Atlanta author Shanna Miles’ debut novel explores young Black love through time and space
“For All Time” is Atlanta author Shanna Miles’ debut novel.
Shanna Miles
In literary fiction, parallel timelines, cross-generational stories and shifting narrator perspectives are the tools of truly ambitious writers. Shanna Miles’ debut young adult novel “For All Time“ incorporates them all in a time-traveling love story where two main characters, Tamar and Feyard, find each other in multiple reincarnations across several centuries.
The chapters, each told from the alternating perspectives of two Black teenagers, take place in eras like the 14th century, the 1920s, present-day, and even in the 23rd century. Miles joined “City Lights” producer Summer Evans via Zoom to talk about her process of writing through all of the nooks and crannies of young love and the Black teen experience through the past, present and possible future.
On Miles’ time-hopping love story and the musings that inspired it:
“I was writing a historical fiction novel and … It was set in the 1850s, which was right before the Civil War, right around the Fugitive Slave Act,” said Miles. “I wanted to explore other eras because there’s a lot of focus on that particular era of American history and Black peoples’ placement in that time … So I played around with some characters, and I just wrote some short stories, some short treatments in different kinds of eras that I thought would be interesting.”
“I had a space, or a treatment, that was in San Francisco in the 1960s during the Flower Children and the Black Panthers, because they were all around at the same time,” she said. “I had a treatment that was in New Orleans around the early 19th century and wanted to play with the Free Black People, the gens de couleur, that were there at that time. I wanted to go into different places. And then as I was doing that, I kept using the same two characters, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I melded all of these?’”
“I love science fiction as much as I love history, to kind of think about how we lived in the past. It’s also fun to think about how we might live in the future,” said Miles. “How will politics evolve? How will our exploration evolve? Because we’ve learned, or we think we’ve learned, that colonialism isn’t necessarily conducive to stable environments, but that’s for right now. Maybe we forget all of that, and we repeat history, and we get arrogant and try to colonize other planets.”
How the present-day and future narratives grapple with COVID, racism and other realities:
“What we know about the long-haulers right now is so little. People are still getting infected, and there are some people who are still sick, and there are people who are dealing with the after-effects of COVID-19 where they’re not necessarily contagious anymore, but they’ve got these horrible debilitating problems, like their lungs are ravaged, or they need transplants, or they’re on oxygen,” Miles said. “I was thinking about, how are we going to acknowledge the pandemic without being set in the pandemic? … It’s been so long, and it’s been so all-encompassing, I don’t think you can ignore it.”
“I do feel that there is a twinge of realism that needs to be there. I like fantasy. I like things to be fantastical. I like when there’s just a twist to reality; when there’s some magic, or when there’s something that we haven’t really developed yet for science fiction — that’s fun,” she said. “But I do like things to be rooted in the real reality. It is more fantastical, to me, for you to create a world where there is no racism and no sexism and try to tell a story, and have some relate to it, than for there to be witches, you know what I mean?”
How characters change and remain the same through different lifetimes:
“If we were reincarnated, or if we lived in different eras, even if we lived in different places in America at the same time, you have to, not change who you are, but your personality and how you relate to the world shifts a bit,” said Miles. “So, for Tamar for example, she has a love of music. So she is a musician and a slave in 14th century Africa. And in the present day, she used to be in the school band. In the future, there is a drum machine that triggers bombs. These are all things that she ends up being drawn to, with probably no real understanding as to why she’s drawn to it, but how that love of music manifests is entirely dependent on where and when she is.”
“They are connected and they find each other in all of their lifetimes, and I feel like, if you believe in soulmates, that would be the truth,
she said. “How they find each other, where they’re living, or what situations they may be in, may be different. And whether or not it’s going to be easy for them to really realize their love, that may be different. But the fact that they connect to each other in all of these lifetimes is an indisputable fact.”
Shanna Miles’ new young adult novel “For All Time” is available now via Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, and can be purchased through IndieBound, Barnes and Noble, and www.shannamiles.net.
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