Book Review| Memorial Drive : A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey

Memorial Drive

I barreled unexpectedly through Natasha Trethewey’s beautiful and painful memoir, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir. I was compelled to finish it quickly the way we are taught to rip Band-Aids off our wounds to ensure that we won’t prolong a stinging sensation, so that we can get on with the healing part and rush through the grief. I explain a little more, too, in my video review on YouTube.

It is not so easy to recover from wounds that involve our mothers, particularly when they do not survive the failings of the world — the world that’s supposed to protect them.

Memorial Drive is the story of Trethewey’s mother, Gwendolyn, through the past and present lens of her daughter’s keen, writerly eye. No detail is spared, which includes transcripts of recorded phone conversations between Gwendolyn and Trethewey’s former stepfather Joel, a haggard, menacing Vietnam War veteran who continually threatens the uneasy peace that opens the book and remains a question mark throughout its pages.

Poets are gifts to us in times of happiness and relative ease but particularly in times of despair, I think, because they can distill what we would normally couch in euphemism down to its essence. In short, they remind us that events are not only what happened but our histories are our active destinies. We can shape them as we wish, but the facts — comforting or not — well, those remain. For women and Black women most of all, there is a way that this power of witness can override the willingness and tendency of others to forget us.

The ache in my heart spread and flourished every time I read a new detail of Joel’s torment of Trethewey, his disregard for her mother or her brother. His manipulation was a knife, twisting and turning with every page; at one point, he breaks the lock to Trethewey’s new gold-edged diary and the violation the poet felt then and perhaps every moment after she had “found her audience,” was so visceral I had to stop reading.

Part of my reaction to the book, of course, is remembering my own mother’s experiences with abuse; the cavalier way in which she would recount having her nose broken by an ex-husband, the way we fled similar boyfriends and sought shelter in homes for what were then called domestic violence shelters. When I posted a review on Instagram, someone mentioned, too, that one of the other aspects of the global pandemic in this moment has to do with a common feature of disasters, which is a rise in intimate partner violence.

The neglect to which my mother succumbed was very different and, besides, you can’t compare one mother’s death to another’s. But what feels the most true here is that I understood that no one was listening to my mother, even when she documented her experience, even when I was a witness. From this, I learned that women were not considered the authorities of their experiences; that even if they were hunted and pursued until they were broken, they would likely not be deemed worthy of protection under the law.

This is a belief I would rather be convinced is untrue. It’s not really in my nature to give into despair. And yet, here is what happens in Memorial Drive, here is what takes the poet three decades to begin to approach & even now, with great suffering and agony: After many attempts to document the abuse and violence and to escape it, Gwendolyn was murdered by her estranged husband in June 1985. Like so many people who have experienced intimate partner violence, she could have been saved — there were so many people warned, so many signs, documented evidence of his threats to her life — and yet, she wasn’t.

This is devastating on so many levels, but especially in Memorial Drive because Trethewey composes the poetry of her extraordinary experience with clarity, grace and generosity while also compiling detail by way of utilizing the economy of every word to perfect effect. As a result, Memorial Drive reads like a classic memoir of grief, like a tragedy in slow motion, the narrative arc, already known, lingers over the text like a set of strings.

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Reading in the Time of Pandemics

If we have anything in common (and maybe we do, since you’re here), it’s difficult to pull yourself away from the surreal every day world into a book at this moment. This morning, news about some of the major independent booksellers that I love laying off hundreds of workers makes me feel small and powerless. There are still things in our control: Our attention, for starters. And, if we have enough to give, our support of authors and others whose book tours and gigs and opportunities have been gutted, canceled and rearranged due to our new world disorder and chaos.

We can also:

  • Read All The Things: I pulled Aja Monet’s My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter & Tanisha Ford’s Dressed in Dreams off a dusty bookshelf to get started after I finish a few of these books, mainly by people of color, about pandemics & surviving them for HuffPost. I am greatly enjoying Sharks In The Time of Saviors. I just finished the very readable & inspirational More Than Enough by Elaine Welteroth. What are you reading?
  • Pre-order: When I was still moving freely about in the world, last weekend, one of the first things I did was pre-order Elizabeth Acevedo’s two new projects: Write Yourself A Lantern & Clap When You Land. Because I could and I wanted to and she is one of the writers I adore. (It’s such an unusual thing for me to do from my phone that Apple called me to alert me to fradulent activity!! So much shade.) It also feels nice to believe in the future ahead of us and beyond the pandemic. We will flatten the curve and life will not be the same, but we can hope that all of us will still be here with good books.
  • Stop Reading & Go Outside: This is also book related. It is safe for you to take your book to a park or walk it around the block with you, for now, I guess. But also good for your brain and your retention of story for you to step away from the screens as much as possible and ground yourself.

You have other tips? Let me know in the comments. And be well. Thanks for stopping by.

 

 

 

Book Review: When You Were Everything

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Book Cover for When You Were Everything, a novel by Ashley Woodfolk

I have been desperate for stories and narratives that have nothing to do with pandemics, so that’s part of the reason it took me less than a week to tear through this sophomore effort by Ashley Woodfolk. The other part is that it is really, really good and it’s a topic that is almost never raised in literature, which is sad — the topic of friendship break ups.

The story at the center of When You Were Everything is essentially this: Cleo and Layla have been friends for a long time. Layla has a speech impediment (she stutters) and Cleo is, for the duration of their friendship, generally encouraging and supportive of Layla being brave enough to tackle things like school musicals and other environments where she knows her friend can shine, impediment be damned. But then, things start to shift. Layla needs Cleo a little less when she encounters the Chorus Girls, a group of musical nerds at their high school. The adults start acting weird too, and suddenly, Cleo’s parents are separating and her father, a librarian, transfers to a different school. There’s a hot guy named Dominic Grey — yes, even his name is hot — who mostly distracts Cleo from all the chaos, but romantic love is not a salve for losing your best friend to a bunch of snotty choir brats. At least, it’s not always; not at first.

So I won’t give away much more of what happens in the book, but I had so many emotions and feelings almost from the opening pages. ( I say a little bit more on my book tube channel, so you can listen to me go on about my feelings here, if you’d like.) First, like most people, I have plenty of ex-friends who come to mind immediately. Female friendship is one of those intimacies and sisterhoods that can feel even deeper than any romantic bond because of how sacred and sweet it can feel when it’s good. The emotional wreckage, though, feels arguably worse than any romantic break up, too, because weirdly, it feels like you can always replace a romantic partner but a friend of your soul and spirit? A little, tiny bit harder to do, no?

Woodfolk puts this well in the book, when Cleo tries to describe what happened with her and Layla:  “The hurt feels so much like when my parents decided they didn’t love each other anymore that I can feel a shift in my breathing. ‘We…broke up.’

Dom snorts. ‘It’s not like it was a relationship,’ he says, and I frown, annoyed at his reaction. Perhaps he doesn’t know how it feels…to break in this particular way. Or perhaps it’s different for boys? But girls cling to their friends for dear life as they wade through the rough waters of learning who they are while everything around and inside them is changing minute by minute. And aren’t we all a little bit in love with our best friends?”

One of my first published essays was in an anthology called “Secrets and Confidences: The Uncomplicated Truth About Women’s Friendships,” published by Seal Press in 2004. It was about the shifting, challenging dynamics of a middle school best friend who, sadly, did not remain my best friend for too long into adulthood. At the heart of parsing out the whys and the hows of a deeply intimate and close friendship ending was the core of what makes When You Were Everything so beautiful and helpful to have, particularly for young adult readers: We all change and grow. Sometimes the people we love the most change and grow in different ways, or they don’t at all, and that’s somehow more heartbreaking. Our culture of loose ties has made it seem like the norm to stay “friends” with people from your past indefinitely by giving them and everyone else unilateral access to the performance of our lives and happiness online. But the truth is, sometimes it’s the healthiest thing for a friendship to have its season in our lives and be over. You might shed some tears over that sentiment and certainly while reading this book, but it’s good for the soul, I promise — on both counts.

New York Public Library Melrose Branch Visit, February 24th

In case you’re curious how my 2020 is going, this is the kind of story that sums it up nicely.

Last month, a Bronx librarian found I Can Write the World. She loved it so much she wrote a really lovely blog about it. And then she asked if I could come to her library and that’s what I’m doing on February 24th in the afternoon: Letting young people interview me about the somehow adult Bronx girl who now writes things that some people read who only dreamed of this life.

 

Flyer_ Author Visit with Joshunda SandersWhat Lauren did not know, I don’t think, is how deeply I love the New York Public Library.

I have several distinct memories of growing up and surviving my childhood because of the sanctuaries that are New York Public Library branches. Thank God things were never so hard that our homelessness led us to try to sleep in them, like so many homeless people do. But my mother loved books and paper and knowledge, and libraries, of course, are perfect if you love all of those things. So I viewed them as sacred spaces, just like church and school.

That’s why there’s a big chunk of my short story, “Fly,” that includes a semi-autobiographical chase scene that leads Kelly to safety because the bully who wants to beat her up doesn’t have a library card. I distinctly remember losing library books in multiple evictions, back when the library card was maroon and white, and feeling this overwhelming sense of shame for messing up the whole flow of things. Information and self-edifying knowledge and escape to another world were these free escape hatches and I devoured them as if they were food; a different kind of nurture.

During a class trip when I was in sixth grade, right before the last of a long string of upheavals at home, I’ll never forget my relief when at the end of our visit to the West Farms branch, the librarian looked up at me when I shared my name and she saw the amount of fines. I felt bad because whatever the significant amount was, I definitely would not be able to pay. Those were books, too, that could have helped some else. “Miss, I was homeless, so I couldn’t bring those books back, I’m so sorry,” I said, tearing up. Seeing that I was anxious and afraid, she just smiled this really gentle smile at me and deleted the fines and gave me a brand new library card. I feel like it happened all in one movement like that. Such a small kindness had such a gigantic impact that I still tear up all these years later. And that was in the 1980s!

Often when people say something is an honor, it feels like the right thing to say and the most gracious. But I mean it deeply when I say I’m honored that I’ll get to engage with kids from my hometown in a couple of weeks. It’s a sweet moment and one that is deeply meaningful. And really, truly, an honor.

Also: Next time you see a librarian, thank them for their quiet heroism. They rock.

School Library Connection Author of the Month Interview

SLC Author of the Month

I’m delighted to share a Q&A with School Library Connection as its December Author of the Month. I got to share my love of The Bronx, the story behind Ava Murray’s name in the I Can Write the World series and more about faith, solitude and writing across genres. I hope you’ll check it out. You can read the whole thing here, but I’ve included an excerpt below:

 

I love the way Ava’s mother uses the window frame to explain how journalists “frame” stories. It seems like so much of our news these days is framed to fit a particular narrative, rather than to express the truth. Why do you think this started to happen, and what can be done to fix it?

Thank you; it wasn’t until I had the great honor of sitting on a panel at the 2019 Bologna Children’s Book Fair with Rudine Sims Bishop, whose beautiful description of books as windows preceded Kim’s description in the book, that I thought more about the significance of how we talk to children (or don’t talk to them) about how stories are framed, or shaped.

I think that it’s fairly recent in society—adjacent and aligned with the rise of social media—that everyone sort of considers themselves a journalist. When you think about it, journalists are witnesses, people who report what they see. So in a way, everybody’s right. What everyone doesn’t necessarily have, though, are the ethics that go along with what professional news gatherers have—this inclination to shine a light on injustice and unfairness. Most news reporters get into the business (and it is increasingly considered mainly a business) with the aims of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. But I think the reason why news more often resembles propaganda now has to do with a kind of commodification of truth and certainly of news. Integrity or nobility are less emphasized than they used to be because most media moguls are looking for revenue to survive in an environment where no one thinks they need an intermediary for news.

One thing I think all of us could do more of is to consider how powerful our platforms are, whether you think you have one or not. All of us who write, for example, have presences online. How can we use that to help others share their opinions or their stories more mindfully? Sometimes it’s as simple as asking these questions, which I love and did not originate with me: “Does it need to be said? Does it need to be said now? Does it need to be said by me?” The other thing is if we are all journalists, now, it shouldn’t just be when it’s comfortable or cute, but all the time. Ask more difficult questions. Who is the source of this information? Are they lying to me about their objectivity? Why do I believe them? Why should I believe them? When in doubt, find your own credible sources and go with that.

The Nuances of Harriet

This was one of Harriet Tubman’s common refrains:

“If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going.”

We all need to hear that message all the time, regardless of who delivers it. I wrote about my thoughts on the movie, Harriet, on Medium. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you’ve seen it.

Starting from the Beginning

I think all the time about blogging, but then life calls. I don’t even know if people blog anymore, but to me, it feels like the people who care the most about hearing anything I have to say are over here, so I appreciate your patience. And that you have stuck around all this time.

Without saying too much more about it, if you have been a fan of my nonfiction work, consider pre-ordering a copy of the Oxford American 21st Annual South Carolina Music Issue. When the piece is out in the world, I’ll say a little more about it. I’m the most proud of the essay that appears in this issue that I have ever been about anything I’ve written.

In the past week, I’ve wrapped up a revision of about half of a novel; submitted a short story & received an acceptance (!) talked about the gloriousness of writing with a mentee — I am honored to be in the company of writers who are part of the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship program, which you can read more about here — and was excited to see this Lambda Literary video from the Emerging Writers Fellowship readings pop up on the timeline.

I also decided that it’s time for me to find an actual hobby.

Also: I am not without hobbies. I draw. I cook. But all of these things are productive. You know, like running marathons. [ Side note: The NYC Marathon is next Sunday, Nov. 3rd! If you’re in New York, come through! I’m at 42% of my fundraising goal, the deadline is Oct. 31st but I’m floored by the generosity of donors to my campaign who have helped get me to $1,268. That’s a lot of meals for the people who deserve to have the services of a food pantry and a hot meal served to them with respect & embodied empathy.]

And now I’m worn out. Totally pooped. Exhausted.

So, picture me out here in these virtual streets trying to play Grand Theft Auto V.

Yup, I’m dipping my toes in gamer world. If you have suggestions and tips on how to not suck, let me know? It took me a smooth 10 minutes to figure out how to make the main character walk around. I was irritated, but then, something cool happened.

I realize how much I love being a beginner. Maybe it’s the essence of being underestimated, both the self’s underestimation and that of others. I sort of enjoy not being very good at gaming.  I can see how people get swept up into these other worlds, start spending money they don’t have (this is why I had to break up with Candy Crush! I was about to start buying lives and my soul just shook its imaginary head…) I mean, I only just started a few days ago. So, like, there’s time.

But this is also what I love about National Novel Writing Month every November– what matters so much isn’t the end product; there may not be one! The point is that you write like hell, roughly 1,667 words a day, and then hopefully, by the end of the month, you have 50,000 words. I just so happen to have a project or two that I want to sink into in November, so I’m in. I’ve been doing it almost every year for about five years. What about you?

 

 

On running the NYC Marathon again

Almost a decade ago, maybe the fifth or sixth time I tried to quit smoking, I started running.

Since I was a girl, I would sometimes just take off running around the block because I didn’t really have friends or anything else really to do besides read. And getting my heart rate going was my favorite thing.

I could feel the wind on my face. I loved the sheen of sweat on my arms and legs. I felt powerful, like the master of my own fate.

One weird thing about me, though, is that I don’t have a good sense of distance. A childhood friend would be so mad at me when I would guesstimate how far a walk from, say, the Fordham train station was to the Botanical Gardens. To me, especially because there was a big part of it that was downhill, it almost didn’t matter. “Maybe six blocks,” was a standard answer for distance of all lengths, all kinds, anywhere.

“Girl, this is more like fifteen blocks!”

All I could do was shrug and apologize. I was used to just meandering the city, a habit I learned from walking everywhere, borough to borough, with my mother. We walked to save carfare, walked to go to the welfare office, walked to church, walked to the pantry, walked and walked and walked.

But running was mine. Running was mine when I was a kid and it was mine when I joined the track team and set a school record my freshman year. It was mine even when I felt like I was coughing up tobacco residue during Austin 5Ks. Then 10Ks. Then half marathons. One, two, three half marathons, 13.1 miles each, and I wondered about the marathon distance, whether I was brave enough to fail. 26.2 miles, even to someone who doesn’t have a normal estimation of distance is still really damn far.

But here is what I wrote about that about four years ago, in a longer post, Running Through Madness:

Next thing I knew, I had made the lottery for the New York Marathon, the same spring when I learned my father had committed suicide.

Both reminded me that nothing was impossible.

It turns out that running 26.2 miles, and training body and soul to do it, is useful for heartbreak. It does not mend anything, your muscles are all broken, and that becomes the point. Everything is weary and strained and exhausted like your heart.

It took me almost six full hours to run that marathon. I started with thousands of marathoners around the world before the sun came up and finished with just a few lonely Clydesdale running souls just as the sun was going down.

This year, I am running the TCS NYC Marathon again with some of my colleagues at the New York Common Pantry. I sit on the Junior Board for the pantry, which helps serve New Yorkers with dignity.

I’m raising $3,000 to help feed New Yorkers who may not have the resources to make ends meet. The New York Common Pantry provides 6+ million meals each year. We are committed to meeting the needs of underserved New Yorkers by providing nutritiously balanced food and services.

I’m also running to see if I can be a little faster, since I have distance and time has helped me heal the heartbreak that got me running in the first place. But the thing that gets me out the door for running miles that take hours to complete is my passion for making sure the hungry get fed. I hope you can contribute to help with the cause. (I also accept prayers, Biofreeze products and chocolate chip cookies.)

 

 

On the legacy of Toni Morrison

“In time, writing became a way to ‘order my experience…’ It’s always seemed to me that black people’s grace has been with what they do with language.”

Late last year I received a copy of The Source of Self-Regard. I guarded this galley with my life, and from the first page, I felt fed. Redeemed. Seen.

I was completely astounded by it, and by the possibility of writing about Toni Morrison for the first time after years of steeping myself in her work. I did what I always do when I’m intimidated by the prospect, by the responsibility, of trying to do someone justice: I went overboard with research. Flung myself into the stacks at the Schomburg. The above quote comes from the 1987 book, Toni Morrison: An Annotated Bibliography by David L. Middleton. Here are my other notes:

Born 1931 in Lorain, Ohio

Chloe Anthony Wofford

Shortened her name to an abbreviation of her middle name purportedly (and with regret) because no one could pronounce Chloe. The theme of claiming one’s name emerged –noted in entry – in her fiction – from third novel, Song of Solomon (1977) to Tar Baby, her fourth ( 1981)

Graduated from Howard in 1953, English Major, classics minor

Master’s from Cornell in 1955 – her thesis was on suicide in the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.

She taught for two years at Texas Southern University in Houston, then returned to Howard as a faculty member.

She married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison in 1958

They had two sons together, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. They divorced in 1964.

She moved w/sons to Syracuse where she worked as Random House textbook editor. Began writing at night as therapy for her loneliness when her sons were in bed.

Transferred to NYC in 1967 to headquarters for Random House editing acclaimed black women writers like Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara.

She kept teaching – at SUNY Purchase 1971-72, Yale, 1976-77. She left Random House in 1983; Appointed Albert Schweitzer chair at SUNY Albany in 1984. Stayed until 1989, when Princeton appointed her Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. (Note from me: That means 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of Toni Morrison becoming the first Black woman to hold a chair at an ivy league university.)

When I am overwhelmed with sadness and grief, like now, I reach for books. Toni Morrison made it so that when I reached for books, I saw the most glorious, complicated and layered parts of myself as a black woman becoming. When I joined the Well Read Black Girl sisterhood for a viewing of the documentary about her life, Toni Morrison: The Pieces That I Am, it felt like we were witnessing a celebrity in the room with us, like she was talking to every black woman in the room even though we were in a crowded theater in Brooklyn.

She did not know me, but she knew me, because her work reached into my soul and embraced the core of me. That is some of how I feel about Toni Morrison’s work; Toni Morrison who lived by the Hudson, recovered from personal tragedies and still, rose. Still, she wrote. Not just anything — everything. The following paragraph did not make it into my Bitch Magazine review of The Source of Self-Regard:

It is easy for us to take for granted Morrison’s vision, the scope and depth and breadth of it. How far she could see into our future from the quiet of those dark nights of her loneliness. The Bluest Eye, for example, was a precursor for this time – showing us that we would continue, always to vilify the acts of sexual assault against black girls or against women, at least, and maybe sometimes we would consider those two to be in the same category, but we would always excuse the perpetrators of that violence in the bodies of black men. It is easy to look back now that Morrison is nearing the end of a storied, established life, not to put her in a grave or anything, and applaud or be dismissive of the soaring loveliness of Beloved. If the book’s failure to win the 1987 National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award despite notable acclaim was any indication – as these things go, it was taken as such – the idea that a mother willing to kill her children instead of submitting it to a life of slavery was so great a leap that it took an open letter published in the New York Times Book Review signed by 48 prominent black writers to have the literary establishment look again at their discomfort. The following year, Morrison won the Pulitizer Prize.

I would be a less proud, confident, whole black woman writer were it not for the gifts of Toni Morrison. She was and is a literary light for the ages. I will miss her sharp, soft language, that keenly spiritual eye and of course, always, forevermore, the narratives she had left to write, if there was any more for her to give.

I’m too gutted to read her eulogy to James Baldwin in its entirety this morning. But this part, this is what I feel about Toni this morning:

You knew, didn’t you, how I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wildernesses for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn’t you, how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No. This is jubilee. ”Our crown,” you said, ”has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,” you said, ”is wear it.”

And we do, Jimmy. You crowned us.

Happy Pub Day to I Can Write the World

Happy publication day to us!
I’ve thought for months about how to best commemorate this day. I’ve been posting and talking and writing and talking about I Can Write the World since last year, so it’s hard to believe that the rest of the world will have access to my labor of love starting today. 
It might surprise you that I never thought I’d write a children’s book, let alone a series. Many of you know that I had a childhood that made me grown in many ways before my time, just like a lot of little Black girls who have our innocence taken or presumed to be a non-entity. But when Six Foot Press’ publisher, Chul R. Kim, asked if I had a children’s book to write, Ava Murray arrived fully formed — a curious girl with incredible storytellers and justice warriors as her namesake in the brilliant storyteller Ava DuVernay and Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, the poet, scholar and legal pioneer who broken barriers even while Murray struggled with gender dysmorphia. 
I was raised in the Bronx, an underdog borough often defined — like Black women — by lack, poverty and everything that it is not. But just like I always sought out Black women role models and lighthouses of beauty and class, I have always seen the best of the Bronx even when I struggled within it because of poverty. Some people see a place that has been neglected because of the Latinx and Black people, largely immigrants, who are stuck or striving; people for whom success would mean being able to leave for a less abandoned, more expensive, whiter place. But I missed the Bronx every single time I left, even though I was in beautiful elite spaces that were supposed to be better for me, were supposed to be indicators I was moving up. 
This is what home is: It is the place where you are most yourself, where you can feel yourself becoming more of your dreams by the minute, regardless of what you or others may see right before you. 
This is what I loved about my girl Ava as soon as she arrived: She came asking questions about the media she absorbed. She is far less shy than I was, with a parent that is more present, more receptive, more attentive, as so many Black mothers and maternal figures are.
Why, she wonders, is a little girl getting arrested for tagging outside when the murals and graffiti around the poor neighborhoods — which, by the way, have become a global force and industry — actually feel like they make it easier to see the beauty there? As adults, we can say and observe that this is heavy for little kids to encounter, but my answer to that is that we already see that they are witnessing this world of criminalizing Black and Brown children. Not just in the Bronx, but everywhere where teachers tell me 7-year-olds have to report to court monthly to talk to strangers to justify their living here in the U.S. Of course, too, at our borders, where toddlers cry unattended, may have to sleep on warehouse floors, may not be allowed to bathe. 
I had the great privilege of being at Essence Festival this weekend and hearing Michelle Obama talk about the kind of world we want our children to inherit, to live in. I am not yet a parent, but I know that I want our babies to grow up in a world where they know that their voices are important. That they can write their stories. That they can write the world. Not only can they write their world; in order for the world to be the best it can be, for the world to be hold, they must. 
I say happy publication day to us because any book’s publication day is the representation of the work of dozens of people. Thank you for being in partnership with me as I seek to tell stories for young readers. This book is for you. Thank you to Charly Palmer, the gifted illustrator who so thoughtfully crafted the beauty of Ava’s world. Thank you to Six Foot Press and Serendipity Literary Agency for all of the support. Thank you to everyone at Ingram for your encouragement. To my librarian, teacher and writer friend communities — Thank you for understanding the vision and helping me share it widely. I hope this book is as meaningful to you as it has been to me. 
I shared this on social media, but during PrideFest/KidFest, a young girl around Ava’s age with barrettes in her hair held the book and lovingly gazed at it and even in the chaotic craziness around us, I could see that small flicker of recognition that you get when you see yourself. And she said, “She looks like me.” And that to me is everything. That is the inspiration for this book, and the next, and the next.

You can buy the book on Indie Bound, Barnes and Noble or Amazon. Please review this book on Amazon and Goodreads please!