“I love to write love poems. I love loving.” – Audre Lorde, interviewed by Claudia Tate
It’s still the Gulf of Mexico.
Canada is still a free country.
It’s still Black History Month.
Did you know that over Thanksgiving, my six-year-old got overexcited, and I don’t remember what he said, but he was rude enough in a crowd of people that I had to pull him aside and give him a talking to. As we’re walking to the other room, presumably to try and soften the coming lecture, he said, “Dada, I’m sad about Martin Luther King getting killed.” You know how hard it is to ream a kid out when you’re stifling laughter and also suppressing the urge to say “we can’t call the FBI” when your child says “we need to call the people who killed Martin Luther King and tell them to say sorry?” So that’s how it’s going in our house, talking to the six-year-old about his biracial identity.
Happy Black History Month.
If you missed last year’s column riffing on an interview with Sherley Anne Williams from the the book Black Women Writers At Work, go check it out! Sherley Anne Williams is full of good writing advice. I wanted to revisit Black Women Writers At Work, a book of interviews edited by Claudia Tate. It’s one of those books that constantly stays on my mind, sort of like Working by Studs Terkel or Indeterminate Inflorescence by Lee Seong-bok. These are nonfiction that books I mentally carry with me in a unique way. It’s almost as though I reach for them like Scripture in times of trouble. It probably means these are books that will get quoted on the most “Storytime With The Shipwrecked Sailor” segments on The Lazy & Entitled Podcast.
February 2025 seems an appropriate time to go digging through Audre Lorde’s interview. Lorde describes herself as a “Black lesbian feminist warrior poet” and goddamn if we don’t need a lot of those right now. Lorde also, years before 2020 style guide updates, requested that “Black” be capitalized. Click that link for reasoning.
Please remember: these are 20-page interviews. I’m only taking small, small snippets. Seek this book out for yourself.
“We should see difference as a dialogue, the same way we deal with symbol and image, in literary study…We need to use these differences in constructive ways, creative ways, rather than in ways to justify our destroying each other.”
The current times feel like they demand we say even the most basic shit, spell it out like the consonant-vowel-consonant words my kid was learning to spell in kindergarten last year. After all, we live in a nation with kindergarten-level reading comprehension.
So: I like living in a diverse culture. I like being around people who are different from me. Not in a “this one neighbor thinks Christofascism is a great way to get the chance to meet Jesus” way. No, I like living in a neighborhood with blue- and white-collar people, with immigrants from every continent, with lifelong Chicagoans and transplants, with enough queer people that it’s extremely normal to see gender-neutral bathrooms, with very old people and college students and other young parents, with a flourishing neighborhood public school that sends home announcements in 20 different languages. My area of Chicago—let’s say anywhere I can walk to, or is max a 20-minute drive or bus ride—is impossible to be bored in. It is impossible to eat a bad meal in. You’ll see and hear good art, public parks, playgrounds, there’s a worker-owned hardware store. There’s a store that sells jeans made in the USA. You can get your car fixed or your bike fixed.
I’m not saying you need to move to a dense neighborhood of a big city to get all this. But seeking this stuff out is a spiritually and materially fulfilling way of living life.
“But because of this shift to the right, some voices once willing to examine the role of difference in our communities are falling silent, some once vocal people are heading for cover…It’s scary because we’ve been through that before. It was called the fifties.”
Put another way, now is the time to stand up for your trans friends. Your gay friends. Your non-white friends. Your struggling-to-make-the-rent friends, your disabled friends, your about-to-not-be-able-to-afford-groceries friends, your about-to-get-kicked-off-insurance-that-covers-their-meds friends.
“I write for myself and my children and for as many people as possible who can read me, who need to hear what I have to say—who need to use what I know.”
Do you—young poet, young novelist, young songwriter—do you ever feel the pressure to be the “voice of a generation?” The “writer who sees the times clearly?” The “writer who knew where all this was headed?” Stop it. Writing is cooking. When you publish a book of poems, you are offering the world a charcuterie board. When you write a novel, you have slow-smoked a porker for anyone who wants it. Some people are vegetarians. Some people are hungry.
“I think writing and teaching, child-rearing, digging rocks (which is one of my favorite pastimes), all of the things I do are very much a part of my work. They flow in and out of each other, help to nourish each other.”
Don’t have a kid just to motivate yourself to finish your novel, but I write more and better after my kid was born. Podcasting is what teachers who dropped out of grad school do. As for rock-digging, I can only assume she means do something physical (say, pickup basketball or kayaking), do something mind-numbing (Animal Crossing?), and do something soul-replenishing (like cooking!) as part of your practice.
“Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change…So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me.”
Told y’all I wasn’t uncool for wanting to see antifascist art.
“…it is not the destiny of Black America to repeat white America’s mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.”
You ever read something and not really want to add anything, just highlight it?
Suppose I’ll just say that I’m not Black. I am white, like my-last-name-is-an-Anglicized-Norman-word-and-my-family-is-from-Tennessee white, colonizing is practically a birthright. Yet I still don’t want to mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.
Happy Black History Month.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris