Hi y’all,
I’m grateful to you for following along in these times of inundation. I still enjoy jotting down informal thoughts in a place where I’m not coming into your inbox, and I’ve been blogging again occasionally. Two new posts:
Writing About Abuse is Not Abuse. I’m often asked whether my parents are still alive and if so what they think of my book. Sometimes readers are just curious, sometimes they're afraid of the consequences of sharing their own tough experiences of family. But for some readers, stories about family abuse and trauma tend to transform the writer into the abuser. And: no.
You Can Have Your Blue Check Back. On Twitter, Elon Musk, and the asinine timeline we’re living in.
I’m excited to see Ancestor Trouble included among the best books of 2022 by the New Yorker, NPR, the Washington Post, Time, and Esquire. And I’m floored by the response to my Writing About Ancestor Trouble class. Thank you. I’m sure I’ll be offering it again.
One of the most exciting, unexpected, and moving things to happen to me this year was hearing from Nanette Vonnegut after the New York Times review of my book came out. I adore her work, as I do her father’s, in some of the same ways and in a lot of different ways. In the Times review, Kerri Arsenault (author of the excellent Mill Town) invoked an insight from Vonnegut quoted in my book: “At the root of a lot of art is an injury that needs addressing.” Nanette Vonnegut shared her maternal grandmother Riah Fagan Cox’s written reminiscences of being committed to a residential facility as a psychiatric patient, and I realized only a couple days ago that these recollections are publicly available: “I Remember Jones” (1950).
Above is Nanette Vonnegut’s portrait of Riah (much larger version on her site). And you can also see her amazing monoprint “Family Tree” on her website.
My devotional this Indigenous Peoples’ Month is Patty Krawec’s Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining our Future. Here’s how it begins:
We are related. Nii’kinaaganaa.
My friend Josh Manitowabi breaks down this Anishinaabe word like this. Nii: “I am” or “my.” Kinaa: “all of them.” Ganaa: “relatives, my relatives.” The phrase could mean any of these things: I am my relatives, all of them. I am related to everything. All my relations.
From our earliest creation stories, the Anishinaabeg (plural of Anishinaabe) understood themselves to be related not only to each other but to all of creation. Our language does not divide into male and female the way European languages do. It divides into animate and inanimate. The world is alive with beings that are other than human, and we are all related, with responsibilities to each other.
And in case you missed it last year, I recommend this FAQ from the Manna-Hatta Fund: What Else Can I Do?
Here are my upcoming events:
November 14: A conversation about Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It, with author Jessie Daniels. In Person. Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, Manhattan, 6 PM ET.
November 20: Miami Book Fair, with Rebecca Donner (All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days) and Ada Calhoun (Also a Poet). In Person and Virtual. Miami Dade College / Wolfson Campus, Building 1, Second Floor, Auditorium, 4:30 PM ET.
A few more things: Min Jin Lee on diasporic people and her own grandparents. Latria Graham on indigo, past and present, and its connection to enslavement in South Carolina. The Road to Unforgetting: Detours in the American South, 1997-2022, “on Southern amnesia — collective and personal — in the toxic perpetuation of white supremacy.”
There are more things I wanted to share, but with an event tonight, a pile of day-job work, a pile of other work, and a trip to Miami later this week, they’ll have to wait until next time.
I’m sending all good wishes your way until then.
Writing about abuse is not abuse
I finished reading Ancestor Trouble yesterday. I will tell you, it was a tough read for me though that is not your fault. So much to ponder. I have a daughter-in-law who gives me endless trouble but I try to understand that she is mixed, that she was given up at birth by her white mother, that it took her decades to find her birth parents; then she had a whole new set of problems. Then so did I!
Also I am writing a book, except for when I am not, about my life and how the literature from every year I have lived informed what I lived through as it informed the culture in which I was raised. It often feels impossible, so your book meant so much to me in terms of how to navigate my own.
I will be posting a review of Ancestor Trouble on Goodreads within the next couple weeks. It will be truthful though not in any way negative. Thank you for what you offered in Ancestor Trouble.