Anita Gail Jones on Crafting Fiction From Family Heirlooms ‹ Literary Hub

For a decade while I was drafting it, my debut novel The Peach Seed had a different title, Peach Seed Monkey, which referred to a tiny monkey carved from a peach pit that had been a present to me and my sister when we were children. A book title has power to pique interest, crack open a gateway to readers, allowing the work to take it from there. But I always knew I could never publish a book about Black folks with the word "monkey" in the title because many underserving words hold too much pain, too much trauma, due to America's heinous racial past that persists in the present. It was fitting, though, as a working title, since in my stories I explore ideas around simple objects and their power to hold cultural and personal histories and become links to a past.