The Science Behind Science Fiction with the Gibbs Sisters
Chapter 510
Oakland
Jan. 20, 2024
It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon, and Shawnee Gibbs is telling me a real-life ghost story.
Years ago, she said, she visited her aunt’s grave with her cousin. Sitting in the cemetery, she suddenly felt an invisible hand gently caressing hers — an intuitive kindness that she believed to be her aunt. She shared this memory with her cousin years later, only to find out that her cousin had the same experience that day.
I’m rapt listening to Shawnee’s stories, warming up with hot tea in the colorfully inviting environment at Chapter 510, the youth writing, publishing, and bookmaking center in downtown Oakland.
I love a good ghost story, and Gibbs has quite a few. These experiences helped inspire her and her sister Shawnelle’s new young adult graphic novel, Ghost Roast, about a New Orleans teen named Chelsea who finds herself graced with the ability to speak to the dead. With equal parts humor and ghostly intrigue, Chelsea navigates the mysteries of young adulthood while dealing with her special gift, and the complication that her father is a scientist who studies ghosts.
The Gibbs Sisters, as they’re known, are seasoned YA authors and Oakland natives. And though I’d only just met Shawnee (Shawnelle dialed in via Zoom for the author talk), the story of how they came to write and publish their graphic novels cemented them as my personal heroes within the space of an afternoon. Like me, they grew up in the Bay Area and moved to Los Angeles (where they currently live), where they worked in TV and film. It’s a space that’s notoriously given precious few opportunities to creatives who are women of color. When I worked in Hollywood years ago, the opportunities for female or BIPOC-focused storytelling, let alone storytellers, felt few and far between.
After going to film school at San Francisco State and working in Hollywood (including on a paranormal-based “ghost hunting” show), the Gibbs Sisters started writing YA stories and graphic novels featuring young women of color, including a workplace comedy about a woman who time-travels using a magical pair of stiletto boots. For Ghost Roast, they secured the book deal on the birthday of Octavia Butler, the award-winning sci-fi author and a personal hero of the Gibbs Sisters, which felt like an omen of good things to come.
Shawnelle and Shawnee, in conversation with local author Angela Dalton, shared the origin story of Ghost Roast with the kids and parents assembled at Chapter 510. They also talked about the freedom that writing science fiction affords.
“There’s nothing off-limits in sci-fi writing,” Shawnee says. “That’s the beauty of the genre.”
With Ghost Roast, the Gibbs Sisters took the cultural backdrop of New Orleans, steeped as it is in French, Indigenous, Creole, and African American history, and created a contemporary coming-of-age story that “mixes science and fiction,” as they described it. That meant drawing on the history of slavery in the area, which they didn’t want to shy away from.
I worried that the rain might keep people away from the afternoon talk and was glad to see that was not the case. The children, a mix of kids and young adults themselves, seemed as rapt as I was listening to the Gibbs Sisters’ own origin story. No ghosts were seen or heard, but the spirit of inspiration felt palpable.
