in my own mind. But better to be honest. So yeah, it's really just a massive, massive props to her for that for the beautiful work that she's done. And the gorgeous colour scheme as well, I just think it's really glorious.

Brianna (TBP)
Did you always know that you wanted it to have illustrations? Because I feel like we kind of maybe, in these books, these kind of middle grade young adult books, we maybe don't see illustration quite as much as we did maybe 15-20 years ago? Was it very, did you want illustration from the get go?

J.T Williams
So I think as soon as the idea of there being illustrations came up, I realised that that was absolutely the right decision, you know, and I hadn't, I hadn't thought about it at the beginning. And partly just because this, this was my first book, and we were sort of working out, you know, what age group it was going to be for. And there were so many things to think about. But as soon as the publisher suggested, you know, that it was going to be an illustrated book. And I think it's really important that especially because for this history, as I say, it's really sort of invisible. So if you, if you're kind of thinking about how we're going to communicate the 18th century, for younger readers, it's really, really important that they have even more of a sort of guide, if you like to just sort of help them on that journey. Because even for me doing my research, it was really hard to find images, images that honoured us if you like, you know, images that I could really sort of draw on. So I think, you know, we want our readers to feel they're sort of in the right way, being transported back into a past moment, they can really really visualise the adventure, and really feel they're right there with Lizzie and Belle. And I think that Simone's work has just done such a fantastic job of making that happen.

Brianna (TBP)
Yeah, thank you so much, because it's also your words, your words did that. And then she was able to create something beautiful from the beautiful stuff you created. So thank you. Thank you for these books. And thank you for your time.

J.T Williams
Oh, thank you so much, Brianna. It was really lovely to talk to you. Thanks so much.

Lizzie and Belle Mysteries: Portraits and Poison is out today. Get your copy here. Haven’t read book 1? Get Drama and Danger here.