Archive for the ‘women's studies’ Category
Afrofuturism, Intersectional Feminism & More: Loving My Greensboro Bound Schedule
Posted on: April 14, 2019
Hi folks,
A few weeks ago I announced that I am participating in Greensboro Bound, a new and amazing literary festival. The festival is May 16-19. All events are FREE, though for some workshops and talks you’ll need to get tix ahead of time including for Zadie Smith’s talk and the conversation between musicians Ani DiFranco and Rhiannon Giddens. The organizers have poured their hearts and souls into this schedule and have planned an incredible array of workshops, talks and panels across all genres that tackle subjects from climate change to yoga. There’s something here for every kind of writer. Take a look at the schedule here.
This is my lineup for Saturday, May 18. I’m psyched!
- 10 am The Real and the Unreal: Speculative Fiction with Valerie Nieman, Michele Tracy Berger, and Jamey Bradbury.
Excited to meet Jamey. Thrilled to be on this panel with Val. She also has a new book coming out this summer which I can’t wait to read. To the Bones is an Appalachian horror/mystery/eco-thriller mashup. Doesn’t that sound cool?
- 12:30 pm Writing as Intersectional Feminism. Feminist Conversation with Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, Michele Tracy Berger, and Cassie Kircher. Moderated by Jennifer Feather.
Wow! I live and breathe intersectional feminism as a women’s and gender studies professor and as a creative writer. I am really looking forward to this conversation.
- 3:15 pm Afrofuturism with Michele Tracy Berger, Sheree Renee Thomas. Moderated by Gale Greenlee.
Sheree Renee Thomas is a writer, editor, publisher and pioneer in documenting Afrofuturism. I’ve admired her work for a long time, so I will try not to fangirl the entire time. I had the distinct pleasure of working with Gale (now Dr. Greenlee), a few years ago when she took my graduate class ‘Exploring Intersectionality: Theories, Methods and Practices of Social Change’. What a gift that she is moderating this discussion.
LOCAL PEEPS: This event combines everything I love–talking with other authors, activism, and women’s issues. I hope you consider joining us for what I believe will be an inspiring and lively conversation:
In her only appearance in North Carolina, national leader and former president of Planned Parenthood Cecile Richards will be in conversation with Michele Tracy Berger in The Fearrington Barn on April 15th at 2pm in support of her new memoir MAKE TROUBLE: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead.
Tickets can be purchased through McIntyre’s Books: 542-3030 or online through their website.
I am absolutely loving her book and can’t wait to meet her in person!
It was a busy weekend! My first stop was at High Point University. I was invited by the English Club to give a craft talk and also discuss the political and structural interests that led me to speculative fiction and Afrofuturism, in particular.
The thing is, I had never given a ‘craft talk’ before! I’ve given lots of academic talks, of course, and have also done several readings of Reenu-You, but never a craft talk. What goes into a craft talk? I found out that a craft talk is just what it sounds like—a writer talking about techniques and processes of writing.
I knew that the English Club would be marketing my visit for a broad audience, so I needed to keep in mind that not everyone would want to hear specific details about writing craft. I spent the last few weeks working on my craft talk.
In the end, I decided to focus the first half of the talk on the speculative media influences on my childhood and young adult years (e.g. the television show, Lost in Space, the Bionic Woman and the film Star Wars). I then talked about my desire to connect to characters in speculative fiction and media with backgrounds that were similar to mine or connected to African American history and for a LONG time how hard that was. By college I was trying to “write myself” into the text and I spent time talking about how during college I discovered both the African American literary canon and feminist speculative fiction! Toward the end of the talk, I then discussed more ‘crafty’ things like how much I love first person narration and why I chose to use two first person narrators in Reenu-You. The audience was composed of students, faculty and parents (it was family weekend!) and they were warm and asked great questions.
I’m so grateful to the students and faculty that brought me to campus.
Dr. Jenn Brandt and Dr. Jacob Paul, organizers of the events
Lauren (on the left) who introduced me at the reading and Molly who is the president of the English Club. They are amazing!
On Saturday at Park Road Books, in Charlotte, I was on a fantastic panel put together by writer and publisher Nicole Kurtz. The panel featured Black women speculative fiction authors including Nicole, Alledria Hurt, Marcia Colette and myself.
On such a cold wintry day, we had a spectacular turnout. The audience was engaged and we talked about diversity in publishing, the possible impact of the films, Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time for young people and pitched our books. We sold out of our books and several panelists and audience members made our way over to a local restaurant for talk and conversation. It was a truly wonderful and uplifting experience! We may try to replicate this panel at future sci-fi conventions.
This week, I met a very special writer and activist—Gloria Steinem! On Wednesday, I was on a panel honoring 45 years of Ms. Magazine! I serve on the Ms. Scholars Board, a group that helps feminist scholars translate their ideas for a popular audience. I discovered Ms. in college through my mentor, and loved it. Ms. still represents the best in feminist journalism and has often been the first to break stories about sexual violence, the wage gap, and the feminization of poverty that changed the national discourse. I had the privilege to write a featured article for their 40th anniversary.
Gloria Steinem is a journalist, activist and co-founder of Ms. I’ve always wanted to meet her. I admire her wit, persistence, humor, insight, style and sheer brilliance. I was on the panel with her and watched her work then and after and can say she walks her talk. She’s 83, kind, forthright and unstoppable. And, she wears amazing leather pants! Later at a reception, I told her how much I admired her book Revolution from Within: A Book of Self Esteem.
It was a vulnerable book that dared to talk about the importance of feminist self-care and the importance of inner work while on the path of political activism. Despite its bestselling status, it was universally panned by critics at the time in the 90s-they just didn’t get the importance of wrestling with the inner dimensions of internalized ‘isms’ nor ruminating on the mind/body split. Ideas that are now front and center in social justice circles as well as in health circles given what we know about how trauma effects the body in complex ways.
She has never stopped being a journalist and never stopped writing her truth which I find inspiring.
She is a living treasure and I am so glad that President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for a lifetime of human rights work.
It’s so powerful to meet a writer that you have long admired.
Judith Stanton is a historical romance author, a former college professor and scholar. She’s obsessed with horses and generally, the natural world. I know Judith as a teacher through the wonderful creative writing program offered through my local community college in Pittsboro, NC. Judith is also a former women’s studies professor and when we get together, we can talk for hours. I’m so delighted that as we come to the end of National Poetry Month, Judith is sharing one of her ‘deer poems’ that I’ve come to adore.
The Three-legged Doe
After long drought
the white oak drops
three times as many acorns
as in a year of good rain.
Under its spreading limbs
the three-legged doe stops to feed,
her right front leg sheared off
halfway between her knee
and hoof—victim of a car?
a stump hole in the woods?
or the black rocks in the stream
she crosses to get to my yard?
In the pasture I can spot her
two hundred yards away
shoulder sinking every stride
her stump touches ground
or the lurch when she bolts
with the herd full speed.
At dusk I see her
flanked by last year’s twins
and this year’s lone fawn
its spots faded by November,
its coat like hers turned gray.
He rams her udder hard.
She watches for hunters
lurking in the woods.
About this poem: I write fiction, 7 novels and counting, so when the leader of our writers group pressed us to write a poem for our blog for National Poetry Month, I walked out grumbling, “I’m a novelist, Al. I don’t write poetry.” The next day I saw the injured doe for the umpteenth time grazing under the oak tree outside my office. I embarked on Deer Diaries, an odyssey into writing about the wildlife I see every day on our farm. Amazingly, in the four years I worked on this collection, the deer, birds, bees, snails, turtles, wild turkey hens who grace my life lined up every few days or weeks to show their lives to me in a new light.
Deer Diaries is now a chapbook forthcoming this year from Finishing Line Press. Meet Judith here at her new website and check out her Amazon page here.
I’m sharing more about the magic of the AROHO writing retreat that happened almost one month ago. In the afternoons during the AROHO writing retreat, participants got to hear various writers discuss and riff off of the touchstone books thematically guiding the retreat: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. The Woman Warrior at its core is about mother and daughter relationships and secrets. The presenters provided insights, read creative work, shared scholarly essays, tributes and everything in between when talking about these two texts. One of the speakers was Tania Pryputniewicz, a poet, who also writes a lot about motherhood and the creative process. She shared with us an incredibly powerful exercise designed to help us reflect on the nature of the secrets our mothers kept and secrets we’ve kept from them. I am re-blogging her wonderful post where she elaborates on her relationship to The Woman Warrior and shares this exercise in full. She is also calling for guests posts based on her exercise.
Mothers and Daughters: Secret Catharsis in Woman Warrior (and a Secret Door Writing Exercise for You)
“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.” So opens Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, from the first section of the book, titled, “No Name Woman.” So begins the re-telling of a family secret, where the story of the No Name Aunt moves out to haunt a much wider audience of mothers and daughters. The irony is not lost on us that the narrator, at the outset, in sentence one, is engaged in the act of disobeying her mother.
Many of us would agree that mother/daughter relationships are at one time or another fraught with complicated emotional, psychological narratives and emotional withholdings. But these same complications often come with hidden gifts.
read the full post here
Becky Thompson has been an inspiration to many. She is an award-winning writer, professor, yoga instructor, and activist. She has spent the last twenty years traveling across the world researching, teaching, and writing on issues of social and racial inequality. An academic by training, she has written on a wide variety of topics that include eating disorders, HIV/AIDS, parenting a multi-ethnic family, and global activism. Her books are infused with creativity, scholarly rigor and meaningful engagement. They are magic carpet rides for the mind, body and spirit. She has also been a pedagogical pioneer in investigating and incorporating a wide range of contemplative practices in the classroom (including yoga, mindfulness, walking meditation, etc.). She uses the power of these practices to create a collective, intelligent and vulnerable space for students and teachers to engage deeply with difficult topics.
I count myself fortunate that I attended one of her contemplative pedagogy workshops, many years ago, while she was a visiting professor at Duke University. That made a deep impact on me though it would be years before I would muster up the courage to incorporate what I learned from Becky into my own teaching practice.
More recently, we’ve realized that we have overlapping interests in many areas, including yoga and social justice.
So, when I discovered that Becky has a new book that brings together narratives of social justice, yoga, trauma and healing, I couldn’t wait to find out more. Her latest book is Survivors on the Yoga Mat: Stories for those Healing from Trauma (North Atlantic Books), and it promises to be groundbreaking.
Thompson’s other books include Zero is the Whole I Fall into at Night (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2011); When the Center is on Fire (co-authored with Diane Harriford, University of Texas Press, 2008); Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS From the Black Disapora (co-edited with Randall Horton and Michael Hunter, Third World Press, 2007); A Promise and A Way of Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Mothering without a Compass (University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
Thompson’s work has also been featured in multiple journals such as Harvard Review, Feminist Studies, Gender & Society, Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, Amandla, Illuminations, and Margie.
Currently, Becky is Chair and Professor of Sociology at Simmons College in Boston, MA.
Becky sees her yoga practice as the foundation upon which her writing, teaching, poetry, and activism can flourish.
It’s is my distinct pleasure to welcome Becky Thompson to ‘The Practice of Creativity’.
–Tell us about your new book Survivors on the Yoga Mat: Stories for Those Healing from Trauma. What sparked your interest in writing this book?
My initial motivation came from an early teacher training I was participating in where I realized that many of the participants were whispering—in the halls, after sessions—about the depressions, loss, sexual abuse, and accidents they had experienced. But they did not feel okay about “coming out” about these traumas. It was as if yoga was in one corner and trauma was in another with no meeting place in between. During that training, I also dissociated on my yoga mat one Sunday morning which surprised me and led me to co-lead a workshop on trauma for the other yogis. That initial push was coupled by the inspiration I was getting from people who started to talk with me about their own stories of using yoga to help heal from racism, sexual abuse, incarceration, accidents, addictions, illnesses, great loss, war, etc.
While I can point to a moment when I officially started writing Survivors, in many ways I have been working my way up to this book for years. In some ways, Survivors is an answer to my first book, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep since Survivors offers stories of people living in the land of healthy solutions, who are finding embodiment that trauma had formerly stolen. The book follows A Promise and a Way of Life since it seeks to offer examples of antiracist activism currently taking place in yoga communities. Although I didn’t know this consciously when I started Survivors, I now know that I needed the last twenty years of writing, living, healing, and activism to get prepared for Survivors. For example, this book is a lot about the process of manufacturing joy. I didn’t know I even needed more joy ten or twenty years ago. And I never would have been able to put so much of my own story of trauma into a book before. That took some real coaxing and guidance this time around.
Survivors is an intellectual book in that I incorporate trauma theory, neuroscience and yoga philosophy. And it is an experiential book in that it starts and ends with the body—its pleasures and pain. Two decades ago, I wouldn’t have had the confidence or the community ties I needed to reach out to and find Joanne Wyckoff, who became my agent. And I wouldn’t have had the guts to include a bunch of photos of “unconventional” collective poses (that we have created together in my years of teaching yoga in an eclectic range of communities) in the book’s glossary. I can’t wait to hear what readers think and feel about all of this.
-In the book, you explore the unique strengths and needs of trauma survivors. Can you tell us a bit about what you’ve discovered while working with trauma survivors?
One key lesson for me was learning that trauma survivors are special—subversive angels on the road to healing. There is a tendency when we hear the word “trauma” to back away. To pass the tissues. The word sounds heavy, intense. In fact, many trauma survivors have special characteristics. We tend to be highly intuitive and ingenious—we have had to be to survive. Trauma survivors tend to throw their weight behind the underdog, are willing to question authority, and take risks. Trauma survivors often come early to yoga classes and stay late. They know that their lives depends upon healing. We are the ones with the wiggles, who cry during savasana, who get up and try again.
-You have been thinking a lot about the connection between yoga and social justice activism. How can they inform each other?
Embedded in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and the “Native American Code of Ethics” (which are both guides for understanding yoga philosophy) are commitments for healing ourselves and our communities. It turns out that trauma survivors are often at the forefront of liberation struggles. Coming to terms with your life being turned upside down often provides motivation to try to turn the world right side up again. I am thinking for example of Lisa Houston, a Scottish woman whose story is in Survivors, who took her yoga mat with her in her work with refugees at the border of Thailand and Burma. I am thinking about Jarvis Jay Masters, a Buddhist man on death row in California who used his body to interrupt a stabbing in San Quentin. His years sitting on his meditation cushion guided him to do this. Survivors is full of stories by people who see activism as key to being human.
The well-known Buddhist Silva Boorstein has said that the longer she has practiced yoga and meditation, the more zealous she has become about social activism. This is a very good sign for yoga communities since practicing yoga certainly does not exempt us from enabling racism, sexism and elitism in our midst. We can’t just “om” ourselves into multiracial, global communities. Long-term yoga can help us listen more deeply and undo inequalities.
-You’ve written many different kinds of books (i.e. scholarly, creative, etc.), and across many types of genres (e.g. poetry, essay, narrative). Who inspires you? Who are some of the writers that you continually mine for technique, style, or phrasing?
Joy Harjo remains one of the writers/activists/musicians whose work keeps me up at night. Her book, A Map to the Next World, has been the one book I have taken with me on my plane flights. Pure magic and talent in that book. Rolf Gates’ book Meditations from the Mat was the model for Survivors and the one I read to my grandmother in the last years of her life. I was thrilled when he consented to write the foreword for Survivors. Stephen Cope’s The Wisdom of Yoga and Matthew Sanford’s Waking are both yoga books I teach in my doctoral education and social theory classes. I like that cross-pollenization. I still think that Edwidge Dandicat’s Breath Eyes Memory is among the finest novels on sexual abuse, colonization and healing. Dandicat also writes outstanding essays.
This Bridge Called my Back, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga gave me (and so many others) the intersectional analysis (attention to race, class, gender, sexuality, language, nation) that forms the theoretical foundation for Survivors (and my other justice books). That book combines many genres—poetry, creative nonfiction, essays. June Jordan, Dorothy Allison, Sonia Sanchez, and Jacqueline Woodson are marvelous models for me. Poetry and literature remain my company when I am lonely, worried, or trying to understand how to respond (or get quiet) in the face of much insanity around us.
Music also gives me much guidance: India.Arie, Angelique Kidjo, Sweet Honey, Bobby McFerrin, Snatum Kaur, Patti LaBelle and many others. Music makes so many invisible links that we need to write across genres—the improvisation in fiction, the steadiness of prose, the surprise in poetry. When I was finishing Survivors, the editor advised that I not include a music list in the appendix since people’s taste in music is so variable. But I couldn’t bear leaving out music and so I ended up labeling that section “idiosyncratic music list” and tucked it in after the “suggested further reading” in an appendix.
-If you could invite three living yoga teachers to a dinner party that you’re hosting, who would you invite and why?
I would love to have Angela Farmer (who teaches in Greece, is 76, and has been guiding us to go inside to find safety for 40 years), Angela Davis (who isn’t officially a yoga teacher but is a yogi), and Nikki Myers (founder of the innovative yoga and recovery model Y12sr) together. I would cook for days—wasabi tofu, grilled asparagus, sweet potatoes, Lundberg rice, homemade hummus, and divine salad. Mango and sticky rice for dessert. I would fantasize about the playlist for the dinner for weeks. Michele and Keval Kaur and Diane Harriford would need to come too. Life is short. I gotta figure out how to make this possible.
-What’s your best writing tip that you’d like to share?
Honor the muse no matter what she needs. If she needs to write while you are driving, pull over. If she wakes you up in the night, thank her. If she is shy or angry, she has good reason. For prose writing, expressing the ideas first as poems helps to keep the language lyrical. Writing after doing an intense yoga practice can bring us into a deeper register. Talking about the writing process is erotic, in the Audre Lorde, expansive sense of the word. Yoga is big like that too.
I am attaching a poem I recently wrote for Sonia Sanchez—long time meditator, poet, and dancer for justice—since the poem resonates with some of the questions you have asked. Thank you Michele, for your generosity and creativity.
She be
for Sonia Sanchez
She be
Tupac in the summertime
She be
we tumble in the fall
She be
writing on the fast train
She be
writing honey slow
She be
listen, she say listen
She be
rhyming with Coltrane
She be
singing us some praise songs
She be
a chandelier of sound
She be
traveling with ashe ashe
She be
prancing with her sons
She be
channeling tenacity
She be
heart sing heart sing heart sing song
She be
circling her audience
She be
can’t wait, can’t wait for love
She be she be she bow she shy she shake she cry she glow she slide
She fly she be she be she be she be
Becky Thompson has received numerous honors and awards for her work, including grants from the NEH, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Association for University Women, the Ford Foundation, Political Research Associates and the Gustavus Myers Award for Outstanding Books on Human Rights in North America.
Becky is a senior level yoga teacher (YRT-500) and teaches yoga at conferences, workshops, in college classes, and community centers internationally and nationally.
Find out more about her and how to purchase Survivors on the Yoga Mat here
Unearthing a Family Mystery, Writing about Gender & Violence: Interview with Author Randi Davenport
Posted on: July 13, 2014
I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Randi Davenport while she was a colleague at UNC-Chapel Hill. She served as the Executive Director of the James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence and taught Honors students for Carolina’s Department of English and Comparative Literature. After a couple of meetings, we soon recognized each other as kindred spirits with similar backgrounds in the liberal arts, a deep passion for teaching, and an interest in women’s studies. It was also thrilling to find another academic who was pursuing a creative writing life. Randi has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Literature, both from Syracuse University. Over the years, I have been inspired by Randi’s dedication to writing.
Randi’s first book, a memoir The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes: A Mother’s Story is about her developmentally disabled son Chase’s psychotic breakdown at age 15. She chronicled being a single parent and the challenges of dealing with the medical industry. This blurb by Alice Hoffman is indicative of the high praise the book received: “A heartbreaking, disturbing, and truly courageous story of one mother’s fight to save her son.”
Randi Davenport is the author of the novel The End of Always (Hachette/Twelve, 2014) and of The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010). In 2011, she received the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer’s Award for Creative Non-fiction, and was a finalist for the Books for a Better Life Award and nominated for a Ragan Old North State Cup Award for Non-fiction. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Salon, Huffington Post, Washington Post, Ontario Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Women’s History Review, Literature/Film Quarterly, Victorian Literature and Culture, among others.
I have been looking forward to speaking with Randi about her new novel The End of Always that is partly based on her family’s history. And, I am thrilled to announce that the novel has just been nominated for a National Book Award! I am delighted to welcome Randi Davenport to ‘The Practice of Creativity’.
The desire for love is a nearly universal human experience, and Marie seeks love throughout the book. But in The End of Always, power and violence seem to thwart her every step of the way. How you do balance these big ideas while telling a tale like this?
I didn’t start by thinking that I was going to write a novel about power and violence, that’s for sure. I started with Marie. Marie Reehs was my mother’s grandmother, which makes her my great-grandmother. She was born in America but her father, mother, and several older siblings were born in Germany, on the island of Rugen. This is where the family came from when they immigrated to Waukesha, Wisconsin. The only thing I knew about Marie when I started was that her name was connected to a deep family mystery. I set out to solve this. When I did, I discovered the events that inspired The End of Always. And those events eventually led me to the issues of power and violence you mention. But I couldn’t start with those, just as I couldn’t write a novel that was just a literal transcription of my great-grandmother’s life. Either choice would have taken me on a fool’s errand.
It’s important to remember that the novel is a story, first and foremost. It’s about one young woman whose life, I suspect, will feel achingly familiar to many readers. If I’ve done my job, Marie’s experiences cannot help but tell us something about ourselves. Perhaps that’s where the things you call “big ideas” come into play. But I didn’t write the novel trying to nail those concepts. I wanted to get at the heart of Marie’s life. The “big ideas” about power and violence are inescapably central to her world. As they are to women everywhere.
Talk a little about the title The End of Always. What does this phrase mean to you?
In the most obvious sense, the title refers to Marie’s fight to escape the brutality that the women in her family have always endured. For her, at least as far as the world of the novel is concerned, always comes to an end. But the end is hard won. It may not last. We don’t know.
More broadly, the title refers to the always that women in America experience. Even women who insist that they have never experienced violence and perhaps believe that it’s not all that pervasive know what a risk they take when they walk in a parking garage alone at night or on an empty street in an unfamiliar neighborhood. They know what it might mean if they run out of gas on a country road or fail to check the back seat in their car when they get into it at the mall. They have seen the things that men they know do. Deep down inside, we all know where we live, even if we say otherwise.
The title is less hopeful on this score. Could there be an end to that always? I’m forever optimistic, but I’m a realist, too.
What was the most difficult part of writing this book?
Writing this book was the most difficult part of writing this book! I made a number of false starts. I kept re-writing. My agent was endlessly patient with me. I was still revising right up to the day the page proofs were due. I had a hard time letting the book go. I think everyone at Hachette/Twelve could still see my fingernail marks on the pages when they arrived at their office.
Socialist ideas pervade the Wisconsin community of immigrants that populate The End of Always, but the novel makes clear that true equality does not extend to women. Do you consider this a political novel?
The End of Always is a novel. It’s not a polemic. It is, above all else, a story about a girl and the choices she makes or the choices that are thrust upon her, and her discovery of her place in the world. When I started writing, I actually was thinking of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles, which is a story of a girl’s journey in an inhospitable land.
But to the extent that The End of Always shines a light on the hard and absolute fact that some Americans are beaten or killed or abused or otherwise damaged when they try to walk this land free and equal—well. I can understand why readers might find the political in that. And of course, the novel focuses on a girl’s story as a way to talk about America, to give us insight into ourselves. That literary terrain is nearly invariably reserved for male characters so I suppose this book is disruptive in that way as well.
What does your writing practice look like?
I’m a writer so I write. If you come across me during work hours, it might not look like I’m writing. It might look like I’m staring into space. Or like I’m pulling my hair out. When I was more able, I’d go for long walks. I do lots of thinking before I begin but I don’t do outlines of any sort. I often talk to myself. Depending where I am in the process, I might be sobbing. No. Just kidding. It rarely comes to that. I also write every day. In the morning, before I do anything else. I’ve always done it this way. When my kids were little I’d get up two hours before they did to write. Now that they’re grown, the habit of writing first thing in the day stays with me.
What’s your best writing tip that you’d like to share?
Let’s see. There are lots of people out there giving advice to writers. Very little of that advice is any good. The best of it is mostly just okay. A good deal of it is truly terrible. Potentially damaging, even. I don’t want to contribute to the problem. However, I’ve been writing my whole life and by this point I do know something about the process. So here’s my advice: If you want to write, write. Forget prompts and tricks and gimmicks. Roll your sleeves up, plant your butt in your chair, and tell your story. Write. And if this isn’t something you can bring yourself to do or if you can imagine any other way to spend your time (Face Book? Twitter? Vacuuming?), it could be that writing is not the thing for you. That’s a hard fact but it’s true. Writers write. And my advice is to get to it.
To find out more about Randi Davenport, visit her website.
Dear Alice,
Happy Birthday!
I like many other writers, readers, scholars and folk are sending you the biggest of birthday wishes and affection. Here are ten things that I want to thank you for:
- For your beautiful smile. By the time I was a sophomore in college I had discovered your body of work and read everything I could find. In my desire to develop as a writer and having so few models that looked like me, I nurtured secret fantasies of being your daughter–because I thought we had similar smiles. I know that sounds strange. Don’t misunderstand–I loved my mother and her face. But, she possessed high cheekbones, ones that I would never have. Seeing your smile with full cheeks made me appreciate my own wide smile and made it easier to imagine myself as a writer. Also, an essence of kindness radiates from your smile that draws people in that I admire. Now, more than twenty years later, I am a writer and have nurtured my creative self, so had shed that fantasy of being your daughter. But, I still love your smile!
- For writing The Temple of My Familiar. Epic, metaphysical, culturally rooted and romantic! I still remember a snippet of a line that Fanny says to her husband as she is trying to encourage both of them to spiritually evolve-“I love your breath most because it is the least colonized part of you” (paraphrase)
- For writing about African American women’s creativity and exploding conventional notions about what creativity is ‘good for’ in the landmark essay ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’. I have written elsewhere about the power of that essay in my life. I am still amazed that in many popular creativity books, authors still fail to acknowledge the genius of African American women (and other women of color) and reduce creativity solely to production.
- For naming womanism.
- For your novel Meridian. I just finished teaching this amazing novel to students in my ‘Women of Color in Contemporary U.S. Social Movements’ class. It provides a powerful connection to the struggles of black and white women during the Civil Rights movement. It also beautifully explores the psychological and health challenges of being an activist.
- For writing about role of meditation and Buddhism in your life and the value of contemplative practices for the future of humanity.
- For resurrecting the work of Zora Neale Hurston.
- For The Color Purple. Singular and visionary.
- For Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems.
- For your short story collections: In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women and You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down. These collections tackled topics that ranged from abortion, pornography, black love, internalized hatred, love, lust, fame, and valuing one’s roots.
I’ve stopped myself at 10, but I could easily keep going. Thank you for all that you have written and shared.
Black Feminist Love Evangelist, Poet, Activist and Scholar: Interview with Dr. Alexis Gumbs
Posted on: July 21, 2013
I know many smart and even brilliant people, but few that I would bet on winning a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ award one day. I believe that Dr. Alexis Gumbs could have that in her future. A true renaissance person and visionary, she is almost single-handedly exposing the general public to black feminist concepts in multiple media and innovative ways. She is the creator of the ‘Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind’, a multi-media all ages community school based in the wisdom of black feminist literary practice. Alexis is a literary scholar with a PhD in English, Africana Studies and Women’s Studies from Duke University and a widely published poet and essayist. She is also a community activist and co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Project, an experiential archive project documenting generations of “black LGBTQ brilliance”. Alexis was named one of UTNE Reader’s 50 Visionaries Transforming the World in 2009, was awarded a ‘Too Sexy for 501-C3’ trophy in 2011 and is one of the Advocate’s Top 40 under 40 features in 2012.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Alexis on my community based participatory research project with African American mothers and their adolescent daughters regarding their communication about health and sexuality. On this project I got to experience her creativity, knowledge of arts based approaches to community engagement and interdisciplinary training and learn from her. Those lessons have stayed with me.
I recently caught up with Alexis to talk about her new poetry book and current projects. I’m so happy to welcome her to ‘The Practice of Creativity’.
–Tell us about your new poetry collection, 101 Things That Are Not True About the Most Famous Black Women Alive. What inspired it? Are there recurring themes that you explore?
101 Things That Are Not True About the Most Famous Black Women Alive came out of an exercise that I designed for myself after listening to Diane Di Prima reading her poem “10 Things That Are Not True About the She Wolf.” I thought to myself…what an interesting exercise. What would it mean to write 10 things that are not true about Oprah, or Condoleeza Rice? Those were the first two poems that I wrote for the collection and I found that there was something liberating about writing out things that were not true about women who are so famous that they seem to be universally known.
Usually I spend my time writing things that I believe to be true about women who are not famous by any stretch of the imagination, so this exercise flipped my practice inside out, but ultimately I found it to be a way to offer some love, breathing room and space in my relationship to women who I often critique (especially Rice). At first I found myself wanting to push back against the media’s pretense of explaining and knowing these women through surveillance and stereotypes, but ultimately I had to admit that I was pushing back even more on some of my prejudgements of these highly visible black women.
As a black feminist I do feel that it is my responsibility to find a way to love and respect all black women, even those who make decisions that to do not align with my politics and those who I feel are different from me in very significant ways. I found the exercise of writing 10 things that were not true about each of these women to be a way to access love for these women based on the very fact that I do not know them, and I do not know what might be behind some of their decisions and self-presentations. That piece of every person that cannot be known is the possibility in them and is the reason they must be honored and cherished for what they might do, who they might become, who they might already be that no one could have ever predicted.
–Much of your work stems from the legacy of African American feminists who were writing during the 1970s and 1980s. Why are their words important to your creative life?
I was born in 1982 and I feel everyday the consequences and liberations of what it means to have been born into a world which black feminists were transforming and rearticulating in urgent ways. When I first started reading their words as a teenager they gave me so much permission to believe in a world that could change in significant ways and to believe in the people around me as the energy of those changes. I have been using Audre Lorde’s words as epigraphs to my own writing since high school and I continue to find a starting place, a jumping off point and a challenge in her words and the words of other black feminist writers that helps me to clarify and awaken myself as an artist.
-You are a scholar, essayist, teacher, blogger and activist. You manage to pack a lot into 24 hours! How do these different activities feed into each other and you?
I wake up really early, but I take a lot of naps. 🙂 For me research, writing for long-term and immediate audiences, designing educational rituals, and building community are all components of an ongoing act of love. I see my whole life as an opportunity to honor my ancestors and love my communities in the best ways I can. And my challenge to myself is to find deeper and clearer ways to do that daily.
–You advocate a DIY approach to publishing and encourage other writers to explore self-publishing. What have been some of the benefits and challenges of this approach?
I strongly believe that multiple layers of publishing are important for creating the world of words that we deserve. Self-publishing is a lot of work and it has the intimacy of hand to hand exchange. A self-published work can stay very close to the author and bring the author very close to audience. Sometimes we literally touch hands. Sometimes I write your name on an envelope and lick a stamp. Sometimes I do layout myself and have to look at my own words sideways and upside down. I think self-publishing and book-making are forms of intimacy that I will never give up. In addition sometimes the urgency of particular words towards a particular audience in a particular moment requires skipping over the long process of traditional publishing. At the same time, I am reaching a point in my work where I need to enable my words to travel much further than my long arms can stretch. For that purpose other publishing methods that require more time and more people become helpful too.
–What’s the next project that you’re working on?
Oh there are so many projects. One project that I am very excited about is a retreat in an eco-village in Jamaica called “Soon Come” for writers like me who are of Caribbean ancestry in diaspora and who find it a creative challenge and imperative to connect back “home” to the Caribbean. I am also in the process of getting feedback on a book of essays, a book of Toni Morrison inspired poems, a workbook inspired by the Combahee River Collective Statement and more!
–What’s your best writing tip that you’d like to share?
Write first. Wake up and write first.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer black troublemaker, a black feminist love evangelist, a prayer poet priestess and has a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. Alexis was the first scholar to research in the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan Papers at Harvard University and the Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University and is currently on tour with her interactive oracle project “The Lorde Concordance,” a series of ritual mobilizing the life and work of Audre Lorde as a dynamic sacred text.
Alexis has also published widely on Caribbean Women’s Literature with a special interest in Dionne Brand. Her scholarly work is published in Obsidian, Symbiosis, Macomere, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Literature, SIGNS, Feminist Collections, The Black Imagination, Mothering and Hip Hop Culture, The Business of Black Power and more. Alexis is the author of an acclaimed collection of poems 101 Things That Are Not True About the Most Famous Black Women Alive and poetic work published in Kweli, Vinyl, Backbone, Everyday Genius, Turning Wheel, UNFold, Makeshift and more. She has several books in progress including a book of poems Good Hair Gone Forever, a scholarly monograph on diaspora and the maternal and an educational resource called the School of Our Lorde. She is also the co-editor of a forthcoming edited collection on legacies of radical mothering called This Bridge Called My Baby.
Alexis has been living in Durham, NC for almost a decade and has been transformed and enriched by holistic organizing to end gendered violence and to replace it with sustaining transformative love. Locally she is a founding member of UBUNTU a women of color and survivor-led coalition to end sexual violence, of the Earthseed Collective a black and brown land and spirit reclamation project and the Warrior Healers Organizing Trust, a community accountable foundation practicing organic reparations and transforming blood money into blood relations.
Find out more about Alexis through her multiple blogs and online communities:
http://blackfeminismlives.tumblr.com/
http://www.alexispauline.com/brillianceremastered/
http://www.mobilehomecoming.org/
http://brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com/lexicon
http://www.thatlittleblackbook.blogspot.com
http://www.blackfeministmind.wordpress.com
Purchase her poetry book: http://www.scribd.com/doc/114139208/One-Hundred-and-One-Things-That-Are-Not-True-About-the-Most-Famous-Black-Women-Alive
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