This weekend marked the 20th anniversary of my graduation from Spelman College. Imagine about two-thousand black women lead by the sisters of the class of 1941– who were celebrating their 70th reunion. Picture all of us wearing white– two by two and arm in arm. Have you ever had a feeling of perfect belonging– not worried that you are “too” anything or “not enough” of anything? For this miracle homecoming, we each came as we were and took our places in the fold.
if only my suitcase was this cute
My newest column for “Countdown to Publication” is all about me getting ready for my book tour. It’s a lot of work both in terms of millions of errands that must be run, the perfect suitcase that must be packed, but also getting my act together emotionally. Here’s en excerpt:
The Silver Sparrow Tour will hit more than thirty cities this summer. Of course I am thrilled to meet so many readers, but thirty is a lot of cities and eight weeks is a long time to be on the road. To prepare, I am basically in training. For the next two months, I will be acting as an ambassador for my novel and I must do a good job, or else what’s the point. Here’s what I’m doing to get ready.
1. Cutting negative people out of my life: Book tour is a vulnerable time, an emotional rollercoaster. Now is the time to be surrounded only by real friends. On the subject of a competitive, jealous, ex-boyfriend,I offer a warning from my publicity guru, Lauren: “ A guy like that will eat your career.” Then she mimed Cookie Monster and I imagined him devouring everything I had worked for. Anybody that’s not making my garden grow has to be put on hold, at least until September. I am usually a pretty patient person, but for book tour, I have to protect myself.
Over at The Nervous Breakdown, I interview myself. Yes, you read that right. Me, talking to me, about me.
ME: How much of this is autobiography? Is your father really a bigamist?
ME2: The dedication to my book is: “To my parents, who, to the best of my knowledge, are married only to each other.” It’s funny—when it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. For fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.
Langston Hughes’ townhome in Harlem is for sale for a cool million bucks. What would he say if he knew what his dear Harlem had become. You know the poem that most people call “A Dream Deferred” is actually titled, “Harlem.” WIth all the gentrification, the title has become ironic.
Over at SheWrites, I have posted the latest Countdown To Publication column. This week I am talking about the best way to talk about your book to strangers. Years ago, I published a post about how all novels sound stupid when you describe them. Case in point– Beloved is about this lady who killed her baby and then the baby came back and tried to take her man. Or worse– It’s called Beloved. It’s sort of like a cross between Roots and “Fatal Attraction.”
Part of this problem comes from the pressure to break your labor of love down into a sound bite. The good news is that you don’t have to.
As the pub date for SILVER SPARROW draws near, I have been lucky enough to sit down with some amazing women and talk about SILVER SPARROW in particular and writing in general. We talked about plot, the “black” section of the bookstore, hair, and The Next Big Thing.
Today I participated in the PEN World Voices Festival. It was kind of a quirky event– 10am outdoors at the Highline, which meant that we were reading on a brigde over a very busy street. The audience were high school students who were kind of into it and kind of not. I was lucky– I was early on the schedule when the kids were still feeling pretty perky. I read from LEAVING ATLANTA and SILVER SPARROW, answered a few questions and that was then. Much later in the program, the students were getting antsy. Pizza was delivered and there was a little bit of a frenzy as the food was distributed and people wanted to know if there was going to be any soda, and what flavor. I didn’t envy the folks on the second half of the program.
Right after the pizza, Rachel McKibbens took the stage to read from her poetry collection, PINK ELEPHANT. Rachel has a presence and she has a look. When she took the stage, the teenagers looked up from their pizza and coke to see what this woman was all about. When she started reciting her poetry about growing up in a working class community in Orange Country (“a part of Orange county they don’t show on TV except for on “cops”)– the kids forgot about pizza and texting and everything else except the raw humanity issueing forth from Rachel’s arresting verses. She tells the hard stories with beauty, vulnerability, and fire, too. After the event, young girl mustered their courage to approach the poet, “We really liked what you said,” one explained. Another broke in, “It wasn’t just what you said. It was how you said it, too.”
I can’t recommend this book enough. Rachel calls it a “memoir in verse. I call it brilliant.”
who is that little girl?
The post is up, and I invite you to go check out. And even leave a comment if you feel like it.
The May/June issue of Poets and Writers magazine includes a seven-page feauture on Tayari Jones and her novel SILVER SPARROW. The feature story is written by Rochelle Spener with a photograph by Christy Whitney.
Recently,Vanity Fair published a photograph of the literary women of Atlanta. The women are posed in front of the Swan House which is not a plantation house, it just vibes like one. This is one of Atlanta’s hallmarks, these not-plantations. Since Atlanta was burned in the Civil War, there are no ante-bellum structures to romanticize, so the good citizens of my hometown make do with lavish Victorians. My favorite example is the Margaret Mitchell House. It was built in the 1900s, long after Rhett Butler said he didn’t give a damn, but it feels like Tara and that’s all that matters. When we agree to accept an illusion, it takes on a kind of truth and this is why the photo spread is so disturbing.
Atlanta is one of America’s “Chocolate Cities.” Along with Washington, DC and Detroit the city was famous for its critical mass of black folks doing anything you can imagine— I grew up believing that any range of human experience could be enjoyed by a black person. My parents never had to wring their hands over whether I saw teachers who “looked like me.” Growing up in Southwest Atlanta, I had no idea that black Americans were a numeric minority. And even when I was old enough to know this, I never believed it in my soul. It’s like when you are told that your body is 75% water. You believe it, but you don’t believe it, since you know yourself to be solid flesh.
Of course, I was glad to see Natasha Trethewey included in the photo—as a Pulitzer Prize winner, if she is not a literary celebrity of Atlanta, then who is? But everything else about the spread stuck in my craw. In the photo, you see half a dozen white ladies—and I use this term deliberately. The way they are posed does not evoke “women”. I see “ladies”. And there is Natasha tucked in there, the one woman of color. (Is “ladies of color” even a term?)
The title of the piece is “Belles, Books, and Candor”. I never call myself a southern belle, though many people here in New Jersey try and put that label on me. It’s not that I deny my southerness, but “belle”, for me evokes images of slavery and hierarchy. I know black women who have reappropriated the term, but I would rather not be wrapped in that filthy blanket. I do sometimes call myself a Georgia Peach, which is what girls at my high school called ourselves. Once, a man called me “Georgia” when he was feeling affectionate and it’s one of the reasons I fell for him, because knowing where I am from is key to knowing who I am. I am not from the world of this photo.
I would love to ask Kathryn Stockett, author of the blockbuster THE HELP how she feels about the problematic optics of this photo. Fans of her work say that she is an advocate for the black women who worked as maids in Mississippi. I’ve been told that she is a fierce critic of white privilege. How does she feel to be touted as leader of “Atlanta’s literary sorority” which does not include any black fiction writers. Did she say to the photographer, “Wait! Where’s Pearl Cleage?”
Today marks Confederate Memorial day in the state of Georgia. This “holiday” is characterized by a nostalgia for a fictional past in which the (white) men are all gentlemen, the (white) women belles, and the fallen Conferderates heroes, all. I shudder to think about how the rest of us fit into this fantasy. So, on this day, I look at this photo and see an opportunity lost. What a powerful rhetorical statement would be made if standing before the Swan House were a group of writers representing the real Atlanta. Imagine even that the net were widened to include women writers from other southern cities. I would love to see Shay Youngblood, Olympia Vernon, Lorraine Lopez, Dolen Perkins Valdez and Alice Randall featured in the pages of Vanity Fair. The south has never been mono-racial, and as the demographics of the country have shifted, the face of southern writing is becoming increasingly diverse– and increasingly rich.
I am aware that many white southern writers feel pigeonholed by the term “southern.” They complain that their publishers will send them to Square Books in Mississippi, but will never send them to City Lights in California. They feel that the “southern” label keeps them from being seen as American writers. Black southerners can feel their pain, because we, too, know what it’s like to be excluded from the American canon. But we know another pain, which may cut deeper: we know how it feels to have our roots dug up, to be told we don’t exist.
