WRITING HOME

“What’s left at the end of the day once we’ve divided and multiplied and subtracted pieces of ourselves to just be able to stay standing.” – Ana-Maurine Lara 

Polymath extraordinaire Ana-Maurine Lara offers Tami and Kaiama much-appreciated  lessons in arithmetic and other miraculous methodologies.

Ana-Maurine Lara is currently an Associate Professor of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon. Her areas of interest include Afro-Latinidad, Black: Queer aesthetics, Afro-Indigenous relationships and traditional knowledges, and the struggle against xenophobia in the Dominican Republic. Also an award-winning novelist and poet, Dr. Lara spent 10 years as a writer and performance artist before deciding to pursue a Ph.D. in African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University. Her short stories and poems have been published in numerous anthologies and literary magazines. In addition, she has written and performed many plays and performance art pieces, most recently Sanctuary (2021), a performance collaboration with Rosamond S. King, Akiko Hatakeyama and Courtney Desiree Morris (directed by D'Lo).

Illustrious poet, novelist, essayist, and thinker Dionne Brand shares her methods for speaking liberation into the world. Kaiama and Tami are grateful.

Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist. Her writing is notable for the beauty of its language, and for its intense engagement with issues of international social justice. Her work includes ten volumes of poetry, five books of fiction and three non-fiction works. She was the Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto 2009-2012. From 2017-2021 Brand was Poetry Editor at McClelland & Stewart- Penguin Random House Canada.

Dionne Brand has published nineteen books, contributed to many anthologies and written dozens of essays and articles. She has also been involved in the making of several documentary films. She was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at St. Lawrence University in New York and has taught literature and creative writing at universities in both British Columbia and Ontario. She has also held the Ruth Wynn Woodward Chair in Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. She holds several Honorary Doctorates, Wilfred Laurier University, University of Windsor, Simon Fraser University, The University of Toronto, York University and Thornloe/Laurentian University. She lives in Toronto and is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. She is a member of the Order of Canada.

We’re back! WRITING HOME returns for Season 3, which sees Kaiama and Tami returning to the virtual studio and taking on questions of writing, teaching, and being in the world. This time around, they’re joined by Dionne Brand, Ana-Maurine Lara, and Gina Ulysse. Taken together, the insights in these conversations serve as something like a toolkit, offering strategies for boundary-creation, self-making, and the all-important art of recovery. Listen to this trailer for season 03 as we continue on our journey of writing our way home.

“No matter how long I’ve been away from home, Haiti remains inside of me.” – Katia D. Ulysse

For the final episode of WRITING HOME’s second season, Tami and Kaiama welcome the critically acclaimed Haitian-American fiction and children’s book author Katia D. Ulysse. Reflecting Katia’s stories, this conversation weaves together the vitality of music, the multifaceted bonds between mothers and daughters, and the changing, transnational narratives of Haiti. Katia drops some wonderful gems as she lifts up the names of the people she loves, such as how she learnt how to story-tell at her grandmother’s feet and why she thinks of motherhood as “babysitting her daughter for the ancestors.”

Katia D. Ulysse is a fiction writer, born in Haiti. Her short stories, essays, and Pushcart Prize–nominated poetry appear in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including: The Caribbean Writer, Smartish Pace, Phoebe, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; Mozayik, The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, and Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat. She has taught in Baltimore public schools for thirteen years, and served as Goucher College’s Spring 2017 Kratz Writer in Residence. Drifting, a collection of short stories, drew high praise from literary critics. She is currently at work on another short story collection. Mouths Don’t Speak is her latest novel.

Reading List:

Katia’s books
Mouths Don’t Speak (2018)
Drifting (2014)
Fabiola Ale Lekòl/Fabiola Goes to School (2016)
Fabiola Konn Konte/Fabiola Can Count (2012)

Authors who Katia mentioned:
Yanick Lahens
Roxane Gay
Edwidge Danticat

“Addicted to Love” by Robert Palmer
Robert Palmer performing with James Brown

“We are a collection of all the stories that have been passed down to us.” – Tiphanie Yanique

Award-winning writer and Virgin Islander Tiphanie Yanique joins Kaiama and Tami on this week’s episode of WRITING HOME. Tiphanie beautifully answers (and evades) our hosts’ questions about the relationship between poetic form and place, balancing beauty and pragmatism, and addressing racial inequality through participation in the publishing industry. Tiphanie hints at the themes that preoccupy her in her upcoming book Monster in the Middle – American colonial identity in the Caribbean, the impact of motherhood on her writing, and the nuns and mermaids she plans to somehow include in a future novel.

Tiphanie Yanique is a novelist, poet, essayist and short story writer. Her writing has won the Bocas Award for Caribbean Fiction, the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet's Prize. She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for and her writing has been published in the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, The Wall Street Journal, American Short Fiction and other places. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands. She grew up in the Hospital Ground neighborhood in St. Thomas. She lives now with her family in Atlanta where she is a tenured associate professor at Emory University.

Reading List:

Tiphanie’s novels and poetry:
Monster in the Middle (October 2021)
Wife (2015)
Land of Love and Drowning (2014)
How to Escape From a Leper Colony (2010)
 
Works Tiphanie mentioned:
Alscess Lewis-Brown and the hurriku

“What would goodness be like? What would more joy be like?” – Edwidge Danticat

Tami and Kaiama connect with the illustrious Haitian-African-American author Edwidge Danticat. In this conversation, the three grapple with how they are emotionally processing the pandemic through writing and reading literature. Edwidge speaks on whether literature survives on suffering, her newfound quest to find goodness within her work, and whether she’s guilty of being a "serial killer of her characters." As Edwidge discusses the precarity of writing at home during the pandemic, she reveals how she navigates her toughest critics: her daughters.

Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, The Farming of Bones, Claire of the Sea Light,  and Everything Inside. She is the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Diaspora in the United States, Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2. Shehas written seven books for young adults and children, Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, Eight Days, The Last Mapou, Mama's Nightingale, My Mommy Medicine, and Untwine, as well as a travel narrative, After the Dance, A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel.  Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was a National Book Award finalist in 2007 and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner for autobiography.  She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow and a two-time winner of The Story Prize, a 2020 United States Artist fellow, and winner of the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Literature.  

Reading List:

Edwidge’s writing:
“Mourning in Place,” The New York Review (2020)
“One Thing,” a short story from The New York Times Magazine’s Decameron Project (2020)
The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (2017)
Claire of the Sea Light (2013)
Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994)

Works Edwidge mentioned:
“Goodness: Altruism and the Literary Imagination,” an annual Harvard University Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality by Toni Morrison (2012)
Goodness And The Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison (2019) 

Authors who Edwidge recommended:
Katia Ulysse
Fabienne Josaphat
Angie Cruz
Doreen St. Felix
Roxane Gay
Nelly Rosario
Tayari Jones

Kaiama and Tami kick off the second season of WRITING HOME with Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James. Just like Marlon’s unflinching novels, our hosts and their guest don’t shy away from any subject, whether it be whiteness and political violence, how to read and write trauma, slavery, misconceptions about queer Jamaican life, or the Black time continuum. Marlon explains how he uses complexity to avoid writing banal caricatures and how he empathizes with the unpalatable characters of his homeland. Because, as he points out, he’s not part of the Jamaican tourist board.

Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. His most recent novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first novel in James's Dark Star trilogy, was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award. His previous novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, was the winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize, The American Book Award, and The Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize for fiction. He is also the author of the novels John Crow's Devil and The Book of Night Women, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Reading List

Marlon’s podcast with his editor, Jake Morrissey: Marlon and James Read Dead People

Marlon’s novels:
Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019)
A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)
The Book of Nightwomen (2009)
John Crow’s Devil (2005)

Works Marlon mentioned:
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work by Edwidge Danticat (2010)
The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica by Ian Thomson (2009)
“The Danger of a Single Story,” a TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009)
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño (1998)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
“Our Myths, Our Selves,” an Oxford University Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature by Marlon James (2019)