Hi, this is Vivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast. Moms don't have time to read books. And speaking of books, I have two of my own books coming out this spring and summer. Princess Charming is a picture book, which debuts on April 19th. And Bookends, a memoir of love, loss, and literature comes out on July 1st, and it is truly a labor of love.

I hope you'll pre-order, order, and join me on tour as I go across the country.

You can find out more at zibbyowens.com or bookendsmemoir.com. And you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens because I always post about everything. Enjoy the show.

Margaret Verbal is the author of When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky. Margaret is an enrolled

citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Her first novel, Maud's Line, was a finalist for

the Pulitzer Prize. Her second novel, Cherokee America, has recently

been listed by the New York Times as one of the 100 notable books of the year for 2019.

So it wasn't so recent. But anyway, she lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Welcome, Margaret. Thank you so much for coming on Mom's and I have time to read books

to discuss when two feathers fell from the sky. Thank you. Nice to be here. Thank you so much for coming on. Mom's, and have time to read books to discuss when two feathers fell from the sky.

Thank you. Nice to be here. I am still recovering from the feeling that you created when two feathers and her horse fell through the tank, got stuck underground in the caves, and like couldn't emerge. I was having like claustrophobia induced

reading at that at what happened afterwards. So thank you, I guess, for a, the immersive read,

if I, I should say. But good, you enjoyed it, sort of. I did enjoy it. I found it all very fascinating, especially all of the research that

you did about how this is what was happening in your neighborhood in Nashville and how you've even

discovered how this, you know, the book starts with a sweeping sort of tale of where this place came to be and how we got rooted in that place

and how, and then we find out that you even found like hippopotamus bones or something like

that near your back tree or, I don't know, something. So tell, tell me a little more about

how your neighborhood and home inspired the story.

Well, I was raised in a neighborhood in Nashville that we knew as children had been built over the ruins of a zoo that Nashville. That park and that zoo had been there from the late 1880s to

1931 and it was if you talk to people's parents and grandparents they thought it was most

magnificent thing in Nashville everybody just loved it people went there to court and to have fun and, you know, do all sorts of things. And there were remnants of

that park and zoo all around us. And as a child, I had always heard that a big tree that was behind my next door neighbor's fence was, had been

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