Tag: nonfiction

Considering Toni Morrison at 90

A photograph of author Toni Morrison by Michael Lionstar
Photo Credit: Michael Lionstar

I had the somewhat frightening (intimidating?) experience of receiving Toni Morrison’s collection of essays and lectures, The Source of Self-Regard before its publication in 2019. [Here is the review I wrote for the smart folks at Bitch Media].

Unlike Ms. Morrison’s fiction, which I sometimes just did not understand (A Mercy, Paradise) or which I loved without really being able to explain why (Song of Solomon, Beloved) or which humored me the way a good friend does (Sula !), her nonfiction was a true education. It educated me by her example, in terms of her biography, and it educated me the way all reading does — through its structure, the way it had been nurtured and considered and through what was not there. 

February 18th would have been Toni Morrison’s 90th birthday, and I’ve been thinking about her a lot, celebrating and commemorating her gifts to me and to all of us through her rigorous writing and creativity. For many Black writers, it is not only her discipline and vision that we admire, it is how she earned the nickname Mother Toni, which is a nod to her guidance to each of us as we have sought to make our way on the perilous journey that is writing and editing and revising and publishing.

Her wisdom is so much a part of my practice that I don’t even remember when I started telling others. Whenever I speak to young writers, I use her example. I remind them that Mother Toni had a day job into her 40s, that she woke up at 4 a.m. before said day job to write while her babies were asleep. I have admired this level of discipline all my life, and while I have different reasons for engaging it, it has been essential to my writing practice all the same. And at the same time, she let us know that we are the people that we are, we are not the work we do, which is essential.

She is also known for giving entire generations of Black writers permission to write the stories that do not yet exist, saying if there is a book you want to read that does not yet exist, you must be the one to write it (this is a paraphrase). I can’t imagine how many books we would not have were it not for this advice, for her presence, for her work and her inspiration.

I rarely have occasion to do such deep research when I plan to write about a writer anymore, but I sensed that Ms. Morrison would not be with us much longer. So, in the before times, I took the liberty of luxuriating in the reference room at the Schomburg. I’ve aggregated below my notes on Ms. Morrison’s life, because these were the thoughts I had that didn’t make it into publication anywhere, and didn’t really fit in any kind of linear place; they also sum up why, aside from her talent, discipline and brilliance, I never felt anything I wrote about Ms. Morrison could really do her justice. I think it was important for me to put this here in celebration of her birthday in part because of how valuable looking at the contours of her life has been for my confidence as a writer. In a collection of her quotes, The Measure of Our Lives, she is quoted as having said: “If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.” One of her many talents was showing us all that writing could do and be if we were brave and persistent enough to meet it.

Writing African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and About Women of Color, Toni Morrison entry, pages 636 – 640

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 marked the 30th anniversary of Toni Morrison becoming the first Black woman to hold a chair at an ivy league university.)

She’s taught at a number of  prestigious colleges and universities including Bard, Rutgers & Princeton, she delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Massey Lectures at Harvard University. She’s also received a number of honorary degrees including from Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Harvard, and Yale. “Although Morrison is perhaps best known for her fiction, she has written successfully in several other genres as well, including drama, children’s and YA, short stories and criticism.”

Won the Pulitzer in 1988, the Nobel in 1993 – the first African American and only the 8th woman to ever receive the prize. Her body of work began with the short story that grew into the novel that became The Bluest Eye, work that “established her recurrent concern with the meaning and place of black female identity.”

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination (1992)

Two collections of critical essays (this would now be three, with the Origins of others, I think)

Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (1992)

Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (1997)

Icons of African American Literature

266-298

“The search for love and identity runs through almost everything I write,” (Taylor-Guthrie 96) Page 269

Page 273

“For Morrison, narrative is necessary. It is a psychic process that enables humanity to conceive and satisfy its fundamental need for coherence and understanding. The model of psychoanalysis throws light on the progress of characters looking for themselves as well as on the peculiar link the narrative creates between them. Such a relationship, reflected in the reciprocal link between narrator and reader, finds its model in the relationship shared by the analyst and its patient. The narrative of the one is stimulated by the patient listening of the other. Wisdom, if it emerges from such relation, is the work of the past, thanks to the traces left by memory or dream. In both cases, the aim is to discover the power of the desire that fuels the story, its origins, in order to master the process that, by elucidating the past, will lead to maturity. For the American black community, whose past is more easily read on the mutilated bodies or in the unfathomable eyes than in libraries, whose present is most often synonymous with alienation, telling stories is above all the way to refigure and to understand, to accept and to master a dismembered history made of holes and omissions.”

Toni Morrison: An Annotated Bibliography, David L. Middleton, 1987

From “Good, Bad, Neutral Black,” NYT Mag, 2 May, 1971, Vol. 7, p. 3 ff

“TM assesses books designed for black children…That which is truly good becomes universal: “Like so much that is meant for black folks, like so much that black people do for themselves, it ends up in the marrow of the culture at large.”

Page 26

“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.”

Review: The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

I am ecstatic to share my review for Bitch Media on Toni Morrison’s stunning collection of speeches, essays and meditations, out today, The Source of Self-Regard. I inhaled it and underlined entire paragraphs over the last two months. I went to the Schomburg for something else entirely and found an annotated bibliography that informed a lot of this piece. These glimpses and pieces of her are the nation’s greatest living novelist at the top of her form and the most intimate look we are likely to get at her most closely guarded feelings and emotions — especially as it relates to the writing process.

The third section of the book, “God’s Language,” begins with the most beautiful piece of writing I have ever read—the eulogy Morrison delivered at James Baldwin’s funeral on December 8, 1987. It is also the closest glimpse we’ve had into Morrison’s personal relationships. Morrison lays her heart bare for a friend in a short poetic jubilee that’s reminiscent of Smokey Robinson’s recent speech at his childhood friend Aretha Franklin’s homegoing service.

“Jimmy, there is too much to think about you, and much too much to feel,” she begins. “The difficulty is your life refuses summation—it always did—and invites contemplation instead. Like many of us left here, I thought I knew you. Now I discover that, in your company, it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: You gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish.” Morrison might as well be speaking about herself. For me and many other writers, Morrison demonstrates how to be in a world that’s committed to your destruction. “You gave me a language to dwell in—a gift so perfect it seems my own invention,” she continues.

Throughout the book, Morrison reveals herself to be a teacher-student who is not just giving readers information that they’re expected to take in and regurgitate. Instead, she’s a “literary homegirl” (a phrase that she actually uses in the text). Referring to a friend as a “homegirl” implies a sense of ease in the presence of someone who knows and loves us, who evokes in us the joy, relaxation, comfort, and depth we typically only associate with home. Home is where we learn who we are, if not who we will become. Home is the starting point. In the title essay, delivered in Portland in 1992, Morrison explains how she viewed self-regard while writing her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. Morrison’s lecture deeply resonates with me because it gives context for arguably her most famous work, which at its heart, offers Black women an artistic vision of our liberation.

9780525521037

A Letter to my Nieces & Nephews on Ella Baker’s Birthday

bitstream
Photo Credit:  NAACP Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

My loves,

One of the greatest Black women poets of our time, Lucille Clifton, is not frequently taught in schools — or at least not taught enough. Her poem, song at midnight, contains a line you may have seen on the internet, in part. We like to circulate it among ourselves as a clarion call, a prayer, a balm & mantra, especially the last lines, but here is the second part of it, from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser:

born into babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

The epigraph to this poem is from a Sonia Sanchez poem: “…do not send me out among strangers.”

Black women’s lives, for so long, were shaped around survival, and it had always been so, it’s true. In The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales told by Virginia Hamilton, in the introduction, though, I was reminded of something else.

“It is amazing,” she writes, “that the former Africans could ever smile and laugh, let alone make up riddles and songs and jokes and tell tales. As slaves, they were forced to live without citizenship, without rights, as property – like horses and cows – belonging to someone else. But no amount of hard labor and suffering could suppress their powers of imagination.”

 

Continue reading “A Letter to my Nieces & Nephews on Ella Baker’s Birthday” →

My Writing Process: Forget what you hear about writing

Nicole D. Collier, one of my favorite members of my virtual writing tribe, asked me to participate in the blog tour. Since I love to read and write about writing (in lieu, sometimes, of actually writing) and I’ve noted that some other writers I admire and respect, including Tananarive Due, Tayari Jones and Daniel Jose Older have all participated, I thought I’d add my humble thoughts and impressions to the mix.

1) What are you working on?

I am working on a book about how racism and sexism have contributed to the demise of traditional journalism and how people of color (and organizations, websites and companies that recognize their value) are changing the media landscape in important but often unacknowledged ways. I have also written a memoir in progress (excerpts have appeared in Huizache, Gawker and TED, among other publications) and every now and then, the poetry that I love comes back. I have worked for years on a short story that turned into a novella about the daughter of a train conductor and the graffiti artist she loves in the Bronx that I know will be published in some form someday.
2) How does your work differ from others’ work in the same genre?

This is an interesting question and frankly, not one that I think too much about. I am willing to admit that not thinking much about it might work to my detriment. Because there are so few people of color who are published and promoted well for work that is for people of color, in that we are the main audience and about people of color that also includes class diversity and is concentrated on the African-American experience, my creative writing and poetry are different from others’ in the sense that I am tacitly aware of internal and external geographies, their impact on how and when and where we tell our stories and how those stories are positioned or excluded from mainstream and popular cultural narratives about people of color — specifically black women. I hope that my reverence, appreciation and empathy for the intersections of my experience are reflected in the work.

The same is true for nonfiction. The main difference in my nonfiction writing is that I am fully aware of the power of the truth, or a truth, to change a life because it is how I was shaped as a young reader who dreamed of being a writer. I love that saying that the creative adult is the child who survived — that is the internal location or spiritual location I write from.

It helps that I have a wealth of traditional newspaper reporting experience, which gives me the power of knowing how to completely own a deadline and the discipline of structure while also giving me the confidence that comes with having failed and made mistakes and learned that failure, or whatever is subjectively considered failure is not the end of the world. There is always something more to write. I think my nonfiction is different from others’ who write memoir, essays and other nonfiction in that I seek to offer information for others to investigate or parse through instead of as a definitive statement or argument.I try to be authoritative without being obstinate and lyrical without trying too hard. I also try not to be too hard on myself when I fail at either of those.
3) Why do you write what you do?

One of the things that brought me a lot of comfort and joy as a young woman and a budding writer was reading elegant, beautiful and clear work about people of color who are traditionally not given models of ourselves in literature that have these elements. I write about women, women of color, the poor and working class and other people of color so that I can be a part of creating the beauty in the world that is otherwise missing when it comes to these groups. Perhaps because of postracial and postfeminist rhetoric, to some people it seems to be redundant and outdated to state and restate how important it is to be committed to writing about black women, especially those who are the least visible in classical or predominantly white canons, but I know how significant it was for me to read Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, for instance, while I was self-parenting and supporting my mother in ways that were beyond my young years or to read bell hooks and Cornel West in seventh grade before I understood what they were even talking about in Breaking Bread. The same can be said of the multi-volume memoirs of Maya Angelou who showed me that while it took courage, confidence and grace to be a Renaissance woman (she was a tall black woman, too, like me — and Octavia Butler!) it was possible to overcome a lot of internal and external resistance to do so.
4) How does your writing process work?

I have multiple processes and I think all creatives do. I write all the time. I write on my phone. I write little notes in a notebook that I usually carry around with me. I prefer to write longhand, which is slower than typing, and to transcribe. I love to write longhand when something is particularly meaningful to me or requires the kind of granular detail that I need to retain. (The most recent example of one piece I did this with is this blog about leaving Austin.)

I don’t necessarily write everyday anymore but I used to, faithfully, for many years. I think you build writing time into your life in a way that is completely natural for you. Do it in a way that doesn’t make it feel like so much work. I actually love work and am addicted to work, so for me, working doesn’t carry a negative connotation in the same way that say, relaxation does (No pun intended, I am working on that. I realize that I ain’t like everybody that way.) But the main problem new and/or young writers seem to face related to process is that they associate writing with work. I say do whatever you need to do to get rid of that mentality and get out of your own way in whatever way you need to to go from being a person who has always wanted to write to being a writer…because writers write. I value my work and the luxury and privilege I have to do it so much that I approach the page as a way to share the gifts that were bestowed upon me and to honor the many different people I’ve known who wished that they had the luxury of sitting down at a page to write.

Writers write but they should also read. I read everything, which is a significant part of my writing process. I believe heartily in taking notes. For nonfiction, I take copious notes. Everywhere — in the book, in a separate notebook, on Post-Its.

I write at all hours, but my best writing gets done when I have the least distractions which is either early in the morning or in the middle of the night. I try mightily to get every last bit of doubt or concern about anything else out of my head while I’m writing a draft and then go back to it when I have some sense and some energy and I can revise. Revision is the heart of my work and the most enjoyable and the most irritating part of being a writer. I revise most things I write a half-dozen times — even blogs — before I am satisfied with word choice and structure and order. Outlines can be really helpful for big projects, but I am not wedded to them.

On June 9th, two of my favorite writers and favorite women are going to post on their blogs about their writing process. Both of these ladies are two of the sweetest people I’ve ever met and their support has helped to keep me writing during some of my lowest points. I hope you’ll read and share their work widely.

Jo Scott-Coe is a fantastic nonfiction author, fellow tall woman and excellent teacher.

Juanita Mantz and I met at VONA in 2012 and her work has been published at xoJane and elsewhere.