Between Books--A Writer's Journey

The Invention of the N****r

2012-01-26T08:38:00.004-05:00

In this historic clip from 1963, James Baldwin explains how the language we use to describe someone reveals more about us than the person or thing we are describing. He offers what the use of the N word reveals about America's need to call him a n****r. As many of us find ourselves being more careful about using the N word, is the core of what Baldwin is saying in 1963 really any different in 2012?

Alicia Anabel Santos Interview Coming Soon

2012-01-19T09:49:00.001-05:00

This powerful, passionate author and filmmaker, Alicia Anabel Santos, will be interviewed on my blog in the weeks to come. Stay tuned!

On The King's Day--Inspiration!

2012-01-15T21:55:00.004-05:00

Happy Birthday, Dr. King!

Visit Me on Facebook

2012-01-15T11:06:00.000-05:00

Hello, Readers,

I just wanted you to know that I also have a Facebook Fan Page: http://www.facebook.com/AnikaWrites

Please feel free to visit me there and connect.

Enjoy your Sunday!

Regenerating Generations

2012-01-14T11:04:00.027-05:00

Photo Credit: Paul Abdoo

re.gen.er-a.tion: regrowth of lost or destroyed parts or organs

It's important as a writer to do my art well and do it in a way that is powerful and beautiful and meaningful, so that my work regenerates the people, certainly Indian people, and the earth and the sun. And in that way we all continue forever. ---Joy Harjo Poet and musician (Muskogee) pictured above

As a Pocasset Wampanoag and African American woman, there are pieces of me that history claims are lost or destroyed...

I was raised as an African American because for generations it was not safe for my Pocasset Wampanoag ancestors to speak of our true heritage. Some of us had become “praying Indians” (Christians) who had fought on the side of the English from 1675-1676 in what came to be called King Phillip’s (Metacomet’s) War. Others refused to give up all that was dear to us and fought instead for our way of life with Metacomet and Weetamoo, the male and female warriors, respectively, who gave their last breath to that cause. When the war was over, the head of my ancestor, Metacomet, rotted for 25 years on a pole in Plymouth as an example to any Native Person who would even think of not submitting to the English. His body was quartered and hung from trees. His hand was given as a souvenir to the Native Man who killed him. The use of our language or any mention of those who had fought against the English meant slavery in the West Indies or death. And yet, the fact remains that Weetamoo, Metacomet, Amie and Tuspaquin are my people. I am neither lost nor destroyed. So it is with my people...

in ourstory

my people live on

we, wampanoags

still fight

still breathe

still write

still dance

still love

still sing

still here.

Hurling Words Into the Darkness

2012-01-05T06:07:00.000-05:00

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.—Richard Wright

This is the perfect description of how I sometimes work. I often know the beginning and ending of a story, but not the middle. Always there are words inside me. I feel them rising. Barely clothed, thirsty, tired, tight within my chest, they arrive, mad with desperation to breathe outside of me. I know nothing but to find the path of their release. What incantation will pull them singing through my fingers to the page? I cannot rest until spent and satisfied, I see their journey through from darkness of conception into the darkness of their birth.

I follow them outside of me to the place of their telling. Ego dissolves. I press myself against the wall, hiding, listening. What are they trying to say? They echo when they’ve begun to find their way, as if to reassure me. Here is the trail. I must hear my way through. Is this the rhythm? Does the feeling sound like this?

And when the words have travelled far and finally reached the shore, I also send other words along. There is recognition. They must move forward or die. Lest they become windblown, forgotten. Forever unexpressed. Together, they enter the ocean. No matter width or depth, it is the watery descent that counts. The sweet surrender to compulsion of expression. If I am lucky, they look behind them and see that they are not alone. It is their hunger to live that pulls me in behind them. They cover me and gnaw at the tender places of my soul.

Re-Vise Your Year (Or Rita Dove's Advice)

2011-12-31T09:51:00.000-05:00

Here you are at the end of another year. Are you sad to let 2011 go? Can't wait to kick it out the door? (I'm with you.)

Wait. Now here's the beauty of being a writer, or at the very least, thinking like one:

Folks will tell you that you can't change anything that happened in 2011. I beg to differ. Why else would I write fiction if not to create the kinds of worlds I wanted or to change the course of events that have happened in my life? That's how writers figure things out. We write to re-vise, re-see what happened, then re-vise again to create what could have happened. Like other artists, we use the stuff of our lives to understand our lives.

Rita Dove had this to say about the value of revision: "In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things."

So whether you write fiction or not, don't be afraid to re-vise your year. Have a sobering, long look at it. In the bittersweet process of reflection, there is always the possibility of something unexpected, perhaps a burning ember from the hearth that could set the spirit of your imagination on fire.

Lift Ev'ry Voice & Sing!

2011-12-27T10:38:00.004-05:00

http://singers.com/group/choral-mixed/

Everyone's got a vibration. The exact tone of your voice, the way your particular vocal chords work together to produce a sound are unique to you and only you. Maybe you love your voice. Maybe you hate it. Maybe you've never given it much thought as a person who is privileged to be able to speak. In any case, your voice, your sound, belongs to you. When it comes to writing, the same principle applies. If someone shut your voice down when you were little, made you feel as if you had nothing of value to say, you may have lost the pure joy of watching your voice come alive on the page. I'm here to tell you that with the challenges ahead on our planet, we need every voice in the chorus of possibilities. So if you haven't found yours, take the first step by believing you have something to say, and say it---to the screen, to the page, to anyone willing to listen, but say it. If you've found your voice, use it. And remember, there is no one way to write. Watch below for all the many ways in which other writers do it...

When You Lose Your Agent

2011-12-23T10:08:00.006-05:00

Everyone who knew Manie Barron knew that you didn't ask him for his opinion if you didn't want to hear the truth. He had a quick, infectious laugh and no problem telling you what was on his mind. And thank God that he did. He had a treasure trove of publishing knowledge up there in his brain and lots of generosity in his heart.

Manie was my agent. His experience in the world of publishing spanned everything from sales to editing to writing. Before I met him, I was told by my then agent, Pam Bernstein, who was leaving the business but handing over the authors whom she believed had promise to other agents, "There's this guy at William Morris who doesn't like anybody's stuff, but he loves your book."

I came to see him in the opulent New York City offices of the William Morris Talent and Literary Agency on W. 53rd St. between Sixth and Seventh Avenue. His big, beautiful smile made me feel at home. We sat down on his leather couch and chatted. Not only did he tell me that he really did love my book, but he told me exactly why. Then he said he'd be there for me to talk me down from the bridge when everything looked bleak and I felt like it was better to jump into the icy waters than to go on. He made me feel special.

When we talked on the phone, he called me "darlin " and "sweetie". He tried his best to get work for me in between my fiction projects, even landing me a meeting with Cicely Tyson, when she decided she was ready to write her memoirs.

With great trepidation, I sent him the first six chapters of my historical novel several years back, hoping he would like it. He did. But no matter how hard he tried, especially hoping to ride the heels of Edward Jones' winning of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Known World, we couldn't get a bite. He knew enough prominent editors who were willing to take a look, but the six chapters alone (with a 48 chapter synopsis), for different reasons at different publishing houses, didn't do the trick.

And then, life happened and for many years, we lost touch. I continued working on my novel, BBC Radio 4 chose to broadcast my story, Draggin the Dog, which was included in my second national publication, Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing, a literature anthology that I was honored to be a part of. Manie became a father and kept inspiring other African American authors not to give up in the white-dominated industry of publishing.

I found out a few days ago that Manie died of lung cancer on January 8th of this year. I love you, Manie. You were one of a kind. Thanks for all your faith in me and your love. I will miss you immeasurably.

De-Mystifying Creativity

2011-12-19T13:33:00.001-05:00

Creativity: an individual, quirky quality that some were born with or a unique and practical gift, accessible to all members of a community? Whatever you believe, it is an indispensable tool in one's writer arsenal. Seeing it as something that happens outside of you can be tricky.Welcoming and honoring it as a part of you that already exists is more useful. Noted novelist, Amy Tan, had this to say about it:

When I look at creativity, I..think it is this sense or this inability to repress my looking at associations in practically anything in life.

What got my attention about Tan's definition was the idea of having to repress one's ability to make associations between "practically anything" in one's life. Why would we as writers, as artists, want to repress that kind of thinking? And what would be the payoff of not doing that?

Let's keep it real. As much as people hunger to be creative (or say that they do), creativity makes folks nervous. It's messy. It's irrational. It opens rather than resolves. The creative thinkers in classrooms are often the children who are viewed as problems. They ask questions. They experience information differently. They see more than one answer to a question, and often more than one way of interpreting a question. There is an agenda in society (the classroom being a microscopic battleground of enforcement) that begs conformity. Creative types slow that agenda down.

So, if Tan is onto something, and I think she is, creativity is about paying attention to the kinds of connections your brain is making that may not make any sense. Huh? Yeah. How often is my eye drawn to the particular way in which a single leaf falls from a tree? What's happening when my ear can't shake the lingering note of a French horn or a phrase a stranger utters as she passes me on the street? I don't always know why those events have my attention, but I have come to learn that they deserve it. These are moments when my creativity is poking its head up from my day-to-day existence and saying, "This is important!" Maybe it's the title of a short story or a key piece of information about a character in a novel, or even a line from a poem I've yet to write. Sometimes these moments do not return. They are lost forever.

The point is to be aware of the creativity that holds its breath in the ocean of your subconscious. It is always seeking the path of oxygen--a way to rise to the surface.

What Boundaries???

2011-12-10T14:17:00.000-05:00

http://www.blacksci-fi.com/features/article/afro-futurism_hits_macon/

OK. So you're an artist. There aren't supposed to be any boundaries. The painting above by Eric Wilkerson, Aquatic: Distant Origins, is from an Afro-Futurism exhibit in Macon, GA at the Tubman African American Museum . Just looking at that image opens the door of possibilities. Why is it so striking? When is the last time you saw a Black man travel in outerspace? As African Americans, we are too often used to the chains that constrain and forecast our paths. As artists, the challenge is to transcend and bring some folks with you to another place that's worth their time--to liberate their minds. While you're creating, it's important to be so fully immersed in the world you've crafted, that the place others call reality drops away. In fact, isn't that one of the reasons why we write? But how far can you take your readers, how deep is your offer of liberation if you're not willing to leave the thinking that chains your mind behind? Who decides what kinds of things you can write about? You do. The trick is remaining true to yourself while still being open to all the other selves who live inside you, especially the ones you haven't given yourself permission to discover.

Explore!!

Here's the Las Vegas, NM Interview on Writers Block Radio Show (KFUN)

2011-11-29T21:36:00.002-05:00

Just in case you missed it, here is the 12 minute interview that took place on November 22, 2011, that I've been promising to share with you. It was recorded from Writers' Block at http://www.kfunonline.com, a regular 8:45 a.m. MST, Tuesday morning segment featuring writers, hosted by author Sharon Vander Meer. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Thanks for listening!

Live Radio Interview on Tuesday November 22 From New Mexico

2011-11-16T18:31:00.000-05:00

Please listen in online this Tuesday (22nd) at 6:15A (HST), 7:15A (AKST), 8:15A (PST), 9:15A (MST), 10:15A (CST), 11:15A (EST). I'll be calling in live to Las Vegas, NM Radio Station KFUN 1230AM. It's a local radio show, Writer's Block, hosted by Sharon Vander Meer. I'll be talking about my writing process, past work, and the new projects I'm working on. If you don't get a chance to hear it, I'll see if I can download it whenever I receive a copy. Thanks for listening...
photo from: raadioconnection.com

You Don't Start Out Writing Good Stuff

2011-11-04T20:14:00.000-04:00

Here's a short post saluting Octavia Butler's words of encouragement to all of you who write and beat yourselves up when your words don't come out perfectly the first or even second time around. Crucial moment not to give up. In the end, it's all about commitment to craft. If you're married to this writing life, you have to keep showing up, even on the days when you're taking a beating.

"You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence."

Yes, there is a payoff. So keep at it. I'll meet you back at the drawing board...

Getting Into the Places Buried Inside You

2011-10-27T17:49:00.000-04:00

So, maybe you’re stuck. But maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re right on the cusp of something rich. Maybe you tell yourself you’re stuck so you won’t have to go to that rich place, because rich as it is, it’s pretty scary. Why is it scary? It’s scary because it’s real. It’s the stuff that hurts, or maybe even shames you. That’s why other people will want to read it. Is it about watching someone else’s pain? Yeah. That’s a part of it—the voyeur in us all. More importantly though, it’s about wanting to feel something. Other people’s pain fascinates us because it helps us look into our own and maybe understand it better. Bottom line? We know we’re not alone.

Heather Sellers, in Page After Page, calls it your compost:

The best writers are able to lumber down on a stepladder into this mucky, stinky, rich, fecund place—a place where the good stuff (eggshells, coffee grounds, onionskins, and paper) transforms into the stuff that feeds, that makes growth and heat and life.

One of my mentors, John Oliver Killens put it more simply. He'd tell us, “When you sit down to write, if you’re not willing to show your ass, don’t sit down.” Twenty four years ago, on this date, my dear John O. passed on into ancesterhood. His words still ring true.

Happy composting….

If You Knew You Were Dying

2011-10-06T10:53:00.014-04:00

If you knew you were dying, would you finish that book, polish off that short story draft, just dive on in fearlessly with some outrageous concept gifted to you from your subconscious? Would you wait to be in The Zone or just plow ahead whether you knew you were in it or not? The recent experience of losing my mother has raised questions like these for me. I am learning that when I find a rationalization not to write, especially when I know something is brewing and bubbling to get out, I am actually cheating myself, embracing regret, and stifling an innate response that is crying out for expression.

The good news is that currently, I am no longer doing that. The bad news is we are all dying. Some of us know it and some of us pretend not to. But that knowledge can be an inspiration.With Death at my shoulder, I now see how little time I really have on this planet. I see the privileges I possess of sound mind, mobility, creative thinking, a laptop, shelter, food, love, support, and I feel blessed. I have wasted far too much time in fear—of the work not being good enough, of the time not being long enough, of not having enough money, of the Muse being out of the country, you name it. Meanwhile, the years have gone their not-so-merry way and I am left with unresolved ideas that never found a home.

Take a vow with me: I will believe in the possibilities of my ideas enough to let them take their first breath. I will find joy purely in the process of creation. I will take responsibility for my gifts, and honor them by staying in relationship with them. I will ignore my fears, nurture my courage, and banish the expectation of instant perfection from my consciousness. When I am faithful in this way to my writing, I am faithful to myself.

Guess who’s working on something brand new?

photo from blackartdepot.com

In Honor of James Alan McPherson--HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

2011-09-16T16:51:00.014-04:00

Among my sisters and brothers in the world of literature who give me hope, and there are many---Zora, Toni, Alice, Baldwin, Nikki, ZZ, Wideman, Gaines, Adichie, Charles Johnson, Octavia, etc, James Alan McPherson deserves more than mention. Born in 1943 in Savannah, Georgia, he was the first Black author to receive a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1978 for his short story collection, Elbow Room. As both a Guggenheim and MacArthur Genius Fellow, he is a skilled writer and teacher who has devoted much of his energy to developing writers in the famous University of Iowa 's Writer's Workshop, of which he was also a participant in his earlier years. He's attended Harvard, Yale, Morris Brown. His accolades are many: several books ranging from short stories to essays, publication in more than 26 journals and magazines, several Pushcart Prize Awards...the list goes on and on. Besides the gratitude of the many craft lessons that come from reading his work, I want to thank him for exemplifying the best of not only the African American tradition, but of American literature in general.

Listen to what he said when interviewed in inertia 1:

"You know, the blues is a synthesis of Greek tradition in that the Greeks in their religious festivals each year, would go to the temple dance or whatever, and dramatize tragedies during the day and comedies at night. And the two together said that life was hard but well worth living. The blues captured that. But we have lost the sense that they have transcended something; and the society encourages us to say that it is all very tragic and it doesn't give us any room to say we transcended it.

We have lost sight of what we did to affirm who we are and we've allowed the larger society to tell us who we are or who we would be. It's a sad thing that the media has given us the right to not be heroic—to become social science heroes. By that I mean: instead of confronting the dragon, we confront sociological theories—and the hero always confronts the dragon, not a sociological theory."

So I end this post by reaffirming to myself the importance of what I do, which is write. (And after spending much of today on a new book project I can speak with a sense of legitimacy..). I am no hero. Yet writing forces me into confrontation--with my feelings, with my ideas, with my upbringing, with my values, with the American culture that I am so deeply rooted in. I write because I am compelled to confront the dragon everyday, to transcend, to make sense of the tragedies of the day through the comedies of the night, not just because I am a woman of color, but because I choose to, because I am a writer--period. Simply put, as Kathleen Ossip states, "[I write] Because I want to. This is no small statement.."

Happy Birthday, Mr. McPherson!

Stories I Was Told or How I Became a Fiction Author--Maybe

2011-08-28T13:58:00.021-04:00

The first “Indian” I ever “saw” was in a Hollywood movie. He was bare-chested, screaming, and wildly riding to his death on a horse, while several other screaming bare-chested “Indians” were following suit in the face of the rifle fire of calm, white men with blue uniforms and beige hats who were clearly trying to kill them. I never felt a thing when each one of these wild “Indians” were picked off by a Calvary bullet and fell whooping off of their horses into the dirt. The white men were obviously sane and righteous. The “Indians” were crazy and obviously savages. White men—winners. “Indians”—losers. Right? Wrong, but...

This is one of the stories I was told as a child about what the world was like.

No one, at that time, told me that some of my ancestors were Pocasset Wampanoags of the powerful Algonquin Nation. No one knew. I was told instead that I was an African American.

The first African I “saw” in school was also half-naked, screaming, and dancing—right before she and others like her were shackled and enslaved. There were no pictures of their great civilizations, and if there were, suddenly the color of the Africans’ skin had changed and magically, Egypt—the only exception to the savage beast rule, was no longer on the continent of Africa.

Thank God for my father, who studied ancient history. He had told me that our people were great thinkers, scientists, mathematicians, and builders. He told me about the pyramids of Egypt and the highly civilized empires of Mali, Songhai, and Timbuktu. He was very clear to point out that these great people were Nubian and looked like us.

So, now some of the stories I am hearing as a child are contradicting each other. It was obvious that my teachers didn’t know the stories my father knew because they seemed to have only heard that people who looked like me had only become civilized once they were taken from Africa. They even got angry when I tried to share the stories my Dad had told me with them. How dare I question their knowledge and authority to tell their (my) story!

Everything always went better when the stories I told them sounded like the stories they had also been told. Could it be that at some point I got tired of this battle for my brain and decided that I would just make stuff up that had no basis in reality, other than what made sense in my own world of fantasy?

I don’t know. Yet, even then, when I look down at the beginning of my path to becoming a fiction author, I see that it was littered with good guys (and ladies) and bad guys (and evil women)who conformed to the descriptions of The One Story, the only story White America told me I must tell. There was no neutral space where I could not be influenced by The One Story I was hearing from almost everyone else. I didn’t know any of this then, which makes it even more powerful, more deeply ingrained in my psyche. When I was taught something even as basic as grammar, for example, were the he and the she ever supposed to be anything other than white?

How did this help me, when I was a child, to make sense of the world? Perhaps I learned early what I was expected to see, hear, interpret, and say if I wanted to get along and get ahead. And yet, there was the constant lure of my imagination, calling me, coaxing me away from this world where everything made sense only when certain people said it did. And there were my parents, whom I can never repay—my mom reminding me that the road of a Black writer was special and demanded the craft of working with the elements of a different truth to create new realities, and my dad, who together with her, modeled that all of us as a family were a part of a larger community that was, in the 60s of my childhood, quickly becoming the American Civil Rights Movement.

To imagine then, the he and she of the English language, to be someone other than a mainstream American, was actually quite revolutionary. Imagination in itself became, for me, an act of liberation.

Please enjoy MacArthur Foundation Genius Fellow and Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as she talks about her early beginnings and “The Danger of a Single Story”:

A Child's Message to Adults

2011-08-19T12:51:00.003-04:00

Here is the power of a young mind. If we could re-connect with that part of ourselves that allows us to think, hope, and imagine as freely and as passionately as this young girl does, most of our problems would be solved. I challenge you to have a pen and paper nearby when you are done watching this and try to capture the ideas that this girl sparks in your heart and mind.

Imagine

2011-08-10T09:26:00.078-04:00

I was searching for something to post when a dear friend sent me this Espada poem. It reminded me of how important the ability to imagine really is. It reminded me of how it has always saved my life..

Imagine the Angels of Bread

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,

gazing like admirals from the rail

of the roofdeck

or levitating hands in praise

of steam in the shower;

this is the year

that shawled refugees deport judges

who stare at the floor

and their swollen feet

as files are stamped

with their destination;

this is the year that police revolvers,

stove-hot, blister the fingers

of raging cops,

and nightsticks splinter

in their palms;

this is the year that darkskinned men

lynched a century ago

return to sip coffee quietly

with the apologizing descendants

of their executioners.

This is the year that those

who swim the border's undertow

and shiver in boxcars

are greeted with trumpets and drums

at the first railroad crossing

on the other side;

this is the year that the hands

pulling tomatoes from the vine

uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts

the vine,

the hands canning tomatoes

are named in the will

that owns the bedlam of the cannery;

this is the year that the eyes stinging from the poison that purifies toilets

awaken at last to the sight

of a rooster-loud hillside,

pilgrimage of immigrant birth; this is the year that cockroaches

become extinct, that no doctor

finds a roach embedded

in the ear of an infant;

this is the year that the food stamps

of adolescent mothers

are auctioned like gold doubloons,

and no coin is given to buy machetes

for the next bouquet of severed heads

in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles

began as a vision of hands without manacles, then this is the year;

if the shutdown of extermination camps

began as imagination of a land

without barbed wire or the crematorium,

then this is the year;

if every rebellion begins with the idea

that conquerors on horseback are not many-legged gods, that they too drown

if plunged in the river,

then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,

teeth like desecrated headstones,

fill with the angels of bread.

--Martin Espada

BOOKS OF HOPE

2011-05-18T18:17:00.003-04:00

I came across this video today and it just made me smile, to think how far my once fledgling Books of Hope has come.

When we let go of our stereotypes, we liberate our children...Let their true stories be told!

2011-04-25T15:03:00.004-04:00

An African American boy in Oakland CA defies the odds. The real question is why is his ability so astonishing to so many and how many more kids of color like him exist?

Full Circle

2011-03-06T09:03:00.018-05:00

For the past four months, I have been watching my mom, sometimes close-up, sometimes from afar, languish in hospitals and nursing homes. While she suffered, and continues to, after a very radical back surgery, (ironically intended to improve her quality of life), my writing also suffered. This is the first time I am putting pen to paper to think out loud about this connection within connection. Having made certain promises to my mother when she was in better health about not sharing “her business with the world,” I am rather self-conscious about even writing this now. But I discovered something very important this week, and perhaps it will help another writer out there somewhere. I hope it will also honor my mother and give recognition to the legacy she has given me.

If you have dedicated your life to writing, as I have, whether you are consistently published or not, (cuz after all, no one pays you to write a novel these days unless you have already reached a level of notoriety), you tend to not be happy with yourself when you’re not writing. The nagging guilt. The ideas that you see the fingertips of slowly fading away from you as you seem unable to reach back. The mountain that some days seems just too high to climb…That’s the place I’ve been in since my mother went into the hospital. I’ve justified my residence at this Hell Hotel to myself by saying, “Your mother needs you. Of course you have no energy to write. Your mother is in crisis. As her daughter, all your energy must go to her…”

One day this week, I was sending the team at the nursing home some background information about my mother that I thought they needed to know. A way of them bringing lifeblood to her face in the gray, sameness of the audience they looked out upon each day. A way to un-train their eyes and really see. I wanted them to see her as a person who was still alive and brought value to this planet far beyond whatever interactions they were having with her on a daily basis. Here is an excerpt from what I wrote:

All of us were privileged enough to grow up in a household where books were practically sacred. I can remember all the word games. And how the words became my playthings. She read to us at night before we went to bed. (Before WWII, her stepfather had read the “funny papers” to her and her sister. I imagine she was passing on the tradition.) She would open the brightly colored, cloth-bound book. The strange, black marks on the page would come to life through her eyes and the way the sounds and silences whispered, giggled, peeked, then danced, sometimes strutted out from inside her. Pictures appeared in my mind. She would close the book as I fell off to sleep, launched into a world of dreams. And when she would return the next night, and open it, that same world she had transported me to the night before was still there between the cloth-bound covers.

It was magic.

I was enchanted. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I wanted a piece of the power in the words. I wanted to hold them inside me and do with them what my mother had done to me. She nurtured my curiosity into a gift. She nurtured my gift into a strength. Every time I brought home a composition assignment, she helped me craft the letters, sentences, paragraphs, showing me what my mind could create. Ultimately, I was blessed enough to receive from her the same joy and respect she had for the words.

As I grew into my adolescence, she wrote volumes and volumes of poetry, often by hand. I was also writing poetry then. I think we inspired each other. She was also the sole editor of my father’s NAACP monthly newsletter. Later, in my adulthood, when I was editor of five national magazines in Manhattan, I hired her as an advice columnist. She was hugely popular, as she was able to combine her counseling and writing skills into a very distinctive style.

So, as you work with her, I thank you in advance for all the ways in which you are helping her to improve the quality of her life, and please know that she is an intelligent, precious being, who means everything to us, everything to me…

In the process of writing this note to my mother's caregivers, I discovered what I think my mother would really want me to do, if she could actually articulate it to me. She would tell me:

Those times when we wrote together were promises we made to each other about how important words are in our lives and what they can do for the lives of others. Even if I can no longer write, Precious, you don’t stop.You hear me, Anika? You don’t stop…

What Has Become Normal

2010-07-22T11:16:00.011-04:00

I gave a presentation a few weeks ago about internalized racial oppression for a mixed race group of graduate students. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it is when we, as People of Color, act upon, believe, enforce, adopt, essentially take to heart all the messages that white folks as a group give us about how ugly, unintelligent, unworthy, etc., we are. So, let's be clear. We don't initiate this action. It begins externally from the dominant group. We are bombarded by it everyday through media, billboards, textbooks, movies, store displays, and on and on...

Now here is the killer.

Because internalized racial oppression has become so normalized in our communities, which is directly proportional to the amount of racism we are absorbing on a daily basis in the United States of America, the People of Color who were witnessing my presentation appeared barely impacted. The white folks cried. But not one of us shed a tear in eulogy of days gone by when we did not hate each other, when we did not hate ourselves so deeply that we could so calmly pull the trigger in the face of someone who looked like us, the days in which skin whitening and eye rounding were not multi-billion dollar businesses. I realized much later that I gave a presentation to folks of color who had never known anything else than these times in which we now live, in which racism is so intensely at our throats, that we are doing its work by devouring ourselves. They were too young to know of any time in which this was not the case.

How sad. I dedicate, with all my heart, Lucille Clifton's poem to my sisters in that room...

Listen Children

listen children
keep this in the place
you have for keeping
always
keep it all ways

we have never hated black

listen
we have been ashamed
hopeless tired mad
but always
all ways
we loved us

we have always loved each other
children all ways

pass it on

Lucille Clifton

Questions About the Price of the Ticket When Equity Is Not Addressed

2009-12-01T20:13:00.016-05:00

In between writing books, I do anti-oppression consulting (and will probably soon publish some articles about that work). I recently had the opportunity to see very clearly who pays the price of the ticket when schools and organizations do not have the courage to address issu
es of equity. There is an impact. I offer the questions below as a reflection. While they paint an intimate look at the possibilities of a very school-specific type of classroom---an advisory, I believe they hold implications for broader ideas of courage, social justice, and the future of children on this planet.

1.How does the advisory approach used by your advisors give white advisors the toolkit they need to be effective advisors of students of color?

2. How long must the families of color, the largest percentage of the end users of public school services, wait for the essence of their children's lives to be a priority? How maddening would it be for you to have strangers who knew nothing of your world make decisions about what should and should not be a priority in the healthy development of your children?

3. Who are the scholars of color whose work is published around issues of healthy development? What is the message when these scholars' perspectives are not represented in materials in general and specifically during live professional development sessions?

4. What is the impact of racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc. on issues of healthy development in children? Who decides what is healthy?

5. How are the needs of all students served when language like "the kids" and “students" is used to apply to all students?

6. How does the issue of safety play out differently for students of color vs. white students? For advisors of color vs. white advisors?

7. How does "student self-calming" become a more valuable skill for students when all advisors have skill in building an anti-oppression community in their classrooms?

8. How can students teach advisors about how rage plays out in their communities?

9. What is the connection between rage and internalized racial oppression?

10. What role do parents and community members play in the lives of their children's futures? How can that capital serve to teach advisors about the world of their students?

11. What role does adultism play in a school’s advisory approach? What is the connection between adultism and student voice?

12. What message do white students receive as a result of white adult advisors not addressing issues of race?

13. How and when will your school community gain the knowledge and skills to help consultants to help advisors help students navigate issues of race?

14. What is the connection between your mission to help create equitable schools so that all young people succeed and the low percentage of consultants and/or educators of color, as well as the absence of resources that reflect the needs and issues of students of color?

15. What is the possibility that your school community profits from the on-going inequities in your school without having to directly address them?

16. What does it mean if this neutral place your school community believes it has chosen by addressing issues of equity some times but not all times, does not exist, and by the very act of remaining "neutral" in the face of inequities, it is doing damage?

17. What is the message to parents, students, teachers and leadership if those who speak up about issues of equity are dismissed?

Are You Compelled to Write? Baldwin Answers

2009-10-21T14:23:00.009-04:00

Read the quote from Baldwin below, then click the link for his interview that explains it.

"If you can describe it, you can control it. If you can control it, you can outwit it..."

Found Some!

2009-10-19T11:11:00.011-04:00

I've been on the hunt for African American literary magazines, or at least literary magazines that regularly publish African American writers. So far I am finding most success by looking at historically black colleges and universities. Below are a few I have found. Please add more in your comments, if you are aware of them. Thanks--happy hunting!

Spelman College's Aunt Chloe: http://auntchloe.blogspot.com/
Texas A& M's: Callaloo: http://callaloo.tamu.edu/
In the UK (Wasafiri): http://www.wasafiri.org/

White Hip Hoppers, Race & Class

2009-09-30T17:57:00.011-04:00

Hey, Folks, Just thought I'd share this posting with you that I did as a guest blogger regarding issues of race and class---from one artist to another. First look at this video clip interview with MC Serch to which I was responding: http://vimeo.com/6460812
Then go to JLoveCalderon's blog under The Color of Wealth for my response: http://jlovecalderon.com/
Feedback is always welcome.
Blessings,
Anika
PS--If you're hungry for more on this topic, check NPR's series:
Hip-Hop: Under Fire - Not Just a Black Thing

Where Are All the Black Literary Mags??

2009-08-05T00:20:00.008-04:00

OK. I'm just gonna say it. I'm frustrated. Where are all the Black literary magazines? The editors who look like me and have some clue of what I'm trying to say? What in the experience of a white editor has prepared her for the experiences and feelings of my characters? Seriously, if anyone out there knows of any Black literary magazines out there that a) exist and b) are publishing quality fiction, please drop me a line. If I took to heart all the rejections I've gotten over the years from all the white gatekeepers who read my words and didn't know what to do with them and therefore deemed (and doomed) them inadequate, I would have completely forgotten that my first book was actually published by Doubleday (incidentally by a Black, female editor). Sometimes, my friends, it's one hell of a lonely road...but I can't help myself, I've gotta keep on writing...

Your World
by
Georgia Douglas Johnson
Your world is as big as you make it
I know, for I used to abide

In the narrowest nest in a corner
My wings pressing close to my side

But I sighted the distant horizon
Where the sky-line encircled the sea
And I throbbed with a burning desire

To travel this immensity.
I battled the cordons around me
And cradled my wings on the breeze
Then soared to the uttermost reaches
With rapture, with power, with ease!
And now a few words from Toni Morrison...(Cuz Lord knows I need to hear all my sistahs tonight)...

Reading in Greenwich Village

2009-05-27T11:18:00.002-04:00

I'm back to the Big Apple for a one-night-only at Small's Jazz Club in the West Village of NYC. I'll be part of The Smalls Poetry Feature hosted by Lee Kostrinsky from 5-7P on June 13th. I'm told I'm going on at 5P for a 20 min. slot. There's a $6 cover charge. I'll be reading from a new work inspired by my short story, "Relativity," for which I have yet to find a literary home. Using the intensely emotional musical compositions of David Thomas, I've created a sort of hybrid between a literary reading and a performance piece with musical accompaniment. The story centers around the lives of three people--two men and a woman, who have an encounter in the 70s that changes the outlook of one of the men in a profound way. I am hoping to capture a feeling between human beings that rarely transpires---when we let go of expectations and labels and open ourselves to each other.
Hope to see you there. (They've managed to make their phone number absent from the website, so here it is, if you have any questions: (212) 252-5091).

Keep writing!

Rediscovering Who I Am

2009-05-27T09:21:00.004-04:00

May is melting into June and I am writing consistently once again. ..

A very gifted radio interviewer, Tania Ketenjian, sent me a copy of an interview I did with her in 2002 on WBAI, soon after my first book, Free & Other Stories had come out. I just listened to it. Amazing how you can remember all the things you thought you had forgotten. This interview with her was one of the most insightful ones I had during that promotional period. Her questions showed keen intelligence and deep thinking, which, in turn, produced some of the best public thoughts about freedom and writing that I may have ever spoken.As I wrestle good-heartedly with the novel, in the moments when I think it will pin me to the mat, I will listen to this captive moment with Tania, and rediscover who I really am.
Thanks, Tania.

(As soon as I figure out how to post the interview, I will share it.)

The Dream

2009-03-09T13:57:00.002-04:00

"The dream is the truth," spoke Zora Neale Hurston, many years ago.

I hear you, sister.

I continue to pursue it. I will follow it to my grave and beyond. I am alive with it. It nourishes me, replenishing my doubt. When I am writing, the dream breathes, it settles restlessly inside me, showing itself in showers of words that sprinkle the page and lead me on...
The novel breathes in me, growing once again.

Watch this video in memory of Zora.

Silent Limbo

2009-01-01T17:15:00.002-05:00

Happy New Year, to you!

Brooks Atkinson, a journalist and theatre critic born in 1894 in Melrose, MA said (or wrote) a few words about a new year that I'd like to pass on to you...

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.

In the spirit of letting go and opening up to all that is good and wise and gifted within you...

Reading From Novel-In-Progress

2008-08-28T21:50:00.001-04:00

Hello Out There! Sorta feels like acting to a tv audience one never sees...Anyway...Wanted to let you know that the novel is still alive. I will be sharing the historical research I have unearthed about the Native and African American experience in New England from the 1600s through the American Revolution. The talk is called: In the Shadows of the Birthplace of the American Revolution: the African & Native Enslaved. It will be a chance to hear a small snippet from the book, but also to get a fairly extensive list of references for those of you who question the revisionist history we are taught here UpSouth, namely that slavery never happened and all the folks up here were abolitionists. Uh----wrong. Hope to see you in Holyoke, MA on October 1, 2008 at 6P at the Wistariahurst Museum...

Hate the Cheap Thing

2008-08-07T00:51:00.001-04:00

If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.—Willa Cather

Sorry to have been away so long, but praise the Lord, I have been writing (and researching). What a feeling to be back in the flow. Up early with my cup of tea and the keyboard. Pounding away with a reckless abandon, without a sense of caring about whether or not what I am writing is good enough. Just writing, letting the emotions and the senses take over so that I am hearing what to say and see next. Listening. There. In the space where the work is becoming...

Looking at Willa Cather’s quote, the word “vitally,” is key for me. I can say I love to write, but if I love something else more that I find myself doing instead, in those times when I could be writing, then writing is, in fact, not vital enough in my life. “Hating the cheap thing” is important too. The cheap thing is what is easy, ways in which I prostitute my gift without using the courage that could come with it to drive me through that fire Cather speaks of. That fire is so often fear of poverty and what will I do if I just don’t take that $70,000 job and choose to find a way to pay my bills and write instead? Yeah. Hate the cheap thing that flashes its value. Seek the thing instead whose reward is longstanding but whose road is elusive. The grit of it between your toes when you are unsure if you are on the road of it at all.

Easier said than done when one is also a partner and a parent, but ultimately, which is better---to be an unhappy, depressed, dissatisfied parent and partner or one who models tenacity and risk-taking in order to realize what one was born to do?

I have recently made the decision to “risk everything and lose everything” by choosing once again to write and figure out how to make everything work around that. Putting a job that is outside of my writing first has always been a trap for me. I am someone who gives 110 percent of herself, and so, a job that exists merely to pay my rent ends up doing only that, but not paying my spirit.

In the end, when my last dying breath leaves my human shell, I want to be able to say that I did the work of risking something for my writing.

Even trying is better than not trying at all.

But I have embarked on a course to do one better than that. I am writing almost everyday now, finishing the novel. I am only taking work that feeds me to continue the writing, not draining me so there is nothing left. It is the only thing that makes sense to me now in the place where I have arrived.

There are days when the novel is my tyrant, pushing me, mocking my fatigue when I still have such a long way to go. I submit. I am doing the work---finally, again. Some days I get through a painful patch and turn it into that valley I hope my reader rolls gently down, down, down, until she is surrounded by the mountains of the novel. It is then, when I too, find myself walking beneath the sky and above the Earth, neck-and-neck with my characters, smelling the porridge on one's breath or feeling the sweat of another roll down my armpit. That is when I am there, in that space where I am becoming “a long sight better” than I ever knew I could be.

See you on the page...

A Life of Its Own

2007-10-29T20:00:00.001-04:00

The actions our lives release into the universe, the words we birth onto the page, magically, logically have a life of their own…

I recently attended an inspirational conference in Philadelphia, PA, sponsored by the Urban Education Fund. The focus was on academic achievement of the African American male student in America. Despite the depressing statistics---a homicide death rate three times the rate for Hispanics; fewer than half of African American boys graduate from high school four years after entering the ninth grade ; African American students have a high school graduation rate of 50% , and make up 41 percent of the inmates in federal state, and local prison, but only 4 percent of all students in American institutions of higher education , all of the workshop speakers I visited had stories of success, methods they were effectively using in their communities to engage Black males in the classroom and build on the students’ natural motivation to learn and succeed as perpetual students of life. So much had to do with the attitudes of the teachers and administrators who believed that these young men wanted to be and could be successful.

I went to the conference luncheon, where some of these educators (twelve in all) were being honored and given awards. It was there that I met at my table, a very intriguing young woman, also of African American descent. Let’s call her S. S was a teacher of seventh and eighth grade students in Philadelphia, whom she clearly loved. (After all, it was a Saturday, and there she was at a conference that would hopefully help her to become an even better teacher.) What made S so intriguing to me was that she also wanted to be a writer. She described her need to quit teaching and pursue a career in journalism, because as she put it, she was just not meant to be a teacher.

The forces greater than us mortals sure do have a creative sense of humor. Here I was, engrossed in a conference as part of a profession that has always paid my bills—education, far away from home on a weekend, and I ran smack dab into my former life. This young woman was me twenty years ago. Without a doubt, the forces had faced us eye-to-eye to help us gaze into a mirror we otherwise would not have experienced.

A young high school English teacher in The Bowery section of Manhattan during the 1980s, I was struggling with the very same tugs on my heartstrings. I was taking home my evening every night, a briefcase full of student papers to read and grade, and I was aching to exclusively be doing my own writing. My love for the students and their battles to simply survive a world that did not nurture and value them, let alone prepare them with the basic rudiments of reading and writing, pulled at my heart. I knew I could help. Hell, I was helping. The students and their families told me so on a daily basis. And yet, as fulfilled as I was, my spirit was missing something essential to my own survival, this satisfying of my yearning to be a writer that pulled with equal power from the center of my very soul.

The guilt was incredible. How could I choose myself when these students loved and needed me so much? How dare I! On top of that, was I just plain stupid? This was something I was obviously good at, with a steady, albeit, small but increasing paycheck to boot. Why walk away from the obviously open hand that was so kindly feeding me? What I came to understand, however, as the pull from my soul became overwhelming, and a poem and short story were published overseas, was that I was not being true to my students or myself. They deserved more and so did I. They deserved someone who was there 100%, not a person whose heart was divided. I deserved to give myself the chance to see if I could be this writer who had haunted my consciousness since childhood. And so, I left, intoxicated by my first publication, yet soberly decided to become a published fiction author of one book after another.

Back to Philadelphia, two book publications and twenty years later, and countless re-entries to and exits of opportunities in education, I came full circle. One of my stories, Draggin the Dog, that was published in Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing caught the attention of a BBC radio producer who was compiling a series of contemporary American literature excerpts for a broadcast in 2005 called Americana. Without boring you with the convoluted details of the path BBC had to take to finally locate me, suffice it to say that by the time I found out that BBC had been trying to offer me a contract for the rights to broadcast my story, it had already been broadcast twice, once in 2005 and again in 2006. I was humbled to have been in the company of Sherman Alexie , Nicole Krauss , Alice Sebold and many other wonderful writers. The woman who delivered the dramatic reading of my work, Alibe Parsons , also gave a poignant interpretation of the story. In the end, the work I had created several years ago had a distinct truth and life of its own, quite apart from the one I had been living when it was evolving into a new and exciting work of art.

So, what’s the point? Education is still the patron of my art, as I continue to both write my novel and work with educators and students in school buildings and organizations throughout America. It took a wake up call from across the Atlantic—again and a young Black woman who stood beside me at both her crossroads and mine, to remind me of the power of one’s words and convictions. Perhaps the only difference in S and I is that I always believed I was meant to teach, but not always in a physical classroom.

No matter how things end, no matter what I do, I am a writer, forever pulled in that direction. I can embrace that energy, recycling, re-energizing itself within and outside of me, or I can fight it, ignore it, feel guilty about it, and deny its presence, as it tears me apart. Every now and then, the forces grant me a pass through the threshold of what my future is becoming, the life of its own spawned on its journey from my original seed. Are you listening, S? Am I?

Thank God for Baldwin

2007-06-05T22:03:00.003-04:00

Thank God for Baldwin. It’s hard to imagine that anyone who’s interested in writing hasn’t heard of James Baldwin, but just in case. When I find myself whining about how much time I think I don’t have to write, I re-read something from one of his novels, Another Country or Just Above My Head, and I know that writing is an ache inside me that cannot be denied. I crave the creation and re-creation of moments that live through me, sometimes as they are born, other times, as I remember them. It is the writing of them that reawakens the sense in me that there was something significant that happened---a feeling, a transformation, and I am off to deepen and duplicate it.

This is the power that we have as writers. So what makes me feel too often like this quote from Baldwin?

“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.”

Self-pity. Frustration. Fear. Anger. Laziness. That 9-5 (more like 9-9) workaday dragon we choose to wrestle with.

But guess what? I can’t blame anyone for that. I must be my own hero. I can’t wait for someone to sanction my art and tell me it’s important enough to indulge in it. THERE WILL ALWAYS BE SOMETHING MORE IMPORTANT TO DO THAN WRITE MY BOOKS. I must engage in writing for it’s own sake, reveling in the feel of it as it goes down into my soul. Cuz way deep down, there, I know that the Baldwin who said this, is right:

“You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.”

This is not about feeling guilty. It’s about not stopping oneself from feeling compulsion. Momentous obsession. So. Today, THIS MOMENT, I embrace my sacred channel, the prayer and meditation that writing is for me. I remember its heavenly landscape from which, once genuinely engaged, I cannot walk away. Which is more frightening---procrastinating your power or walking boldly into its doorway?

“The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.” (Baldwin, of course)

(If you're hungry for more of Baldwin, check out this historic newsreel of him in San Francisco in the 60s.)

Happy writing---let it come through.

A Dream of Absorption

2007-03-17T00:00:00.001-04:00

Zadie Smith, a writer from the UK, when interviewing Ian McEwan,a fellow Brit author, dove into McEwan's fiction and came up with this gemstone:

Zadie: ... there’s a paragraph in Saturday about surgery, apparently, but it seems to me to be about writing. I read it and thought it can’t be about anything else. You know the paragraph I mean? “For the past two hours he’s been in a dream of absorption”—it’s such an exact description of what it’s like to write when it’s going well.

John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, asserts, "Whereas the realist argues the reader into acceptance, the tale writer charms or lulls him into dropping objections;.." He goes on to say that "...fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader's mind..."

I'm struck by both authors' sense of the creative process as a kind of dream, both in the artist's state of creating the work and in the reader's state of experiencing it. I know that when I am fully engaged in putting words on the page, it feels like anything but that mechanical a process. It is much more like pulling pieces from the picture I am seeing from one world into another. I hold them like the sprinkled texture of objects I have touched somewhere else---both familiar and not, hoping they will not dissolve before I get a chance to carry them across the threshold into another life.

Is what I ended up with what I saw in that other place? Did I say what I was hearing in my head? When I can read my words and be in that place I've felt and seen, I know it's working. When I keep the vision in front of me, I can often see what's missing from my words, and that is when I re-vise until the words and the image and/or feelings meet. The more I am absorbed in this process, the more my reader will be, although I must not think of her when I am writing, for fear of too much self-consciousness---the very thing that will ultimately break my reader's illusion and make her remember that she is, in fact, reading.

Gardner says it best, "We read a few words...and suddenly we find ourselves seeing not words on a page but a train moving through Russia, an old Italian crying, or a farmhouse battered by rain. we read on--dream on--not passively, but actively, worrying about the choices characters have to make, listening in a panic for some sound behind the fictional door,..."

May all your dreams remain lucid and rich...

Writing Fiction as a Cultural Tool

2006-09-29T22:12:00.001-04:00

Tomorrow I am going to deliver a luncheon keynote address about connections between writing fiction and culture at U-MA Amherst’s Western MA Writing Project conference on Best Practices in Writing. (Stay tuned for a Jessamyn West: “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” In essence, there is no separation from who we are and what we write, so why would it be so surprising that writing fiction could be used as a way to reveal one's culture? Fiction lives in our subconscious. It is the stuff from which we create.

In 1999, when I first began Books Of Hope, a teen literacy initiative in Somerville, MA, one of the early groups as pictured above, everyone told me that all the young people would want to write autobiographies. Maybe because I am a fiction writer or maybe because of something deeper in our nature as human beings, this was not the case. I have always maintained that if you want to really know who a child is, don’t ask her to write a true story. Coax her into writing fiction and you will find out all you need to know.

Keep reading—it supports writers. Keep writing—we need to hear your voice!

A Way to Find Your Character(s)

2006-07-25T03:25:00.000-04:00

Hello again, those of you out there who have probably given up on my ever making another posting. Sorry. I've been busy writing. I'd like to say I'm working on the novel, but right now the novel is working on me, like a nagging relative whose phone calls I can't bring myself to return. There is hope, though. There always is. Remember I said that I had been writing? Well, that's the truth. I've been crafting two short stories, much to my agent's dismay, I am sure, but since I would always rather be writing than anything else on the planet, I figured it was better to stay sharp and write something rather than feel guilty about not being able to write the novel right now and write nothing.

So why can't I write the novel right now? I've temporarily lost the flavor of the historical period I'm writing about and even though I'd love to bang out the next 20 chapters, I want to do it with the right sense of that time period--in the way the people talk, dress, discuss the latest events, use the inventions of that time, etc. What that means for me is---more research. Which is fine. I love the research. But in the meantime, I want to write. So, I am enjoying the craft for its own sake, even if I can't sell the stories right away (another full time job). And, as always, it is the process of writing itself, where I find myself. Nothing else exists but me and the page, me and the words, me and the universe I have created. what other people think or think of me has no power, for I am plugged into a greater truth much bigger than me or my characters.

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
- Giordano Bruno

If you're also a fiction writer, and want to read an interesting article about how one fellow writer approached characterization in a very creative, unique way, check out M.J. Rose

In fact, as I think about it, as I am writing this, I think M.J. has just given me the solution to what you do in the meantime when you're not quite ready to write your novel, but you don't want to lose your connection to it...As always, happy writing!

Giving Yourself Permission

2006-02-03T23:03:00.000-05:00

Recently, I gave myself permission to work on my novel again. With the new job I've taken, there is often little space in my head to even think about the characters I've left on the dusty roads of the town I created so long ago. But I've been here before. And I have learned that there is a time when you have to shut down everythng and everyone if you want to get to your art. You see, there will NEVER be an ideal time to write. There will always be something more important that needs doing--paying bills, buying food, attending a meeting,etc. So, the bottom line is that if you want to write, you have to do it, even if you feel guilty about neglecting something else. For me, it's become more like torture not to write than it is to go through the pains of writing. When I read a poem or a story that reaches inside my chest and grabs my heart or attacks my serenity in the hollow of my stomach, a throbbing begins, silently at first, and then, becoming the ache I miss of reaching for the right word, the perfect phrase, matching the rhythm in my head to the one in my ear. I moan, suck my teeth, or find myself in an argument. All distractions for the real emotions I'm masking---anger and guilt for not doing the writing I yearn for, and in that moment know like I know nothing else---that I was born for.

To release myself, I finally had to stop waiting on the miracle that was supposed to happen to create the time for me to write. I am the miracle, the miracle of growing and becoming and claiming the path I have chosen. I am the mystery born of courage with no guarantees. I gave myself permission, and that has once again opened the door.

Still Here

2005-10-25T18:06:00.000-04:00

Just checking in to let you know that I am still here out in cyberspace. Made a big move (literally) and am still hovering somewhere between space and cyber. I'll be back soon with more thoughts about the writing life.

'Til then, write on...

Procrastination

2005-08-20T12:05:00.005-04:00

Okay, let's be honest. If you're reading this, you're probably someone who procrastinates. Welcome. I've struggled with this character defect my whole life. Recently, I've had to fight against it to complete the manuscript I'm getting ready for my agent. I have one million reasons I could tell you that would explain why I haven't gotten any further on my book than I have----facilitating the writing group at the women's safe haven in Cambridge, MA, working on film deals that may or may not happen, finding new, creative ways to pay my bills, coaching/editing for graduate students who are writing their theses, family crises, being the mother of a 15 year-old...You name it, but as my mother always says, "Those are good reasons, but what's the real reason?"

FEAR.

Plain and simple. What if it isn't any good? What if my agent can't sell it? What if I don't have what it takes to finish it? Any of this sound familiar? This is a process I seem to go through with each book project, even if the last book was well-received. It is an insecurity common to artists (but we don't own the corner on that block) that I think comes with the other trait, sensitivity. We can let our imaginations take us to all sorts of obsessive fantasies of doom about outcomes we can't control. Guess what? We can use that same ability to actually do the work.

Let me share something with you that I discovered recently. This book that I am writing is a departure from fiction, which automatically raises issues of motivation, competence, etc. for me. I finally realized, though, that my fears around writing this book could be used as part of the thrill of writing it. The not knowing, the doubt, etc. Coming to the page with all of it is really the key, isn't it? You can come to the page acknowledging that you've got all that stuff going on and make that your edge to dive in with this heightened sensation or you can move back and forth from running from the work and beating yourself up about that by obsessing about how frightened you are about the whole thing. Which one do you think will help you put words on a page?

When I came to that realization, I was able to show up for the appointments I'd made for myself, which for me, means 4 o'clock in the morning when the world is still quiet and my mind can be still and open to receive ideas. What I knew would happen, of course, did happen. The book took on a life of its own, separate from my self-consciousness about the process. It created its own energy and just took me along for the ride. When I carve out that kind of groove for my art, gifts arrive randomly---phrases from dreams, an image that catches my eye outside my window, and so on. Once you open the door and give your subconscious permission to work the problem (because that's all art really is anyway, solving problems) it will work overtime and relate everything that you do to that problem. You will see connections where none seemed to exist before. What's changed? YOU. (Try it. Think of a word or concept. Then choose any book in your library. Close your eyes and flip to a random page. Touch it. Open your eyes. Your brain will find a way to make a connection between your original concept and the words on that page.)

Ready to stop procrastinating? Check this out.

Okay, time to go. I'm supposed to be writing my book....

Blogging the Bleep

2005-06-17T20:58:00.001-04:00

Just a quick post about a movie that you need to check out: "What the Bleep Do We Know?" It may change your life. At the very least, unless you're dead from the neck up, it will change the way you perceive reality. I have been watching and re-watching it and my interactions with the world have changed dramatically. I don't want to spoil it for you, so I'll stop here. RENT IT! If you want more information,...

Later...

Books Of Hope

2005-05-05T20:40:00.000-04:00

Are you stuck? Insecure? Fearful about your ability to write? Think you might not have what it takes to be a writer? Let me tell you a little story…

In the spring of 1999, I walked across the street from where I lived in Somerville, Massachusetts at the time, into the Mystic Housing Development, and my life changed forever.

I was working in a bookstore, feeling a bit self-righteous. I would open boxes of other people's books, put them on the shelves and think smugly to myself, "One day, these people who work here and the customers will see my book on these shelves. They think I'm a mere bookseller. What they don’t know is that I am an artiste, a literary Wonder Woman—bookseller by day, SuperWriter by night ."

I discovered instead, what would become the real truth of my existence. I found a passage from one of Iylana Vanzant’s calendars that told me that if I wanted to be successful, I had to genuinely be happy for and help someone else achieve the very success I desired. I had to stop feeling sorry for myself, envying other's success, and get a whole new attitude.

I'd had lots of success working with high school students in New York City, so I thought, "Why not help teens write, publish and sell their own books?" The profile I was looking for was the same young person I'd gotten so much from motivating in New York---a kid who hated English, didn't like to read, didn't like to write. I wanted the kid who couldn't get past a sentence to end up with a book she'd written that had her name on it.

By 2004, I'd been able to reach more than 91 first-time authors, most between the ages of 13 and 23, who were able to self-publish upwards of 71 titles. Think about that for a minute. These were young people who didn't even like to write, writing two, three, four books, reading their work publicly, doing book signings, and sometimes even performing their work. Somerville News was talking about it (and still is), and so were the people in the housing development.

It was an incredible experience. I had lots of support from the Somerville and Boston area communities to help make my dream become a reality. But here's the thing--it all started with a mindset. I visualized it, then took the steps to make the vision come to life, and once the young people were able to believe that what they had been told about themselves was not real ("You're too stupid, too Black, too poor," etc.), space was made in their lives for a new vision of themselves as worthy participants in the larger community of artists---musicians, painters, filmmakers, and so on. They found their voices and realized that not only did they have something to say, but there were plenty of people out there who cared to listen.

In an interview I did awhile back, I talk more about how this relationship impacted my life as a writer.

Although I remain the founder of Books Of Hope, but am no longer the director, it is still going strong. Meet some of these amazing youth and be inspired!

Why Do You Write?

2005-04-11T18:40:00.001-04:00

Hi. If you are interested in writing, at some point you need to ask yourself, "Why?" What does writing do for you? What does it offer your spirit? How does it help you to define who you are? Ultimately, what do you want to do with your writing, if anything, besides write for yourself? (Note: this does not presuppose that one must do something with their writing. For some, the very act of writing is enough.) These are key questions to ask yourself if the process of writing has become a ritual for you, and if you can visualize yourself doing it ad infinitum.

Also, if you do have aspirations to publish your work, it's important to be able to separate your personal reasons for writing from the reasons that are connected with the business of writing. If writing heals you, know that it is something you must do in and of itself, regardless of whether what you produce will be saleable or not. If you are trying to follow a bestseller formula simply to pay your bills, you may feel as if you are prostituting your heart. Ideally, you want to be able to write what makes your heart pump faster.

You know. That sentence that makes you dance around the room.

You want to be able to choose to write because you are writing about something you care about first. If, in the process, you end up creating something that makes others' hearts jump because they care about it too, you've found the perfect union. But it must begin with YOU. By the way, chances are that if you care deeply enough about something, and you can communicate that passion on paper, you can make others feel your passion too.

'Til next time, keep writing and dance to the beat of your heart....

One Resource to Get You Started

2005-03-26T14:00:00.001-05:00

If you've written something or you're trying to, it can often (by necessity) be an isolating process. There are quite a few websites out there that offer you support and community. One that I recommend for its user friendliness and clear writing is Writer's Net http://www.writers.net/. It brings literary agents, writers, resources, and publishers together on one site, where you can promote your work, tap information which can help you to write better, and learn more about the business of publishing. One note of warning: surfing the Internet can be a seductive way to spend your writing time. Feel free to enjoy the resources I will share with you, but remember that writers write. The most important time you can spend as a writer is in the act of putting your butt in the chair and writing.

Heather Sellers, in a book called Page After Page, talks about making writing your lover. Think about it. Would you be unable to see someone just about everyday with whom you were deeply in love? Not likely. 'Til next time, enjoy your lover, even if s/he pisses you off. Write on...

Exploring New Publishing Planets

2005-03-26T12:25:00.001-05:00

I'm a virgin blogger. This is my first post. Be gentle.

This blog thing feels freeing. It's been awhile since I've written without a deadline or an agent's or editor's response in mind. And I would almost always rather be writing than doing anything else.

The first time my writing was published was in the 80s, in a now defunct publication in London, England, called Wild Words. After years of anguish and rejection, my first book was published in hardcover, in 2002 by Doubleday, and later in 2003, in paperback by Harlem Moon/Broadway Books. The book is a collection of short stories entitled Free and Other Stories.

It was a turning point in my life.

The collection is about freedom. It asks the question, "What are the prisons we are born into and those that we create? And how do we break free?" The characters are primarily African American, but not exclusively. There are white, young, old, blue and white collar characters who don't reappear from story to story, but who are each asking themselves, "What does freedom mean to me?" I have used this book in various cities across America to begin dialogues between races, classes, and genders. (If you are interested in my visiting your book club, workplace, public library, school or community center, please contact me through this blog.)

Writing Free and Other Stories convinced me that it is possible to find an agent, be published and be read by people all across America whom you've never even met. (That brings to mind a workshop that I enjoy facilitating for those seeking publication--"Taking the Fear and Mystery Out of Finding an Agent".)

For those of you familiar with my work, I've been busy for the past few years writing an historical novel that is a prequel to the story, "Four," in my first collection. I was (and still am) very excited about this novel. My agent is excited about it. My partner...OK, you get the idea. Unfortunately, my agent and I couldn't get any editors excited enough about it to buy it, so I am now working on a non-fiction book that is writing-related to afford me the luxury of writing the novel once again. These days, writing fiction feels more like a necessity, though. I yearn to be back in the fictional worlds I have created...It doesn't mean that I am any less sincere about my ideas in the non-fiction book, which will be about how I was able to help youth with writing issues. It's just that I miss writing fiction so, so much.

In the coming days, I hope to communicate with you about my life as a writer, meeting as many of you in person at one of my readings or signings as I can. I am also working on a way for you to order a copy of my book signed to you (or whomever you like), if you so desire.

OK. Writers write. Gotta go.
Anika