Chicago — What I personally find so intriguing and beautiful about literature is the unique “flip sides” that consuming it can provide people. On one hand, there’s escapism, getting blissfully lost in a world that’s nothing like our own, faced with unfamiliar situations we’ve never had to personally deal with. Fighting dragons and uncovering dark plots can become therapeutic.
And then on the other side, there’s the mirror that literature can create, reflecting back onto the reader’s relatable struggles, wants, and experiences that might have seemed impossible to be represented anywhere. Seeing yourself in a story can be just as therapeutic as reading a story and becoming someone else somewhere else.
Recently True Star got a chance to talk one-on-one with Terry J. Benton-Walker, a newly published author, who is striving to show both sides of that literature coin.
Benton-Walker’s debut novel, “Blood Debts”, is a contemporary fantasy featuring what is described on Benton-Walker’s Goodreads profile as “Powerful magical families intergenerational curses, and deadly drama in New Orleans. Thirty years ago, a young woman was murdered, a family was lynched, and New Orleans saw the greatest magical massacre in its history.”
In “Blood Debts”, readers will get to experience not only that escapism by way of a magical fantastical setting, but also the mirror by way of representation for Black and queer.
This guest post is in partnership with True Star Media.