Karsyn Wallace Pays Tribute To Black Families In Her First Novel “The Loves of Our Lives”
Karsyn Wallace is a junior at Chapman University, originally hailing from Seattle, WA. (Photography by Studio B Portraits)
Cultures worldwide have kept the memories of their loved ones passed down from generation to generation, and Black families are no different. They keep memories and traditions alive. This positive experience inspired Karsyn Wallace, 21, to write her first book, “The Loves of Our Lives.” The book is fictional, but it is loosely based upon Wallace’s relationship with her mother and grandmother.
“I'm super close with my mom, and so she would always tell me about college and growing up and everything like that. And she had a lot of different guy experiences, a lot of boyfriends and crazy stories, and so I always found that interesting, because she lived a whole life before she had me it seemed,” Wallace said. “So when I came up with this idea, I knew that I was gonna have some stories off the top of my head, because both my mom and my grandma have a lot of, I would say like unique life experiences.”
“The Loves of Our Lives” centers on the intergenerational connection between the three main characters: a daughter, a mother and a grandmother. It discovers themes of womanhood, love and relationships and how the lives of the three main characters connect and relate.
“You kind of follow them through their lives. Through the timeline of their romantic relationships and connections. It starts when they're each about [at the] end of high school, early college-age and then up to recent time,” said Wallace.
Wallace is a junior at Chapman University studying peace studies and documentary film. Like many others, she delved into her passion for writing as quarantine dragged on. She had written some short stories, but the idea for “The Loves of Our Lives” had existed for quite some time.
“When I came up with the idea, it was over quarantine so I went on a camping trip with my parents at the time, and I just sat down with my mom, and we had like a three-hour conversation, and I recorded it, just...telling me all these different stories that I had no idea about,” Wallace said. “My mom is really into family history…so all of our family histories are organized in these bins from like the 1900s to now, and they're all organized by date, so I was looking through those. And I just found some really interesting stuff I had no idea about I thought would be a good book, so I was like, I'm just gonna do it.”
“The Loves of Our Lives” is set to debut at the end of April. (Cover art created by Bogna Brewczyk)
Wallace got accepted to the New Degree Press independent publishing program. She said that overall working with New Degree Press has been a really positive experience and that she would recommend it to first-time writers because of how much she learned about the process of writing a book. She’s gained experience that will help her produce another book in the future. She has had the opportunity to work closely with Bianca Myrtil, a marketing and revisions editor.
“Karsyn has had a clear vision for her book since its inception, so she really knew the stories that she wants to tell, and the themes that she wanted to explore and she really delivered. She wanted to bring out themes of womanhood and sexuality and…connections, and she really does a good job of that,” Myrtil said. “I think readers will find themselves falling in love with the characters and also thinking about their own relationships.”
Karsyn hopes that “The Loves of Our Lives” will inspire others to learn more about their own families and how the past can inform the present and future.
“I hope that people can identify with it. I feel like everyone that reads it will be able to identify with at least one of the characters, and they all go through such a diverse amount of experiences. And so, I just hope people identify with it and they'll just find it enjoyable. I think that there's some like fun stuff in there,” Wallace said.
“The Loves of Our Lives” will release at the end of April 2021. You can keep up with Wallace and be one of the first to snag a copy by visiting her Instagram. To learn more about New Degree Press, click here.