Michael Leali Q&A Part 1: Addressing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Head on in MG Fiction

Photo by Sophie Emeny, from Unsplash

If you’re an MG or YA novelist, you’re probably thinking about how to portray diverse characters in your fiction. I know I am. Learning how to write more inclusively is one part of learning to write compelling fiction—we’re not born knowing how to do all of this. But we can learn it.

As a straight, white, cisgender woman, I’m educating myself about issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in part by reading compelling novels that address these issues head on.

Michael Leali does exactly that in his debut middle grade novel, The Civil War of Amos Abernathy (HarperCollins, 2022). (For a quick overview, see my post recommending this excellent novel.)

Michael is a gay, white, cisgender man who’s been out since he was a kid. He chatted with me via Zoom about his novel. This Q&A is a lightly edited version of our conversation.

Michele: How many other novels did you write before this one?

Michael Leali: Gosh, finished drafts? I think I probably wrote maybe four or five full novels before I wrote Amos, but I have partial drafts and first chapters and outlines for dozens, probably hundreds of random projects.

Michele: [laughs] I love hearing that. So what was difficult or challenging about writing this novel?

Michael: So many things were challenging about writing this particular book. The first major challenge was that so much of this story is based on my lived experience—unpacking some of the memories and the joys and the hurts of being a young person who, in many ways, is far more aligned with Ben [Amos’s new friend and crush who’s home schooled and learning about his identity] than with Amos [the narrator, who’s been out since 4th grade].

One of the biggest challenges was finding the emotional space to what that felt like and to go back into those memories and sit in that a little bit so that the characters came out authentically.

But it was also really fun to go back and think about my time as a historical reenactor and to revisit the place where I’ve volunteered. All of that was a blast.

And then aside from the personal and emotional side of it, the research component was huge. Doing justice by Albert [a Union soldier in the U.S. Civil War who, if he’d lived today, may have identified as a trans man]. Making sure that I was cross-referencing and double-checking my sources. Making sure that different voices from different marginalized communities and the intersections of identities were represented in this novel, without it becoming a textbook or just too information heavy.

At the heart of it, it needed to be a story about Amos’s experience with Ben and Albert.

Michele: I thought three of your secondary characters were especially important in terms of how Amos grows and changes throughout the story: Ben obviously, but also Chloe, who’s a real bad ass, and Amos’s mom. Could you tell me how those characters developed?

Michael: In some ways, Ben was the easiest and the most challenging because again, he’s so close to who I used to be, but I also wanted to update him and make him a child of today.

I feel like sometimes members of my own LGBTQ community feel as if we’ve moved on from certain things, like the need to come out. I live in the Midwest. It’s not a thing that we’ve moved beyond in all places, and children, even from supportive families, still struggle with celebrating and loving who they are.

So this still feels like a very relevant conversation to me, and I don’t think it should be dismissed.

I wanted to bring that into the story and acknowledge it as a challenge for so many LGBTQ youth while also showing Amos this side where he’s able to celebrate it as a middle schooler. That was a lot of digging into memories, processing it, working through it.

Chloe [Amos’s best friend and a Black girl] was such a fun and incredibly challenging character to write. I knew going into this book that she was gonna be part of it from the very beginning.

I would have been very wrong, I think, to write a novel about the American Civil War without including a Black character who is empowered and passionate and is also reckoning with what it means to love her country and to want to take ownership of history, but also call out history and have her own voice.

She changed tremendously across drafts as I did more research, as I tried and failed and tried again, getting aspects of her character and her description correct on the page.

We brought in a Black woman sensitivity reader. I think that for any writer who is writing outside their lived perspective, if you can get a sensitivity reader to read your manuscript and help you create more authenticity on the page, then you should do it 100%.

I found I needed to continue to be humble and recognize that for as much as I know, I have so much more to learn, and I was very honored by the feedback I received.

I really do think because of so many different perspectives that came to this book in addition to my sensitivity reader, that Chloe’s character really stands out and that she is who she is because of people beyond me as well.

And then the mom, Amos’s mom [a white woman who’s a widow]. I love Hannah. Oh man. She really came to life as we were nearing the end of the editing process.

I always knew I wanted her to be a messy parent, someone who’s trying to do the right thing, who in some ways is so successful and in others fails epically. I wanted to give her a chance to redeem herself, and she does. She’s so fierce. She’s based on a lot of qualities my own mother has—I’m very fortunate.

One of the things that grew for her character was that originally she didn’t have a boyfriend. Darren was not a part of the narrative originally, and one of the things that I worked with my editor on was giving her more and allowing her to find a different kind of happiness on the page and allowing her to breathe a little more fully.

Michele: One thing I noticed about each of those characters in particular was how much of a character arc they had of their own. That was very satisfying, I thought, because you were able to look at different aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion with each one.

Michael: Yeah, a lot of layering.

Michele: A character-driven novel certainly needs those kinds of layers, I think, to be really rich, and that’s what your novel offers. I think your novel offers a lot for adult readers too, especially straight, white, cisgender folks who are probably over 30. [laughs] I was identifying with the mom. It was so realistic for her to make those bad decisions, but then good for her for turning that corner.

Michael: Thank you for saying that. I think it’s interesting that so many adult readers have come away from this book saying, “This is for kids? I feel like I got just as much out of it,” which I take as a compliment.

Watch for Part 2 of my Q&A with Michael next week. Or sign up for my newsletter to make sure you receive it.