Praisesong for My Literary Mama

She places you inside a complex character and doesn’t give you any room to wiggle or to flinch or to look away.  She tells the truth and takes you with her to it. She knows the characters and the voice and the emotion of the worlds in which she creates more than any writer I know. She is the most divine unsung woman in Black Literature perhaps in all of contemporary literature. She has never been given full credit for her “linguistic imagination” and her genius as a writer.  It seems that when black women write about black women people think that it’s not much of a stretch that no matter what century, what circumstance, what sociological background, what dialect, what region, we are always writing about ourselves so it’s not real literature just glorified nonfiction. I read once that audiences were always impressed with her when she lectured because there was such difference in the way she spoke and the way her characters speak.

Much has been written and discussed about her personal life, her inclination to stay out of the public spotlight. She lives here in Lexington and I have resisted all these years from driving by her house to get a glimpse of her on a regular basis, though I do admit that I drove down her street once but then felt ashamed and kept my head straight forward and refused to gawk.

I often find myself reacting with clinched fist and a throbbing disappointed heart when someone says they have never heard of her. Then I get really angry but instead of slapping someone’s face, (because my grandmother raised me right) I’m more inclined to blurt out the titles of all her books and tell them to take out a pen and write them down.

My love of this woman’s work almost made me go get a second terminal degree just so that I could study her work further--writing  my extended critical essay on her work while earning my MFA at Spalding University just wasn’t enough. I re-read at least one of her books once a year and still I find new things to admire.

I urge you to go find her work if you don't know it and to read it again if you do. You'll be glad you did.

http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/jonesGayl.php


Corregidora
Eva's Man
Chile Woman (a play)
White Rat
The Healing
Mosquito

Song for Anninho
The Hermit Woman
Xarque and Other Poems

Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature


Gayl Jones: The Language of Voice and Freedom in Her Writings

Write About A Childhood Meal

 

Of course the problem with blogging is that you must...well...uh...blog. I won't complain about my life because I know that we all have hectic lives. So I wanted to revive something from the time of the dinosaurs when MySpace was a social networking force to be reckoned with. I thought I'd post a writing exercise from time to time. So here's the first one:

The Table

Begin a poem or piece of prose by bringing to life a particular meal or food from your. Choose a meal or the eating or gathering of a food that may have been ordinary but memorable. Perhaps someone makes an announcement, maybe someone walks into the scene, someone was fired and it's blurted out, maybe the food is horrible, maybe someone announces they are leaving.etc. 

Three rules:

1) Include the sensory details of the  food .

2) Include the physical details of the food (the peeling, touching, preparing, gathering, eating of it)

3) Make sure something happens (something always has to happen)

Feel free to share your response here or to keep it to yourself.

Happy Wednesday Writing.

Author Crush: Michael Ondaatje

I was on a hotel elevator with him once at the Virginia Festival of the Book. He asked if I knew where a particular conference room was. I pointed to the location on my program. I looked at his beautiful white hair. I listened to his voice steeped with Canada and Sri Lanka. I looked at his hands and thought about all the beautiful words that had come from them. I didn't say "You're Michael Ondaatje!" I knew. He knew I knew.  He thanked me and nodded as we got off the elevator and went in opposite directions. "I love your work," I said over my shoulder and wished I could have come up with something more genuine, something closer to how I really felt.  
What I wanted to yell was "I write better because of you!"
 
The books? Yes, yes. Of course reading the books. Reading always helps writing.
 

But Ondaatje was the first writer who I'd heard say it was okay to be artful and instictive. I don't remember his exact words but I remember him saying he wrote "all over the novel" and then he went about building a bridge to connect those sections. I'm sure it was the poet in him that compelled him to say this.  I held the image of these bridges of words and when I went to his novels and examined them more closely, I could see poems, bits of condensed narrative, bits of expanded narrative, etc. that took the reader from one place to another in the story.
 
Perhaps many writers write like this. I suspect they do. But for me it was Ondaatje who first gave me the visual of the bridge of words from one place to the next and the potential for tension in that approach. He freed me from the restraints I felt when someone tried to explain gut and instinct and art in convulted terms. Sometimes writers sound like mathematicians instead of magicians.
 
Maybe the simple truth is that I heard what I needed to hear at that particular time. But no matter if it was what I needed to hear, his words were magic, filled with conjure. I write better now because of Ondaatje. Or at the very least, I can say that I am now moved to allow my own stories to rise up on their own accord, hoping I'll build a bridge later. I nod toward Ondaatje for that.
 

 
His Books


The English Patient

Divisadero

Anil's Ghost: A Novel

In the Skin of a Lion

Running in the Family

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (this is the only one I haven't read. I'm not sure why.)

Handwriting: Poems

Coming through Slaughter (probably my favorite)

The Cinnamon Peeler (probably my second favorite)