Vol. 69: Working it out on the page

On Friday, I saw Camonghne Felix in conversation with Jason Reynolds at Loyalty Books about her new memoir, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculations - which I haven’t read yet but have heard so many good things about. In addition to being incredible writers and literary citizens, these two are also dear friends, so seeing them in conversation was extra special.

One of the many things they discussed was the experience of Camonghne’s poetry being called difficult or inaccessible. Reynolds said that Toni Morrison’s work is revered and read with rigor in a way that few Black writers today are offered. Some felt like an intra-community conversation about how Black folks read Black writers, so I’m hesitant to mischaracterize it, but it did give me a lot to reflect on how “accessibility” is a requirement for Black writers being published today in a way that it perhaps wasn’t in the past, as well as considering how and when I read with rigor. I read for a lot of reasons - sometimes to escape, sometimes as a mindfulness practice, sometimes as autodidactism. Particularly coming out of a reading slump, I know that when I’m not in a headspace for a certain kind of writing, I can miss craft or flatten the book into solely demographics or review tropes (one word that came up on Friday, Felix said, “my book was called raw - I think it’s pretty well baked!”).

I also loved the way Felix spoke about her efforts to shield her readers from trauma, and the idea that her memoir, while she shares intense and painful personal experiences, was not something she wrote to heal. I did my healing in therapy, she said, and the book is an exercise in craft.

This echoes something I heard T Kira Madden speak about during her book tour for Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, an absolutely stunning memoir that includes an essay previously published in Guernica around Madden’s sexual assault as a preteen. During that piece’s publication, her abuser started a years-long online harassment campaign against Madden despite her never naming him. Now that I know this experience was going on behind closed doors, I have new context for how she spoke around it during her book tour stop in DC; writing the book wasn’t healing, she told us, it actually stirred up a lot from chapters I’d closed and caused more pain.

Shortly after I saw her in DC, she published an incredible essay Against Catharsis: Writing Is Not Therapy. There are so many quotes I could pull from it, but here’s one:

“But tell us more about the catharsis? Are your books your therapy? Jaquira and I agree there is room for working things out in words. There is value to journaling, to keeping notes; there is no question that funneling our fears and observations and desires onto a page can be a productive way of transforming energy. This can be true for anyone; creativity as a coping mechanism has been studied ad nauseum. But our books are not our journals, says Jaquira, And even if they were, I add, they wouldn’t come any closer to the truth.”

I’m starting a new writing course this evening and thinking a lot about what my key projects are going to be, what that means and why. I’m both anxious and excited. I want to write because I am a writer, period. I have a story to tell and more than that, I love the art of using language to connect. I also often feel lost or scared on the page; is that a reflection of feeling lost and scared in life, or a reflection of rusty craft?

I was involved in poetry slam as a teen. While I had some friends and an extremely meaningful teacher, the whole thing felt very cliquey and inaccessible at times. There are many writers I admire from afar who were deeply involved in slam and performance poetry in their youth and so, thinking about these Greats, I don’t feel like I can claim that experience as my own. But I did it and even almost made it all the way to Brave New Voices when I was seventeen before losing in a tie breaker (a slam off!) when I was wholly unprepared to read a third piece.

Camonghne Felix came up through slam and still works with young people in performance poetry. She spoke about how her mentor, Mahogany L. Browne, advised her explicitly to not work out her trauma on the stage-  and how that advice runs counter to much of slam culture. Felix and Reynolds spoke about how often kids feel that they need to be sharing a painful story in their poem to get high scores, because that’s what they saw their elders and mentors do, and how that can be retraumatizing and exploitative when they aren’t provided with mental health resources.

I remember walking back to our car after leaving Ann Arbor's city-wide youth poetry slam at the Neutral Zone with my parents when my mom made a comment along the lines of, “I’m sorry we didn’t give you a hard life so you had more to write about in your poems.” There’s a lot I want to unpack about that moment, my youth poetry experience as a whole, about how I felt as a teen despite having an “easy” life but not always knowing how to cope with my emotions or surroundings - but if I’m leaning into not treating the page like my therapy, it’s best to stop here. I’ll report back.

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