How Dare We! Write E-Book

• Herausgeber: Modern History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 349

Beschreibung

How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse offers a much needed corrective to the usual dry and uninspired creative writing pedagogy. The collection asks us to consider questions, such as "What does it mean to work through resistance from supposed mentors, to face rejection from publishers and classmates, and to stand against traditions that silence you?" and "How can writers and teachers even begin to make diversity matter in meaningful ways on the page, in the classroom, and on our bookshelves?"
How Dare We! Write is an inspiring collection of intellectually rigorous lyric essays and innovative writing exercises; it opens up a path for inquiry, reflection, understanding, and creativity that is ultimately healing. The testimonies provide a hard won context for their innovative paired writing experiments that are, by their very nature, generative.
--Cherise A. Pollard, PhD, Professor of English, West Chester University of Pennsylvania
So-called "creative writing" classes are highly politicized spaces, but no one says so; to acknowledge this obvious fact would be to up-end the aesthetics, cultural politics (ideology) and economics on which most educational institutions are founded How Dare We! Write, a brilliant interventive anthology of essays, breaks this silence.
--Maria Damon, Pratt Institute of Art; co-editor of Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader
How Dare We! Write a collection of brave voices calling out to writers of color everywhere: no matter how lonely, you are not alone; you are one in a sea of change, swimming against the currents.
--Kao Kalia Yang, author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, and The Song Poet, a 2017 Minnesota Book Award winner
How Dare We! Write is a much needed collection of essays from writers of color that reminds us that our stories need to be told, from addressing academic gatekeepers, embracing our identities, the effects of the oppressor's tongue on our psyche and to the personal narratives that help us understand who we are.
--Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria, writer, spoken word poet/performer and contributing author to A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota

Leseprobe

How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse

Copyright © 2017 by Sherry Quan Lee. All Rights Reserved.

Learn more at www.SherryQuanLee.com

ISBN 978-1-61599-330-7 paperback

ISBN 978-1-61599-331-4 hardcover

ISBN 978-1-61599-332-1 eBook

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lee, Sherry Quan, 1948- editor.

Title: How dare we! write : a multicultural creative writing discourse / edited by Sherry Quan Lee, MFA.

Description: Ann Arbor, MI : Modern History Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017002195| ISBN 9781615993307 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781615993314 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: American literature--Minority authors. | Authorship. | Racially mixed people--Literary collections. | Ethnic groups--United States--Literary collections. | Multiculturalism in literature. | Multiculturalism--United States. | Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)

Classification: LCC PS508.M54 H69 2017 | DDC 810.8/0920693--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002195

Published by

Modern History Press

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Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Preface

Literary Gatekeepers (and other myths)

What Would Edén Say? Reclaiming the Personal and Grounding Story in Chicana Feminist (Academic) Writing, Kandace Creel Falcón

Imposter Poet: Recovering from Graduate School, Jessica Lopez Lyman

A Case for Writing While Black, Sherrie Fernandez Williams

mamatowisin: Writing as Spiritual Praxis, Nia Allery

The Tyranny of Grammar

Complete this Sentence: Say it Loud! _____!, Brenda Bell Brown

Crazy, Chris Stark

Saying My Name with Happiness, Ching-In Chen

Dancing Between Bamboos or The Rules of Wrong Grammar, Marlina Gonzalez

Identity(ies)

Intersectional Bribes and the Cost of Poetry, Sagirah Shahid

It Happened in Fragments, Isela Xitlali Gómez R.

Creating Native American Mirrors: and Making a Living as a Writer, Marcie Rendon

Notes in Journey from a Writer of the Mix, Anya Achtenberg

Personal Narratives

The Thenar Space: Writing Beyond Emotion and Experience into Story, Taiyon J Coleman

How Maya Angelou Empowered Me to Write, Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay

Legendary Documents, Tou SaiKo Lee

Stories that Must Be Told, Luis Lopez

Telling Stories That Should Not Be Passed On, Wesley Brown

Rejection Not an Option

Fear of an Apocalypse: Racial Marginalization on the Act of Writing, Hei Kyong Kim

Picking a Goot’ Indin (a play selection from No Res Rezpect), William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.

Perfectly Untraditional, Sweta Srivastava Vikram

Healing the Heart

Our Silence Won’t Save Us: Recovering the Medicine in Our Stories, Anaïs Deal-Márquez

Writing: Healing from the Things I Cannot Change, Lori Young-Williams

Stories from the Heart of Dark-Eyed Woman—Sikadiyaki, Olive Lefferson

A Fundamental Human Yearning, Michael Kleber-Diggs

About the Contributors

About the Editor

Index

Introduction

As a poet and memoirist and a creative writing teacher in academia and for community organizations, I have asked for years: Where are the textbooks by writers of color about the craft of writing? A text that would address the experiences and needs of writers of color whose work has been/is being silenced, ignored, and recklessly criticized; writers who have been vocally undermined, or on the other hand, patronized.

I arrived here, as editor of How Dare We! Write, at the end of a very long journey that began in the late 1970s. A journey in search of myself, and a journey to make myself, a woman of color, a mixed-race woman, a woman “in the mix,” visible.

How did you get here? I ask my students. Not just, I skipped dinner, got hung up in traffic, but how did you get to this classroom, this particular class, wanting to write, writing? What is your timeline for your journey to become a writer?

When I began my journey as a creative writer, I noticed there were no books about me—a Chinese Black female who grew up passing for white in Minnesota. So, I began to write myself into existence.

Some said my stories weren’t trendy; others said they didn’t teach me how to write in that MFA program; and others just took pity. But along the way, mentors and friends, and even some family, gifted me with their encouragement and their support—they needed my stories, and they needed to tell their stories, which is why How Dare We! Write became a possibility, and now a reality.

My publisher said, Write it. Write the book you wish someone else had already written. But I didn’t feel qualified. What did I know? Then in 2015-16 I was a mentor for the Loft Literary Center’s Mentorship Program. The participating writers asked questions about my writing. I was challenged to come up with answers about my writing process, as well as how I had crafted individual poems. My first thought was, I don’t know, I just write. But the more I strove to answer the questions, the more I realized that my writing was not without intention, but it was not all about craft, either. I realized that the textbook I sought and then envisioned needed story: the personal experience; the fear, risk, reason, and responsibility.

After carefully considering the questions from the mentorship participants and answering them, I sent my publisher, Victor Volkman, a text saying, maybe I do know something. He said, It’s about time you believed in yourself as a writer. Now, write the book.

I drafted a few chapters, but the book was slow to progress. Then, something happened. I read two anthologies published by the Minnesota Historical Society: Blues Vision, edited by Alexs Pate with co-editors Pamela R. Fletcher and J. Otis Powell; and A Good Time for the Truth, edited by Sun Yung Shin. And I realized I wanted more than my story.

“What about an anthology?” I asked my publisher. Without hesitation, he responded, “Yes.”

I believe who we are influences our writing, just as who we are may defy those who think they have power over our writing. I knew in my heart that for writers of color, writing isn’t just about process and craft, but also the challenges we face as writers, and how we overcome those challenges. I imagined a textbook that gives support and encouragement to those of us who understand that one size doesn’t fit all, that MFA programs don’t necessarily address our needs, nor do publishers necessarily accept stories that don’t fit their agendas or economic needs. I wanted a textbook that considers the relevance of race, class, gender, age, and sexual identity; culture and language; and that by so doing, on some level, facilitates healing.

I didn’t have to search far. The Twin Cities is saturated with writers, with writing classes, with MFA programs. Some of the authors presented in How Dare We! Write have relocated to Minnesota for their education, or their families migrated here, or they, like me were born here. Many of their stories unfolded in the Midwest, but also from beyond the Midwest. Each writer who is from outside the Midwest—from New York, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, Montana, Maine—has a connection to Minnesota as a visiting writer, a former resident, a playwright with work produced here, or a writer who just happened to know me or my publisher.

The authors included here are teachers, community leaders, activists, career writers; they are bilingual, multilingual; they are poets, playwrights, novelists, short story writers; they are established writers, they are emerging writers; they are millennials, gen x, baby boomers. What they have in common is that they have stories to tell that disrupt our most familiar white narratives about why they write, who can write, what they can write about, and how they craft their writing.

How Dare We! Write consists of 24 stories of interconnected genres, themes, challenges, and possibility. I have organized the book into five sections: Literary Gatekeepers (and other myths); The Tyranny of Grammar; Identity(ies); Personal Narratives; Rejection Not an Option; and Healing the Heart. The Preface contains a synopsis of each story for greater clarification, and the index can also be a helpful resource.

Whether you identify with these writers’ stories yourself and feel a little less alone, and learn how circumstances can be overcome, or you offer them as a teacher of creative writing to students who need them, this book is essential reading.

Sherry Quan Lee,

Editor

Acknowledgments

To David Mura, co-founder of the Asian American Renaissance (AAR) and Artistic Director, and Carolyn Holbrook, founder and director of SASE: the write place—thank you, thank you. David was the visiting writer of color during my MFA program—there were no resident professors of color at that time. He introduced me to the Twin Cities’ vibrant community of Asian American artists. In 1998, David was the mentor for the Loft’s Inroads Program for Asian/Pacific Islander Writers, of which I was a fortunate participant. Carolyn offered me my first teaching job after I earned an MFA in creative writing (I was the only non-international student of color, and the only student not enlisted as a teaching assistant during my time in the program) and she invited me to participate in her Black Women Writers group. For a Chinese Black woman trying to make sense of her identity, both these writers and their respective organizations gave me a safe place to write and teach and meet other writers of color. Yet, writers of color such as David Mura and Carolyn Holbrook were the exception in Minnesota, home of 10,000 lakes—and many writers, but not much diversity. But thanks in large part to the work these two have done, not only are there many more visible writers of color in the Twin Cities, but their reach is nationwide.

I was fortunate to be accepted to Cave Canem in 1996, the year Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady established a writing retreat for Black poets, where I met writers from around the country, many of whom have since been highly recognized for their work. I will be forever grateful for the Cave Canem writers, the experience, and all that I learned that summer in a monastery on the Hudson River surrounded by poets.

Anya Achtenberg I met in the early 80s. She worked tirelessly to make the Loft Literary Center more inclusive, and its events and classes and opportunities more accessible. She is the writer I so vividly remember who worked amongst writers of color in the Twin Cities, and attended our readings. In 2007 Anya returned to the Twin Cities; she became my mentor and friend. She introduced her publisher, Victor Volkman, Modern History Press, to me and my work. The rest is history. Anya, I can’t thank you enough for your kindness, and for your selfless commitment to writing, to teaching, and to social justice.

Victor Volkman, Ann Arbor, Michigan. We’ve never met, except over email and on Facebook. You have made visible the stories of three Minnesota writers—Chris, Anya, and me—because you believed in our stories and believed they fell under the auspices of Loving Healing Press’ mission, even though Loving Healing Press didn’t have a category for our stories. So you created one: Modern History Press. Thank you. Thank you for understanding the need for this collection and for giving voice and visibility to the writers and their stories in How Dare We! Write.

I tell my college students and the writers who participate in my independent workshops to get to know their writing community, meet other writers, attend readings, participate in readings, and participate in writing workshops and classes. The people you get to know, and not just writers, can move you forward on your journey in ways you may not even imagine. Also, I might add, give back, share the love.

If I were to create a writing timeline for how this book came to be, focused on the mentors, teachers, and encouragers who have in the past or continue in the present to support me as a writer, it would be filled with names such as those already mentioned, including the How Dare We! Write contributors; and, those, with much regret, I may have missed mentioning; and, the following people: Elsa Battica, Sun Yung Shin, Bao Phi, Eden Torres, Alexs Pate, Lupe Castillo, Vidhya Shanker, Mark Tang, Sandra Newbauer, Barbara Bergeron, Charissa Uemura, Rose Chu, Sandy Agustin, Nikki Giovanni, Nellie Wong, Linda Hogan, Alison McGhee, Ed Bok Lee; and Anne Holzman, copy editor—she came to us highly recommended and we are grateful for her expertise and generosity of time.

Preface

What Would Edén Say? Reclaiming the Personal and Grounding Story in Chicana Feminist (Academic) Writing, Kandace Creel Falcón

As a Chicana academic navigating scholarly publication, Kandace Creel Falcón demands to push against the forces of the academy that seek to challenge or minimize Chicana, queer, and women of color feminist work. This essay details how Chicana feminists became her literary history, inspire her to add to their rich archive of work, and pave future pathways for new Latinx writers. As a Chicana feminist, writing for Falcón is: vulnerable, a call to action, and a community investment no matter where it happens.

Imposter Poet: Recovering from Graduate School, Jessica Lopez Lyman

This essay highlights the structural challenges which impeded the writing process. Internalized oppression heavily restricts Writers of Color from finding their voice. This essay addresses how the writer adapted and shifted to form a new relationship with the page.

A Case for Writing While Black, Sherrie Fernandez-Williams

There is an agony in being a black writer with slave ancestry and a long history of poverty and disenfranchisement on all sides of her family. There is a desire to give voice to those who were silenced, but Fernandez-Williams acknowledges how cut off she is from their stories and lives. Still, their hurt exists in her body and even if she wanted to shake them she cannot. It is her obligation to continue to search for them, make the connection, and search for the right words no matter how difficult it gets. For Fernandez-Williams, writing has nothing to do with gatekeepers. It has everything to do with telling the truth and resurrecting the dead.

mamatowisin: Writing as Spiritual Praxis, Nia Allery

The hidden curriculum in academe largely ignores the whole person. The author points out the dilemma for indigenous ways of being in institutions that limit learning and teaching to analyses and cognitive understandings. She didn’t think she would survive or thrive within these strictures until she began teaching American Indian Spirituality and Philosophical Thought as a world religion. She found that creative writing allowed and encouraged students to describe their inward journey and spiritual praxis, known in the Cree language as mamatowisin. With this mindset teacher and students explored openly and vulnerably the expanse of mind, body, and spirit, united.

Complete This Sentence: Say it Loud!_______!, Brenda Bell Brown

Writer Brenda Bell Brown seized this opportunity to take you by the hand and walk you through the reason why she is so adamant about writing in a manner that is firmly rooted in her Black American cultural tradition. With a great big thankful nod to her teachers—both common and academic; all familial—Brenda writes from a standard of practice that does not apologize for being “too Black!,” it celebrates it!

Crazy, Chris Stark

Chris Stark’s memoir essay addresses how viewing as “crazy” the ideas, experiences, and foundations of writing outside of the whitemalenorm limits, silences, and marginalizes many writers of color. Stark discusses how her first novel, Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation, breaks down sentence structure, punctuation, language, and style to authentically convey the intersectionality of the protagonist’s multiple marginalized identities.

Saying My Name with Happiness, Ching-In Chen

This is a personal essay about familial influences on writing. The essay also discusses exclusion due to racism and the power of naming and shaping your own story.

Dancing Between Bamboos or The Rules of Wrong Grammar, Marlina Gonzalez

Written from the perspective of a writer who is multilingual by historical default, this personal essay looks at how colonized cultures like that of the Philippines learn to concoct a cultural halu-halo (literal translation: “mix-mix”), making up words out of three (or four or five) lingual ingredients to create a vocabulary that reflects the “bifurcated tongue” and the diverging social, cultural and political impact of colonialism on writing and thought.

Intersectional Bribes and the Cost of Poetry, Sagirah Shahid

In this essay Sagirah Shahid explores her own journey as an African American Muslim woman and unpacks how her identities have sharpened the criticalness of her poetic eye.

It Happened in Fragments, Isela Xitlali Gómez R.

This piece is about how the author came to understand her writing process—in scattered particles that began to come together as she stopped forcing them. She often writes in fragmented form because that’s how her memory works: unfluid, fleeting, at times not her own.

Creating Native American Mirrors: and Making a Living as a Writer, Marcie Rendon

Part how-to, part story, Rendon’s essay is about how she strives to create and write the stories her people can relate to. This can serve as a guide to other writers seeking publication, audience, or ways to tell their own realities. According to Rendon, “we need to strive not just to find our own voice but the voice in us that will resonate with others like us.” She writes to burst through invisibility as a Native Woman, and believes the acquired practicalness of the job of writing is how others will have access to our work.

Notes in Journey from a Writer of the Mix, Anya Achtenberg

Briefly exploring the identity issues of people of color who fall outside recognizable categories of race, and are here referred to as people of the mix, Achtenberg discusses the implications of this identity on creative writing. Interrogating creative writing truisms through this lens of identity, she focuses centrally on the instruction to “write from a sense of place.”

The Thenar Space: Writing Beyond Emotion and Experience into Story, Taiyon J Coleman

A first person essay and writing exercise that considers the creative juxtaposition of past memory, present knowledge, and details from experience that work to reveal narratives that have both text and subtext. It is writing that reveals story and epiphanies for both the writer and the reader.

How Maya Angelou Empowered Me to Write, Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay

Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay is constantly fighting for her place within the literary ecosystem to write and most importantly, for stories from her kind to be uplifted. Sometimes the fight takes place inside of her head as excuses. Before she learned how to mute doubting voices, she had to defeat the idea that her story didn’t matter.

Legendary Documents, Tou SaiKo Lee

Tou SaiKo Lee explores what if? What if he had access to today’s social media in the 90s? Would a “basketball hoop” become a different story? His coming of age experiences influenced who he is today, a storyteller, a poet, and a hip-hop artist giving back to the Hmong community, providing resources and motivation to youth.

Stories that Must Be Told, Luis Lopez

Being brown in an all-white writing workshop. Knowing what limitations can be expected of other students as well as from the workshop lead. The importance that sincerity plays in these moments and how to account for it when no one has a similar lived experience.

Telling Stories That Should Not Be Passed On, Wesley Brown

Wesley Brown’s father was the repository of his family history. And the unsettling stories he told him as a child shaped his view of the world that is often a dangerous and unpredictable place. This essay examines how, as a writer, Brown came to see that the most valuable stories are those which we would prefer not to hear.

Fear of an Apocalypse: Racial Marginalization on the Art of Writing, Hei Kyong Kim

This is a lyrical essay about what writing has meant to Hei Kyong Kim and why she writes, how her marginalized identity has been a barrier to her writing, and how the act of writing has been a form of social justice for her. Kim shares her ups and downs on being a writer of color in a challenging society and how she has worked to overcome them.

Picking a Goot’ Indin (A play selection from No Res Rezpect), William S. Yellow Robe

Through an imaginary but believable situation, playwright William S. Yellow Robe renders a scene where a committee chooses which play will represent American Indians because of, or in order to get, grant money. Does it matter if the playwright is Indin?

Perfectly Untraditional, Sweta Srivastava Vikram

This is an essay about a writer’s experience—someone who grew up noticing gender inequality, stereotypes, and patriarchy in different continents—and her resolve to tell the stories truest to her.

Our Silence Won’t Save Us: Recovering the Medicine in Our Stories, Anaïs Deal-Márquez

The writer considers how women’s stories of migration and survival in her family have defined the places she creates from. This piece looks at how mujeres have found strength in each other, their recipes, their laughter, and explores what it means to tell our stories without apology in a world that wants to silence us.

Writing: Healing from the Things I Cannot Change, Lori Young-Williams

Born to a mixed-race, black/white family, Lori grew up in the white suburb of St. Paul, MN. The death of her sister brought her to writing and it is through writing that she is able to heal from the challenges of not only being the daughter who lived, but also being the only black girl in her school and neighborhood. She learns through college, research, and family stories from her father that she comes from strength. Through writing she is able to write through frustration and hurts—and heal.

Stories from the Heart of Dark-Eyed Woman—Sikadiyaki, Olive Lefferson

Olive Lefferson grew up with an oral tradition, hearing the stories of her ancestors, feeling pride in her culture but also confusion about her identity as a Native in a white world. Criticism silenced her. Providing a space for other Natives to share their stories has helped her find her identity as a writer and as a Native woman in a white world.

A Fundamental Human Yearning, Michael Kleber-Diggs

As a son of two parents with advanced degrees and as a black boy coming of age in the 70s and 80s, Michael Kleber-Diggs was raised to see himself among the best and the brightest. In “A Fundamental Human Yearning,” he reflects on how he migrated away from messages steering him toward life in the business world to embrace his true identity as a writer.

Literary Gatekeepers (and other myths)

What Would Edén Say? Reclaiming the Personal and Grounding Story in Chicana Feminist (Academic) Writing

Kandace Creel Falcón

Determined to find out more about Chicana feminism, I huffed and puffed as I walked up each set of stairs in the Watson Library stacks. A research project for one of my women’s studies classes brought me to the library, a stately building defined by limestone and stairs, but I was digging for knowledge not assigned by my professors. Even though I was familiar with doing research in the library on the University of Kansas campus that housed the humanities and social sciences texts, my heart filled with a sense of awe, wonder, and pride every time I set foot in Watson. To think my tuition paid for the access to all these books and knowledge reminded me of the joys I felt researching in the Lomas-Tramway library as a young girl in Albuquerque, New Mexico. While a set of stairs also led up to my childhood library, it leveled out into a one-story maze of bookshelves easily navigated by patrons. The Watson Library contained five floors of books with stacks emanating from the center of the library connected by back-way, windowless, and cool climate-controlled staircases that made me feel more like a scholar in an Indiana Jones movie than a mere undergraduate in Lawrence, Kansas.

Libraries inspire a sense of belonging for me. They feel like home. Since childhood, shelves of books never judged my tastes; checking the catalogue for current library holdings and figuring out the inter-library loan systems unlocked gates I never knew were sealed. Discovering a favorite place in the library to read through the pile of books I found also brought its own rewards. The library became my sanctuary, a place where I could determine my destiny. Despite the recognition that I was often the only woman of color exploring bookshelves of texts, and the feeling that university spaces were not meant for a Mexican American like me, the Watson library felt safe.

It was in college when I learned libraries were politicized spaces, tasked with not only holding books, but also curating different ways of knowing for diverse readers. In my childhood library I don’t recall coming across books by Mexican Americans, despite growing up in New Mexico. I tore through the typical (white) children’s series, like Amelia Bedelia, The Berenstain Bears, and later The Baby-Sitters Club. Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima, and Sandra Cisneros’ A House on Mango Street, books assigned to me in middle school, were exceptions, not the rule in my literary history. Stumbling upon Emma Pérez’s The Decolonial Imaginary in the E184 call section of the 1 center stacks in the Watson Library changed me. Nearby, Carla Trujillo’s edited anthology Living Chicana Theory lived on the shelf. Both books with rich, purple covers contained images of powerful Chicana iconography I never imagined, yet felt compelled to hold near. After admiring the covers and acknowledgments, I dug into these books’ bibliographies and began searching out the other influences, stories, and voices that enabled these words on pages. Future visits to Watson encouraged a thorough search of the 4 and 4-½ center stacks where Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera sat next to the groundbreaking second wave feminist anthology by women of color This Bridge Called My Back, which resided near Norma Cantú’s Canícula.

In the cave-like rooms in-between the library’s floors that housed metal shelves crammed full of so many books, these Chicana feminist texts seemed like they were waiting just for me to find them. Upon searching them out, I devoured them with an urgency not yet felt upon other literary discoveries. As a Chicana with a brown mother and white father, Anzaldúa’s ideas of mestiza consciousness, being in-between, and navigating borders helped me make sense of the experiences grounding my lived reality. By the time I came to Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years, I emerged from her pages a Chicana. Moraga’s mixed-race claiming of Chicanidad and the telling of her story of how she came to know her lesbian self inspired my confidence in claiming a queer identity too. These works not only helped me better understand myself, but they also pushed to challenge dominant assumptions that I felt deeply compelled to embrace.

Women of color writing freed me from previous assumptions I held about writing. Chicana feminists’ lyrical writings fully embodied what my professors taught in my women’s studies courses—that the personal is political. Except, more powerfully, Anzaldúa, Moraga and others center a Chicana experience of theorizing the personal so as to make political claims. Before reading women of color writing, my understanding of knowledge production focused on data, on evidence collected in a methodology sanctioned by a history of white academic legacies as the only true (correct) way to make valid scholarly claims. Women of color claims, informed by the realities of what it meant to be in the world through their experiences, further released my passion for knowledge with a new recognition of the value of seeing myself in the form of the messenger. Because these mujeres connected the self to the world around them, I learned the importance of exploring histories and present conditions entrenched not only in our individual selves, but also by the collective experiences of our people. Gathering the rich history of storytelling in the form of writing then is a Chicana feminist project filled with urgency and rooted in legacy. A race to correct the record of century-long inaccuracies, a need to interrupt the narratives of domination, became my call to action and invitation to engage this shared mission.

Finding Chicana feminist authors in the Watson library stacks won me admittance into the University of Minnesota’s Feminist Studies Doctoral Program. It was my archeological digging up of their words that informed my writing samples and personal statements when I applied for graduate school. It was my amplifying of their voices in concert with my urgent need to make sense of my own history that led me to the research projects and writing centering their expressions, identities, and stories. Emboldened by Chicanas reclaiming figures like La Virgen de Guadalupe as a Chicana lesbian role model, I began incorporating bold revisions and reimaginings of the intersections of my gender, sexual, and racialized identities in my writing. Along the way white scholars reminded me of how this project was not sanctioned implicitly and explicitly. I recognize it now by the way I had to make sense of these words on my own, without guidance, without classroom discussions, without the assumption that my professors would have read these works as undergraduate students. I remember how professors and grant reviewers constantly questioned my projects as a graduate student. “Is this research?” they would ask in the margins of my drafts. “The self and family are not valid sites of knowledge production, what is your intervention?” would come through in comments on my work. “There must be an archive somewhere, your job as a scholar is to find it.” These demands from senior white scholars of what rigorous scholarship looks like clatter in my ears.

“Valid” academic writing and scholarship requires distance, a pretend, yet required, scenario in which the observer is supposed to be outside of that which is being observed. This is laughable. Who is behind the keyboard, the pen of your ethnographic observational notes in your field journal? Who is the name attached to your page? The assumed neutrality of whiteness translates into invisible Authorship. I do not mean the invisible authorship forced upon queer people of color where our written stories struggle to make it to page or press. I am naming the invisibility that the academy exalts, a disappearing of the raced/gendered/sexual self—operating in effort to falsely couch neutrality. White academia tries to insist the better scholarship is by those who can retain a neutral stance. (Queer) women of color writers know this neutrality is code for cis-male white privilege. I do not care for this project. I would rather my reader know this scholarship is rooted in an agenda of liberation. And women’s studies as a discipline insists we push against the premise of objectivity/neutrality. Every effort challenging the establishment status quo of maintaining current power structures is the project of liberation for us all.

The PhD track is supposed to discipline you. During my time as a graduate student the process tried to beat me out of my writing. It started innocuously enough by erasing every first person utterance or inner thought. This happened in the name of “good” scholarship. I embraced the idea that through writing I should exhibit above average intelligence. So, when my professors started scratching out my “I” voice, I accepted it. I began replacing everyday words with exuberant ones I looked up in the thesaurus. Hours spent poring over difficult and indecipherable texts replicated complex (long) sentence structure in my formal writing. Soon, I could no longer recognize myself in my pages. I had been disciplined. Sometimes, in a rush to push writing out, I will revert to this distant, “objective” voice. Recognizing the strong pull of academese is not enough; I need backup.

If, like me, you are lucky, your Chicana feminist advisor will be your backup. She will give your writing back and pointedly say to you, “What is this? Where are you?” when you are missing from your stories. She will share with you that she stopped reading after the first paragraph. At first you will feel crushed, a bit spirit-broken, but later when you look again at what you gave her, you will come to agree with her assessment. You will look to her text, Chicana Without Apology as your muse. You will remember, you are not writing for white male academics, you are filling in gaps of knowledge, you are interrupting what has been done before. You will remember your true audience, your abuela who completed eight grades of formal schooling in Juarez, Mexico. You will remember your true audience, your mama who graduated from high school against the odds in Washington, Kansas. You will remember your true audience, your hermana who will soon graduate with a master’s degree in technical writing with an emphasis in women’s studies from Kansas State University. You will remember your true audience, your 4-year-old niece, and the young girl hungry for more, who is now searching for your book in the stacks of her community library.

Edén Torres, my Chicana feminist mentor, serves as the Chicana writer who most helped me bridge what I discovered long ago in the stacks. She continues to shape my writing practice even as she no longer reviews all of my work. I constantly use her as my gauge—what would Edén say about this? Where would she push me to reveal more of myself to get closer to the meat of my arguments? What story might I share to paint a better picture of the theory I wrestle and try to wrangle from thoughts to words on the page? She taught me many lessons, but the lesson I try to live most in my writing practice is that we each have an authentic voice and when we hone it, it cannot be detached from our self. When we are present and intentional about our audience, our writing sings most powerfully. My songs are only possible because of Edén’s.

Basing my writing process in exposing and cultivating my authentic voice means that sometimes, most times, writing is a painful process. It is a task that requires me to lock myself away with only my thoughts. As an extrovert who thrives on being with others, writing can appear solitary at first glance. Moving the solitary to the communal takes a gentle shift in perspective and helps me feel less alone. With the successful honing of my writing craft, I bring my community into the process to counter the fears of being isolated. Feeling like the “only one” in academic institutional spaces haunts my reality when Xicanas make up such a small percentage of the professoriate. The demands of the academy constantly discipline. Women of color writers who masterfully blend story and theory bring me back into balance when the demands of academic writing conventions stifle my authentic voice.

Women of color and Chicana feminist writers lay their souls, traumas, and bodies bare for the reader. I am convinced that this practice in vulnerability is a political act of liberation. Anzaldúa reminds us of this in her famous essay, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers.” In exploring why she is compelled to write she offers:

Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice. Because I must keep the spirit of my revolt and myself alive. Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger. I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you.

(Anzaldúa, 2009, p. 30)

To write in this way is to be laid bare for all to consume. To write in this way is to build community. I envision my writing through story, like Anzaldúa’s as an ofrenda, an offering, for you, my community. A gift rooted in a vulnerable sharing of me.

Resistance defines my writing experiences. External detractors wishing to deter my voice converge with internal thoughts trying to shame me into not writing. Perfectionist tendencies meet lifetimes of not seeing myself in others’ words. Worries about what “counts” for publications creep up on the need to put myself into my writing to fulfill my compulsion to write. These tensions mark my journey in uncovering my authentic voice. When these pressures mount, I light a candle on my altar. The altar is my facilitator of offerings. To make an ofrenda at my altar grounds my intention. When I light a candle to honor the past and present, I embrace the flicker of shine from its wick. The candlelight reminds me to face the glow of light, imagine a spotlight and spill myself onto my screen, into my pages, whether keyboard or pen under my fingers. When a breeze taps the flickering light to illuminate my statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe, I imagine how she appears in all angles of illumination. These different perspectives of her back or side alit, harken back to my invisible readers, my supporters, my reminders of why I write in the dark, why I push through that which may be uncomfortable to share. Knowing even if it is only me who needs to read these words is enough to continue writing when it is most difficult. Rules of my craft matter less than unlocking the process of writing for me. Finding the conditions that best support laying myself bare for my reader took a while, but now, when I get lost, I light a candle and make an altar wherever I am.

Have you ever moved yourself to tears when you write? In a world where our tears may be construed as weakness, or used against us when we call out injustice, the act of crying while writing legitimizes my product and process. When my words move me to cry, I know I have left something behind that cannot be consumed without leaving a mark on the reader. I seek to move myself to cry when I write despite feeling uncomfortable or scared. To shift myself to cry confronts the borders within and the barriers I erect between others and myself. When I cry on my page, I know I am contributing to the archive of women of color writers who have brought me to tears through theirs. I am stretching that catalogue to embrace the young Chicanita who is searching for a glimpse of herself in the pages of a book or on the cover of a book in the tombs of a favorite library. I am honoring alternative ways for the foremothers, myself, and those not yet on this path. I learned this lesson when I revised the piece that Edén could not read. I lit a candle, scrapped the original, and opened myself to the vulnerable act of sharing myself with my page. I cried as I wrote, choking up even more when I read the new draft to myself out loud. When she gave it back to me, smiling and beaming, she said, “Now this is you.”

Notes

1. I choose to use the term Chicana to signify the terminology Chicana activists and scholars used during second wave feminism, which proceeds the terms Xicana and Xicanx. While Xicana specifically references the indigenous roots of Chicanisma and Xicanx offers a destabilizing of the gender binary, my choice of the term Chicana is not to discount these interventions but rather to historically ground the terminology in the context in which I first learned of it. Chicana/Xicana/Xicanx all embody a politicized effort to challenge and correct social, political, and economic inequities Mexican Americans face in the United States with particular attention to dismantling patriarchal forms of control.

References

Anzaldúa, G. (1999) Borderlands/La frontera. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

---. (2009) “Speaking in tongues: A letter to third world women writers.” In The Gloria Anzaldúa reader. Ed. AnaLouise Keating. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Anzaldúa, G., & Moraga, C., eds. (1983) This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color. 2nd ed. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press.

Cantú, N. (1995) Canícula: Snapshots of a girlhood en la frontera. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

Moraga, C. (2000) Loving in the war years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. Expanded 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Pérez, E. (1999) The decolonial imaginary: Writing Chicanas into history. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Torres, E. (2003) Chicana without apology: Chicana sin vergüenza. New York: Routledge.

Trujillo, C., ed. (1998) Living Chicana theory. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press.

Writing Exercise

Gather three items that are sacred to you and place them in a purposeful arrangement with one another. Light a candle near the items. Use your writer’s altar to ground yourself in your writing. Pay attention to your emotional, spiritual, and rational self as you prepare. Write a story connected to one or all of the objects you selected by starting with a story about you. If you are having trouble getting started, begin describing one of the objects and why you chose it. Think about the meaning of the object as it connects to you and the audience you most wish to reach with your words.

Imposter Poet: Recovering from Graduate School

Jessica Lopez Lyman

Spring 2011

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