Family history with imagination

I'm teaching a class, the Ancestor Trouble paperback is coming out, and more.

Hi friends,

The paperback edition of Ancestor Trouble will be out on June 20, and I’m in love with this cover refresh. Like the original jacket, it was designed by Rachel Ake.

Two days before the book comes out, on June 18, I’ll be teaching a one-day online class, on Family History With Imagination. (Updated to say: Registration for this course is closed! Thanks so much for all the interest.) This class overlaps a little with part of the Writing About Ancestor Trouble course I offered, but is structured to allow more people to join, and will focus on cultivating imagination around tough family histories and how to draw on creativity transparently in nonfiction while also prioritizing fact and establishing how the two intersect. (Fiction and poetry writers, and writers of uncertain genre projects, are also warmly welcome.)

Here are the details:

It's entirely possible to write factually about complex and difficult family history while making space for creativity. Come explore ways of integrating empiricism, feeling, and imagination. Bring a pen, notebook, and index cards. Also, facts, questions, feelings, intuitions, synchronicities, speculations, and a sense of play.

This online course is intended to be generative and supportive, and will be held as a presentation with writing exercises, occasional periods of participation by chat, and an opportunity for questions toward the end. 

Suggested reading and the Zoom link will be provided one week before the class start date. A recording will be available to students for one month after the class. 

A request to participate indicates your agreement to preserve confidentiality around disclosures by participants and that you are entering the class in open-hearted good faith. The scholarship available for a BIPOC student has been claimed, as has the one for an LBGTQI+ student, but please reach out if the cost is prohibitive. Fifteen percent of the proceeds will be split between the Manna-hatta Fund, the Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness, and the Black-led Small Business Capital Fund of Mississippi. 

Date: June 18, 2023

Time: 1 - 4 PM ET

Cost: $50

If you’re interested, head over to Maud’s Place—it will be necessary to create an account on the network and then go into the class space there to sign up. If you have any questions, I’ll respond to messages as quickly as possible but bear with me if you don’t hear back immediately.

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This month has been full of excitement, in good and less good ways. My mom’s hip continues to improve! Some beloveds in my family have been having an extremely tough time of it and a great deal of my mental and emotional energy has been with them. My day job’s been busy, with some excellent new hires coming aboard to help with workload. I reviewed a book (more on that below) and am reviewing another.

Max and I went to Baltimore to visit our friend Lauren and had a fabulous time (see above) and also picked up a stomach bug that has mercifully moved along. I had a soul-nourishing time last Wednesday night talking ancestor trouble and related inheritances with a group of amazing, smart readers, thanks to the editor and writer Yahdon Israel, who chose Ancestor Trouble as the March Literary Swag Book Club pick. Last Thursday, Max and I went to see the NBCC Awards presented. I loved hearing from the winners, including Morgan J. Talty, whose great Night of the Living Rez received the John Leonard Prize for a first book, and whose acceptance speech came by phone from his sofa, with his newborn on his lap. After the ceremony, Max and I celebrated his solar return with beer and fish and chips at a local Queens spot.

As for the month coming up, I am behind on writing and on reading that needs to get done, so I’ll keep this newsletter on the linky side.

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But! I wanted to remind those of you in New York City that I will be talking with Dionne Ford about her transcendent first book, Go Back and Get It, at The Strand on April 6. While Dionne and I haven’t met in person yet, I’ve been a fan of her work—including the Slavery’s Descendants anthology she co-edited—for many years. As she said when we were corresponding last week, our conversation in April will feel like a continuation of one we’ve been having through our work for many years.

Come on out and join in—tickets here!

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Reading and links:

• I reviewed Rachel Jamison Webster’s first book, Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family, for the Washington Post Book World. I appreciated the author’s intentional, thoughtful, and inclusive approach, and also had some hesitations and came away with some questions.

• Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe, author of the great book Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk, explained last year why she calls her book an “ancestral autobiography” instead of a memoir: “It couldn’t just be a memoir or an autobiography… It allows it the space needed to be my own story as a Coastal Salish woman, as a survivor, and rooted with it is the story of my ancestors and the women of my family, and I knew this was their story just as much as it was mine.”

• Beethoven’s DNA reveals that one of his ancestors had an affair, and he is not biologically related to the Beethoven family.

• The Black activist Angela Davis was astounded to learn that one of her ancestors came the U.S. on the Mayflower, and you may have seen the brief viral clip where she expresses disbelief. But as Melanie McFarland argues at Salon, the clip is only a fraction of the story and doesn’t do justice to the care with which Finding Your Roots consistently unearths and exposes the family histories of individual people and how they interconnect with the foundations of this country.

• “Archaeologists in Kenya have dug up some of the oldest stone tools ever used by ancient humans, dating back around 2.9 million years. It is evidence that the tools were used by other branches of early humans, not just the ancestors of Homo Sapiens. The tools were used to butcher hippos and pound plant materials like tubers and fruit, the researchers said. Two big fossil teeth found at the site belong to an extinct human cousin, known as Paranthropus.”

• Ancient humans in what is now Europe moved into Southern Spain to escape the cold during the last ice age.

• Years ago Leah Grisham found a suggestion that some of her ancestors were Jewish. Later she converted. “I know my conversion makes me a Jew,” she writes at Kveller, but she keeps looking for for concrete proof of her ancestors’ Jewishness.

• A woman moved from the U.S. to the German town where her ancestors lived before they were killed in the Holocaust—so now people can’t say there are no Jews left in the town.

• Jean Guerrero discovered as an adult that some of her Puerto Rican ancestors were considered Black during their lives, and that her mom and grandmother were resistant to acknowledging that their family has Afro-Puerto Rican roots.

• The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is remembering the journey of their ancestors through the Virtual Trail of Tears Walk.

• Sometimes the word “ancestor” is also used to mean “descendant.”

Sending all good wishes until next time,

Maud