April 8, 2025
Storytelling As Freedom: A Novelist's Evolution
Stories have power—especially when they challenge expectations and break barriers. This is exactly what novelist Nkrumah Mensah demonstrates through her fantasy series that starts with "Anne of Survivor," featuring a young woman who flees an arranged marriage in the 1500s and finds herself entangled in kingdom-wide intrigue.
During our captivating conversation, Nkrumah reveals how her own background shaped her storytelling journey. Despite facing dyslexia as a child, she comes from a lineage of natural storytellers on both sides of her family. What began as tales for the children she babysat eventually transformed into published novels when her daughter discovered an old manuscript in a dusty box.
The spark that ignited her first novel came unexpectedly—sitting up all night with a college friend before her arranged marriage, wondering: what if they ran away? This thought experiment, transported to the limitations of the 16th century, became the foundation for a seven-book series featuring different female characters who each overcome unique challenges. Unlike many authors who create fictional versions of themselves, Nkrumah crafts protagonists with qualities she admires but doesn't necessarily possess—women who act decisively without hesitation.
Nkrumah's writing process reflects the beautiful chaos of real life. Working construction by day and writing by night, she steals moments whenever possible—sometimes with late-night sessions accompanied by popcorn and tea, other times in five-minute bursts throughout a busy day. Her approach balances planning with spontaneity, allowing well-developed characters to navigate situations authentically, often leading to surprising yet satisfying conclusions.
Want to discover more of Nkrumah's empowering stories? Find her on Instagram @theNkrumahMensah or visit her website at between-the-line.com. And remember her advice for aspiring writers: "Just keep on reading. And if you're looking to write and you want to know how to get started, all you have to do is take a blank page and get started."
Want to be a guest on Living the Dream with Curveball? Send Curtis Jackson a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1628631536976x919760049303001600
00:00 - Meet Novelist Nkrama Mensah
01:41 - Journey to Becoming a Writer
04:26 - The Anne of Survivor Series
09:11 - Nkrama's Writing Process & Inspiration
12:43 - Favorite Books & Future Projects
16:48 - Advice for Aspiring Writers
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Welcome to the Living the Dream Podcast with Curveball, If you believe you can achieve.
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Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire.
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I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire.
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Today, I am joined by novelist and storyteller Nkrama Mensah.
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Nkrama is a mother of two.
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She loves Star Trek and Shakespeare and ballroom dancing, and she loves telling stories, so we're going to be talking to her about her stories and everything that she's up to.
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So, in Krama, thank you so much for joining me today.
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Curtis, thank you for having me on today.
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Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?
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Well, I think you've given them just about everything.
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It's like my dossier.
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Yes, I am a single mother of two.
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I'm about to be an empty nester, Can you believe it?
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And Star Trek is absolutely downright my favorite TV show and I love, love, love, love dancing.
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And I love anime too.
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I guess that's one thing you didn't mention On a different note.
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On a different note, I write books.
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I used to tell stories to my children all the time, and actually before them when I was much younger, to the kids I used to babysit, and as I got older I decided to write a story for a good friend of mine called Anne, and since then Anne has been published because my eldest daughter found it in a dusty old box one day and asked me if she could read it.
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Okay.
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Well, how did you get into being a novelist in the first place?
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Well, I always loved to write In fact, I was talking to my mother about this earlier today and even though I'm dyslexic and I didn't read much as a child because of that, I come from a long line of storytellers, on both my mother's side and my father's side.
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So I grew up hearing stories and I grew up making up stories, and one day I decided, hey, maybe I should write these down.
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It wasn't until I was in my 20s, however, when I was hanging out with a college friend of mine on the night before her arranged wedding that I decided to actually finish something that I wrote.
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So, taking the fact that she was she hadn't arranged marriage, I sat up with her all night wondering well, what if she ran?
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What if she didn't get married?
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What if we crawled out the window, shimmied down the columns onto the front porch and just took off?
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Well, in this day and age, you know, women have a lot of choices.
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I know that it's not exactly where we want it to be, but we have so many more choices than we used to have, and my friend and I could have run off.
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I already had a job, she could get a job, and then we could get an apartment and live our lives.
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But what would have happened if she lived in the late 1500s, early 1600s?
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More difficult, back then, women were often thought more of as property than people that could make decisions for themselves and live on their own.
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So when I decided to write a story about a girl who was running away from an arranged marriage, I put it back in the late 1500s and asked the question how would this work?
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And from there Anna Survivor was born.
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How much does your story mirror your life?
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does your stories mirror your life?
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It doesn't, in fact.
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I'm glad you asked this question.
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A lot of people ask me if Anne is me.
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Anne is not me.
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In fact, I wish Anne, I wish I were more like Anne, because she doesn't hesitate, she's like this is not what my life is about, this is not what I want to do, and so she just breaks free of her family, me.
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I have to think about it, like, okay, well, how do I do this?
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It would take me, like I don't know, a full month of planning before I would actually run away from home, whereas Anne makes the decision overnight and she takes off before anyone else in the house wakes up.
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Also, there's an element of surprise around each and every corner.
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Things that she would have never imagined could happen happens.
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So she's leaving home just to leave this arranged marriage.
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She's not looking for anything but freedom, but in leaving she embroils herself in a larger situation that basically has consequences for the entire kingdom, not just herself, but her family and the royal family and other other islands off the coast of her country.
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So it's it's much bigger than what she could have ever imagined.
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So mirroring my life?
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No, I'm pretty simple.
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I live in my little home with my girls and I work in construction by day and then write my little stories at night.
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Okay.
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Well, who are your target audience with your stories?
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adult women on this story too, and and a few guys, which I'm really surprised about and really excited about because I wasn't expecting them to be so interested in my story, because it is more geared toward adolescent girls, because I wanted to empower them to not just listen to societal norms but trust and believe within themselves and believe that they can do what they put their minds to and, being the mother of two daughters, that was extremely important for me to put down and from there, anne of Survivor is actually the first book in a seven book series and I decided to have the entire series about the in this area.
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So Anne lives in Ryland.
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Her issues actually encompass Ryland and predominantly the island of Ildalay.
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Well, the next part of the book, the next part of the series, is about a different character and it focuses on the island of Ildalay.
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And then the next part of the story is another female character and it encompasses a completely different country and all of them have different situations that they have to overcome and different struggles.
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And I wanted to show girls that with Anne's situation it's more societal and family.
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When the next character's situation it's still again society, but it's also believing in herself.
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And then the next situation is a girl who completely believes in herself, but she has to use her smarts rather than her brawn, like Anne or the next character, to handle her situation.
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Well, explain to the listeners your writing process and how you come up with your ideas.
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So my ideas come from all over.
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I can't pick one area or another.
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I could be driving down the road and something pop in my head, but honestly, I think where my ideas come from is I see something and then I ask a question.
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And once I ask that question, I want to answer it, and I come up with all sorts of answers, and if one avenue excites me more than another, then I might pin it down and say, hey, this could be a story.
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As far as my writing process, oh, it's willy-nilly.
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I'll tell you, first and foremost, high in the sky, my writing process would be late at night, when nobody's awake.
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A bowl of popcorn, maybe some chocolate, some music in my ear and some tea, some hot tea, and I would just sit and write all night long.
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I used to do that during COVID and I just hang out with my daughter's gecko and stay up till three in the morning just writing.
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However, now, since I have so much to do and so much going on, I've got one kid in college, one who's in her junior year of high school, and I'm writing books and running around all the time.
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I write whenever I can.
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So that could be five minutes here, five minutes there.
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It could be an hour here, an hour there.
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This morning I actually went to a coffee shop and spent several hours just writing and writing while people walked around me.
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I'd get up every now and then for a coffee or a tea, and it's whatever I could possibly do.
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I do like to, once an idea gets in my head, put a rough draft of the plot together.
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I really have to have a beginning, a kind of middle and an end.
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But I like to create the characters, at least the main characters, and then, as what happens to me when I ask a question, I will put my characters in situations and since I've already like kind of fleshed out what their personalities are like, once I throw them in a situation they have to behave in a way that is true to their personalities and from there the story grows.
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So if I come up with a middle that doesn't coincide with where the characters are taking the book, then that could change and it could also possibly change the ending in one way or another.
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But I let the characters drive the story forward and sometimes at the end I'm surprised at where we end up.
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Sometimes it's better than I had hoped, sometimes it's kind of funny, but I like seeing where the characters take me.
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Okay, well, who is your favorite author?
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Who encourages you to do what you do, and what's your favorite book?
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is Pride and Prejudice and, yeah, there've been so many renditions, so many different movies of Pride and Prejudice, but it's just nothing like the book.
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And I've read that book dozens of times from different character perspectives and I just love picking apart the society in Jane Austen's book and I love the fact that she shows us what it's like for Edwardian women during the time and how they try to find their own happiness and how, in Pride and Prejudice, the Bennetts have five daughters and they all have a different path, and I love that.
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I love watching how each of their stories unfold and I think she just did a beautiful job of it.
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If she hadn't, I wouldn't continue reading it.
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Not only that, it has a happy ending and I tend to like stories that have happy endings because we live in this world.
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It's, you know, I live real, real life.
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I don't want to read real life.
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That's me personally.
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Now I've read stories that are nonfiction and I I really appreciate them, but it's not something I would reread.
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Not something I would reread only because I would rather, in my free time, read something happy and fantastical than to read something that is is real life.
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If I'm, if I'm reading for enjoyment and not for study or for research.
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Okay, Well, kind of take the listeners into your books, you know.
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Tell us about them, what we can get them, what we can expect when we read them.
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Okay, well, anne of Survivor is available wherever books are sold.
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You can get them absolutely everywhere.
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Now the second book should be out.
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It's called Anne of Ryland and that should be out sometime this year.
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So you'll have to wait and see where that comes out.
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On another note, I write romance novels under a different name and my first romance novel should also be out this year, but that is adult.
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I don't want to talk too much about that.
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That's adult, adult, and I don't want my young adults to read that.
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That being said, I also have written a web comic and I'm looking for an artist to work with to flesh out that, and we'll let you know when that comes out.
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All right, Well, so people can keep up with everything that you're up to.
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Throw out your contact info.
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Okay, so you can find me on Instagram at the Nkrumah Mensah.
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That's at the, and then my name is N-K-R-U-M-A-H-M-E-N-S-A-H.
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You can also check out my website at wwwbetween-the-linecom dot.
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Between hyphen, the hyphen line dot com.
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All right, closes out with some final thoughts.
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Maybe, if that was something I forgot to talk about, that you would like to touch on, or any final thoughts you have for the listeners.
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Just keep on reading.
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And if you're looking to write and you want to know how to get started, all you have to do is take a blank page and get started.
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I get that question a lot Like how do you write books?
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Yeah, get started, and it could be two words, it could be three words, but you know what?
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You keep working at it and suddenly those two words are a paragraph, and then it's a page, and then it's ten pages and you just keep on doing it.
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Hey, ladies and gentlemen, keep on doing it.
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Check out everything in Kramer's up to at between dash the dash line dot com.
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Please be sure to follow rate review.
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Share this episode to as many people as possible.
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For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, we have a new website wwwcurveball337.com.
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Check it out.
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Share it to all your friends.
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Thank you for listening and supporting the show and Cromer, thank you for all that you do and thank you for joining me.
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Thank you, curtis, you have a good one.
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For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, visit wwwcurveball337.com.
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Until next time, keep living the dream.
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