Victoria Bond

Hey there. It’s the end of the world as many of us have known it. Sad in many ways and shockingly serious, I know. And amidst all this, right now, I have to do something that feels pretty crazy. Tell you about my book. Yes, that’s right: my book. Here we are in the dystopian future undergoing a biological attack. Publishing books remains a thing. Well, okay. Here we go. My name is Vicky Bond. I wrote a book called Zora and Me: The Summoner. It comes out on my grandmother’s 93rd birthday, October 13, 2020.

The strange personal twist for me is that 2020 has been exactly the kind of year I tried to write about in The Summoner. In 2020, everything happens entirely at once continuously. The pandemic has shuffled and scrambled the architecture of our lives by altering both our circumstances of and perspectives on family, health, safety and money. The murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd have given rise to demands for racial and social justice. At the same time, the facts of those deaths and so many others hollow out our hearts and for me personally often crash my train of thought. Some of us have recognized, in light of the pandemic, that how we get our food and how we educate our children and how we make money, in other words how we live, is dependent upon incredibly fragile supply and labor chains that our society currently has trouble maintaining, sustaining, and stewarding. The democratic experiment in the United States of America feels like it’s ending. The Earth’s lungs, the Amazon rainforest, is on fire. Come on, you get the idea. We’re at the end game of, at the very least, a version of life here in America.

My version of endgame in The Summoner for the all-Black community of Eatonville, Florida in 1905 was a lynching, a grave robbery, and an election, happening within the town’s borders, all in quick succession. I wondered how people take stock and respond when they are being attacked as a racial and civic community? How will people change when they see signs around them that their world is falling apart? What kind of leader will people be drawn to? What vision for the future will give people confidence and inspire them? These are some of the questions that I went into this book with. I had no idea how long it would take me to write The Summoner. Or that something like 2020 would ever happen. But it did. Here we are. My name is Vicky Bond. I have a book coming out.