Greetings!
We hope you’re enjoying the balmy weather.
A few small news items here, plus our interview with Carolyn Holbrook, whose book, Tell Me Your Names and I will Testify, was published this summer by the University of Minnesota Press.
Holbrook has been a pillar of the Twin Cities writing community for years, and has done more to open doors for writers of color than any other single person. Her essays are beautiful. Her life, epic.
Soon we will also have an interview with Neal Karlen, whose book, This Thing Called Life: Prince's Odyssey, on and Off the Record, was published this month, and which chronicles his years-long friendship with Prince. You can read an excerpt here.
Be well, and keep reading and writing!
Lester
News & Events:
Survey here on the new State Arts Board Grant Programs. Survey expires Oct. 12.
Bookseller Bill Savran has died.
Lots of places in Minneapolis named after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow references. A look at the poet here, and the places named from here work here.
Twin Cities Book Festival is next week.
Stories & Books:
Nonfiction
John Rosengren’s story, The Pretender, about the Lois Riess murders, was published at The Atavist.
Holly Day’s Music Composition for Dummies, will be published in January.
Poetry
Éireann Lorsung’s The Century, was published by Milkweed Editions this month.
Holly Day’s new poetry books, The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body and Book of Beasts were published this summer.
Young Readers
Margi Preus’s The Silver Box: An Enchantment Lake Mystery was published this month.
Anika Fajardo’s What if a fish, was published in August.
The Lester Interview: Carolyn Holbrook
Carolyn Holbrook is a writer, educator, and longtime advocate for the healing power of the arts. She is the author of an essay collection, Tell Me Your Names and I will Testify, a chapbook, Earth Angels, and is co-author with Arleta Little of MN civil rights icon, Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s memoir, Hope In the Struggle. Her personal essays have been published widely, most recently in A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota and Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota. She is the recipient of three Minnesota State Arts Board grants, a 50 over 50 award, and she was the first person of color to win the Minnesota Book Awards Kay Sexton Award. In addition to writing, she is founder and director of More Than a Single Story. She teaches creative writing at the Loft Literary Center and other community venues, and at Hamline University, where she won the Exemplary Teacher award in 2014. More at carolynleeholbrook.com and www.morethanasinglestory.com.
Lester: What were the origins of this Tell Me Your Names?
Carolyn Holbrook: I’ve been working on this book since the 1980s when my kids were teenagers. It all started with writing about the funny things my kids said and did in an effort to stay sane while raising my five children without the partner I had divorced.
For a long time, I thought the book would be a chronological memoir. But as I kept working on the essays that appear in the book, I couldn’t figure out how to put them together into a logical sequence. Several years ago, while putting together a pitch for the Loft’s Pitch conference, my writing buddy, Diane Wilson described my manuscript as a memoir in connected essays. Suddenly, I realized indeed, that was the form I was writing in, Thankfully, my editor agreed.
The title is an excerpt from a poem by Lucille Clifton, at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, South Carolina, 1989. In the poem, Clifton implores the unnamed slaves who are buried there to tell her their names so that she can testify on their behalf. From there I move to the prologue where I tell the story of a visit from an ancestor who commands me to “tell our story.” I took it to mean my family’s story but it could also mean to testify on behalf of myself, my ancestors and on certain aspects of the story of my people.
L: In some ways, your book is a history of the literary community in the Twin Cities. How has that changed over the years, either for better or worse?
CH: I believe the community is much more welcoming for writers of color now and many have told me that SASE: The Write Place, which I founded in 1993, was instrumental in creating that change. I started SASE (pronounced “Sassy”) as a way to creating more options and opportunities for MN writers. Until then, the Loft was pretty much the only place with steady programming.
At SASE we offered two streams of programming:
* For practicing writers we offered small grants, mentorships, and the SASE About Town reading series which, to my knowledge was the first program to pay writers a small amount ($25) to read. We also paid writers to coordinate readings in their own communities. Readings were held in libraries, community centers, coffee shops, bars, etc. Interestingly, writers were not used to being paid and many never cashed their checks. Three of the readings are still going on, though most people may not remember that they started at SASE: The monthly readings at the University Club, the monthly readings at Banfill-Locke in Fridley, and the Queer Voices series, which recently published an anthology. As for our grants, we, together with E.G. Bailey, created the Verve grants, the first grants in the nation for spoken word artists. We also brought the National Poetry Slam to Minneapolis in 2002, their first time coming to Minnesota.
* In our other programming stream, which we called Art with a Heart, we collaborated with schools, community centers, and nonprofits such as the Sexual Violence Center, to provide programs to suit the needs of their constituents. We never went in with the idea that we had the answers. Instead, we asked for their input in order to design programming that truly met their needs. Perhaps the program I’m most proud of in this stream was the program we created side by side with a deaf poet, a poetry curriculum for middle school students at Metro Deaf School. When those kids moved on the high school, we were invited to come back an update the curriculum for high schoolers. I don’t know if this program still going on. I hope so.
Today, there is much, much more available to writers of color and nontraditional writers in our area. Also, the Loft has more scholarships and more specialized programming.
L: Your path into writing was a long, hard road. What made you so sure you wanted to be a writer and work in the arts?
CH: It was never a question. I was the quiet one in my family and have always loved the power of words
L: Who are some of the writers who influenced you?
CH: Tony Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, James Baldwin, Ocean Vuong, Jesmyn Ward, Ta’nehisi Coates…and many more.
L: What are the challenges of working in a place like Minnesota?
CH: People in the communities of color experience “Minnesota nice” differently than white people do. Our experience is largely that it is passive aggressive and back stabbing. If I were to list my confusing and humiliating experiences with “nice” Minnesotans the list would take all day. Microagressions has become a buzzword but it is still very much a daily thing that we experience. The murder of George Floyd was an extreme example but, unfortunately, not surprising.
L: What does it mean to you to be a Minnesota writer?
CH: I don’t care much for labels. Minnesota in my home. It’s all I know, except for a few brief years when I lived in New York, Boston and North Carolina. I know I am Black, a woman, a Minnesotan, a left-hander…but that’s not all that I am.