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Dete Meserve - Four Way Interview

Dete Meserve leads Silver Creek Falls Entertainment, a production company that has produced everything from big-budget dramas and mysteries to star-studded comedies and animated series, including the animated PBS Kids STEM series, Ready, Jet, Go!, a science-based series for children centered on astronomy and featuring live-action interstitials with NASA Jet Propulsion Lab astronomer Dr. Amy Mainzer. Dete’s Silver Creek Falls Entertainment has two major new kids’ series coming up this year, including Al Roker’s Weather Hunters (PBS Kids) this fall. The new show is designed to support kids’ learning about Earth science and meteorology through adventure and comedy. Her other new series is Not a Box (Apple TV+), based on the award-winning picture book by NYT bestselling author Antoinette Portis, which just launched last month. Her new novel is The Memory Collectors.

Why science fiction? 

The Memory Collectors uses science fiction as its foundation—the premise that time travel is possible and people can purchase an hour in their past—but at its heart, it explores how we can transform our lives simply by seeing them with fresh perspective.

Most time travel stories obsess over one question: can visiting the past alter the future? I believe they miss time travel's true power. Even if you couldn't change a single moment, you would return fundamentally changed by reliving your past.

My background producing hundreds of science-focused TV episodes led me deep into time travel research. Traditional theories suggest that visiting the past would create paradoxes and alter the future. Then I discovered the groundbreaking work of physicist Dr. Fabio Costa at the University of Queensland. His research on closed time-like curves proposes that time travel would occur without paradoxes—if someone tried to change the past, the timeline would self-correct to prevent any impact on the future.

This became the foundation of The Memory Collectors: You can't change time, but revisiting the past changes you.

The novel bends genres to tell this story—science fiction for the time travel mechanism, a compelling mystery at its core, a couple of love stories, and thought-provoking moments of growth and transformation.

Why this book?

I’m someone who vividly remembers my dreams. I write them down, reflect on them, and share them with my husband and kids. One night, I had a dream so real that I rushed to write it down the moment I woke up. In this dream, I turned to see my son, Jake, as he was twenty years ago—four years old, with strawberry blonde hair, and big brown eyes. His cheeks were flushed from the sun, and I leaned in to kiss his hair, inhaling that familiar little-boy scent. In that moment, I was convinced I’d traveled twenty-two years into the past.

The dream lingered with me for days, blurring the lines between reality and imagination, making me wonder: What if we could truly revisit our past? How would we be changed by our experience?

I was in the midst of writing another novel—What Hides in the Quiet—and was so inspired by this idea that I set that other novel aside while I delved into The Memory Collectors. 

In real life, would you personally want to travel in time in the manner used in your story?

Absolutely! Initially, I thought I'd revisit moments with people I've lost—my wedding day, when my parents, grandparents, and in-laws were all still alive. But I'm equally drawn to reliving challenging moments, like when all three of my children had meltdowns in the grocery store. With fresh eyes, I'd see the fleeting nature of childhood and get to listen to their little voices again.

Lately, I find myself wanting to revisit an ordinary summer day from my childhood—a box fan humming in my bedroom window, my mother watering the garden, my siblings playing in their rooms. Then I realize: we don't need a machine. We can time travel in our minds.

What’s next? What’s exciting you at the moment?

Weather Hunters premieres September 8, 2025, on PBS Kids! As executive producer and showrunner, I can't wait for families to discover this series about the wonder of weather and nature surrounding us. Inspired by Al Roker's family, the show launches with forty half-hour episodes, four mobile games, activity sheets, digital shorts, and upcoming books and board games.

I'm also just finishing What Hides in the Quiet—the novel I set aside for The Memory Collectors is complete and heading to my agent!

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