finding, in our books, the persons we must be now.

I write less here on this blog than I used to. The conversation I am having is mostly with myself. When my son calls and asks how I am—when friends ask—I have no news, no funny anecdotes, I am mostly absent. Perched on the edge.

I am reading, I am writing, I am reading more. I am reading memoirs or novels that might have been memoirs or books on the meaning of story. Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls). Alison Bechdel (Are You My Mother?). Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts and Bluets). Decca Aitkenhead (All At Sea). Sarah Manguso (Ongoingness). Heidi Julavits (The Folded Clock). Ta-Nehesi Coates (again). Claudia Rankine (again). Joan Silber (The Art of Time in Fiction).

Every time I slip inside these books I am living, for a spell, as other. Walking, as they say, in others' shoes.

The news is crisis. It is a madness that requires us to absent ourselves from ourselves so that we might occupy the heart and mind of others. White. Blue. Black. Whatever color it is: take your own off, put another on, and see. Feel. Think.

Two weeks ago I taught memoir to a group of six who, in their glorious differences, were gorgeously one. Tonight we will have dinner with friends who know and love us. In between I am seeking, in the books I read, a path toward greater empathy and knowing. So that when I return to me I'll be bigger than I was. More capable of making some kind of earthly difference.

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sometimes you don't need to throw a launch party; the party is the day itself

Yesterday:

Early morning, opening this outrageously wonderful gift from Taylor Norman (Chronicle Books), in celebration of the launch of This Is the Story of You.

A 20-minute walk in the rain to the delayed train.

Train time spent with Diana Abu-Jaber's Life Without a Recipe, a very beautiful memoir launching from my first editor and house, Alane Mason, W.W. Norton, this month.

A walk in the lessening drizzle to Penn where, on my way to a meeting, I discovered Story in the front window of Penn Book Center, where I'll be joining my Jensen friends (Cordelia and Melissa) for a Saturday afternoon reading and discussion on June 4th.

A conversation with my teaching and writing colleague, that very same Melissa Jensen. "Pure sunshine," one of my students said of her, and oh she is.

The privilege of watching my students conduct a conversation about Between the World and Me. One by one, they wrestled with the readers' guide questions I'd prepared, felt free to disagree, voiced their opinions with precision—and deep respect. A discussion unbounded—content and craft.

The moment when I read out loud from Dear Mr. You, Mary-Louise Parker's collection of letters to the men in her life. The students had read "Dear Daddy." I shared, then, this, from "Dear Oyster Picker." Parker's father has been given little time to live. Parker is standing in a bookstore, on the phone with her dad, wanting to be all right, not being all right. These are the final words of this essay, and the book:

I said well, okay, I'm standing in this really awesome bookstore. You'd love it, I said. He gave a sigh of longing and said, oh my, tell me, they have anything interesting? I said yeah, tons. I'll send you a book from here, how does that sound. He said that's wonderful, that's just tremendous, thank you sweetie. I told him I was sending him some candy too and he thanked me, said he'd be on the lookout for it, and he then said, tell me, what are you writing now? You working on anything? I said oh Daddy, just little things, I don't know, and he said okay, but listen to me


just write, keep writing, promise me that you will.

The walk back to the train in brightest sunshine. The train ride home with the gloriously multi-gonzo talented Lorene Cary. The deliberately lengthened walk from train to home so that I might talk, as I love to talk, with Debbie Levy.

The infusion of unforeseen support and hope and kindness on Twitter, on Facebook, on email, regarding the launch of Story. Thank you.

A dinner with my husband, where we lifted our glasses to sea and storm and, then, sun.

A call from Danielle.

Sometimes you don't have to throw a party for a book. The party is simply all bound up in the day that you have lived.

Thank you, universe.

Just write, keep writing

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the new semester begins at Penn with an Adele hello

Sometimes, as the first day of a new semester begins at Penn, I think of how very close I came to saying no to this opportunity all those years ago.

It would have been one of the greatest mistakes of my life.

And so, again, on this bitter cold day, we begin. We're focused on home this semester. We're reading Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, George Hodgman's Bettyville, and Ta-Nahesi Coates's Between the World and Me, not to mention John Hough on dialogue and countless excerpts (countless as of now, anyway, because I can never tell what's going to inspire me before and during class). We'll be tapping into the new Wexler Studio—recording some of our work. We'll be laying the groundwork for the Beltran evening on March 1—all invited—during which time we'll be visited by my writing friends (and worldly talents) Reiko Rizzuto, A.S. King, and Margo Rabb. We'll hear from former students. We'll write letters to the people in our lives, in Mary-Louise Parker and Ta-Nahesi style.

And today, if all the machines are working, we'll start out with this.

I can't tell you why or how we'll use it.

You'll just have to imagine.

Meanwhile, before any of that, I get to share an hour with Nina and David, who will be writing their theses with me.

How lucky I am.

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Between the World and Me/Ta-Nehisi Coates: My Book Club of Two

I bought two copies of Between the World and Me, the Ta-Nehisi Coates National Book Award winner, this famed letter to a son. One for me and one for my nephew Owen, with whom I stood, not long ago, on the Yale campus during commencement. We were there in celebration of Owen's sister. The crowd had settled and was waiting. During the pause a near stranger accosted first me and then (this was my fault) Owen with her singular world view. It was hard, she said, to be a white man in today's world. It was hard. In fact, it was terrible.

Politely, with economical urgency, my nephew offered his perhaps not. Perhaps being a white man in this world is not the hardest thing to be. Perhaps, he said, laying out the logic.

I love my nephew. He teaches me many things— Rubik's cubes and emoji and a recipe for tortilla soup. But I love most the conversations between the funny stuff, the glimpses of serious that we allow ourselves, the guy he was at Yale that day, dissuading Privilege from her ideas about wronged privilege. And so I bought me a copy of Coates and I bought Owen a copy of Coates, and I suggested that we together read.

"Book club of two!" Owen declared. Indeed.

Between the World and Me is fearless in its construction, damning in its accounting, a sandblasting of "Dreamer" ideology, a history of racecraft. It is deliberately bold, self-awareishly extreme, the sort of testimony that rocks readers from a long sleep:

Americans believe in the reality of "race" as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.

Body is the word here. Living inside a black body is the question, the experience, the theme, the springboard from which Coates tells the story of his own coming into awareness as a quester, as a young man whose father beat him so that he might be strong, as a Howard University student who left the classroom for the library and found his heart inside The Mecca, as a friend whose friend was wrongly gunned down, as a father, as a husband, as an excursionist to Paris. Yes, Paris, beautifully rendered here.

Bracing and blunt, Between the World and Me is a missile launched toward the heart of comfortable ideas. It is a cry out from a place of long darkness:

Do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. 

But here in these pages readers will also find the salve of knowledge, the power of curiosity, and the potentiality of language—learned and deployed.

I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago—the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth—loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions—beautiful writing rarely is.... Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.

Dear Book Club of Two member: I want to know your thoughts.

Dear World, Dear Privilege: We are standing on the precipice. Narrow, excluding points of view will not, cannot save us.

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