Tag: books

Art During Crisis

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In turbulent times, art won’t save us; but it can serve as a guide.

That is the message of the two art books that are bookends for my summer.

A Black History of Art by Alayo Akinkugbe is a recent publication in which the author “delves into the portrayal of Black figures in Western art, explores Blackness within museum spaces, and examines curatorial practices.”

In June, I was able to experience the power of Alayo Akinkugbe’s book by attending a 5-week, online course hosted by Black Blossoms, UK and given by the author who earned her degrees at both Cambridge and Courtauld Institute of Art.

The audience was as diverse as the art, with participants hailing from the African Continent, Europe, and the Americas.

Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st Century Art and Poetics by Dhyandra Lawson et al was published at the end of last year. This book captures the essence of the exhibit I saw in August at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Likewise, it “illuminates aesthetic connections among established and emerging US–based artists in dialogue with artists working in Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Europe.”

Why my interest in these books?

Art continues to strengthen my interpretation of the Black diaspora and Pan Africanism. The Black diaspora crosses over international borders and various continents, and it communicates in various languages. Visual art is one of the most accessible avenues for interacting across differences because we might not be able to read the foreign language of the novel or understand the foreign language and accent in a song. Art is visual and immediate. It invites us to interact instantaneously with themes and motifs that crisscross the Black and Pan African experience.

I’m grateful for the connections art spurs me to make, whether in art galleries, via social media, or in excellent books such as these.

AWP vs LA Festival of Books

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Los Angeles hosted two large book events within two months, and I attended both. Was one better than the other? I think not. They both focused on their audience and did so quite well.

March was abuzz with AWP and the writers who visited from across the country and internationally to make the city grand!

Association of Writers and Writing Programs hosted 12,000 writers, editors, publishers, book sellers, college programs, and others at the LA Convention Center. Amazingly, I didn’t just attend. I also presented for the first time! I was on the “New Literary Forms for a New Los Angeles” panel moderated by Claire Phillips. Along with Claire, I was proud to accompany writers Steph Cha, Sesshu Foster, and Gina Frangello.

Challenge number one was to calm my nerves! This was my first time presenting at AWP. The closest I’d ever gotten to presenting at AWP was participating in an off-site event alongside my publisher, Another Chicago Magazine, at AWP Seattle in 2023. But practice paves the way for perfection. And practice I did, even though my goal wasn’t to be perfect. I just wanted to be prepared enough so that if I made a mistake, I’d be able to regain composure and keep it moving.

As an attendee, I made my way to the panel “Do the Hustle: How to Publicize Your Book.” Luckily, I am reaching that yearned-for point in the writing process in which I get to focus now on submission, marketing, and publicity. So, it was great hearing how authors are clearing their own pathways to sales in an era in which publishers do less book promotion.

The panel “Literary Production During Authoritarian Governments” hit the right notes of concern and caution given our current administration in D.C. I share in the presenters’ belief that it’s imperative we continue writing and resisting during this era of book bans and limited funding.

“We Beautifully Outside: Informal Writing Collectives, Community and Kinship” was a wonderful reminder of the power of writing groups and how they have nurtured Black women writers in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Seattle.

In April, LA Festival of Books had about 160,000 people in attendance and was more about casual engagement. Let’s face it, at AWP writers are speaking to their peers — the toughest audience sometimes.

Because AWP and LA Festival of Books were back-to-back in the same city, I picked up on the different tone right away. At the book festival, authors speak to their readers. So, the presenters delve into the content of the text more so than the writing process that led to its creation. Their presentation is more relaxed because they want to meet their audience halfway, and their audience is simply out and about enjoying their weekend.

For me, panel number one was “Existential Memoirs.” As a writer of hybrid memoir, I search out this genre. The panel was moderated by Gina Frangello, my co-panelist at AWP, and included authors Meghan Daum, Lyz Lenz, and Glynnis MacNicol. The women covered a wide range of topics including relationships, motherhood, the humor of daily life, and the horror of contemporary politics.

And finally, the “Speak Out” panel on writing and activism was moderated by journalist Jonathan Capehart and included authors Ibram X. Kendi, Aida Mariam Davis, and Rita Omokha. I loved that this panel had a Pan African scope, with presenters of US, Ethiopian, and Nigerian heritage. Their call to activism was rooted in US reality but stretched across the African/Black diaspora and highlighted the need to act locally and analyze globally as we draw on Black activism from the past to traverse the winding roads of an uncertain future.

Why Samuel Beckett: A Black Writer’s Perspective

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Studying Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett during junior year at UCLA was the final straw that pushed me towards mental and emotional exhaustion. I had overextended myself academically by taking too many classes during spring and summer quarters; and, studying Beckett in the fall led to questioning my Catholic faith and having to take a quarter off from my studies.

When I heard that OR books was publishing a hybrid memoir titled Beckett’s Children by Michael Coffey, I rushed to pre-order it. Coffey’s memoir, published in July this year, offered a sense of relief because I had worried that the allusions to a modernist writer in my memoir manuscript might seem a bit dated. But here was a memoir published in 2024 proving me wrong.

Unlike Coffey’s book, there are no continuous references to Beckett in my manuscript. Studying Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is pivotal to the inciting incident in chapter one because it causes me to doubt my faith. In Beckett’s Children, on the other hand, the author’s inciting incident centers around the idea that the Irish author may have fathered the American poet, Susan Howe.

Threads running through Coffey’s hybrid memoir include the stated curiosity about a familial bond between Beckett and Howe, Coffey’s literary research on the two writers, his own history as an adoptee, and his relationship with his son who is a three-time felon and addict.  In my manuscript, I weave in the history of Black Los Angeles beginning with the founding of the city by the Spanish.

Coffey’s description of airports and prisons as structures distinguished by their “architecture of waiting” stood out to me. This description was impactful because I’m familiar with Professor David Harvey’s description of the revolutionary potential of airport workers who are a class in themselves with the potential of becoming a class for themselves. In contrast, prisoners are the most captive humans on US soil; and prison is where the US Government has sent revolutionaries, such as members of the Black Power Movement and the Black Panther Party. So, I found the analogy of prisons and airports interesting because the two structures can also be considered exact opposites.

I recommend Beckett’s Children because one or more of the four narrative lines the author weaves into his hybrid memoir will grab your interest and pull you through the author’s skillful storytelling until the last page.

“The House on Mango Street” and a Garden in Watts

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The House on Mango Street in a roundabout way helped me buy the garden in Watts. The garden wasn’t just the purple fountain grass and Mexican feather grass protected by weed fabric and surrounded by wood chips at the side of the house. But also, the papyrus grass that grew six or seven feet in front of the house. I bought the house in 2004 and watered the decorative grasses and the green St. Augustine grass every Sunday until the house went underwater, financially, in 2008. Then I sold it in 2009; and not because of the garden and not because of the house, but because of a family emergency that was more important than the house.

When Sandra Cisneros first published her novella The House on Mango Street in 1984, I had been living my period of attempted literary exile that inspired me to fly from Los Angeles to Paris in search of a city Anaïs Nin portrayed as inherently artistic. Nin told me this when I ditched eleventh grade and read her autobiography inside the newly constructed big blue Pacific Design Center on Melrose Avenue. While I was ditching at Pacific Design, the Diaz sisters also had a house on Melrose that they owned before the building was completed in 1975. Ironically, their 900-foot house sat at the front steps of the blue building until 1997 when they finally sold. Another irony is that as an adult I would hear Cisneros read from her book inside the auditorium of Pacific Design. I can’t remember now if the Diaz house was still at the entrance or not.

During my literary exile that mimicked A. Nin, J. Baldwin, and J. Baker, I sat one day on a bench in the cold of winter listening as the streets of Paris told me I needed a vocation. On the metro running beneath the streets, the Black skin – akin to my own — of Francophone Africans hinted I needed a home. I returned to Los Angeles determined to teach despite my mother rightly warning that secondary education was too much work for too little income. Cisneros’ House on Mango Street gave me something to teach. And lasting in the trenches of teaching, so you can have a livelihood, pay your rent, and maybe one day buy a house, is all about having something (you are passionate about) to teach.

Cisneros is back in the States from her current home in Mexico. Speaking at City of Asylum on October 20 for the fortieth anniversary of the publication of her book, she described her time teaching high school in Chicago and how she realized the students needed more than literature; she suggested that what they needed were social services and social change. Indeed. I agree. At the same time, I am thankful she gave me poetically crafted chapters to teach, such as “My Name,” “Marin,” and “Papa Who Wakes Up Tired in the Dark.”

As I taught, I wrote poetry. Lots of it. My first published poems were bilingual, and Arte Público Press accepted them for publication in their journal The Americas Review. At City of Asylum, Cisneros stated that House on Mango Street was first published by Arte Público – a press, she said required its writers to be better than good. They had to be excellent. I knew, without a doubt, that my poems – “La Chanteuse de Jazz,” La Pachanga,” and “Boca Oficial” were excellent. Cisneros also whispered to us during her talk that a lot of Latinx writing today is pop literature.

Mango Street not only inspired me to continue teaching; it was a catalyst for me to write my own YA novella while I lived in the house in Watts where on Sundays I tended to purple fountain grass, Mexican feather grass, and papyrus grass. Thinking back now, I can’t fathom how I wrote a novella as my marriage slowly dissolved and I stepped into the role of single motherhood responsible for two kids while tending to three dogs and a garden behind wrought iron gates.

It dawned on Cisneros as she studied creative writing at University of Iowa in her early twenties that everyone in her class had a house except her. That difference was another inspiration for her writing the novella. Did I ever think of my house in Watts as “A House of My Own” that was “a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem”? Considering that idea now, I don’t think so. I wrote a novella inside its four walls, but that writing occurred in a whirlwind I barely remember. The Watts house didn’t nourish my ability to write for publication; it nourished my ability to write in order to live. It, like teaching, erased the line between writing, teaching, and living until one and the other became the same.