Check out my fun interveiw with Atmosphere Press

I am a life long reader. My love of all things books tilted me toward thinking maybe I could write a book. When I wondered who would be interested in my story, I remembered how I was drawn to the Black women’s stories I’d read. How happy I was to read about someone like me. A brown girl. 

Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Iceberg Slim, James Baldwin, J. California Cooper, Richard Wright, Claude Brown, Frank Yerby (who I didn’t know was Black until I was an adult), Toni Cade Bambara, Ann Petry, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor showed me what life was like outside of my small world. 

I read my father’s books, too. He had a collection of paperbacks about military men and hard boiled detectives. I read the assigned books from school but the most engaging stories were from outside reading. As a youngster my goal was to read every book in the library. I had no idea how many books would come to be.

As an adult the desire to write my story got stronger, but fear held me back. I wrote in my journal, stories piled up in my computer. One friend told me, “Write something every day for a year and you will have a book.” I did that. That whole year is diligently chronicled. Not such a good book, though. I tip-toed toward actually writing a book. I looked at online classes, and went back and forth without going anywhere. I even submitted stories here and there to magazines. Nothing was accepted.

About ten years ago I started saying out loud that I wanted to write a book. Fear tightened its grip on me. I didn’t think I could handle criticism or rejection. I also didn’t think I could just make up a fictional story, so if I wrote, it would have to be my own story. The only one I know. 

Finally a friend, after years of listening me talking about writing a book but not wanting to take a writing class, whispered to me, “Don’t you want it to be good?” I was stumped. I wanted it to be good. I marinated in that idea for another couple years. 

Five years ago, I started a blog. I figured it was a safe place to write and I could just put it out there and see what happened. I also thought in the end I could print it out and it would be a book. Not. It did become the kernel for my memoir. The book that I learned how to write by joining a writers group. 

I scraped up the courage to ask Denise Nicholas if she was in a writers group. I’d read her wonderful book, Freshwater Road, and I was going to beg her to let me join. She replied she was not in a group. Crestfallen, I didn’t know what to do next. But a few days later, she got back to me and she had decided she wanted to start a group. I nearly cried tears of joy and gratitude. 

There can not be too many stories about Black women. There are people out there who need to know that others have gone through similarly rough things, terrible things and have survived. I think there are many who will be able to relate to my story, my mistakes, my fun, my life. So I decided to go ahead and write this memoir. It has been good for me, too. It has shown me how resilient and strong I am.