Falling in love with an idea: A chat with author and educator Bethany Baptiste on her YA crossover novel, The Poisons We Drink

Falling in love with an idea: A chat with author and educator Bethany Baptiste on her YA crossover novel, The Poisons We Drink by Briana Asmus

This week our post is prepared by Briana Asmus. She is a wonderful educator and a veteran contributor to Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday having produced several posts over the past few years. It is great to have her back.

Briana Asmus, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Literacy in the School of Education at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, MI. She received her PhD in English education from Western Michigan University. She has taught middle and high school English as a foreign language (TEFL) in South Korea, Japan, and China. She is newly returned to higher education after a 2-year hiatus teaching multilingual students from over 20 linguistic backgrounds at an urban high school. ​

What if instead of falling in love with a person, a love potion could make someone fall in love with an idea?

On November 18th, 2023, I fell in love with the idea behind a novel. 

At NCTE 2023, I sat on a panel entitled “First Impressions, Lasting Connections, and Real Change: What to Read First in High School English.” Attendees (mostly ELA teachers) listened to brief presentations arguing why certain texts would serve as good first choices in the high school ELA classroom. At the end of the panel, conference attendees were able to hear YA author and former teacher Bethany Baptiste discuss the compelling story of how her debut novel, The Poisons We Drink, came to fruition. This was no ordinary story, and no ordinary process, but instead, one shaped by Baptiste’s own dreams and realities, battles with mental illness, and her experience of a hostile, politically-charged landscape.

In her address, Baptiste opened the floor by taking the audience back to a time in our history that isn’t that far away, but in some ways feels like decades ago. Only seven years ago, the 2016 presidential election was rocking the world. Baptiste explained that it wasn’t just the election that shook her to the core, but the events that followed, including racially motivated attacks, incidents of police brutality, and xenophobic rhetoric coming from the top-down. As Baptiste writes in her letter from the author, “On November 9, 2016, I woke up in grief. Racism and hatred won on a political stage and killed my hope as a woman, a Black woman, and a Black American woman” (2023).  What began as Baptiste’s grief journal, morphed into “a tribute of Black sisterhood, the struggles and strides of Black people, and the strength it takes to wake up early each day in a country that doesn’t love you” (2023). It was her experience and processing of this time in history that laid the foundation for The Poisons We Drink, an urban, Black fantasy/dystopian novel set in Washington DC.

Baptiste’s ideas really held on to me, and got me thinking about the various ways a book like The Poisons We Drink might be a unique and valuable addition to a high school library. On a more base level, I was also excited to read something that combined some of my favorite elements of YA fiction: dystopian narratives, witches, and governmental corruption were right up my alley! After the conference session ended, I relayed my excitement to Baptiste about reading the book as soon as it was released on March 5th, 2024. You can imagine my surprise when I was generously offered an advance copy. Steve Bickmore floated the idea of an interview as a way of following up  post-read, and two months later I finished the book and was able to interview Baptiste with questions about the text in mind. As a result, I am able to offer you, the potential reader (and recommender), this window into The Poisons We Drink so that YOU can order your copy when it drops on March 5th, 2024. (In fact, hit the link in the last sentence and order away.)

What is this book about and who is it for?  ​

On the surface, this is the story of a Black, 18-year-old witch fighting for survival in a world where humans and witches are engaged in a civil conflict. As Baptiste notes, it’s “Practical Magic” meets “The Hate You Give.” However, there is so much more The Poisons We Drink has to offer.

The protagonist is Venus “V” Stoneheart, a smart, headstrong girl with a deep sense of loyalty to her family and friends. Venus’ family lives in Washington DC, in a neighborhood characterized as “A haven for no-gooders, unconventional achievers, the forgotten, and the downtrodden” (25). The streets she knows are a direct contrast to the rich and powerful DC that most folks see represented in TV dramas. V is in the family business of brewing illegal potions and selling them in order to contribute to the family income, and V’s abilities as a brewer are important to her family’s livelihood. Despite the dangerous situations at play in her surroundings, including meetups with human clients, laws that unfairly target the witcher community, and hate groups with iron bullets in their guns, what lurks inside V is the biggest threat to her life. V’s refers to her “deviation” (a metaphor for mental illness, in this case, PTSD) as It. It comes across as a voice inside Venus, encouraging her to use her powers for evil and destruction. As the war brews around her, Venus is also at war with her inner-self. If not kept in check, It has the potential to destroy her. Venus does her best to suppress It in the beginning of the novel by chugging potions of various kinds, none of which offer relief. Eventually, (and without spoilers), V must contend with It. To make matters more complicated, V’s regular patterns are interrupted when her mother (the head of the household, and head of the family business), is murdered by the iron bullet of a human hate group that hunts witchers. V’s desire to know the name of her mother's murderer drives her into a deal with the Grand Witcher in the upper echelons of witcher society. Soon enough, Venus finds herself in the middle of a plot to influence senators by brewing love potions that make DC politicians vote against anti-witcher legislation. Unfortunately, every time V brews a love potion, she harms herself in the process. 

Characters and events in The Poisons We Drink are skillfully woven into a detailed socio-political context. Textual features like the “Witcherpedia” entries at the beginning of each chapter offer the reader more detail about the abilities of witchers and help the reader understand some of the intricacies of the witcher community. Like other dystopian novels, the present moment in the novel is complicated by events of the recent past, and the future is something that isn’t promised. This sense of time isn’t too far off from what an adolescent in today’s present might feel. As a “crossover” novel, this book aims to appeal to 18-19 year olds, a group that is positioned to feel the tug between the past and the future, between youth and adulthood. Considered adolescents by most measures, including those used by the World Health Organization, it’s common for this group to get left out of the conversation of “YA Lit”, despite the varied experiences that can happen in these years, including increased responsibilities, formational relationships, and major life transitions. ​

Unfortunately, it is also common for this age group to be stereotyped, as experiences can vary drastically across class, culture, etc.  In their article, “How Rethinking Adolescence Helps Reimagine the Teaching of English”, Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides, Robert Lewis, and Robert Patrone note how dominant views of adolescence are often discussed in terms of deficits. Additionally, because they are often seen as “becoming,” adolescent strengths are not always grounded in their present life experiences, and instead framed as what they will become (14). This stereotyping is something The Poisons We Drink actively resists through its exploration of inner and outer conflict, and its tendency to avoid fixed resolutions to complex problems and relationships. One example is the decision not to provide a resolution to V’s PTSD, a reminder to the reader that mental illness should not be viewed as something to be “fixed.”  According to Baptiste, this was  a conscious choice.

What can we learn from Bethany Baptiste & The Poisons We Drink?

“I  wanted  to  make  a  point  that  love  doesn't  cure  all.  It's  people  loving  you  for  who  you  are.  That's  not  the  cure,  but  that's  the  most  important  thing  that  they  could  do  is  love  you  exactly  as  who  you  are.” - Bethany Baptiste

Baptiste is a teacher, through and through. Astonishingly, she wrote her book while teaching full-time by pouring every ounce of her creative energy leftover from the classroom into her writing. In our interview, she said she often felt like writing and teaching were at war with each other, which I interpreted as not too dissimilar to the world of V and the conflicts on the inside and outside of her world. These lessons are what ground The Poisons We Drink. People are complex, relationships are not always smooth, and we all do our best to find our way in the world we are born into. What Baptiste describes isn’t easy for most people, but falling in love with this idea is perhaps one of the most worthy undertakings. ​

Bethany Baptiste is a slightly responsible grown-up living Jacksonville, Florida in a little brick house with her fiancé, three chaotic evil dogs, and too many books. When not prying a shoe from a Schnauzer’s jaws, she writes about Black kids with big hearts and little morals. You can visit her at bethanybaptiste.com or @storysorcery on Twitter. Bethany is represented by Andrea Morrison of Writers House.

References: 
Baptiste, B. (2024). The Poisons We Drink. Sourcebooks Fire. 

Baptiste, B. (2020, October 25). The Tragedies of Trying to Get Agented. Bethany Baptiste. https://www.bethanybaptiste.com/
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" EJ" in Focus: How Re-thinking Adolescence Helps Re-imagine the Teaching of English
ST Sarigianides, MA Lewis, R Petrone - The English Journal, 2015

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