Ever So Slowly

I'm writing again.

Not a lot.

Just a little.

And things are coming along.

Ever so slowly.

I like it this way.

I also hate it this way.

Two weeks ago I dusted off some novel pages and read them to a crowd. A few things happened that surprised me. First, I wasn't nervous. I am always nervous when I have to get up in front of an audience and say anything. My nervousness reaches its pinnacle when I have to read my own work. Last summer, when I was invited to read at Politics and Prose for Kimbilio, terror was the only thing on my mind. Family came in from Philly and Virginia to hear me. My cousin videotaped (is that a thing or do we just say recorded now?) it, Dolen Perkins Valdez was the main attraction. It was both one of the best experiences I've had as a writer but also one of the most stress-inducing. It went fine. I read. People clapped. My parents looked proud. My hands would not be still the entire time. I clutched the sides of my dress the same way I'd done when I delivered my grandfather's Eulogy, which was the last time I read something I'd written in public.

While I cannot say for sure why I wasn't nervous. I have a suspicion that it has more to do with the work than anything else.  I am, I realized, confident in the project that I've been working on for so long. Far more confident than I should be considering how long it's taking/how little time I've had to devote to it.

Starting this week--maybe tomorrow--I haven't picked a day, I'm going to attempt to write 2 pages a day for forty days. Consider this my religion.
Usually teaching Fiction inspires me to write more but that's not happening with the same kind of east as it used to.


Book Update:

Just finished reading: The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson (I cried on the subway reading this. That seems like endorsement enough.)
Currently reading: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Listening to: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

Knitting Update:

Honey Cowl--Unfinished
Fetching Gloves--Unfinished

Summer 2015 Wrap-Up Part. I

I had a dream that I had written a blog post in the last six months.

It must have been a dream because when I signed in I was surprised to find that I'd written nothing.

Hmm.

The post I thought I had written was all about the books I planned to read this summer. You know, the requisite "I'm gonna read all these books this summer!" post, which inevitably becomes a source of intense shame when, at the end of the summer, I've read less than half those books.

So, I guess I saved myself some good, old-fashioned, Catholic school shaming.

I actually did read some books this summer.

Loving Day, Mat Johnson
Balm, Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Sula, Toni Morrison
The Stranger, Albert Camus ( I don't think I'd read it since my freshman year of college.)
Snow, Bird, Boy, Helen Oyeymi (Let's pretend she's not 30 years old, okay?)
'Till The Well Runs Dry, Lauren Francis Sharma

Note: This summer I became obsessed with the idea of "twinned books". I re-read The Stranger in the hopes that I'd also read "The Mersault Investigation". I have a whole list of classic works and their modern counterparts.

 This leads me to "Books I started and have yet to finish."

The Meursault Investivagion, Kamel Daoud
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante (I'm going to blame not finishing this one one something really annoying and pretentious: I want to read it in Italian and I have not been able to connect with my friend who brought me a copy back from Italy. There. Super pretentious.)


Ask me about it.

Basically what this list has taught me is that I didn't read nearly enough books and probably watched way too many episodes of "Criminal Minds" this summer. 

Current life reading plan: I now live in New York City and will have a 50 minute commute to work every day and a 2 hour and 40 minute commute to Baltimore every weekend to see the husband and the cat, I can read on the subway, train, or bus, which should greatly increase my capacity to read books.

Oh, right, I got married and now have a husband and a cat. We got the cat first.

More on that later.

Writers, Writers, Everywhere

On Saturday I saw a friend who told me how much she liked the blog. The blog I hardly ever think about or publish on.  On this icy, wet, but oddly warm, day, I feel inspired to write. I also just finished teaching my Fiction Writing class and that always inspires me to write.

Last week was an incredibly busy one. The reading series I host at work had its kickoff event last Thursday. We hosted three poets: Dora Malech, Will Schutt, and James Arthur. Our incredibly talented librarian Jessica, wrote the event up on our school's library blog. You can read all about the reading here. 

In my introduction that evening, I spoke about how I've had to learn to enjoy poetry. It's quite lovely to be able to say that I like it and mean it, this is largely in thanks to the talented poets who shared their work with us last Thursday.  

Thursday also was also made special by LaShonda Katrice Barnett, who visited my class to read from her new novel, Jam on the Vine, and talk about the writing life. The kids were inspired and I made a new friend. She also recorded me telling Amy Bloom how much I love her. So you know what, EVERYONE WON on Thursday.

What's next? Well, Asali Solomon will be reading at FriendsLit next Tuesday, March 10th. Her new novel, Disgruntled, was released back in February. I first learned of Asali back in 2007 when I was headed to Iowa. I devoured her collection of short stories, Get Down. Those stories did many things for as a human but as a writer, they gave me confidence.

I love writers. I love books.

Books! Glorious Books!

The truth is, I don't read as much as I would like to. I mean, I don't read for pleasure as much as I would like to. Even when I have the time to read, I don't. I knit (sometimes). I watch tv (too much really). I bake. January 2015 has been rather good to me as far as finding time to read is concerned. I finsished two books: Team Seven, by Marcus Burke and All the Light You Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. Both were so good I couldn't put them down. I started and finished the Doerr in one day, yesterday in fact. I took it with me on my train ride down to DC and between the round trip train ride (about two hours), and being home alone with the cat, I finished just before midnight.

It felt good to binge read rather than binge watch episodes of a television series.

Up next: A Tale for the Time Being  by Ruth Ozeki. A friend is moderating a discussion between her and Claire Vaye Watkins in a little over a week and both my student and grown folks books club are reading it for February and March respectively. 

2014 was kind of a big year for me.

I stopped blogging. (Though I'm not really sure why.)

I got engaged.

I found purpose through Writers in Baltimore Schools.

I knit an Elizabeth Zimmerman Pi Shawl. Really.

My short story, La Sepoltura was published by Amazon's weekly literary journal, Day One.

I started a reading series called FriendsLit and Porochista Khakpour and Julia Fierro were my first visitors.

I helped organize and lead a Write-In on Ferguson for high school and middle school students. Their poetry was published in both the Washington Post and at www.blackwordsmatter.org.

My friend circle expanded and now feels really, really, complete.

I took two road trips. The first to Iowa City, Iowa in March. The second was to St. Louis, MO in August.

La Sepoltura was anthologized by Day One Year One, Best New Stories and Poems 2014.

It was a pretty good year but I expect 2015 to be even better.

Hiatus

I had to take a little work related break from the blog. I should be back in action later this week with reviews of Goodebox, Birchbox, Yuzen.

Until then....

Why I Can't Sleep

For years I went around saying that I never wanted to have children but then three distinct things happened to make me (kind of) change my mind. First, the election of Barack Obama as President of the United State. I remember watching the news and hearing interviews in which Black Americans recounted for the first time that they felt as though they could tell their children that they could be the President of the USA and have it not be a lie. Hearing those statements made something ping in the back of my brain: I didn't want to raise children in a society where they would be limited by the color of their skin. Really, who would? Many do but to be honest, I get that hardship and passing it on didn't seem right. But then we got a President who looked like the people I came from, and that made me see this country in a different light. Second, we re-elected him. Third, I fell in love and thought, Sure, I could reproduce with this man. Now, nothing is perfect. Obama is struggling. There are people out there that refer to him as the nigger President. Relationships eventually lose their glossy newness (now we talk about Drain-o before bed, pick out sheets, and fold each others underwear). I find happiness in the mundane. Even still, I feel hopeful, like I could maybe have a baby.

I felt hopeful.

Because people still call Barack Obama a nigger and even if the Airman and I have children, his whiteness will never overshadow their blackness and that blackness is still so undervalued in this society. After the Newtown shootings I was actually afraid to go to work. One morning I cried so hard that the Airman told me that maybe I should take a day off. I felt fearful of the world. Of my world as though any minute it would devour me and I would never be heard from again.

I find myself feeling similarly in the aftermath of George Zimmerman's acquittal.  I'm afraid for my brother and my cousins and my uncles. I'm afraid for my friends and for their sons because it really does feel like open season for the hunting of young, Black, men. And now I'm reminded (because when you live in a bubble, it is so very easy to forget) that it's not just the neighborhood watch or the police you have to be afraid of; it's that fact that no matter how hard America tries, no matter how civilized and polished we try to appear for the rest of the world, we are still a nation full of hate.

How could I even begin to think of raising a child in all of this?

I can't. I don't think I will.

Earlier today I thought: My White friends are so lucky. They can have babies who will unlikely ever find themselves in Trayvon Martin's position. They might never know what it's like to be followed around a store or be called a nigger or carry the burden of being a member of a race some deem worthless. But really, they are not luckier than the Black babies being born today. As long as we continue to demean and devalue any human lives, we are all suffering. Whether or not we can see it, it's true.

Even knowing this, I'm  back to thinking that I don't want babies.