Tayari's Blog: Flanked by Andria Cole

He needed to be rescued from poverty, from self-loathing, from his confusing sexual identity. He said aloud the thoughts in my head and then I knew it was okay to write for more than art’s sake or simply for my people. I write for those reasons as readily as any other, but I write for my own salvation, mostly. I can’t list my demons as easily as I spit Baldwin’s, because I’m –timid in that way. I’m reminded of Zora Hurston’s description of Ethel Waters: “She is shy and you must convince her that she is really wanted before she will open her tender parts and show you.” I feel like Mrs. Waters.

I can tell you that I’m a single mother, happily and by choice. Not single in the sense that I was abandoned with my daughter on my hip; not that way (and there is nothing shameful about being abandoned, I just want to clear up that word ‘single’ for my own story). Sol’s father is good as they come (she’s with him now, and tomorrow he will send her to school with a lopsided ponytail and too much food in her lunch). I’m single in the way many artists are—I usually can’t find room in my heart for love and writing. If you’re lucky, then your partner understands your passion and doesn’t want to fight with it. Well anyway, writing won. Though I never do enough of it.

A few months back, I was awarded the top grant prize for fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council. This gift is how I came to know Tayari. She was one of the jurors, so I set to finding her, so that I could lay at her feet a ‘thank you.’ Long story sweet, she responded. I told her I was taking my grant money and funding a writers’ conference, and might she check out the site? Might she be our literary guest? Long story sweeter, she said yes. So, God sent me her twice. I carried her book under my arm because it might be lost if I didn’t, and then I would walk around thirsty for its characters, and miserable. Here, between the underside of my arm and the silhouette of my breast was literature written by a woman brown like me, young like me, and yet she was concerned with lasting and I was welcomed to sit back on the cushion of her words and feel safe. This experience reflects my mission for the writers’ conference.

The Flanked Women’s Writers Conference came out of one of my needs—this one I’m not so tender about, and will share with you. Sometimes, most times, I need a fellow writer to say something meaningful to me; I need her to read my stuff and tell me she loves it or hates it or could do without it, really. I get so lonely after a while, writing for ten minutes and revising for one hundred more. I just want someone to say, ‘It’s hard’ to and be understood. That’s all. I just wanted to call women up from under their writing rocks and meet with them intimately, in excellence. Perhaps then, the umbrella shielding the conference is “Rescue” and maybe “Excellence” and “Intimacy” and “Diversity” stand beneath its cover. If you find yourself hungry for any of these, wanting to be rescued from singleness, or simply talented, I encourage you to visit us at www.flanked.org, complete an application, and meet us at the oak tree on 16th street—we’ll be the women holding pens and
laughing out loud ‘cause we’ve found one other.

(And maybe, after the conference has run its course and I’ve gotten to know a few of them, I can open up and tell them what I need rescuing from.)