Tayari's Blog: March 2008
March 31, 2008
One Reason to Love New York
Live music... on the subway.
Posted at 05:43 PM | ![[comments]](http://www.tayarijones.com/images/comments.gif){kind=small}
Comments (1)
Category:
Living For The City
After Lunch Links
Posted at 01:38 PM | Comments (1)
Category:
SCHOLARSHIPS TO SPLIT ROCK!
I've just found out that there are scholarships available for the Split Rock Summer Arts Programs! I'll be teaching a class all about the coming of age story, so you can just imagine how thrilled I was to find out about the scholarships. You should visit the site to see which one is best for you to apply. There is even one designated for African American artists.
And how did I find out about this opportunity? Erika over at Practicing Writing! You should sign up for her free newsletter.
Posted at 07:56 AM | Comments (0)
Category:
The Writing Life
March 28, 2008
Rose Petal Iced Tea by Gayle Brandeis
Cocktails with Writers was meant to celebrate the start of spring, 
but now I am using it to coax spring into showing her pretty face. So, in the spirit, here is a lovely non-alcoholic beverage contributed by Gayle Brandeis, the author of the novel, Self Storage. Here's what she says about her recipe:
"The main character of Self Storage is fascinated by her Afghan neighbor, who wears a full burqa. Flan never sees Sodaba's face or has a full conversation with her, but their lives collide and they find human connection."
In honor of Sodaba and all her sisters, here is a cool drink for hot days, fragrant and refreshing:
Rose Petal Iced Tea
Serves 4-6
Ingredients:
Directions:
Serve well chilled over ice, garnished with extra rose petals (perhaps even candied rose petals), if desired.
“Walt Whitman couldn’t have asked for a slyer, funnier, savvier envoy than Gayle Brandeis to carry his 'Song of Myself' into our day and age.” —ABBY FRUCHT
Posted at 11:09 PM | Comments (0)
Category:
Cocktails With Writers
March 27, 2008
Fountain of Youth?
I read over on Fred's blog that he was reading Pearl Cleage's new 
book, See It All And Done The Rest. Pearl is my favorite springtime author, so I headed over to amazon to pick it up. She and I had talked about this book while she was working on it. The protagonist is the grandmother of Zora, one of the minor characters from her noirish Baby Brother's Blues.
Chek out the cover. The model, pretty as she can be, is no granny! Are young women considered more marketable? I know that mature women are seldom used to sell beer, but what about books? Even when the market is women?
Stonecoast On Line!
I just got word from Annie Finch that the reading that I did for the Stonecoast MFA prgram is available streaming on line and as a podcast. Don't you just love technology?
There are a lot of cool things on the Maine Humanities Council website, definitely worth checking out. And here is the direct link to the mp3 of my reading.
What a terrific experience I had out there. Good folks. Good times.
March 26, 2008
Sorry In Advance!
My web genius, Phil, is switching the blog over to Wordpress. It will make things so much easier. However, there may be a few bumps in the road as we get things together. I am hoping for no drama, but in case there is, please bear with us!
Posted at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)
Category:
Great Things Are Happening
To people who read this blog!
I know there's more good news out there. Drop me an email and let me tell the whole world about it!
Posted at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)
Category:
Travels & Rambles
March 25, 2008
Ah, Youth!
Every now and then, I run into some artifact from my past. In this case, it was the 2001 edition of Grants and Awards Available to American Writers. Nowadays, the Grants and Awards is a searchable database, but back in the day, it was a soft-bound book you could hold in your hands.
I found my copy in a box labeled "Leaving Atlanta." I ordered the book in 2001, when my first novel had been accepted for publication, but had not yet been produced. My copy of the book is full of highlighted passages and notes scrawled in the margins. You would not believe my level of fabulousness. Pulitzer Prize? Highlighted in green. Beside such awards as The Rome Prize which were designated as internal nomination only I wrote "research this." I even identified prizes for which my friends would be eligible.
That year, I applied for everything. With my tired desk jet printer I produced letter after letter... "Dear Sir/Madame, I am writing to find out more information.... enclosed is a SASE..." I loved working so hard on creating opportunities for myself. I even wrote to George Washington University to inquire about the Jenny McKean Moore Writer in Residence position. Six years, and three application cyles later, I actually ended up with the job-- and loved every minute of it.
There is something to be said for the wide-openness with which a young writer approaches the world. I want that self back. I want to be that young lady who has the confidence of having a book accepted for publication, but hasn't yet known the heartbreaks that come along with putting herself out there.
I still apply for everything, but it's different now. Not as much fun. Years ago, a jaded older writer said to me, "Apply for everything. Every day I hear about someone getting something they don't deserve. It's only a matter of time before the same thing happens to you!" I am ashamed to say that I have even repeated these words as my own.
I know it's almost April, and a little late to make New Year's resolutions, but I am hereby resolving to recapture the eager young writer who lives somewhere inside of me. I am going get that joy back. I am going to cup all that optimism in my hands like a winking firefly.
Posted at 04:26 PM | Comments (2)
Category:
The Writing Life
March 22, 2008
March 20, 2008
Almond Joy by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
Cocktails With Writers is a spring feature, but I figure it's spring somewhere, if not here in New Jersey.
Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, the author of three volumes of poetry, including Red Clay Suite, contributed the recipe. Here's what she says about it:
"I'm a fan of anything with coconut in it (cookies, candy, granola, etc.), and I was thrilled to discover coconut rum--the authentic kind, not the artificially flavored mess--at a Caribbean friend's house about five years ago. I thought it was a new thing, but it turned out I was the last to know. I'm not too sophisticated about alcoholic drinks; I drank Mad Dog 20/20 back in college if that gives you any indication. Anyway, I wondered if there was a drink that tasted like an Almond Joy (the ultimate candy), so I found this recipe. For those who like their drinks a little stronger, add a little bit more rum (to taste), and for coconut fans like me, add a tablespoon of all-natural unsweetened coconut cream to the drink in the mixing process (although that will cut the sweetness a bit); you can find real coconut cream at health food stores, which in small cities like mine are usually across town from those naughty liquor stores."
Almond Joy Cocktail 
Mix together all the liquid ingredients. Then pour over ice into a highball glass. You can garnish with shredded coconut and chocolate bar shavings if you want to get all fancy with it.
“Honorée Jeffers leads with her ear and follows with her rigorous intellect, then adds an emotional depth and fearlessness that make her poems uniquely powerful. This brilliant third book is a thinking woman’s blues that continues to challenge, delight, and terrify.”—Elizabeth Alexander
Posted at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)
Category:
Cocktails With Writers
What Not To Do
I saw this over at Practicing Writing:
You may remember that the Wilesden Hearald short story contest was called off last year because the judges could not find one single short story worthy of the prize. Some people cheered, as this was seen as a return to standards, and others thought the judges needed to just get over themselves.
Well, the paper has decided to post a list of 27 common mistakes they found when sorting through last year's submissons. Many of the listings are quite helpful, so it's worth a look.
This is the best one:
3. Undifferentiated characters. A name is not a character. Pinky said this, Perky said that, Blinky said something similar and Pisky said the same, as the old wartime song might have gone. Each character should be a complete person, with their own C.V. if you like, their own history, temperament, habits, weaknesses, plans, objectives etc, though these need not and should not be explicitly listed as such.
And this was by far the worst:
24. Ankles. Particularly ankles in Asia. But I don't want to be overly negative and turn critique into a despicable blood sport, because there have been many charming, fascinating and amusing entries from the sub-continent as well as from Africa and other (to me) strange places. As a matter of fact, I’m not at all sure that Ankles in Asia, though it sounds worryingly now like a rare disease, is not in fact a virtue. Let a thousand professors dream of butterfly kisses with a thousand feisty young neighbour girls. And please do try us again with wonderful tales of African village life and politics.
Now, if this means what I think it means, it is kind of problematic that writng from developing countries is sort of seen as a "genre." I don't know if the qualifier "(to me)" when describing other countried as "strange" keeps it from being an ignorant, provencial, and probably racist remark. And that last sentence about "wonderful tales of African village life..." Is it me, or is this really condescending??
March 18, 2008
Packer on Obama and Black Exceptionalism
Z.Z. Packer makes so many good points in her brilliant essay, that I don't know which to quote! It's a long one, but worth printing out and forwarding all over the place. (You'll have to read the article yourself to see what Barak Obama has in common with Michael Jackson....) Meanwhile, here is a choice paragraph:
The horrible double standard is obvious. According to those of Ferraro's ilk: if you're a poor black man, or incarcerated, or jobless or homeless, you are where you are because of your own ineptitude and should take responsibility for your actions. However, if you've excelled at one of the top schools in the nation, then later on became a star attorney and later become a senator who inspires millions, then you're only there in spite of your ineptitude and you really shouldn't take responsibility for it. Talk about movin' on up.
More commentary to come, but I didn't want to wait to share this with you. Read the article and we'll meet back here tomorrow to talk!
(Thank you, JT, for forwarding the link!)
Posted at 08:26 AM | Comments (2)
Category:
Current Events
March 17, 2008
Day Trip To Adelphi
Today I took a drive out to Long Island to visit Jaqueline Jones LaMon's creative class at Adelphi. We had a terrific time. Prof. Lamon had assigned the class a short story of mine called "Press and Curl," which was really an outtake from Leaving Atlanta. At the end, we staged an impromptu quiz and the winner got a signed copy!
Posted at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)
Category:
See You on Wednesday?
I am going to be giving a reading and talk at The New School as part of the Women Writers of The Diaspora series. I'd love to see you there!
6:30pm
66 W. 12th Street, Room 510
New York, New York
Posted at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)
Category:
March 16, 2008
I Can't Believe I Read The Whole Thing
I can't believe that I gobbled down The Sky Isn't Visible From Here in a single afternoon. The idea was to read a few pages and then finish the laundry. I could not put it down.
I am sorry that the current memoir crisis had me looking at the author photo thinking, "Is this real? Is this the face of a former drug addict?" It's such a shame because there was nothing within the pages that struck me as false.
I did notice some eerie parallels between Felicia Sullivan's excellent memoir and the disgraced Love and Consequences. Both are stories of white (or at least white-looking) girls growing up in a urban jungle, around some really scary people of color. However, Sullivan's story doesn't have that smack of exploitation. There is no crazy "ghetto talk" and despite the sensational subject matter, she keeps the drama to a minimum. (Much of the memoir is about her own struggle to fit into the upper-class, all-white environment she found after college.)
I hate that I couldn't stop thinking about all the liars and cheaters when I was reading this book, pulling me out of the story even as I was enjoying it immensely. Even as I write this, I am hoping that the author doesn't make a fool of me. It's wrong and stupid for me to even worry about this. It's like I am letting the bad guys win. But I just can't help it.
Sigh.
March 15, 2008
Back Up Plans
Since I got the ixnay from MacDowell, I did some research on writers retreats that you have to pay for. (MacDowell and many others are 
free; this is why there is such a rigorous admittance process. For the ones listed here, the only issue is whether your money is green.)
Okay, that's all I could come up with. Anybody else know a good place? I really need to get away this summer.
(Photo is from my stay a couple years ago at Gibraltar Point Artist Retreat in Toronto!)
Posted at 11:11 PM | Comments (1)
Category:
The Writing Life
Stay In Bed All Day Links
I spent the bulk of the day trying to decide if I was sick or just lazy. The verdict-- both. Here are some links I came up with while vegging out for the last fourteen hours:
Posted at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)
Category:
Travels & Rambles
March 14, 2008
Multi-Faceted Technical Difficulties
Things are haywire here on the blog. For a couple hours, the whole site was down, and so was the parent site that hosts it. I don't know what that was all about.
Now, I have noticed something very improper with the snapshots. When you put your mouse over a hyperlink, it provides a preview. I like that. But lately, I have noticed links that I have not inputted. Apparently snap is using software to provide links to products and websites that it contracts with. I am going to have my web guy disable snapshots as soon as possible. This blog is not for commerical purposes and I am very angry that this software is being used without my permission.
Posted at 06:56 PM | Comments (2)
Category:
March 12, 2008
Misery Loves Mojitos
I was going wait until spring officially sprung, but after that little heartbreak with the nice people at MacDowell, I could use a little pick-me-up on the rocks.
"Cocktails With Writers" is a weekly spring series here on the blog. Writers share with us their favorite drink recipes.
Let's kick it off with Carleen.
Posted at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)
Category:
Cocktails With Writers
CARLEEN’S ORANGE MINT MOJITOS
Carleen Brice, who blogs 
over at The Pajama Gardener, is celebrating the publication of her first novel, Orange Mint and Honey-- the story of how - with the help of the late Nina Simone, a teenage boyfriend, and the mother she thought she'd never forgive - a late bloomer finally blossoms.
Keeping with the spirit, here's her recipe for Orange Mint Mojitos:
Serves 6
INGREDIENTS
3 limes
½ cup orange blossom honey (or any honey or sugar)
12-18* mint sprigs
2 cups orange juice**
Seltzer (orange or plain)
White rum or orange rum
DIRECTIONS
*For an especially nice presentation, garnish with mint in flower, a trick I learned from my friend Elizabeth.
**You can substitute orange liqueur for orange juice, but 2 cups is probably too much! You’ll probably only want a shot or so per glass.
"Carleen Brice's Orange Mint and Honey, a new novel about real mama drama, will have you hooked from page one. ." - Essence
Posted at 10:29 AM | Comments (1)
Category:
Cocktails With Writers
March 11, 2008
REJECTED!
I got my rejection letter from MacDowell yesterday. I can't say I was shocked-- I've applied about six times, and only been accepted twice. And hardly anyone gets in two years in a row. But still, rejections suck. A lot.
March-April make up the high season for rejections. Late December and January is application season and everyone walks around all high on what-if. But reality hits in early spring. Thank goodness for the time change. When I came home from work and saw the thin envelope from MacDowell, the sun was still out and it was warm enough that I didn't have my coat on.
I am walking around now on pins and needles. I only applied to two colonies this year because I was embroiled in all manner of personal drama and failed to get my applications in on time. The best bet is to apply to four colonies in order to get a summer spot. So, this time I may be forced to *gasp* write AT HOME.
Fingers crossed for Blue Mountain, y'all.
Posted at 07:18 AM | Comments (5)
Category:
The Writing Life
March 10, 2008
Tracie Morris @ The Stone
On the weekend, I went with a bunch of the cool kids to The Stone, an avant 
garde performance space in Alphabet City. The headliner: Tracie Morris and her band. It was raining like you wouldn't believe. I almost drowned getting out of the cab, but I made it, gasping for air.
Tracie gave a multi-layered show, combining spoken word poetry, cabaret-style singing, and experimental work that put me in the mind of the daring work of the Black Took Collective. Wikipedia describes what she does as "sound art" and that feels just about right.
Of all her performances, my favorites were re-arrangements of the classics. The stand-out was her performance of "Give It To Me Baby," made popular by the late Rick James. I wish I had recorded it. Tracie crooned it slow, accompanied by a mournful guitar. "Give It To Me" became a plea. This was not from the Spike Lee "please, baby, please" school of begging, but from the Luther Vandross, Superstar, "baby, baby, baby, oh, baby" (old) school of loneliness.
If she's in your town catch her act. Make sure you bring your open mind and your open heart.
Posted at 07:23 AM | Comments (0)
Category:
Living For The City
March 06, 2008
Ben & Jerry's-- Anti-Southern?
Ben & Jerry's has named an ice-cream for Barack Obama-- this may the pinnacle of pop-culture liberalism. The ice-cream is called (drum roll please...)YES, PECAN!
As Ladylee would say, *crickets*.
See, where I come from we say p-e-c-a-n as "puh-CAHN". So I was saying aloud "Yes, Puh-CAHN?" Then, I looked around me, surrounded by northerners and got it. "Yes, Pee-CAN!", rhymes with "Yes, We Can!" Cute, I guess.
Granted, I am sensitive, but I felt a little left out of the joke.
Posted at 03:18 PM | Comments (6)
Category:
Current Events
I Am Trying to Leave This Alone
Really, I am. But this LA Times piece on the Love and Consequences drama was really interesting.
Jones/Seltzer, who claimed to be half Native American and often lapses in the book into the inner-city black vernacular of "hoods," "homies" and "ima make sure," is part of a long tradition of white artists impersonating or borrowing the voices and experiences of racial minorities, experts said. ....
"I think some of the authors of these memoirs have pain and suffering they don't know how to name, so they attach them to something that's universally associated with suffering," like race.
The whole article is really interesting.
Posted at 08:35 AM | Comments (2)
Category:
Current Events
March 05, 2008
Wednesday Afternoon Link Up
Posted at 02:11 PM | Comments (1)
Category:
Travels & Rambles
Why? Oh, Why?
Yesterday, in the comments, Sarah asked why people like Margaret Jones just don't publish thier stories as novels. Why do they feel compelled to call it "memoir"? I don't know, but there are a couple interesting hypotheses out there in the blogosphere.
Maybe Jennifer Joseph of Manic D Press is right when she emails that this whole fake memoir trend points to a dysfunction at "New York commercial houses." As she analyzes the situation, "Bookselling is all about categories, and the Memoir category sells better than Fiction. Agents know this, Editors know this, Publishers know this. Authors learn this... Blame it on reality TV shows which give the illusion (though they're scripted) that 'true stories' are somehow more appealing than fiction." (That said, it should be conceded that Misha Defonseca's phony Holocaust survival story was published by an indie press.)
Yxta Maya Murray, who reviewed Love and Consequences for TruthDig (she loved it), has this to say:
The answer? Because we don’t value the novel anymore. The coin of the realm is Reality: blogging, biography, Web confessions, “The Real Housewives of New York City.” We have learned to so diminish the importance of the imagination that we no longer pay sufficient attention to the “ecstatic truths” (Werner Herzog’s much-repeated maxim) that may be gleaned from fiction. Thus we have created a market that demands “true crime” and “authentic” tales of woe, which are easily exploited by frauds.
Anybody else got a theory?
Posted at 07:27 AM | Comments (2)
Category:
Current Events
March 03, 2008
There's A Sucker Born Every Minute
And apparently, they all go to work in publishing.
This has been a bad week for liars. First the holocaust survivor who said she was literally raised by wolves turns out to be just a regular, if depressed, person. Now, Margaret Seltzer, the author of Love and Consequences, the highly acclaimed "memoir" about her life as a half Native American/half White gang banger, has been been explosed as a fraud.
In the vividly told book, Ms. Seltzer wrote about her African-American foster brothers, Terrell and Taye, who joined the Bloods gang when they were 11 and 13. She chronicled her experiences making drug deliveries for gang leaders at age 13 and how she was given her first gun as a birthday present when she was 14. Ms. Seltzer told The Times last week, “One of the first things I did once I started making drug money was to buy a burial plot.”
It's like a satire of a satire. This is my favorite line in the whole NYT article: "Sarah McGrath, the editor at Riverhead who worked with Ms. Seltzer for three years on the book, said she was stunned to discover that the author had lied." Gotta love that understatement and comic timing.
But seriously, you may remember an article last summer that appered in TimeOut New York about matters of race in publishing. (My post on the subject here.) This was one of most important quotes from the article:
“Invariably,” says Craig, “a black-themed book will come up for consideration, and there won’t be anyone of color to put in an opinion, or there’ll be one, who shouldn’t bear the burden alone. So we all pretend we’re experts. Maybe I’m the only one who’s embarrassed by that.” The end result of such roundtables, one can only fear, could be that the only books depicting people of color that get published are those that do not challenge white assumptions.
I can't help but wonder if Ms. Seltzer's book with all it's far-fetched, tales-from-the-urban-jungle flair, would have passed the smell test were it read by a more diverse panel of editors.
Posted at 10:57 PM | Comments (4)
Category:
Current Events
Monday Morning Link Up
Happy New Week!
Posted at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)
Category:
Travels & Rambles
Winter In Vermont!
The Vermont Studio Center is different from many other artist colonies in that part of the deal is that there is on-site instruction, as well as the opportunity to just hunker down and write. I will be giving a craft class, a reading, as well as one-on-one sessions with interested writers.
Interested? Check out their website. And apply sooner than later so that you can have a better chance of getting your preferred time slot.
(And here is some unsolicited advice from me: Go ahead and apply even if you aren't sure what your life will look like in December. So often, we don't put in for opportunities because we are hung up on "what-if". Just apply and if your schedule doesn't allow you to attend, you can just decline. But go ahead and apply. Even if you don't apply for this, apply for something. Put yourself out there. It's the only way you'll get something back.)
March 02, 2008
Just Because You Haven't Heard Of It...
Rule #1 for teaching creative writing: Just because you haven't heard of it, doesn't mean it's not true.
A few years back, I taught a one-week workshop in California. One of my students, a woman in her sixties, brought in a manuscript that I found to be a little bit hard to believe. It was a strange experience. She was a beginning writer, so the work had a lot of the hallmarks of a newbie just starting out-- a lot of extra words, clunky transitions, etc. On the other hand, there was a sort of passion on the page and the author herself was nervous in workshop-- signs that point to fiction that borders on autobiography. But at the same time, the story was just sort of far-fetched. I didn't know what to make of it.
Since I could tell that the author has put her whole heart on the page, I led the class discussion with kid gloves. The story was about a young girl who was sent to a home for unwed mothers, back in the 1950s. Frankly, I couldn't get myself to believe that pregnant girls were sent to live in facilities designed to humiliate them. For example, the pregnant girls were not allowed to walk in the front door. I found the community reaction as depicted in the story to be flat. Certainly no one spit on her when she said she was pregnant?!?! The conditions reminded of the treatment of blacks in the Jim Crow south!
I know that a more experienced writer can make a reader believe what she ordinarily would not, but this was a workshop for people who are just finding thier voices. At this stage in her writing, she wasn't ready to try and convert non-believers.
Flash forward a couple years:
All The Cool Kids Live in Brooklyn
Colson Whitehead has an amusing piece in the NYT about the mythology of the "Brooklyn Writer." As a frustrated fiction writer marooned on the wrong side of the Holland Tunnel, I am glad to know that it is mostly hype.. though I must say that Mr. Whitehead is so over it that it makes it seem hipper than ever to live on the F train route. Here's one adorable, too-cool-for-school paragraph. To read the rest, go to the NYT.
I have a hard time understanding all the hype. I dig it here and all, but it’s just a place. It does not have magical properties. In interviews, I get asked a lot, “What’s it like to write in Brooklyn?” I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it’s like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it’s like writing in Manhattan, but there aren’t as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It’s like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French.
And lookie here, we have a snapshot of Colson Whitehead from AWP!
Posted at 02:27 PM | Comments (1)
Category:
Living For The City