Y'all, bardo, thinning veil, and my class

Illustration by Clay Hickson for the New York Times Magazine

Hi y’all,

I wrote a letter of recommendation for this delightful and inclusive southern pronoun in the most recent New York Times Magazine and suggest using it if it feels hospitable.

I hope you’ve keeping as well as possible, gearing up to vote in the midterms, and doing whatever you can to encourage turnout. Beyond those things, I’ve been writing, traveling, Zooming, and doing my best to take joy in what my grandfather called the radiance of October afternoons.

Illlustration of me for Tricycle Magazine by Harriet Lee-Merrion

Not long ago, I spoke with Ann Tashi Slater for Tricycle Magazine about Ancestor Trouble and connecting with the past to move forward in the present. I enjoyed being able to center these aspects of the book in conversation with someone else who’s given a lot of thought to them, through the lens of bardo and her own family.

In this season associated with the thinning veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead, I’ve been reflecting on Ancestor Trouble’s entry into the world. One of things that especially excited me over the past year was a religion professor’s request to include the research-based section of the book on the history of ancestor reverence in their class. I took that part of the book impossibly seriously while writing, researching widely, including into traditions once prevalent in the West, and agonizing for years over how to structure it and what to include. And it’s being read by students!

In a chat with the Fayetteville Free Library book club last night, several readers really vibed with this section of the book, and the personal narrative that followed. Talking with them about it touched me beyond measure.

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Writing About Ancestor Trouble: the Class

Early next year I’ll be offering a class on Writing About Ancestor Trouble. Here’s part of the overview:

This open-genre writing class focuses on acknowledging troubled family histories honestly, open-heartedly, and with imagination. The objective is to help students move ever-closer to the story they want to tell. The focus is on cultivating an immersive and generative relationship to the histories that feed your writing.

We'll explore how to handle gaps in what can be empirically known. We'll discuss repetitions across generations, concepts of inherited trauma, and the value of leaning into our own fascinations and impulses. Ideas about relationship with ancestors after their death will be centered and explored. An openness to synchronicity, the uncanny, and the numinous will be a recurring theme and invitation.

Readings may include selections from Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers' The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, Joy Harjo's Poet Warrior, Sarah Smarsh's Heartland, Emily Raboteau's Searching for Zion, and my own book, Ancestor Trouble, among other books and writings from authors I’ve mentioned in this newsletter over time. I'm still tinkering with the syllabus. Additional reading recommendations will be dispensed freely. In-class writing prompts will be given. Students will occasionally discuss their writings in response to the prompts in breakout rooms before rejoining the full class for a broader discussion but are not required to share more than they're comfortable sharing.

We will approach the course through the lens of ancestors of the body and adoptive ancestors, with the recognition that students may also be interested in exploring broader concepts of kinship and ancestors. All approaches are valid. Students with a difficult experience of family are welcome.

The class is open to writers of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, graphic memoir or fiction, or any combination of these.

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Class Details and Schedule

• Jan 24 (Tuesday), 8-10 PM ET: The Stories You "Can't Tell" 

• Jan 31 (Tuesday), 8-10 PM ET: Navigating Information Gaps

• Feb 7 (Tuesday), 8-10 PM ET: Working with Concepts of Inherited Trauma

• Feb 14 (Tuesday): No Class

• Feb 18 (Saturday), 2-3 PM ET: Office Hours/Open Q&A

• Feb 21 (Tuesday), 8-10 PM ET: Leaning into Synchronicity and the Uncanny

• Feb 28 (Tuesday), 8-10 PM ET: Cultivating a Sense of Connection

• Mar 4 (Saturday), 2-3 PM ET: Office Hours/Open Q&A

• Mar 7 (Tuesday), 8-10 PM ET: Identifying Gifts 

Cost: $400

Class Limit: 12 Students

Two scholarships are available for BIPOC and/or LBGTQI students.

If you’re wanting to delve deeper into a project around difficult family histories and interested in learning more about the class, head over to Maud’s Place and tell me a little bit about your interest. And if this isn’t for you, but someone else comes to mind, feel free to forward this to them. Edited to add: This first iteration of the class is unexpectedly full already, with an absolutely great group, but feel free to send a request through Maud’s Place telling me a little about your interest if you’d potentially like to join a later offering.

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Heretic Giveaway

Happy publication day to Jeanna Kadlec! This month I’m giving away a copy of her memoir, Heretic, which I highly recommend for you and the exvangelical in your life. I’ll be talking with her tonight at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, in a sold-out event.

I shared this before, but here’s the full blurb I wrote for the book: “In this outstanding debut book, clear, elegant, and precise as etched glass, Jeanna Kadlec recounts a detachment from her own heart and desires so profound and carefully inculcated that desire for anyone other than God felt like transgression. Her prose is wise and erudite, undergirded by plain speech and an open heart. Heretic is a light unto the path of every former evangelical who longs for communion beyond the condemnation and spiritual abuse of the church, and a crucial window for outsiders into what it's like to grow up handed a birthright of original sin.” Email me by 11:59 PST on Thursday to enter, and I will purchase a copy from the winner’s favorite independent bookstore via Bookshop.

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Of Interest

• I loved Ava Chin’s Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming, forthcoming in April. My all-too-brief recommendation: “Ava Chin blazes a path through the fictions made necessary by the Chinese Exclusion Act to a gorgeously intimate story of her own family across generations and a powerful indictment of the ways this country's past xenophobia reverberates in the present. She discovers that many of her ancestors' histories flow through a single building on Mott Street, a place that simultaneously grounds and unleashes the spirit of their collective story. A beautiful and necessary book.”

• Right now I’m reading Dionne Ford’s wonderful, inspiring, often wrenching Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing, also out next April. More on this book from me to come, but here’s the publisher’s description: “Countless Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the enslavers who bought and sold their ancestors. Among them is Dionne Ford, whose great grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift. What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take? In these pages, which move between her inner life and deep research, Ford tells us….  To heal, Ford tries a wide range of therapies, lifestyle changes, and recovery meetings. ‘Anything,’ she writes, ‘to keep from going back there.’ But what she learns is that she needs to go back there, to return to her female ancestors, and unearth what she can about them to start to feel whole.”

• I finally tracked down the announcement for Lizzie Skurnick’s forthcoming book, which was announced in August. I am over the moon with anticipation for this one and have been hearing about this ancestor of hers for years: “Lizzie Skurnick’s The Special Students, in which she uncovers the mysterious and brutal death of her great-grandfather, a 1926 grad student at Harvard, and discovers he was part of a remarkable group of Black scholars (MLK’s lit teacher among them), who took up W.E.B. DuBois’ call to the Talented Tenth as the architects of a parallel world that allowed Black people to thrive while the white world kept them out.”

• Ada Ferrer’s Cuba: An American History received the Pulitzer! I especially like Ed Morales’ review in The Nation: “Early on in her masterful book Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer alludes to a double meaning embedded in her subtitle: ‘History in the first sense refers to what happened; in the second, to what is said to have happened.’ Cuba’s history, Ferrer tells us, is likewise two histories. It is simultaneously a narrative of freedom… and a chronicle of the ways in which those who have struggled for liberation understood their history and were ultimately able to change it materially.”

• Dani Shapiro’s luminous and connective new novel Signal Fires is out, to justified acclaim. She’s probably best known for her excellent memoir, Inheritance, and for her Family Secrets podcast. I raced through this book a few months ago.

• I’ve been dipping into Eleni Sikelianos’ gorgeous Your Kingdom, which is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in January. “From the cellular to the celestial, Your Kingdom inquisitively and energetically investigates our notion of biological kingdoms, calling us to ‘let the body feel all its own evolution inside.’”

• So much intriguing poetry is upcoming. Thanks to Copper Canyon press, I have an advance copy of John Freeman’s Wind, Trees, out this month. As I often have over the past few years wandering through the park across the way on Lenape land in Queens, these poems seek guidance from the trees. I also got my mitts on Copper Canyon’s forthcoming retrospective, A House Called Tomorrow: 50 Years of Poetry.

• In the first talk of the Southern Foodways Alliances’s 2022 Symposium, “Latria Graham draws a line from the transatlantic slave trade to contemporary South Carolina barbecue, exploring the erasure of Black contributions from the historical canon. It’s a story that touches her own family history as a fifth-generation South Carolina farmer.”

• Aungelic Nelson’s For the Cool Kids is a handbook “that introduces Black youth to family history and genetic genealogy.”

• Alexander Chee is curating a monthly fiction box set for Boxwalla. He also edited the forthcoming Best American Essays, which I am eagerly awaiting.

• This might apply to two or three people, but if you read my piece on y’all and are wondering what the “scalawag letters” I mentioned might have looked like, here you go.

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Upcoming Events

• October 25: Books Are Magic, launch conversation with Jeanna Kadlec about her excellent debut memoir, Heretic. In Person and Virtual. Brooklyn, 7 PM EDT. (Sold out, but please pick up the book!)

• October 28: Six Bridges Book Festival, conversation with Stephanie Maxwell Newton. Virtual. Little Rock, 4 PM CDT.

• 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. Manhattan, Hunter College, 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.

All good wishes until next time.