“Know? I know I’m a writer now.” – Sherley Anne Williams, asked “when did you first know you were a writer?” by Claudia Tate
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
Cotton Xenomorph’s “Cryptids and Climate Change” issue continues, with “Grief Shells” by Meg Cass and “After The Flood Recedes” by Justin Carter awakening out of cryo-sleep in our literary Nostromo.
It quickly became obvious, as I was reading Black Women Writers At Work, that I was going to write more about it than just that Friday Links’ 1-2 paragraphs. Being honest, that was a thought I had before even starting the book. Black women are in the running for humanity’s most cogent thinkers, if there were group-based awards for that sort of thing. My most cogent thoughts either happen after I’ve been reading, say, Eve L. Ewing/Claudia Rankine/Gwendolyn Brooks, or after I’ve been talking to my wife. Of course this book of interviews is going to speak to me, especially since it stars people whose stories aren’t “I wrote on my lunch breaks until my novel was done and then talked to my golf buddy Ketterman who works over at Simon & Schuster and now I’ve quit my job at Sterling Cooper to write a lucrative series about a copywriter who learns he’s secretly a superspy.”
Wasn’t sure how I was going to keep writing about it, though. I read a book or more a week for this blog, which is pretty breakneck pace for The Shipwrecked Sailor, Area Dad. Going back and re-engaging with a book beyond what sticks in the nook-&-cranniest parts of my brain matter doesn’t sound as fun as, like, sneaking in a game of NBA 2K after tucking the kid in bed.
Then the last interview in this book, with Sherley Anne Williams, made me think that’s exactly what I should do.
(Note: Sherley Anne Williams does not capitalize “Black,” this is a post-2020 stylistic change from what I can tell, I will reprint as written).
“As I travel across the country, I’m hearing more and more that the people who were directly involved in the black movement feel they’ve been burnt out by the movement and its aftermath. I think the reason why so much attention is now being paid to black women writers is because as a group we are, in our individual ways, trying to say, ‘No, you can’t stop now. Something was there, and you have to keep going on even in the face of the unknown.’”
See, right there out of the gate. This is not going to become an election post, but maaaan I read that and immediately thought of 2020. In 2020, we had clear eyes: COVID is bad, Trump is bad, cops are liars and murderers and petulant babies who don’t deserve to lick gum off the bottom of our winter boots (but should). There was a lot of other stuff, too, but we were super clear about those three things and it seems like they’ve gotten watered down or lost their urgency.
I don’t recommend checking it out, but someone over on Bluesky started an account called Four Years Ago Today. It’s worth reflecting on what we knew in 2020. That was the closest I ever felt to socialism mainstreaming in the US. COVID so clearly reflected how much we need each other, how much we depend on each other. What we owe those of us deemed “emergency” or “essential” workers. How much bosses extract from us, in unseen ways, and how much they don’t need to. How much death could have been prevented if we had a competent government—not just on the federal level, but robust social services and systems of aid. We can’t lose that knowledge just because Joe Biden got the democratic presidential nomination.
But this is supposed to be about writing.
“‘If we don’t deal with ourselves, it doesn’t matter how we deal with the white man.’ This issue over the years has constituted one of the main differences between black women writers…and black male writers…Black women writers don’t deal with the so-called big subjects. Now, more so than at any time in our history, we see that the so-big subjects…those themes are all well and good, but the question still remains: what are we going to do about the here and now, me and you?”
This struck me for a number of reasons that I’m not sure relate to this gendered false choice of Big Themes vs. Intimate Themes. It’s something that keeps me going when I feel like there’s too much going on in the world. When the omni-crisis weighs too heavily. Why write poems when climate change is happening? Why write poems when there’s a genocide in Gaza? Why write poems when so many people remain locked in prisons?
There is always going to be trouble. There are things in the world that want to harm us. Art is one of the things that keeps us alive. We’re always going to need art. Big-themed or, uh, intimate-themed.
“I feel that a writer ought to transcend his or her background to some extent. Background ought not be the only source of creativity. On the other hand, I do know the reason I was first inspired to do a story was because I wanted specifically to write about lower-income black women.”
There’s nothing to add to this, except that that is the balance all writers (and readers) need to strike. Some books are window books, some books are mirror books. Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop came up with that concept, and here’s me talking about it in a Cracked article about parenting.
“I fit writing in[to my life] any way I can…write anytime and anywhere. I could write in a room full of people; I could write on a train. I don’t know if that was out of necessity, but I think it says I was comfortable enough to write anywhere…I could work with the TV on, with kids running around. I was happy to do this.”
Personally, I wish I learned how to do this 15 years ago. I used to need perfect silence (or chosen music), a closed door, time to get into the right headspace to be ready to try to write—then, if I was lucky, I’d get a good 30-45 minutes in before the whiskey made the thoughts illegible.
Now? Shit, dude, I’ve written poems on my phone while Dora The Explorer is on. I wrote chapters of Vine waiting for chicken to roast. I wrote a whole goddamned Cracked article on my phone at a playground in August heat. Go read all of them and try to figure out which one. Having a kid is good way to figure out how to carve out writing time/space without your precious little comforts.
“My topics select me. Then I just go ahead and try to work with them. I really try not to push things. If it’s going to come, it’ll come. I’ve always had enough projects going, so that if one was not going well at one point, I could just go on to something else.”
With the caveat that you should finish things—I linked to a piece recently about the importance of finishing things and I stand by it—this is great advice. Be humble in the face of your work, and let the work flow through you. The ancients were onto something with the Muse.
“I think writing is really a process of communication…It’s the process of reading to people and getting their feedback that’s important to me…It reinforces the fact that I’m in touch with somebody other than my own mind.”
Writing is lonely, and as Mariame Kaba says, everything worth doing is worth doing with other people. We have a responsibility to one another, and our writing has to have a way of living in the world, too.
“For me writing is a process of ordering the world. It is a process of bringing insight, playing around with possibilities, solutions, in a way I could never play around with actual life. Just think of the differences between the ‘order’ of a poem and a novel and the chaos of life. That can give you some insight in knowing that if the chaos cannot be ordered, at least it can be dealt with in a constructive way. It’s this I’m after.”
Bob and I talk a lot on The Line Break about feeling like writing is the one place we feel we can properly order our thoughts.
“No matter how close to autobiography any one piece happens to be, if all I can see is that this happened to the writer, then the writer has failed. The autobiographical thread must represent something else.”
I’ve always felt this way. I really can’t stand when I feel like a protagonist is a writer’s stand-in. This is different from “the speaker of the poem is not the author”—of course not, we all know the speaker of the poem is not the author, otherwise we wouldn’t all repeat it so often and with such urgency, as though we were willing a lie to truth. If I’m watching a movie and vaguely-40s-ish-white-man-hero is making dad jokes, or “I should go to therapy” jokes, or whatever? I feel like I can smell the screenwriter on the screen. But if I read a book/watch a movie and think “I can tell the author has familiarity with this subject/situation, but this character is their own person”—that’s the sweet spot.
“One of the things I would like to see is real American literature taught in this country. I would like to see ‘American lit’ defined and taught in such a way that you’re teaching the literature of all the people in America, not teaching it from one point of view as in the past, which excluded everybody else except white men and a few white women from consideration.”
She was saying this in the 1980s. There is no mythic past “when we weren’t worried about all this race and gender stuff.” The US has never been a white nation, they just put it in the Constitution that only white, property-owning men counted. That’s sort of like that verse about blended fabrics in Leviticus, or the one about homosexuality being a sin—it was a lie they tried to will into existence by writing it down.
“I really believe writing has a purpose: to teach and to delight.”
Hell yeah dude.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris