Unbound Conversations: 'Neon Steel' is a love letter to youth and to nerd culture

The Unbound Book Festival is coming up this weekend, and KBIA has been talking to featured writers in a series we're calling "Unbound Conversations." Find the rest of them here.

Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of Neon Steel, an interconnected collection of short stories focusing on the experiences of a nerdy Black teenage girl growing up in Pittsburgh in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

KBIA's Rebecca Smith sat down with Maritza McCauley to discuss the collection, which draws inspiration from her own experiences as a millennial nerd, or "Blerd." Here's an excerpt from their conversation:

Rebecca Smith: So, I guess just to start out — you consider this an homage to millennial nerd culture, and so, I guess I'm wondering if you can kind of take us back a little bit and tell us a little bit about your own experiences as a millennial nerd.

Jennifer Maritza McCauley: I was a book nerd first. I was obsessed with the Berenstain Bears when I was a kid. I loved them, and I would read them voraciously. But my mom also gave me, you know, Pablo Neruda and Shakespeare and things like that. So, I was reading that pretty early too, but when I discovered comic books — my whole world changed.

Smith: There are a lot of common experiences for millennial nerds, whether that's manga, anime.

Maritza McCauley: Yeah.

Smith: But I, you know, in one of the early chapters, when our main character meets her community, they talk about Blerds.

Smith: And so, I guess I'm curious — what was it like writing a book that really centers and highlights Black nerd culture, and what's maybe unique about that?

Maritza McCauley: Yeah, I mean, I think the stereotype for Blerds is that they don't exist. A lot of times, if you go to a con, there are a lot of white folks there — at least when I was growing up, there weren't a lot of Black folks.

There is this kind of conception that to be a nerd you have to be this white, kind of spindly guy with big glasses, and that's what a nerd was, and that as a Black person, you were supposed to be depicted in a completely different way, as well.

So, I think that what we ended up doing was finding our own communities — and that's, you know, that's joyous, too, to be able to find your tribe. And I think that Blerd culture in general is still present, and I think it's becoming even bigger than it's ever been.

Courtesy of Jennifer Maritza McCauley

You know, I think that Megan Thee Stallion came out famously as otaku, and I remember when she came out, when she said that — I didn't know it was gonna happen, but then people loved it.

So, I was totally stunned by that because, when we were growing up, liking this stuff was like, you know, you keep it under wraps. You don't tell too many people about it. You kind of huddle with your friends. You get bullied for it.

Smith: Early in the collection, right? The first chapter, “The Girl in the Bomba Dress,” you set up this idea of community and magic and then don't revisit it until the end when she's achieved that kind of self-actualization and love. Was that the intention there? What does magic represent in this book, especially for Adrienne and for you?

Maritza McCauley: You know, I wanted there to be a certain beauty to the work, as well. I think, like you said, Adrienne is a character that didn't value herself. She didn't see worth in herself. So, you see that in her actions in the first part of the book, you see that and how excited she is just to have any friends.

Then you see that arc of her actually realizing that this joy she has with her friends is more complicated than that, and she meets people that represent the things that she was always into when she was a child.

So, she definitely grows up. It's kind of a coming-of-age tale, in a way. So, she ends up learning that she does have value. She does have worth. I wanted her to kind of go through an arc of becoming a woman — and I think there's magic to that.

Smith: Yeah, she got her magic girl moment, for sure.