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From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson and this is the Nerd Up Book Club, it's just like

a regular book club, except sometimes the author stops by.

It is the month of October and our selection is more in Grops newest novel The Vaster

Wilds.

It is about a servant girl, an early American colonial history who flees her corrupt and

smallpox riddled settlement and has to struggle to survive in the wilderness.

This book is a meditation on ugliness and misery and strife and mortality and deep, deep

isolation, but it also balances a remarkable eye for beauty and grace and peace.

Lauren, welcome to Nerd Up.

Thank you so much for having me on the show.

So I would love to start with your research process because you are speaking very much

of a specific time period, but also kind of not at all, which is a really fascinating

balance.

But I mean, how much did you actually research early American colonial history with this

one?

Well, my research process is absolutely bonkers because I love the archive.

I think it's one of the most exciting places on the planet, right?

Then it's full of just surprising and amazing things.

All these details that actually bring a very vague and sort of amorphous idea into the

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