Hi!
Newsletter #3. Still here. Miracles, my friends.
Earlier this summer I took a writing workshop taught by my good friend, Neelanjana Banerjee. She opened the workshop with a piece by Peter Orner called “Writing About What Haunts You.” (NYT 2013) In that piece, Orner wrote about stealing his father’s gloves when he was a kid:
I watched my father in the front hall putting on his new, lambskin leather gloves. It was a sort of private ceremony. This was in early November, 1982, in Highland Park, Ill., a town north of Chicago along Lake Michigan. My father had just returned from a business trip to Paris. He’d bought the gloves at a place called Hermès, a mythical wonderland of a store. He pulled one on slowly, then the other, and held them up in the mirror to see how his hands looked in such gloves.
A week later, I stole them.
This soul defining moment, as he describes it, was something he knew bore great significance in his life, yet he struggled to fictionalize the event even after numerous attempts. And so Neela posed the question to us: What haunts you? Immediately, I knew the answer.
When I was about ten years old my sister and I buried our pet bird in a glass jar in the backyard. There used to be two of them, but one of them flew away. We had the bad habit of always opening the cage door to play with them. They had gotten out many times before, but that final time, the cage was outside in the backyard and the little brown finch got out and flew away to freedom. The remaining bird suffered by our poor care. Our lack of cleaning the cage. Our loss of attention since there was only one left. And so eventually it died. I was going through a phase then, more than likely triggered by my first dissections in science class. We started with earthworms, then on to cows’ eyes and hearts, and finally the fetal pig, which they used for dissection because of its resemblance to the human body. I was fascinated by all the specimens in the science closet which were stored in glass jars filled with formaldehyde. I didn’t have formaldehyde, but I did have a glass jar. So we put the bird in the jar, dug a hole, and buried it. I had this vision that the bird would somehow be preserved and that if dug up twenty years later, would still be intact. I never got to find out what became of the bird. It wasn’t there when I tried to dig it up twenty years later as my younger self had predicted I would. Perhaps I had remembered the location incorrectly. Or maybe my grandfather found it one day while gardening and threw it out, but I never got to see the results of that experiment carried out so many years ago.
I remember the details so vividly. The way the white feathers on the bird’s neck yellowed in death. The smell of the lemon tree. They way the sun shone through the branches. Like Orner's stolen gloves, this bird in the jar was a weirdly soul defining moment, yet its exact significance still remains a mystery to me. And so this backyard memory has been the opening scene to many abandoned stories. Over the years it has become a specter in my writing life, a ghost that lingers until its unfinished business is complete.
This is all to say, I’ve accidentally started writing a novel. In taking that workshop in the summer I had no intentions of beginning a larger project. I was perfectly happy to keep abandoning my short stories. (Actually, I was quite miserable doing that.) But in writing out this scene, at this point in my life, I felt an ease. A comfort in the narration. Language I could sit in. That isn’t to say that the writing has been easy. It very much feels like pulling a boulder out of my ass. It’s incredibly difficult. But I can say that I’m ready for this investigation. To write about home. To process my family story. To invite the specter to the table, have a cup of tea with it, and listen to its stories.
I get the opportunity to return to this writing with Neela in a BIPOC focused writing workshop with the most supportive group of beautiful brown women. I am so grateful to write this story and have it be held by these amazing people.
On thinking about home:
I can’t wait to dive into his book, “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America”, by Kiese Laymon. He writes about mental health and well being in relation to being a Black man in America, his home of Mississippi, and his family history with much focus on his dear Grandmama.
Listen Laymon’s NPR interview here:
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/09/933057261/kiese-laymon-on-how-to-slowly-kill-yourself-and-others-in-america-republished
The city of San Francisco is definitely its own character in my story so it helps to have some inspiration. My friend, Mariko, sent me this excellent IG called Bay Area Nostalgia.
This swing set and park was the joy of my childhood:
What the 80’s were like on my side of town:
A day of triumph for some and sadness for others when they demolished the Geneva Towers, the high rise projects, in 1998.
I draw so much inspiration from The Last Black Man in San Francisco. A love story and an elegy, the film held ceremony for the death of the city I knew as a child. So many of us from this place built our identities on being from this city and this film showed me how you can be more than where you come from. I cried alone in a movie theater in LA watching this opening sequence. SF is featured in a lot of movies, but I had never seen it look more like its true self than in this opening scene.
See you next week!
~j9
A beautiful, rich reflection, J.