Candor Continued: Celebrations, Frustrated Sighs

A month where I got a little older (happy birthday to me!) and where toxic masculinity just flung itself all over the place...


Anita Hill continues to eloquently speak truth to power even though she probably wants to bust car windows and say: "Y'all back on this admitting lying sexual predators onto the Supreme Court fuckshit again?"

In Sometimes I Hate My State News: Hillary Clinton, Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Friedan, and Helen Keller are deemed "unnecessary" for Texas school books because well, it's just not 1812 enough for some people.

How to write a great sentence according to Joe Moran

Rebecca Solnit explores the storytellers of gender narratives and the gross entitlement of white men, while Megan Garber wonders if we'll ever get past the "boys will be boys" narrative in the time of #KavaNope

Blackballing and bigotry: the price for being a 'cocky' Black woman

I'm in good company with these 25 writers who dish about the agony (and defeat) of writer's block

The traditions of Audre Lorde reside in US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith 

So we're still calling Joyce Maynard an "opportunist" for her relationship with J.D. Salinger? *eyeroll*

Thirty, Flirty & Thriving: Roald Dahl's telekinetic bibliophile (and my first literary she-ro), Matilda Wormwood turned 30 this year, and book's illustrator Quentin Blake imagines what she'd be up to today.


Let me know what were your favorite reads of the month!

Thomas and Beulah

"We were good, though we never believed it" 

Somehow we became the curator of the family photographs.

When a relative died, or time needed to be revisited, out came these mammoth leather-bound books and worn manila envelopes that now occupy an already stuffed secretary, awaiting my lethargic ass to get in gear and assemble them in some cohesive, chronicling fashion. Crammed in the plastic and glued atop yellowed paper is a captured history of intertwined lives, of greeting cards, of pressed flowers, of announcements, of varying faces, and its this history that I stem from.

Whenever I look at these photographs, I wander into daydreams about who these people were. Who is this man in the baseball uniform that I got my nose from? Who is this woman with the pensive stare, cascading pressed waves, and corsage who I should thank for this thick mane atop my head? Who are these light-bright girls in cotton shift dresses standing, squinting, and smiling in the Texas sun? How did they live as they did? How did they thrive in times of transition? How did they cope when the world was even a bigger ball of confusion and conflict than today? These sepia-toned images of varying sepia-toned individuals accompany stories, stories that as the years crawl and rush by are as fading as the images themselves.

Reading Thomas and Beulah by acclaimed poet laureate, Rita Dove felt as if I was rummaging through piles of family photographs, uncovering stories and recapturing a unique history. Though Dove's roots aren't mine, but her words made me feel as if it could've been, that the individuals she crafted weren't strangers.

I know a Thomas: he is my Grandfather.
I know a Beulah: she's my Granny.

It's this act of unearthing familiar familial roots that made this collection such an enriching read for me.

Thomas and Beulah is, on its face, a love story, a story that was intended to mirror the union of Dove's own maternal grandparents. These poems also double as a historical document of the Black American experience, this told through the eyes of two individuals who see the world unfold at the turn of the century, with wars, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights Movement charting their course. Due to Dove's lyrical flair the prose cloud rolls into forming a fable, where ordinary tasks and events such as Thomas arriving by riverboat from Tennessee to a new future up North, and Beulah rearing four girls take on a mythical sheen.

Organized in two parts, the dual perspectives Dove fashions for her characters gives depth to these ordinary lives. Here we have two people who occupy a similar world and are conjoined in their biography, but both have a unique and contrasting viewpoint, and it's Dove's careful, tender wording that gives us this delicate dance between the two of them. With her enriching word meals, it's truly no wonder that this won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987.

Vagabond Heart

 "A female I was, and a female I find myself again; to suffer from it and to rejoice in it."

Renée Néré is my kind of heroine. She's damaged, but still tenacious in the fight; smart, but human enough to second guess such intellect when her heart wants to run free.

She's a 30-something Parisian vaudeville performer whose reveling in a crucible of change and newfound freedom after divorcing a controlling philanderer. Emotionally beaten and bruised by the marriage, Renée is suspicious of romance and isn't keen on surrendering the singular life she has so meticulously assembled for herself. When a handsome and wealthy admirer named Maxime makes his intentions known, Renée is thrust into a tailspin of doubt and temptation, where she wonders if she should allow herself to love again, or remain in a hardened shell of independence.

Colette is my kind of writer. A writer who isn't afraid to prick at human emotion and write about the battle scars. A writer whose works feel so human, so 'lived in'.

Usually I'm not much of a fan of stream-of-consciousness narratives, but Colette's approach at the technique in The Vagabond is exquisite and engaging. Never does Renée's voice wander or sound contrive, and even when it feels frantic it still romantically swings as we experience every doubt, every act of resistance, every passionate surrendering, and every anguished decision. At times while reading a section of prose, I would find myself nodding in agreement, thinking --- is this me? --- even though last I checked I occupy a different skin, a different world than Renée. It's this intimacy towards a character that Colette has achieved best of all in the pages of The Vagabond.

There are claims that this is the most auto-biographical of Colette's works, and that's quite the truth as Renée is in a lot of aspects a vivid rendering of Colette. Like her, Colette was a young woman whose much-older first husband, author and publisher, Henry Gauthier-Villars, was a notorious libertine and an imposing figure in her life. Gauthier-Villars was the one who steered her into a writing career, this at the cost of her own voice, as her classic Claudine series was first published and promoted under her husband's nom-de-plume "Willy".

Most writers often write from experience, and then lie about it later (ha!), but after learning this bit of information I got the sense that Colette, in a way, regained her suppressed voice within the pages of The Vagabond, being one of the first books she wrote that was correctly attributed to her. It's why Renée is written to have such determination for autonomy, and why it's so potent whenever she declares it for herself:

 "You want me to behave like everyone? To make up my mind? Him or somebody else, what does it matter? You want to disturb the peace that I’ve won back, you want to direct my life toward some other concern than the rugged, bracing and natural one of earning my own living? Or are you prescribing a lover for my health, like a purge? What for? I’m feeling well, and thank God, I’m not in love, I’m not in love, I’ll never love anyone, anyone, anyone!"