I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still

watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,

soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,

Stories Without End from WB EZ Chicago.

Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.

Listen wherever you get your podcast.

From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is the Nerdat Book Club. It's just like a regular book club, except sometimes the author stops by. We did it. We made it to an entire new year. And our pick for January 2023 is Kevin Wilson's newest novel, Now Is Not the Time to Panic. It's about teenage Frankie, a misfit girl living in Tennessee, and the very weird and amazing summer that she can't let go of.

She meets Zeke, a fellow weirdo, and they make an enigmatic poster that upturns her small town

and eventually the world. In Kevin's words, this is a book about friendship, about art,

about memory, and about what it means to hold on to the person who we were even as we become

someone else. That's all I'm going to say for now, since this is a spoiler-free conversation.

Kevin, welcome to Nerdette. Oh, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

So I mentioned that this is sort of a book about like a teenage girl and like kind of that one summer that changed her life. But this is extremely not your typical that one summer kind of novel, if you know what I mean. Can you talk a little bit about just sort of like, I don't know, you're doing so much here with the power of nostalgia and the frotness of being a teenager and the pain and delight of figuring out how to be weird. It's just, it's just so beautiful.

Oh, thank you. I think, you know, I think a lot of this is just, I'm 44 and I have my own kids now who are 14 and 10.

And it feels like as much as I live in the present with them, because their experiences are such that they keep pulling me back into the past.

So, and we live in the, they're growing up in the same county I lived in. So you get

it even weirder kind of blend of time, but they're in the same movie theater I grew up in.

And you get these weird, strange moments where even though you're in the moment, you're pulled back

to the past and they're kind of overlaid. And I just kind of wanted to

write about that sensation of how you measure the life that you're living and trying to find

that thread that connects you to the past. It's just kind of a human condition, I think, to go,

how did I get from here to here? Totally. Well, and I think the perspective in this book

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