Dedra Johnson

An Adjective You Don't Want to Hear

2012-01-13T10:48:00.002-06:00

Transvaginal.

As in "transvaginal ultrasound."

Knowing what it is does not ease my stomach. Or anywhere else.

Squirrel Cat

2011-10-21T06:03:00.005-05:00

Cairo has always had different relationships, or conflictships, with each of the 3 cats:

Man he hovers over like Man is the weak link in the herd [which he is--so old, he's lost all his body fat, his fur thinning and now white close to his skin, a walk that's like a creep through glue];

Oshi and he alternately hate each other, are nearly homicidally jealous of each other, or want to kill, or at least play roughly with, each other, and will not separate, no matter how loud the growling, hissing and scrambling get;

Tabby, the youngest cat, was softening her hardline position but Cairo was too much of a dog to lick her on the top of her head which she offered him every time she came near him.

Then Cairo saw Tabby climb the neighbor's crape myrtle. He seemed a bit stunned by her dash up the tree. The only things he's seen climb trees are squirrels he nearly chokes himself trying to get to.

Since then, he has been obsessed with Tabby. He growls, yodels, whines when she comes inside and chases after her, intentions unclear. He gets more hyperactive than usual and can't hear any commands, not even the word "cookie," his favorite word other than "Cairo," and one of us has to scoop up Tabby and place her somewhere out of his reach, or grab Cairo and hold on with both hands and a little body weight to keep hm from running to her so fast he bowls her over. He gets this look on his face these days like, DAMN! Y'all never told me she was a SQUIRREL, too?!?

-----

pics by dsbnola

Love This Detergent

2011-10-06T09:19:00.000-05:00

This is totally out of character for me but I love this laundry detergent.

For most of my life, I've had various forms of rashes, mostly on my face, occasionally on my shoulders or arms. Once I started doing my own laundry and tried different detergents, I realized some made me break out more than others. [I went through the same trial-and-error with soaps. Oy. And don't ask about shampoos, conditioners, deodorants, lotions---a sensitivity that preceded fibromyalgia] Then fragrance- and dye-free detergents came out and I was able to link some breakouts to fragrances and dyes. I read a lot of labels and assumed as long as I was in this modern world, my forehead would continue to be scattered in, if not covered in, little skin-toned bumps.

Then we got a sample of Myndee Corkern's laundry detergent, that she created because she could not find one that didn't aggravate her daughter's eczema.

Oh. My. God. A subtle, clean smell in the clothes and sheets that leaves my forehead smooth. One little scoop [we have a front-loader/high-efficiency]. And the clothes are clean. I don't have to add borax or OxiClean or some other shit to get stuff clean, it just works. Check out Myndee's Etsy page. The scent names are NOLA style: Mardi Gras, Bananas Foster, Fleur de Lis. She has a Baby scent, too. AND she's local!---Fresh GraNOLA: small, woman-owned and -created business, quality product with the sweetest packaging and lovely little red scoops.

Fresh GraNOLA’s All Natural Laundry Powder is made from high quality, hand crafted olive oil soap and other natural materials. It's hard working, yet gentle enough for babies. It will leave your clothes smelling fresh and clean!

You know you want it now.

Tell her you read this post/heard about it from me. You can follow her on Facebook [www.facebook.com/freshgranola] and/or Twitter [freshgranolamyn].

And you will LOVE this detergent. I promise.

Draft Undone

2011-06-30T11:30:00.000-05:00

So here's the method of my madness:

I realize most of this first draft is wrong. But I have to finish it to have a complete, tangible draft to undo.

Next, research. I can already visualize my plan.

Next, a NEW first draft with the research, changes, unwindings, reknottings tucked into the manuscript and then weeks of deleting, pasting, moving, more deleting, drafting, moving, pausing, deleting and drafting.

Then I will have a first draft. And can start revising, aimed at a final draft by this time next year. [I'm sure I'll regret saying that in May 2012.]

Draft Done!

2011-05-31T10:05:00.001-05:00

It sucks monkey shit but now I have something to work with. Flawed, too narrow, factual details all over the place, but I feel a bit of cool relief.

Mid-Stream

2011-04-13T12:59:00.002-05:00

I am deep enough in this first draft to be absent-minded, daydreamy, always a step back from the present, distracted, and even when I am not thinking I feel like I am thinking.

That's the good news.

The bad news is I am deep enough in this first draft to have it seeping from my skin and I am not enjoying sharing head space with my narrator right now. It's a fucked-up time for her and for everyone around her even if they think all is good and fine in the world. If I had the luxury and privilege of going into the full immersion the draft is teasing me with, I would gladly go over the deep end. But there are small animals to care for, physical therapy, meals, dirty dishes, calls to make, leads that fade and have to be picked up again later, family and relationships I actually like and don't want to drop for a few weeks/months/a year and the general need for non-writing in order to be able to think about writing and write.

So here I sit.

Dog Care

2011-03-12T10:20:00.000-06:00

I have taken from the basenji's mouth:

aluminum foil

bark

beer can wrapped in a paper bag

bone knuckles

broken chicken bones

carpet fibers

cat claws

cat hair

cat litter

cat turds

charcoal briquettes

chewing gum wrappers

chunk of blueberry muffin

cigarette butts

clean napkins

clipped fingernails

coupons

crumpled paper bags

dirt

dirty napkins

dirty piece of sausage

dog turds

dry cat food

dust bunnies

flower petals

human hair

leaves

more carpet fibers

more cigarette butts

mulch

newspaper

piece of bread covered in ants

piece of onion

plastic bags

rocks

steak bones

unidentifiable pieces of plastic, various colors

weeds

wet cat food

wet half cigarette

whole chicken bones

And I have pulled a whole dried dracena leaf out his ass.

*********
photo courtesy of dsb nola, used under this Creative Commons license

Noelle Kocot

2011-02-17T18:34:00.002-06:00

Amazing. Especially the last one.

Awkward

2011-02-16T10:08:00.004-06:00

The health club--I mean, wellness center where I take a warm-water exercise class is, during the day when I go, a hot spot for older folks--they chat, hug, catch up, walk on machines or the track together or exercise in the pools keeping up a steady conversation. In the locker room, I am surrounded by naked, half-dressed, dressing, undressing, showering women 15, 25, sometimes 30 years older than I. One morning, groaning as I got dressed again, sagging and wrinkling and cane shuffling all around me, I realized that the song coming over the loudspeaker "face to face/and back to back/you see and feel/my sex attack" was Billy Idol's "Flesh for Fantasy."

Awkward.

________________

photo courtesy of Olivander, used under this Creative Commons license

Bilocal: Next Stop = NOLA!

2010-12-11T16:16:00.000-06:00

The energy in Seattle was amazing and inspiring. It was the best organized event I've ever been a part of, thanks to Bob Redmond. Our Seattle hosts were lovely, enthusiastic, talented, and warm. In April, it will be our turn to host.

I adore the poster made of my so-so memoir piece. I plan some revisions that may help the piece adhere better to the theme of "community." The event itself was community, and one I savored and look forward to being in again.

See the Bilocal blog for updates, links, comments, etc.

Images from Town Hall

Like Bilocal on Facebook!

New Orleans Mythbusters

2010-10-30T09:33:00.003-05:00

Did Katrina flood New Orleans? Is the Lower Ninth Ward below sea level? Is the Westbank west? Check out New Orleans Mythbusters at AOL Travel to see what's true and what's false.

Oh yeah, I wrote it. Gina Misiroglu of Red Room connected me with AOL for this article.

Bilocal: Seattle/NOLA

2010-10-24T10:20:00.003-05:00

from press release:

An innovative arts program kicks off this November, under the direction of the new non-profit organization Essential Arts. The program (like its producer) presents art with an eye on social impact. In this case, the intention is to create new work about the nature of community, and to take action to help the Gulf.

Says producer Bob Redmond, "Rather than navel-gazing about our Seattle selves, we decided to partner with another city to make something more dynamic happen. And what better city than New Orleans, who knows what it means to build community from the ground up?"

The program features, from each city: 6 writers, 6 graphic designers, a musician, and a filmmaker. A host of Seattle chefs will provide hospitality. All artists are creating new work on the theme of "community/home/location." Town Hall Seattle will host events on November 12 and 13, with an art exhibit at Tether Design Gallery the month of November. In April, New Orleans ("NOLA") will return the favor by hosting the same artists in performance in the Big Easy.

Some of the marquee participants are songwriter and pianist Robin Holcomb (Seattle); cajun music forerunner Zachary Richard (NOLA); Seattle writers Molly Wizenberg, Megan Kelso, Riz Rollins, and Jonathan Evison; NOLA writers James Nolan, Dedra Johnson, and Asia Rainey; Seattle artists Jeff Kleinsmith and Jeffry Mitchell; NOLA artists Ness Higson and Daniela Marx; Seattle filmmaker Ben Kasulke, and NOLA filmmaking ensemble Court 13.

_______________

November 4 - 26
Exhibit: 12 Designers on Writing

when: Thursday, November 4 through Friday, November 26
cost: Free
time: Monday through Friday, 10 am - 5 pm
first Thursday opening 6 pm - 9 pm
where: Tether Design Gallery
323 Occidental Ave South (at Jackson)
Seattle, WA
info: www.bilocal.org
featuring: (Seattle) Chelsea Conboy, Karen Ganz, Louie Gong, Jeff Kleinsmith, Jeffrey Mitchell, and Carlos Ruiz; (NOLA) Nancy Bernardo, Ness Higson, Melanie Innis, Lizzy Margiotta, Daniela Marx, and Justin Shiels

Friday, November 12
Reading and Performance: Writers on Location + Zachary Richard
Pre-funk reception with food and drinks

when: Friday, November 12
where: Town Hall Seattle
1119 - 8th Ave (at Seneca)
Seattle, WA
pre-funk: 6:30 pm
show: 8:00 pm
tickets: $20, $15 advance; all ages
featuring: writers (Seattle): Molly Wizenberg, Alex Kuo, Swil Kanim
writers (NOLA): James Nolan, Dedra Johnson, Jamar Travis
filmmaker: Ben Kasulke (Seattle)
musician: Zachary Richard (New Orleans)
host: Denise Jolly, poet (Seattle)

Saturday, November 13
Reading and Performance: Writers on Location + Robin Holcomb
Pre-funk reception with food and drinks

when: Saturday, November 13
where: Town Hall Seattle
1119 - 8th Ave (at Seneca)
Seattle, WA
pre-funk: 6:30 pm
show: 8:00 pm
tickets: $20, $15 advance; all ages
featuring: writers (Seattle): Megan Kelso, Jonathan Evison, Riz Rollins
writers (NOLA): David Rutledge, Anne Gisleson, Asia Rainey
filmmaker: Court 13 (NOLA)
musician: Robin Holcomb (Seattle)
host: Denise Jolly, poet (Seattle)
______________

12 DESIGNERS ON WRITING

Having worked with Curator Daniel R. Smith on the successful Seattle-Havana, Tehran, and Moscow poster shows at Bumbershoot, Bilocal producer Redmond invited Smith to help create and curate a Seattle-New Orleans exchange of designers and artists.

Smith came up with an idea to commission new works that would be inspired by the participating writers, and invited New Orleans designer Tom Futrell to help identify talent. Silkscreen prints of the work will be generated in limited quantity and sold to benefit the cause (investigative journalism in the Gulf).

Seattle artists Chelsea Conboy, Karen Ganz, Louie Gong, Jeff Kleinsmith, Jeffry Mitchell, and Carlos Ruiz are joined by NOLA artists Nancy Bernardo, Ness Higson, Melanie Innis, Lizzy Margiotta, Daniela Marx, and Justin Shiels. In addition, former UW professor Michael Spafford has donated prints from his landmark "Labors of Hercules" series for sale to benefit the cause.

PROCEEDS TO HELP THE GULF

Net proceeds will benefit The Lens, a New Orleans non-profit doing investigative journalism in the Gulf. The Lens, the first non-profit journalism venture in New Orleans, boasts a staff with veteran investigative reporters from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Portland Mercury, and other publications.

"The project is all about stories," says Redmond. "And we want to support not just metaphors, but facts. The Lens tells the real story of the Gulf from the people who are there, and getting these stories out is absolutely essential to doing the right thing in the Gulf."

Says Ariella Cohen, journalist and cofounder of The Lens, "At a time when the Internet has made more information readily available than ever before, communities must have sources they can rely on for relevant, accurate reporting on the issues that affect them most and that is why we at The Lens do the work we do." Find out more about the Lens at www.thelensnola.com

AMAZON.COM AWARDS GRANT

"This project would not be possible without the support of Amazon.com," says Redmond. They believed in it from the start—not just in our capability to make something happen, but also in our community-building goals. Amazon.com is making a real difference in its hometown by supporting writers and new writing."

The creation of new work is a feature of Bilocal, says Redmond. "All the writers are generating something new for Bilocal; even Holcomb and Richard—both accomplished lyricists—will present new work for the program." The writers' stories will be used as inspiration for graphic designers and filmmakers from each city; the writing and artwork will be published online and in a book.

"Amazon.com is proud to be a part of the inaugural Bilocal program,” says Jon Fine, director of Author and Publisher Relations for Amazon.com. "Essential Arts and Amazon.com share a deep commitment to supporting the creation of new works, and we look forward to the contributions to come from Bilocal’s impressive lineup of talent."

Bilocal joins a diverse range of regional and national not-for-profit author and publisher groups receiving support from Amazon.com for programs dedicated to developing new voices and new works. Other recipients include 826 Seattle, Poets & Writers, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, One Story, Pen American Center, ACT Theatre's Young Playwrights Program, Artist Trust, Clarion West, Copper Canyon, Hedgebrook, Richard Hugo House, Seattle Arts & Lectures and dozens of other groups nationwide.

WRITERS ON LOCATION • FUTURE CITIES • VIRTUAL SPACE

Bilocal: Seattle/New Orleans is the first of an annual series; future events will pair Seattle with other cities from around the nation. Do we know where? Yes...cities in some kind of decay, if not trouble, with rich cultural and social histories. Future projects will also benefit a targeted charity in each partner city. Bilocal 2011 will be announced within the year.

Writing from participating communities, and other locations as well, will be solicited via bilocal.org; selected work will be published on the site, and collected in a forthcoming book.

CREDITS

Bilocal is produced by Essential Arts, and co-presented by Town Hall Seattle and Tether Design Gallery, with the participation of University Bookstore, Chin Music Press, and the NW Film Forum.

The program is made possible with a generous contribution by Amazon.com, with additional support from Tully's Coffee, the Seattle Weekly, KBCS 91.3 FM community radio, the Sorrento Hotel, Girlie Press, and 4Culture (King County Lodging Tax).

The program is curated by Bob Redmond (producer and director), with Daniel R. Smith (curator, "12 designers on writing" and Tom Futrell (co-curator, "12 designers on writing"). Thanks to Wier Harman (Town Hall) and Stesha Brandon (University Bookstore) for overall guidance.

Creative design provided by Tether.

***

BILOCAL PARTICIPANTS

MUSICIANS

Robin Holcomb (Seattle)
www.robinholcomb.com
Pianist, composer, singer and songwriter Robin Holcomb has performed extensively in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia as a solo artist and the leader of various ensembles. Living in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1980s, she was a founder of Studio Henry, a venue for maverick composers, and the New York Composers Orchestra. Living in Seattle since 1989, she continues to compose and record songs and music for solo piano, chamber ensembles, dance, theatre and film.

Her work has been called "remarkable" (CMJ), "stunning" (Option), "entrancing" (Billboard) and "sensitive, descriptive, adventuresome and full of soul" (Washington Post). "Hers is an unsettling, utterly original vision." (Entertainment Weekly) According to The New York Times: "Ms. Holcomb has done something remarkable here: she has created a new American regionalism, spun from many threads - country, rock, minimalism, Civil War songs, Baptist hymns, Appalachian folk tunes, even the polytonal music of Charles Ives. The music that results is as elegantly simple as a Shaker Quilt, and no less beautiful."

Her most recent recording is The Point of It All (Songlines), a collection of songs and instrumental collaborations that confound categorization with Talking Pictures (Ron Samworth, Peggy Lee, Bill Clark and Dylan van der Schyff) and Wayne Horvitz.

Zachary Richard (New Orleans)
www.zacharyrichard.com
Zachary Richard is a Cajun singer/songwriter and poet, who is credited as a major influence in the preservation and popularization of Cajun music worldwide. In his 35-year career, he has released sixteen studio albums of which five were declared gold albums in Canada with 1 double platinum (Cap Enragé). In addition to his musical works, Richard has published three books of poetry: Faire Récolte earned the Prix Champlain (Québec) in 1998 and Feu received the Prix Roland Gasparic (Bucharest Roumania) in 2002. He has also published three children's books, and produced "Against the Tide: the story of the Cajun People of Louisiana," which was awarded Best Historical Documentary by the National Educational Television Association (NETA) in 2000.

In 2009 Richard released LAST KISS, his first English-language album in 15 years. Co-produced by Richard and the celebrated New Orleans pianist, David Torkanowsky, the album was recorded in Montreal, Paris, Brussels, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Lafayette, Louisiana; and features a recording of Robbie Robertson's classic "Acadian Driftwood" in a duet with Céline Dion. This August Richard he released two new tracks, the sale of which will benefit efforts in the Gulf through his charity Gulf Aid Acadiana.

WRITERS

WRITERS - SEATTLE

Jonathan Evison
www.jonathanevison.com/
Jonathan Evison is the author of "All About Lulu," which won the 2008 Washington State Book Award, and the forthcoming novels "West of Here" (2011, Algonquin) and "The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving" (2012, Algonquin). He is the executive editor of "The Nervous Breakdown" and a chief contributor to the lit blog "Three Guys, One Book". In 2009, he was awarded the Richard Buckley Fellowship from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.

Denise Jolly (host)
http://www.myspace.com/denisejolly
Denise Jolly is a writer, performer, educator and community builder. She is currently Co-Executive Director of Seattle Youth Speaks and a member of Salt Lines Spoken Word Collective. She has served as co-host and facilitator of the Seattle Poetry Slam, Poetry Curator for The Round (a live multidisciplinary collaborative arts show), member of Eleventh Hour Productions Board of Directors and Vice President of Stronghold Productions. Denise was the 2009 San Francisco Grand Slam Champion and member of the 2009 San Francisco Slam team who ranked 3rd in the nation. She has performed, taught, and/or collaborated in venues as large as Coachella and as small as Cook County Detention Center, Cleveland High School, and Seattle Youth Speaks writing circle. She likes doing great things with amazing people and being moved by art, community and how the two work together.

Megan Kelso
www.girlhero.com/
Megan Kelso began in comics with her 1993 Xeric award winning comic, Girl Hero. She continued the series until all six issues were compiled in the Highwater books publication, Queen of the Black Black in 1998. She has continued in comics, with the release of her environmental minded comic, The Lost Valley in 1999. In 2006, Fantagraphics released a collection of 15 of her short stories in Squirrel Mother. And in 2007, the New York Times Magazine ran her weekly narrative comic strip, Watergate Sue. Over the last decade she has worked on her graphic novel, Artichoke Tales, released this year on Fantagraphics.

Alex Kuo
www.alexkuo.org/
Alex Kuo has published more than 350 poems, short stories, photographs and essays in serials in the last 50 years. His most recent books are WHITE JADE AND OTHER STORIES, and the novel PANDA DIARIES. His LIPSTICK AND OTHER STORIES won the American Book Award. His big doppelganger novel and political manifesto THE MAN WHO DAMMED THE YANGTZE will be out in March 2011, as well as A CHINAMAN'S CHANCE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS.

Riz Rollins
Riz Rollins spent his first 25 stormy years in the city of his birth, Chicago. 25 years of trouble, heartache, and ordinary pain led him to move to Seattle and he's been feeling much better thank you very much. A world-renowned DJ, Rollins currently is celebrating his 20th year of being an on- air host for KEXP 90.3 FM, where he is the originator of that station's electronic + program called "Expansions." He also hosts a weekly variety show. In this same 20-year period he has also enjoyed some notoriety as a writer, publishing first in The Rocket and The Stranger, featuring in the Jack Straw writers program, and contributing to NPR's "This American Life" and so many other events that he couldn't possibly recount them all.

Swil Kanim
www.swilkanim.net/
Swil Kanim is a world class virtuoso violinist, storyteller, popular keynote speaker and actor. He intertwines his music with storytelling, poetry, and audience interaction. He starred as "Mouse" in Sherman Alexie’s highly acclaimed movie The Business of FancyDancing. In April of 2008, Swil Kanim was invited to perform for the Dalai Lama at Key Arena in Seattle for The Seeds of Compassion event and in November of that same year Swil Kanim performed four "sold out" shows at the Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC. This year he was asked to open for the entire summer concert series at the Tulalip Amphitheatre, which included The Temptations, Blake Shelton, Robert Cray, Buddy Guy, Billy Idol, Chicago and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

[editorial note: "Swil Kanim" is the artist's whole name and should always be written in full. The name is a sentence, meaning (in the Lummi language) "Works for the Spirit of the People."]

Molly Wizenberg
www.orangette.net
Molly Wizenberg writes the monthly column "Cooking Life" in Bon Appetit magazine, and her first book, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, was a New York Times bestseller. She is the voice behind Orangette (www.orangette.net), named the best food blog in the world by the London Times. Her work has also been published in Best Food Writing 2009, Town and Country, and on NPR.org, PBS.org, NYTimes.com, and Gourmet.com. She lives in Seattle, where she and her husband Brandon Pettit own the restaurant Delancey.

WRITERS - NEW ORLEANS

Anne Gisleson
www.press-street.com/
Anne Gisleson is a New Orleans native and chair of the writing program at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, Louisiana's arts conservatory for high school students. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, Oxford American, The Mississippi Review and other magazines and has been selected for inclusion in several anthologies including Best American Non-Required Reading, Best Music Writing, Life in the Wake: Fiction from Post-Katrina and Paul Chan's Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide.

Gisleson also helps run Press Street, a non-profit collective that promotes art and literature in the city through events like the 24 hour community arts extravaganza Drawathon and collaborative publication projects. Press Street also operates the downtown gallery Antenna, which hosts art shows, readings, workshops, free screenings and other activities. She lives with her husband artist Brad Benischek and their two sons in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans.

Dedra Johnson
A native and current resident of New Orleans, Dedra Johnson received her MFA from the University of Florida-Gainesville, where she was a finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Award for College Writers. She also earned undergraduate degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Southern Mississippi. Her stories have appeared in Product and Bridge. Her novel, Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow (Ig, 2007), was a finalist for the 2006 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Award. Some of her post-Katrina online writing appears in A Howling in the Wires: An Anthology of Writings from Postdiluvian New Orleans (Gallatin & Toulouse, 2010).

James Nolan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nolan
James Nolan's most recent book, Perpetual Care, was awarded the 2007 Jefferson Press Prize and the 2009 Next-Generation Indie Book Award for Best Short Story Collection. The manuscript of his novel Higher Ground won the 2008 William Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal. His collections of poetry are Why I Live in the Forest and What Moves Is Not the Wind, both from Wesleyan University Press. A regular contributor to Boulevard, his poems, stories, and essays also have appeared in The Southern Review, Georgia Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, Utne Reader, North American Review, the anthologies New Orleans Noir and The Gastronomica Reader, and the Washington Post, among many other places.

Nolan has translated Pablo Neruda's Stones of the Sky (Copper Canyon) and Longing: Selected Poems of Jaime Gil de Biedma (City Lights). He is the author of Poet-Chief (University of New Mexico Press), a study of the Native American poetics of Whitman and Neruda, and a collection of his personal essays, Fumadores en manos de un dios enfurecido, has come out in Spain (Enigma Editores). He has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two Fulbright Fellowships, and has taught literature and creative writing at universities in San Francisco, Florida, Barcelona, Madrid, and Beijing. Recently he was Writer-in-Residence at both Tulane and Loyola Universities in New Orleans, where he now directs the New Orleans Writing Institute at the Arts Council. A fifth-generation native of the Crescent City, he lives in the French Quarter.

CONTACT

Asia Rainey
www.asiarainey.com/
As an award-winning spoken word artist and vocalist, Asia Rainey has been invited as a featured and guest performer at countless events, festivals, benefits, and educational institutions around the country. She has shared stages with artists such as the Last Poets, Mos Def, Suheir Hammad, Kalamu Ya Salaam, Charmaine Neville, and many more. Asia has appeared in several theatre productions, as a recording artist (Jena Six Project, No Rainbows for the Colored, Her Name is New Orleans, Poet's Collabo), in television (writer, special co-host of Between the Lines), and recently in film, in a lead role of Flood Streets (www.thehatcherymedia.com). She is presently working on both her second book and a new CD which will include her original music and spoken word, and is completing two original poetic stage plays (Shut Up and Fly; Neutral Ground).

David Rutledge
www.chinmusicpress.com/
David Rutledge is now in his twelfth year of teaching English at the University of New Orleans. He has taught American literature, Shakespeare, New Orleans literature, among other classes. His book on Vladimir Nabokov, entitled Permanent Mystery, will be published next year by McFarland Press.

Rutledge is the co-editor and a contributor to Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? (Chin Music Press, 2006), a post-Katrina anthology that celebrates the culture of the city. The book release party at the Saturn Bar, in February of 2006, was the most remarkable evening in his eleven years of evenings in New Orleans.

He has also edited and contributed to Where We Know: New Orleans as Home, the second collection of New Orleans essays and stories from Chin Music Press/Broken Levee Books (2010). It explores the joys, difficulties and challenges of choosing to make New Orleans home.

Jamar Travis
Jamar Travis is a youth poet from New Orleans. Jamar was first introduced to spoken word by National Slam champion Karama Sadaka. He represented New Orleans at Brave New Voices, a national event of youth poets, from 2007 through 2010, serving as team captain 2009-2010. Says Jamar: "The experience changed me not only as a writer but a person, and forced me to see the importance of life, love and faith."

DESIGNERS

DESIGNERS - SEATTLE

Chelsea Conboy
http://doublefelix.carbonmade.com/
Chelsea Conboy is a Seattle-based illustrator and designer. She grew up in Southern California, went to high school in Las Vegas and studied literature at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her first foray into graphic design was a college job with a small on-campus design studio, designing posters and print materials for school events. Not wanting to stray far from the Pacific, she moved to Seattle after college and immediately took a liking to the persistent moss and salty air. Chelsea cut her teeth in the Seattle startup world and struck out on her own in 2009 with Double Felix Industries, a creative studio. Chelsea works primarily in a digital medium, but strives for the craftsmanship of traditional printed arts. She finds inspiration in the uncharted regions between nurture and nature.

Karen Ganz
kganz.com
Karen Ganz was born in Riverside, California in 1963. She received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and MFA from the University of Iowa in 1988. Her work is influenced by 1900-1920s cartoon and comic strips. She works mostly with large, constructed canvases and collage, using ink drawing overlaid with paint. Her paintings and drawings invoke a sense of nostalgia, humor and concern for the predicament of "the common man". Her work has been shown in over 40 exhibitions and in several public collections—notably a 110 x 5 foot set of paintings at the North Terminal of Sea-Tac airport. Her work is in the collection of Microsoft, Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Boise Art Museum, and the True collection. She received a residency at the MacDowell Colony and has been awarded numerous grants and purchase awards during her 20 years in Seattle.

Louie Gong
eighthgeneration.com
Louie discovered the power of art to express ideas when he used crude, but well placed, graffiti to effectively woo a girl. Around the same time, he started seriously exploring Northwest Coast Salish art by painting drums in preparation for the 2006 Canoe Journey. He started seeing the world in crescents, ovals and formlines. In 2009 he found his groove as an artist when–on a whim–he took a sharpie to a pair of Vans. The resulting merger of Coast Salish art and pop culture perfectly represented his complex cultural identity. While many are drawn to his work because it represents the confluence of multiple worlds, others simply appreciate Coast Salish art or the shoes’ freshness and originality. Either way, Louie is honored that people find value in something he loves to do.

Jeff Kleinsmith
jeffkleinsmith.com
In 1990, Jeff Kleinsmith moved to Seattle and started freeloading around the offices of local music rag The Rocket. He was drawn to artists and designers like Lisa Orth, Art Chantry and Mike King, and was influenced especially by the design of The Rocket. He worked there for four years, including a year-long stint as art director, until Sub Pop hired him away as their first and, as of yet, only in-house art director. In 1992, Kleinsmith started BSK Screen Printing in his basement with two friends which later became Patent Pending Printing. In 2000, Patent Pending Design was formed as a creative outlet for producing and marketing silkscreen posters and freelance design work. His work has appeared in design books and magazines too numerous to list, ditto with gallery shows. He is currently working on a monograph tentatively scheduled for release in 2010.

Jeffry Mitchell
http://www.thestranger.com
Jeffry Mitchell's exhibitions, both solo and group, have drawn critical praise and include the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards at the Portland Art Museum, 2008, Western Bridge, 2006, the World Ceramic Biennial in South Korea, 2003, the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 2001, DiverseWorks, Houston, 2001, White Columns, NYC, 1997, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC, 1992 and the Seattle Art Museum, 1990. His works are in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Philadelphia Art Museum, the New York Public Library, the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum and Western Bridge among others.

Carlos M Ruiz
cmrtyz.com
Carlos Ruiz never went to art school. In fact, he openly admits that he never studied graphic design techniques, doesn't know a thing about computer design programs and doesn't even own a computer. With a good eye for composition and a bit of intuition, he often designs posters while riding the bus and completes layouts within an a few hours using sharpies, collaged images and copy machines. His black and white and two-color posters are simple in the sense that they are bold and raw, pixelated and hand-drawn, possessing an organic edge that is rarely seen in the work of contemporary designers. When he's not designing a poster or drawing in his sketchbook, you'll likely find him smoking, listening to garage-punk records, or drinking his coffee black.

DESIGNERS - NEW ORLEANS

Nancy Bernardo
www.nancyabernardo.net
Nancy Bernardo, trained as a graphic designer (MFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago), currently resides in New Orleans and teaches design at Loyola University. Her work focuses on the relationship between text and interpretation of messages. The messages she experiments with are from observations in everyday life as well as appropriating image and text from the Victorian era through the 1950′s. She uses typography to visually enhance and communicate alternate meanings.

Ness Higson
www.iamalwayshungry.com
Nessim Higson runs IAAH (I Am Always Hungry), which functions on the core belief of good design = good business, and that design has a responsibility to not only contribute to the economic market but also to the social fabric of society. The studio has been recognized nationally and internationally by organizations including, but not limited to, Communication Arts, Print, Graphis, DGV and was recently named a "young gun" by the Art Directors Club of New York.

Melanie Innis
www.melanieinnis.com
Melanie Innis is a designer and founder of Mac Stanley & Co., a multidisciplinary design studio in New Orleans, LA. Melanie spent her childhood tearing it up in her father's print shop art room and her early design career submersed in the world of print design. Now, she's primarily focused in interactive design and obsessed with studying user experiences alongside her biggest support team, Mac (the cat) and Stanley (the dog).

Lizzy Margiotta
www.sodizzymisslizzy.com
Lizzy Margiotta was born in Florida, but lived most of her childhood on North Island of New Zealand. She received degrees in both Advertising and Graphic Design from Loyola University New Orleans. Currently she designs for I Am Always Hungry studio in New Orleans and Sandbag in LA. Biggest influences include Swiss design and surf culture. She sees design as a tool that when used properly can cause outstanding effects.

Daniela Marx
http://www.postersofdiscontent.com/artist9.html
Daniela Marx is a designer and an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Loyola University New Orleans. She is currently on sabbatical researching, reinventing and revisiting the power of design in the city of New Orleans.

Justin Shiels
http://www.curioustribe.com/design/index.html
Justin Shiels is a creative thinker, artist, communicator and self-proclaimed New Orleanian.

FILMMAKERS

Ben Kasulke (Seattle)
www.benkasulke.com
Ben Kasulke is an award winning Director and Director of Photography based in Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York. Ben graduated from the Northfield-Mount Hermon School and received his BS in Cinema Production from Ithaca College following additional study at the Filmová a Televizní Fakulta Akadmie Muzickych Umní in Prague.

Ben's professional experience includes employment as an Instructor at Northwest Film Forum, a film archivist with The Image Treasury, programmer with London's Raindance Film Festival, and as a staff projectionist with the Olympia Film Society. While employed as the staff cinematographer for the Seattle based Film Company, he was fortunate enough to work with award winning filmmakers Guy Maddin and Lynn Shelton. Kasulke has also worked in music video and performance documentation with various acts including Andrew Bird, Einsteurzende Neubaten to Built To Spill.

In 2006, he received two awards for his Cinematography on Shelton's "We Go Way Back" from the Slamdance and Torun Film Festivals. The Seattle Stranger shortlisted Kasulke for its Genius Award in Film in 2007. In 2009 Ben was fortunate enough to lens the Sundance Special Jury Prize winning "Humpday" which eventually went on to win the John Cassavetes Award at the 2010 Independent Spirit Awards. Kasulke's work has been screened at multiple film festivals including the Toronto, Berlin, Sundance, and Cannes Film Festival Director's Fortnight. His feature film work has been released by Zeitgeist Films, IFC Films, Magnolia Pictures, and The Criterion Collection.

Court 13 (NOLA)
www.court13.com/
Court 13 is a grass roots, independent filmmaking army—a collective of artists and animators of junk that seek to tell huge stories out of small parts. The Court made its first film, "egg," when its creators were still in college. Shorts like "Jettison Your Loved Ones" and "Death to the Tinman" (Ray Tintori, director) also came out of Wesleyan University to play at festivals such as Sundance and Cinequest.

The Court truly found its roots in New Orleans in the spring of 2007, when it created "Glory at Sea" (Benh Zeitlin, director) a short film about a community responding to loss in the wake of a near-apocalyptic storm and flood. "Glory at Sea" received 15 festival awards, including the Wholphin Award at South by Southwest, Best Short Film at the New Orleans Human Rights Film Festival, and the Best Short Fiction Film at the New Orleans Film Festival.

In 2010, Court 13 commenced production on its first feature film, "Beasts of the Southern Wild," after being accepted and going through the Sundance Institute's Directors, Screenwriters, and Producers Labs, respectively. "Beasts" also received the NHK International Filmmaker's Award, and was a recipient of a generous post-production grant from the San Francisco Film Society and Kenneth Rainin Foundation.

Michael Gottwald, director of the Bilocal film project, is proud to call himself a founding member of Court 13.

CURATORIAL

Bob Redmond [producer/curator]
Founder of Essential Arts (producer of Bilocal), Bob Redmond is a writer, community organizer, and beekeeper. From 2004-2010 he was Arts Program Manager at the Bumbershoot Festival, and before that helped start the Capitol Hill Arts Center, did programming and production at Experience Music Project, worked in community radio and journalism, and founded and ran the Seattle Poetry Festival from 1998-2000. A former writer-in-residence for Richard Hugo House at the Belltown P- patch garden, Bob also runs the Urban Bee Company, which operates the Honeybee Sanctuary program in Seattle.

Daniel R. Smith
www.thunderbitch.com target="_blank"
[curator, "12 Designers on Writing"]
Daniel R. Smith is a designer, artist and sometimes curator. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1994 with a BFA in Graphic Design and a BA in fine arts. Currently Design Director for Tether, a design firm and gallery in Pioneer Square, he has worked for NBBJ Architecture, Experience Music Project (EMP) and Starbucks Coffee Company. His work has been chosen for inclusion in Seattle City Light’s public art collection and EMP’s permanent collection. Curatorial projects include The Seattle-Havana Poster Show, The Seattle-Tehran Poster Show, The Seattle- Moscow Poster Show and Thunderbitch: Women Designers in Northwest Rock 1966-2010.

Tom Futrell
www.tomfutrell.com
[co-curator, "12 Designers on Writing"]
Tom Futrell is a designer and educator living in New Orleans. With 10+ years of print and interactive design experience, Tom has worked with a wide range of clients that include Centurylink, Intel Labs, Louisiana Economic Development, New Orleans Tourism, Seattle Arts & Lectures, and the University of Washington. His work has been recognized by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the American Institute of Architects, and the American Advertising Federation. An active member of the New Orleans design community, Tom is an adjunct professor of design at Loyola University of New Orleans and also serves as Development & Community Outreach co-chair for AIGA New Orleans. Tom received his MFA in Visual Communication Design from the University of Washington in 2008.

PARTNERS

Essential Arts (Producer)
www.essentialarts.org
Essential Arts develops creative work for the Common Good. Through events, educational programs, and artist support, we focus specifically on community development, local agriculture, and education. With artistic work that has social impact, and social work that has creativity, we aim to address constructively the urgent needs of our global and local communities.

Tether (Co-producing partner)
www.tetherinc.com
Dedicated to promoting emerging artists, designers and visionaries. Tether is a group of friends that are passionate about one thing. Telling stories that matter. Tether operates a design shop in Pioneer Square in Seattle, as well as a gallery and retail store.

Town Hall
(Co-producing partner)
www.townhallseattle.com
Town Hall Seattle is home to many of Seattle's fine cultural and civic organizations, which use the facility for a busy schedule of concerts, lectures, meetings, and fundraising events. It also rents space to many individual users, from small meetings of 40 to full-building, multi-floor events for 1,000.

As a nonprofit organization with deep roots in Seattle's civic life, Town Hall's mission is to serve as a common home for dozens of Seattle's mid-sized nonprofit organizations.

Located in a renovated church dating to 1922. The building is one of the landmarks of First Hill, Seattle's first suburb and still a neighborhood of distinguished and varied older buildings. Continuously used and well-maintained over the last 80 years, Town Hall was purchased in 1998 from the Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist by a group of 16 civic-minded Seattle citizens for conversion into the community culture center it is today. It opened its doors in March, 1999.

University Bookstore
www.bookstore.washington.edu
Washington State's oldest independent bookstore, University Bookstore is an indispensable resource in support of UW's vision and an unforgettable attribute of the UW experience. The bookstore is also a tremendous community asset, providing over 450 author readings throughout the year (most of them free), supporting numerous community events, and creating unique local benefits such as 110|110, a book that featured 110 local writers on the occasion of the bookstore's 110th birthday.

Chin Music Press
http://chinmusicpress.com
Chin Music Press is dedicated to the art of storytelling. As we ride the digital wave cresting at the beginning of the 21st Century, we’re searching for new ways to tell stories about our world.

Bruce Rutledge and Yuko Enomoto founded Chin Music Press in 2002, sensing that the time was ripe for small presses willing to publish risky books. Designer Craig Mod joined in 2003, adding an important layer to the press: Chin Music books would not only be risky, they would be beautiful.

After the levees broke in New Orleans, David Rutledge, a professor at the University of New Orleans, spearheaded Chin Music’s effort to publish one of the first books about those early days. The success of that book — Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans — led the press to begin another imprint, Broken Levee Books.

Northwest Film Forum
www.nwfilmforum.org/
Northwest Film Forum is Seattle's premier film arts organization, screening over 200 independently made and classic films annually, offering a year-round schedule of filmmaking classes for all ages, and supporting filmmakers at all stages of their careers.

Founded in 1995 by filmmakers Jamie Hook and Deborah Girdwood, the Film Forum now operates the region's first and only non-profit center for the film arts. The Film Forum's programming embraces film production as well as film exhibition, with two cinemas, film production and post-production facilities and equipment, educational workshop space, filmmaker offices, a film vault containing over 1,000 titles and a filmmaking.

SPONSORS

Bilocal is made possible with a generous contribution by Amazon.com and with additional support from Tully's Coffee, the Seattle Weekly, KBCS 91.3 FM community radio, the Sorrento Hotel, Girlie Press, and 4Culture (King County Lodging Tax).

A Howling in the Wires:Debut and Reading Aug. 26

2010-08-19T07:25:00.006-05:00

CORRECTION: Readings will begin at 7:30 PM.

A Howling in the Wires: An Anthology of Writings from Postdiluvian New Orleans

Gallatin & Toulouse Press announces the publication of A Howling in the Wires: An Anthology of Writings from Postdiluvian New Orleans. This collection combines the vivid post-Katrina experiences captured by internet-based "bloggers" from New Orleans--individuals who don't think of themselves as writers but who were writing powerfully in the months after 8-29--with the work of traditional writers. Some of those, like novelist Dedra Johnson and poet Robin Kemp, share their most immediate reactions from their own blogs. The book deliberately blurs the line between formats and focuses on cataloging some of the best-written and most powerful reactions of the people who experienced Katrina.

Editors Sam Jasper and Mark Folse are writers who turned to the Internet to chronicle their own experiences and reactions to Katrina and found in the months after 8-29 they were part of a larger community sharing the public and very private events of the period.

The book will be published late August, 2010. A launch party and reading is scheduled for Thursday, Aug. 26 at 8 p.m. upstairs at Mimi’s in the Marigny.

Contributors include cookbook author and travel-and-sailing writer Troy Gilbert, poet Valentine Pierce, Professor Jerry Ward of Dillard University and poet/playwright Raymond "Moose" Jackson together with the work of bloggers who are by day engineers, teachers, geologists, computer programmers, bankers, and social workers but in their spare time writers of talent whose only prior outlet has been their Internet-based blogs. These works were edited minimally for basic spelling and grammar, mistakes easily made writing first hand accounts created under great duress, in an attempt to preserve the original "howl" of people who experienced these events first hand.

Editor Sam Jasper’s preface explains: "When we started this project, our goal was to find some of the best words that were howling in those wires once the wind stopped and the levees broke. We read through hundreds of thousands of words for weeks. Sometimes the pain in those words re-opened wounds we thought had healed. Sometimes the words gave us insight into another person’s experience and we were astonished by the nakedness, the vulnerability, the ferocity and often the defiance being expressed so soon after the event. Naked and raw and very, very public."

"These voices, oblivious to each other and miles apart, sing in pitch perfect harmony—a phenomenon only possible where truth is absolute. Stunned courageous but always in motion, the Every Man and Every Woman of these Gulf Coast narrations and poems lean blindly towards recovery and redemption just as they struggle to comprehend the enormity of what has happened to them. Here you will find no analysis ad nauseum, no academic dissections, no punditry or pretension. Just ordinary folks caught up under extraordinary circumstances, telling their stories in real time, absolutely in the moment—in grief, in anger, and—most miraculously—in good humor. If you only ever read one post-Katrina related book, and if you think you can handle for that book to be an unapologetically unfiltered and dead honest journey back into those dark days and months after the storm, this thin volume is all you will need."

Louis Maistros, author of The Sound of Building Coffins

"A powerful and immediate look at post-Katrina New Orleans. Sam Jasper and Mark Folse have done a great service to America by compiling these early writings from the storm."

Stephen Elliot, editor of TheRumpus.Net and author of The Adderall Diaries and Happy Baby.

"There are no better guides to post flood New Orleans than the bloggers who emerged here during the immediate wake of the levee breaks. What's particularly remarkable about these writers is that none hew to the snarky, cynical, superficial style found on most blogs--instead there is an enormous passion for New Orleans, real anger at its injustices and much needed rebukes to the received wisdom surrounding this moment of man made disaster."

Ethan Brown, author of Shake the Devil Off and Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip Hop Hustler

Gallatin & Toulouse Press is a new endeavor, publishing the work of emerging New Orleans writers to a wider audience. This is the first in a planned series collecting short, Internet-published works chronicling the storm and flood collectively known as Katrina and the recovery of the city of New Orleans.

A Howling in the Wires: An Anthology of Writings from Postdiluvian New Orleans

Paperback: 160 Pages, Gallatin & Toulouse Press, ISBN 9780615388793. Enquiries to: gallatin.and.toulouse.press@gmail.com. (504) 324-6551
Available Aug. 26, 2010.

One Book One New Orleans 2010

2010-03-09T15:38:00.003-06:00

It's coming up. Sandrine has been nominated--twice--but only a concerted campaign will make it come even close to being considered. [I can understand the pause.]

Get your pens and fingers ready.

Excerpt--Interview with a Dog:

2010-02-17T09:40:00.003-06:00

from Coconut 14, copyright Amy Gerstler 2008:

...

Q: No, really. How come I get you all nice and clean and you immediately roll in something stinky?

A: Humans don't get true grooming, which only takes place using the tongue. Toothpaste, mouthwash, and deodorant are what's "stinky." Soap's revolting. Terrible invention. Why have it in your lamplit, carpeted, doorlocked lair? Dung is informative, complex—full of news flashes from the body's interior. Shit's an encyclopedia, volumes of urgent correspondence your organs wrote if only you knew how to read. What's learnt from smelling shampoo? It just causes sneezing, erases articulate fumes. Bulldozes olfactory signposts. Washing is book burning.

...

Read the whole glorious, wacky thing here [scroll down to the second poem].

In about 10 days, I'll have my dog.

Second Friday of 2010

2010-01-08T07:42:00.002-06:00

Now that the house is quiet and my head is throbbing less [it is hard to wake up from sleep exhausted and drained], I can think about this draft that I know is a novel but I try not to call one, a draft that sprawls and drips from my fingers. It's unreasonably cold in NOLA today so the street is even quiet, for now.

Proust, Pt. 1

2009-07-30T15:10:00.005-05:00

I have 3 books on dogs to read and am enjoying them but can't stop myself from reading Marcel Proust: A Life by Edmund White. I feel an urge to read Proust now and that makes me uneasy. In Search of Lost Time--the Modern Library 6-pack is 4211 pages. Reading Proust is a near-compulsion that dissolves things like appointments, meals, work, hair-combing, writing....

Swann's Way in college, the first time around. The bulk of Combray in London, the second time around. I can almost feel the Proust swoon.

MPB Writers: African American Writers uplinks

2009-07-12T06:41:00.002-05:00

Anthony Grooms, Ravi Howard and I talked with Gene Edwards some months ago and now the episode is available, but only if you ask [read: convince] your local PBS station or stations to link up. Some details from a dearest fan:

Here’s what you do:
Call the station’s program director. In New Orleans, that would be Elizabeth Utterback at WYES (504.486.5511) and __________ at WLAE (504.830.3719).
Explain that there’s a Mississippi Public Television program you would like to see. It’s called Writers, and the episode “African American Writers.”
Note that Mississippi Public Television offers the program royalty-free to to any PBS affiliate across the country.
The standard uplink is scheduled for Sunday, July 19 @ 16:30 ET, SD 07.
The high definition uplink is scheduled for Wednesday, July 22 @ 17:00 ET, HD 03.
In New Orleans, emphasize the local angle: Dedra.
Elsewhere, just say it’s a kickass program and you’re itching for a compelling reason to donate to public broadcasting.

Take that last one how you will. I think a critical mass [?] could get WYES to broadcast it.

Cheryl Wagner's Plenty Enough Suck Left to Go Around : TPMCafe Book Club

2009-07-11T18:26:00.007-05:00

An excellent, painful, smart book that's a joy to read. So read it. TPMCafe Book Club features it July 27-31.

I near-giggle when I say I know her, that she's a friend.

Where to Find Me Other than Facebook

2009-07-02T11:43:00.004-05:00

I have left Facebook. I'm not a real social network person. But what drove me out was the 50+ requests to answer quizzes, play games, see who had a crush on me or thought I was attractive or thought I might join an ashram in 5 years. It was a lot of activity for very little real contact with the real people I miss. Every day, more people recommended people I should "friend" on Facebook until there were only a handful of people on my Friend list that really were friends or people I wanted contact with. And the people I remain in contact with I rarely if ever contact via Facebook. It was useful, I'm sure, for readers to find me there but they can find me in other ways.

Maybe, too, Facebook is getting to be passe. Everybody's grandmother and grade school chum and former student is on it. I guess I like less social or network in my social network.

Where you can find me:

Shelfari
Library Thing
Red Room
GoodReads
Blogger [right here]
Twitter

Open Loop Press: Interview Audio & Transcript

2009-03-08T15:12:00.007-05:00

Sheesh. I haven't thought about this place for a long time. Free lets you do that.

OpenLoopPress.org

There's also a page called Open Loops that links to books, authors, etc. mentioned in the interview. The transcript also has some links.

Reading: July 19, Maple St. Book Shop

2008-07-14T12:34:00.004-05:00

Maple Street Book Shop

7523 Maple St
New Orleans, LA 70118-5098
Phone: (504) 866-4916
1:00-2:30 PM
Saturday, July 19

Dedra Johnson will read from and discuss SANDRINE'S LETTER TO TOMORROW.

Trade Paper | 5.5 x 8 | 211 pages
ISBN: 978-09788431-2-0 | $14.95

"...the dialogue is fast and lively, and Sandrine's first-person narrative delivers immediate, searing drama."—Booklist

"[An] aching debut...[with] echoes of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings..." —Publisher's Weekly

"Reading Dedra Johnson's Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow, I was fully in the presence of the mind, heart, and soul of a richly rendered, fascinating fictional character. I knew I was also in the presence of the brilliant voice and sensibility of a major new American writer. This is an important novel by a true artist."—Robert Olen Butler

"Dedra Johnson has caught something wonderful in Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow. She writes brilliantly about childhood, New Orleans, the intricacies of a vexed family life. Sandrine is a remarkable debut novel that will catch your heart."—Frederick Barthelme

One Book, One New Orleans

2008-04-28T22:02:00.002-05:00

Know a great New Orleans book? Think the whole city should read it? Then go suggest it at One Book, One New Orleans.

Help us select the book for the 2008 annual community-wide reading project! We’re now considering the book all of us will read together later this year.

We’re seeking a work that relates to our community at this moment and will inspire us in how we relate to each other.

Our past book selections have been A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines in 2004, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Barry in Spring 2005, and Coming Out the Door for the Ninth Ward by Nine Times Social and Pleasure Club in 2007.

All Over the Internets

2008-04-22T14:32:00.008-05:00

I've been busy and too tired from being busy to post all the places I've been and still am on the Internets so here's the round-up:

Conversations Book Club interview at the Richard Wright public library:

Adblock

AuthorViews interview at the NOLA Bookfair:

Carp(e) Libris review and book giveaway

Carp(e) Libris interview

Thanks, Diane, for reviewing my book, hosting the giveaway, and posting the interview. It was great fun. Next book, I'll do it all again.

And an oldie but goodie: Crystal K.'s interview on WTUL, part of the Katrina Warriors Network reading project: The Podcast

Thanks, Crystal. It was a lot of fun and when my life is less like a race to the grave, we should do it a 3rd time. With questions from listeners this time, yeah, like my friend Preston Allen is doing at his All or Nothing blog.

Conversations Book Club New Orleans: March 15!

2008-03-12T13:24:00.002-05:00

Conversations Book Club in New Orleans will host authors C-Murder ("Death Around the Corner") and Dedra Johnson ("Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow") at the Comfort Inn & Suites Downtown (356 Baronne St./ 504.524.1140) beginning at 1p.m. Admission is free.

For details, visit http://conversationsneworleans.blogspot.com or call 601.664.8805.

Review: Press-Register, March 2

2008-03-10T13:00:00.006-05:00

It's an honor to be read like this.

A child at the crossroads Innocence, awareness intertwine in Dedra Johnson debut

Sandrine's first escape route comes through the books she reads voraciously, among them "Little House on the Prairie," "A Wrinkle in Time" and "Watership Down." She also reads biographies of Frederick Douglass, Mary McLeod Bethune and Harriet Tubman. She defines herself through the words of writers and the lives of historical icons, and she uses these lessons to find her own voice. In keeping with Tubman's example, Sandrine and her classmate Lydia, also an abuse victim, become an Underground Railroad for one another:

Lydia showed me how to hold keys in my hand with the points sticking out, a sharp fist to scratch, poke or punch with. I told her the back ways we took to school and she said I was smart, that she hadn't thought of it.

Johnson lets objects and moments tell their own stories when she shows the reader a blurred Polaroid of a mystery woman on the mantle and a jar of Mamalita's pomegranate jelly. She also writes of Catholic schoolchildren who wear their house keys like rosaries. Johnson skillfully lets these scenes breathe and keeps the reader within the present-tense moment. The effect pays off. There is no adult Sandrine looking back, putting her childhood in perspective. Johnson shows her protagonist in real time, the questions in her life still intact and unanswered.

In one scene, Sandrine and her classmates make papier-maché American flags to celebrate the Bicentennial. Perhaps this image captures the essence of "Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow," the story of a young girl crafting her independence. To that end, Sandrine draws upon lessons learned from the kindnesses and cruelties she has encountered in her young life. In a powerful debut effort, Johnson shows us how these acts affect the lives of children.

Ravi Howard, Mobile Press-Register, March 2, 2008

March: NYC and Boston!

2008-02-27T12:22:00.003-06:00

Grant Bailie and I will be reading together this month and in April. March dates:

Thursday, March 6, 7 PM--McNally Robinson, 52 Prince St. (between Lafayette and Mulberry), New York, NY 10012

Also Thursday, about 10-11 PM--

National Small Press Month Reading Marathon: Thursday, March 6, 2008 @ The Bowery Poetry Club:

7 pm to Midnight / $6

Eileen Myles (Wave Books), Noelle Kocot (Wave Books), Lynne Tillman (Soft Skull), Jen Benka (Soft Skull), Brenda Coultas (Coffee House Press), Ted Mathys (Coffee House Press), Alex Rose (Akashic Books), Camelia Entekhabifard (Seven Stories Press), Veronica Liu (Seven Stories Press), Martine Bellen (Belladonna Books), Lila Zemborain (Belladonna Books), Dan Machlin (Ugly Duckling Presse), Rachel Sherman (Open City Books), Leni Zumas (Open City Books), Sharon Mesmer (Hanging Loose Press), Marie Carter (Hanging Loose Press), Melissa Buzzeo (Leon Works), Tisa Bryant (Leon Works), Bob Holeman (Bowery Books), Paul Mills (Bowery Books), Radhiyah Ayobami (Bowery Books), Rachel Levitsky (Futurepoem Books), Erica Kaufman (Big Game Books), Corrine Fitzpatrick (Sona Books), Dedra Johnson (Ig Publishing), Grant Bailie (Ig Publishing), Camilla Trinchieri (Soho Press), Anne Landsman (Soho Press), Jason Schneiderman (Four Way Books), David Lawrence (Four Way Books).

For more information visit www.smallpressmonth.org or call 212.764.7021.

Friday, March 7, 7 PM--DIRE Reading Series, 106 Prospect St., Cambridge, MA

Needed: NO Prose, Poetry, Art

2008-02-25T12:08:00.003-06:00

Blacklight, the journal of the Organization of Black Students at the University of Chicago, is seeking submissions for an upcoming New Orleans issue. The website has some outdated information (and a soundtrack--you have been warned) but you can contact Nabeel (current president and editor) directly at nabeel@uchicago.edu. Nabeel says he is looking for submissions that "deal somehow with New Orleans, geography, or space." Contact him for more info.

The deadline is mid-March.

Dillard: Reading, Book Signing, Reception

2008-02-22T08:59:00.004-06:00

Dillard University
2601 Gentilly Blvd.
Stern Hall Amphitheater
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
7:00 p.m.
Free & Open to the Public

Novelists Alice Wilson Fried & Dedra Johnson (me!)

Poets Valentine Pierce & Mona Lisa Saloy

Sponsored by Dillard University Lyceum, the Creative Writing program, and the Division of Humanities

picture of AWF from AWF's official website
picture of VP's book from Portal Press website
picture of MLS from www.architectureforhumanity.org

In Chicago? Need a Signed Copy?

2008-02-20T14:46:00.002-06:00

Contact the NOLA in Chicago Network, a group formed after Katrina to help New Orleans expatriates and lovers support New Orleans. Your purchase through NOLA in Chicago will benefit Schools Count, a non-profit asking schools what they need and getting it for them! Check out their site at Schoolscountcorp.org.

For more information, email nolainchicago@yahoo.com.

Conversations Book Club New Orleans: POSTPONED!

2008-02-16T09:39:00.002-06:00

I had a great time in MS this week, especially at Crystal Springs High School (details and pictures at Conversations Book Club). The book club today is canceled for a couple reasons, including the expected nasty weather, but I will be at the March Conversations Book Club-New Orleans. More details soon!

Thanks Cyrus and Robin and Martin! Can't wait to see you again! And thank you, thank you to Crystal Springs High School, Mr. Bradford (pictured) and Ms. Crisley!

This Week: Mississippi!

2008-02-11T12:32:00.000-06:00

Tuesday, February 12
Conversations Book Club will be talking live via conference call to bestselling authors Clarence Nero ("Three Sides to Every Story") and Dedra Johnson ("Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow"). This will be at the Pearl Public Library in Pearl, MS, beginning at 6 p.m. CST. Admission is free. For details, call 601.664.8805 or the library at 601.932.2562. http://conversationslive.blogspot.com

Wednesday, February 13, 5 PM
Off Square Books, 129 Courthouse Square, Oxford, MS
New Orleans native Dedra Johnson will be at Off Square Books to sign and read aloud from her latest book Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow.

Off Square Books is Square Books' annex store located just across the crosswalk on the southeastern side of the square at 129 Courthouse Square next to AC's Bed & Bath.

Thursday, February 14, 5 PM Signing, 5:30 PM Reading
Lemuria Books, 202 Banner Hall, 4465 I-55 North, Jackson, MS 39206

Friday, February 15
Conversations Book Club will host author Dedra Johnson ("Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow") LIVE and in person in a series of events with its various chapters in Mississippi.

Saturday, February 16
Conversations Book Club in New Orleans will host authors Clarence Nero ("Three Sides to Every Story") and Dedra Johnson ("Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow") at the Comfort Inn & Suites Downtown (356 Baronne St./504.524.1140) beginning at 1 p.m. Admission is free. For details, visit http://conversationsneworleans.blogspot.com or call 601.664.8805.

For more Conversations Book Club events and details, check out

http://conversationslive.blogspot.com and/or http://conversationsneworleans.blogspot.com.

February Readings

2008-01-28T19:59:00.000-06:00

Friday, Feb. 8, 7 PM
Book Cellar, 4736-38 North Lincoln Avenue, Chicago, IL

Saturday, Feb. 9, 2 PM
Reading, Q&A and book signing sponsored by the NOLA in Chicago Network and the Organization of Black Students at the University of Chicago
Bartlett Dining Commons Trophy Room, University of Chicago
5640 S. University Avenue, Chicago, IL

For more information about this event, email nolainchicago@yahoo.com.

For persons with disabilities who need an accommodation in order to participate in this event, please contact ORCSA at (773) 702-8787.

Wednesday, Feb. 13, 7 PM
Square Books, 160 Courthouse Square, Oxford, MS

Thursday, Feb. 14, 5 PM
Lemuria Books, 202 Banner Hall, 4465 I-55 North, Jackson, MS 39206

Friday, Feb. 15
Jackson, MS, events TBA!

Saturday, February 16, 1 PM
Conversations Book Club, Comfort Inn and Suites Downtown (346 Baronne St.)

Possibly another at the end of February in NO...details soon!

Conversations Book Club: NOLA Debut!

2008-01-18T10:14:00.000-06:00

I will be there, Saturday, Jan. 19, 1 PM, Comfort Inn and Suites Downtown (346 Baronne St.). Details below:

On Saturday, January 19, 2008 book lovers and fans from Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia will converge on New Orleans for the debut of "Conversations* New Orleans," hosted by radio/television show host Cyrus A. Webb.

Conversations Book Club in New Orleans is pleased to be uniting readers of all genres, races and genders around great books and authors. Meeting at the Comfort Inn and Suites Downtown (346 Baronne St.) every 3rd Saturday at 1p.m., the group will talk about authors that are making an impact on the literary scene and get to meet them live and in person.

Moderated by Conversations Book Club President Cyrus A. Webb (http://www.authorsden.com/cawebb) of Mississippi, the group will host authors Corey "C-Murder" Miller (DEATH AROUND THE CORNER) and Latricia Peters (GIRL, NAW!) in its first meeting and announce some exciting news for book lovers worldwide. Special guests include Mississippi author Vocele Savage (A LETTER TO MY SISTERS) and Louisiana authors Dedra Johnson (SANDRINE'S LETTER TO TOMORROW) and Clarence Nero (THREE SIDES TO EVERY STORY).

Webb and Miller began working together in January 2007, bringing a series of scheduled conference call discussions with book lovers in Mississippi and listeners worldwide to chat about Miller's bestselling novel DEATH AROUND THE CORNER. After the success of the phone chats, Webb and Miller were able to partner again to orchestrate his visit to Mississippi--- the author's first-ever stop outside of his hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana in promoting his book. The response was over 2000 attending the two days of events and hundreds of books being sold in the state. (Watch Conversations' exclusive tv interview with Miller by visiting here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=-WqRmiVj-Zs)

For details, feel free to visit http://conversationsneworleans.blogspot.com or contact Cyrus A. Webb at cawebb4@juno.com. You can also contact Webb's assistant, Robin Garder, at 601.664.8805.

C'Mon. Join the addiction: Get hooked on books!

from Interview with Chris Volk Regarding Black Writers and Literature

2008-01-14T09:46:00.000-06:00

Q: Do you think Black authors have a unique perspective because of being Black, or is that irrelevant? If they do have a unique perspective, do you think they're writing things that non-Blacks can relate to, or are their experience foreign to most other races/ethnic groups? I guess what I'm asking is whether most Black literature is based on a past of poverty and oppression that any struggling ethnic group can relate to, or is it unique to American Blacks?

A: To the extent that some (not most) African American literature is based on a past of poverty and oppression, I think it speaks to all groups who have struggled against these - however, the black experience in the U.S. is unique in many ways: the length of their history in the U.S. going back to the 17th century, the fact that they were brought to the U.S. unwillingly as slaves, and also that the form of slavery to which these Africans were subjected in the west was in many ways the worst the world has ever known (the only one which considered slaves as chattels, of no more significance than ownership of cattle).

The other important thing to realize in looking at African American literature is that in many ways it is part of a world literature or a trans-Atlantic literature. The term "diaspora" is used to indicate the spread of those of African descent to most parts of the western world. So my own personal perspective has been broadening to include Afro-Caribbean writers (many of whom left the Caribbean and went to England, France, Canada and the U.S.), Afro-Brazilian, and African writers. In fact, if you are talking about a writer from Puerto Rico or Cuba who has come to the United States, is that writer a Latin American or an African American or both?

One other point: the best literature is universal - Thus Grapes of Wrath speaks to all readers, not just migrant farm workers, and I think so does Wright's Native Son, and Baldwin's Go Tell It on a Mountain and Zorah Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine, to give just a few examples.

Q: Do most Black authors only write about Black characters? I'm curious about this, as Caucasian authors seem to write about all nationalities and racial and ethnic groups (although perhaps not with the authority that an author from a particular country or racial or ethnic group brings to writing), and most of the admittedly few current Black authors I've read seem to stick to Black characters and Black situations.

A. I guess I am partly curious about why you say that white writers seem to write about all nationalities and ethnic groups. Certainly one sees this in children's literature where in the past the writers were almost exclusively white, but the children were often from different countries, or little black children. But I think in serious literature it is much less common for a white writer to have the protagonist of the work be of another race. Again, in the past, some Southerners wrote novels in dialect, but these were intended to confirm white readers in their belief that Negroes were simple, child-like, happy folks, or untrustworthy and shifty or whatever.

I don't want to say that there aren't any exceptions, because of course, there are but they are precisely that, exceptions: To give just one very modern example, Susan Straight is a white woman who set her first few books exclusively within the black community but she was married to a black man and living within that community at the time and her books stand out precisely because they are uncommon.

Some other interesting exceptions occurred during the Harlem Renaissance when you had a white woman like Nancy Cunard create the massive anthology "Negro" or Marc Connelly write a play like "Green Pastures" Langston Hughes referred to this phenomenon rather uncomplimentarily in one of his poems, but the fact remains that the Harlem Renaissance was a time in which it was "popular" to be black. Similarly, during the Civil Rights era and the Black Power movement, there was a certain allure to the whole scene which led to many writers who were not black featuring black protagonists.

However, it is true that most white writers have, in a sense, more freedom to write totally outside their own culture or their own experiences. They have been given this freedom by society, where they are not expected to "uphold the race" and by publishers. However, one of the ongoing issues for many black writers is not just expressing themselves creatively but also how much of an obligation do they have to work to correct injustice through their writing. Should they always be thinking of the white reader who might read their books and find his/her stereotypes confirmed if they described a black man as brutal or unfaithful (a criticism leveled against Alice Walker and Gayl Jones, for example)?

Richard Wright, whose books focused on the daily injustices blacks faced in America, felt that Zora Neale Hurston was wrong in writing her novels about a self-contained black world. I just got a copy of Bronze, the second collection of poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson, a minor Harlem Renaissance writer. Her first collection was criticized because it dealt with the "heart" and not race, so this was her book of poems on race (although still infused by the heart), and in her last book, she again ignored race.

An interesting example is Charles Perry: his first and only published novel Portrait of a Young Man Drowning, was based on his own experience of juvenile gangsters in his Brooklyn neighborhood, but it features almost exclusively white characters - a decision made, according to Perry's daughter, out of a fear that issues of race could cloud the humanity of the characters. Did this make it harder for him to get published?

Just two more very different examples: Many people still do not realize that Frank Yerby was a black man. His earlier books did not have a picture of him on the dustjacket, and almost all of his books are historical fiction, adventure novels, and so on, set almost exclusively within a white world. When Charles Chesnutt published his first book, even though it used dialect, it was thought that he was white. In fact, he was light skinned enough that he could have easily passed for white, but instead his novels became increasing more "political" and less popular. What had been considered his last novel, The Colonel's Dream, was published while he was still relatively young, and only a few years after his first, and sold poorly. In fact, a recently found later novel of his has just been published, and this is the story of a man who grows up thinking he is black, and discovers that he is white (does this count as a black writer writing a novel with a white protagonist?)

So African American authors have both pressure from others in their communities to write about black people for many different reasons and from publishers who find it easier to keep writers in a 'box', a desire to overcome the prejudices and injustices they have faced, a dramatic history to write about is it surprising that they mostly write about black characters?

Q: Do you believe it is harder, today, for a Black author to find a publisher? To be marketed as a mainstream author by publishers? Or do their works command a smaller audience which discourages publishers from pushing their work?

A: Most African American writers would be considered 'mid-list' writers. I think that all mid-list writers are having problems now in finding publishers, but yes, this situation is probably exacerbated for black authors. I recently went to a signing by Mary Monroe, who just published her second novel more than 10 years after her first one and the reason was that she could not find a publisher. I can give several other examples of women who have had good critical reviews, or even won prizes for their books, but they wind up with no publisher for a while.

Marketing is, of course, another issue and it is one that becomes very obvious in some bookstores where African American writers are for the most part put in a separate section of the store. In a way, this increases the 'ghettoization' of black authors, by implying that only black readers will be interested in their books. Writers like Toni Morrison obviously have broken out of this, but I think this trend is increasing.

...

Q: Do you think that popular Black authors are helped a lot by the publicity Oprah gives their work? What other venues or people are helping Black authors?

A: I can't really give a complete list of authors Oprah has selected, but it seems to me that her effect has been much more dramatic on some of the white woman writers she has selected: specifically, I am thinking of her first selection, Jane Hamilton, who was very little known until that happened.

In a sense, Oprah is much more conservative in selecting African Writers: many have already won recognition. Toni Morrison was already a Nobel Laureate, Ernest Gaines had won the National Book Award, Crosby books were already all best sellers, etc. I might be missing someone but offhand I cannot think of an unknown young African American fiction writer who she selected.

interview by Shirley Bryant

IOBA Standard, Vol. II, No. 3 (Dec 2001)

Readings in February

2008-01-11T09:14:00.000-06:00

It'll be another few weeks before the distributor has another set of books. UNO's bookstore should have some soon and I've seen 5-6 at Loyola's bookstore and at the Barnes and Noble on the Westbank. Two signed copies will be auctioned off at Aububon Charter School's Spring Gala at the Elms Mansion January 18 (details at the school website).

So far in February, I will be reading in Chicago; Jackson, MS at Lemuria; and Oxford, MS at Square Books. Chicago in February!

Authors Signing Books Friday: Loyola Bookstore

2007-12-12T14:29:00.000-06:00

I will be one of three authors signing books at the Loyola University Bookstore in the Danna Center Friday, Dec. 14, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The bookstore has multiple copies of Sandrine.

Where to Get Sandrine: Now until February

2007-12-11T17:52:00.000-06:00

The first print run sold out. TA-DAH!

Copies of the book will be scarce at online outlets like Amazon until the second printing is done in late January. The best place to find the book until then is in local bookstores which have as-yet-unsold copies on the shelf or in storage. Barnes and Noble should have multiple copies but may only have one or 2 on the shelf. If you don't see it, ask.

Maple Street Book Shop:
7523 Maple St.

Garden District Book Shop:
2727 Prytania St. (Washington Av. and Prytania in The Rink)

Octavia Books:
513 Octavia St. (near Laurel)

Borders:
3131 Veterans Memorial Blvd, Metairie

Barnes and Noble:
Centre at Westbank, 1601B West Bank Expressway, Harvey
and
3721 Veterans Boulevard, Metairie, LA

W.I.N.G.S. on WTUL, Friday 8-8:30 AM

2007-12-05T20:27:00.000-06:00

I'll be reading from Sandrine and talking with Crystal K. Friday morning about the book, growing up girl in the 70s and more on WTUL 91.5 FM, 8-8:30 on the W.I.N.G.S. (Women's International Newsgathering Service) broadcast. Just in time for carpool!

You can't call in but you can listen.

Ta-Dah!

2007-11-30T09:57:00.001-06:00

I didn't know People did book reviews. Why is my book labeled "Novel" while Grafton's book is labeled "Fiction." Dare I ask?

page 59:

(3 out of 4 stars) Innocence, it seems, can be hard to crush: Nine-year-old Sandrine Miller--the straight-A student in 1970s New Orleans who narrates Johnson's heartbreaking debut--is beaten by her mother, abandoned by her loving but restless father and sexually abused by two family friends. Yet she's too young to realize the horror of it all; astonishingly, she remains unshakeably [sic] loyal to the grown-ups who let her down. Until the day she cracks: "I heard what sounded like a thick old voice but slowly recognized it as mine, full of tears, hoarse, broken by hiccup sobs." The only thing this affecting story lacks is a bigger picture, wondering how the wounded Sandrine will fare as an adult, readers may be left wishing Tomorrow could write back.

Not Just an Announcment--A Post!

2007-11-29T10:47:00.000-06:00

I keep saying I'll actually post here...I had an excellent opportunity while on the reading tour with Preston Allen. I need lots more friends like Preston. He's crazy funny, wise, open, thoughtful, a hell of a writer, a great person all around. I can't wait to really host him in NO--food, Misery Tour, Harrah's, Central City, beignets, po-boys and brass bands.

I may have a big national review tomorrow, the biggest yet. I don't know if I really believe it. When I see it, then I'll believe. It just seems too crazy....

Book Notes: Largehearted Boy

2007-11-09T11:00:00.000-06:00

Book Notes - Dedra Johnson ("Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow")

Reading: Nov. 13: Dillard University

2007-11-06T11:26:00.000-06:00

Review: Times-Picayune, Nov. 4

2007-11-05T08:31:00.000-06:00

Only a Day Away by Susan Larsen:

Johnson perfectly captures the voice of a young girl, searching for acceptance and friendship. In Sister Paul and the nuns at her New Orleans school, Sandrine finds mentors and models for kindness; in the women who work at her father's clinic, she finds solace. In a new life with her father, she allows herself to feel "small and safe," confident that she has come home at last. After such a bleak existence, she is allowed that ray of hope, that most basic right of childhood.

Reading: Nov. 5: Garden District Book Shop

2007-11-01T00:32:00.000-05:00

Review: Booklist Oct. 15

2007-10-16T08:00:00.000-05:00

Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow
Johnson, Dedra (Author)
Nov. 2007. 212 p. Ig, paperback, $14.95. (9780978843120).

Growing up in New Orleans in the 1970s, Sandrine is proud to be black, but because she is light-skinned and very smart, the black kids think she is stuck-up, and the white kids won’t speak to her because, to them, she is black. At home, her single-parent mother beats her, makes her scrub the house constantly, and blames her for being a slut when she is sexually abused. For a brief time, Sandrine has one white friend at school, but Lydia also has dark secrets, and she shows Sandrine that the vicious prejudice they encounter is not only about race and class, but also about gender, and that many believe educating a girl is a waste. This debut novel is more a short story with one repeated theme played out in family, Catholic school, and neighborhood. But the obsession never gets boring or messagey, the dialogue is fast and lively, and Sandrine’s first-person narrative delivers immediate, searing drama, showing her pride, passion, and courage as she breaks stereotypes.

— Hazel Rochman

Review: Publishers Weekly

2007-09-25T09:56:00.000-05:00

Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow
Dedra Johnson. Ig (Consortium, dist.), $14.95 paper (212p) ISBN 978-0-9788431-2-0

This aching debut explores a girl's coming-of-age in poverty-drenched mid-1970s New Orleans. Eight-year-old Sandrine Miller lives like a servant to her mother, Shirleen, a low-wage typist, and her mean-spirited grandmother, Mother Dear, both of whom keep Sandrine overloaded with chores despite her homework and eagerness to keep up good grades at school. Sandrine's main escape is visiting her father and his mother, Mamalita, in the country for the summer, but her dream of moving there is crushed when Mamalita dies, and her busy country doctor dad leaves Sandrine in the noncare of his girlfriend, Philipa, whose dotty daughter, Yolanda, is, to Sandrine's bookish disgust, more interested in boys than her education. Indeed, Sandrine feels wronged, especially by her mother, who holds Sandrine's light skin against her. As she grows, Sandrine finds empowerment in knowledge of her body (taught to her by an older classmate, Lydia, whose step-dad molests her) and the recognition that learning is her only escape from the defeating cycle of early pregnancy, poverty and general futility. There are echoes of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Sandrine, with her fierce price [sic], is an instantly likable underdog. (Nov.)

Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow

2007-06-29T14:13:00.000-05:00

Advance Amazon.com page:
Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow

Book Description

Set in 1970s-era New Orleans, Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow is the disturbingly powerful and uplifting story of a young African American girl named Sandrine, whose only refuge against a world of poverty, racial discrimination, and parental abuse are the letters she writes to her dead grandmother. In the tradition of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow is a brilliant debut from an important new voice in African American fiction.

A professor of English at Dillard University, Dedra Johnson received her MFA from the University of Florida, where she was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Award. Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow was a finalist for the 2006 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Award.

Lucky

2007-02-08T11:00:00.000-06:00

This short story was originally published in Bridge Magazine (Chicago, IL), Fall/Winter 2002.
c Dedra Johnson, 2002

I needed immediate obedience so I shot the cashier. Everyone lay still on the floor as he emptied the register with one hand, the other holding his bleeding shoulder. I noticed bills that didn't look like twenties or tens and my face folded into a smile. As I backed towards the storeroom, only he moved, sliding off the stool to sit on the floor. I fired again in the storeroom to scare them and walked up the empty alley to a McDonald's on the next street. In the bathroom I washed off the pancake makeup, changed my shirt and cut up the wig, one of Eileen's. When I smiled at myself in the mirror, it felt like my skin was dry enough to crack.

At Eileen's I put frozen lasagna in the oven and sat on the floor. My back warm against the oven door, I finished a rhubarb pie.

***

I've stayed at Eileen's for a few months now. The first day she took out all her guns—semi automatics, shotguns, a Luger, and a rifle. They all felt too heavy, blocky. Eileen slid off the sofa to the floor to sit next to me, smiling. She liked seeing them in my hands.

She has a dinner every week. Her friends bring casseroles, fondue, fresh bread, pesto, homemade pasta, and she ties on a cherry print apron from the dollar store to pose for pictures with pies and cakes and an hysterical grin, pictures she says her parents will love. Eileen has me stand next to her to show them all how tall I am, how long my arms are. I rarely have to get up from the corner of the sofa; I hear her in the kitchen telling John, PJ, Miles, Shari, Liz, whoever, to take a piece of pie to me, take me a plate, take me a beer, put the tequila in front of her, she'll drink it. Every goddamn week.

Last week Eileen shot the TV during a commercial. In the kitchen, hugging the plates I'd been carrying to the pantry, I stayed still even after she yelled that she felt better and the gun was unloaded.

A friend from college said she could hold her apartment in San Francisco for me until March. I needed at least $2000 to move and had no idea how to squeeze it out of six dollars an hour, and I had to leave town.

***

Kim came into the bookstore every week, walk up and down the aisles for half an hour or an hour and never touch a book. I would stay at the register each time. Eileen called her the Albino; her hair was pale blond, her eyebrows and eyelashes almost white, her eyes pale gray. She was finally showing; even her face looked puffy. Last year she threatened to scratch my eyes out if I didn't stay away from Dorian. Whenever I mentioned her, Dorian would start about Kim's father, Kim's dead mother, Kim's abortions, Kim's sculpture, Kim's psychotic roommate. Kim threatened Dorian, he said, but he didn't stop calling or coming to my apartment. She told Eileen a week before I left my apartment that she'd have me raped. I was sick of her shit, too.

***

Every time Dorian and I went out, I could look down the bar or up from my shot at the pool table and make out Anthony's long coat or hear his cackling laugh. Kim was usually with him: she'd leave after I looked at them and smiled. He was so dark and she was so white. A few months before I went to Eileen's, Dorian and I were at a bar; he said Kim's baby was his and I said nothing. I just finished my beer. He said he wanted Anthony to move in with us, into the extra room. No, I said. I've always looked out for him, he said, he's my friend, that place is too expensive for him and our rent'll be that much less, I don't see why you're being such a bitch about it. She still doesn't work? I said. Is she going to move in? Dorian set down his beer, leaned close and ran his finger up my neck to my ear. Why can't you just trust me? he said. Trust him with what? Suddenly I was so angry I felt like I was going to pass out. I left, forgetting my coat, and walked home, eight blocks, and it felt like I had goosebumps even on my cheeks. Dorian broke the kitchen windows to get in but I'd locked the bedroom door so he slept in the hall. Small victories satisfied him usually.

***

Dorian said if we ever had to do something illegal, we should do it in the winter so we could wear gloves. He slid closer to me on the bed and my game of solitaire slipped under his leg. He stared at my face. A little makeup and you could pass, you're not that dark, he said. Neither are you, I said, and he laughed.

He had old scars, purple brown welts on his shoulder blades and side, from something his father did to him. He'd pick me up from work at night, usually drunk, and the car never weaved but I could tell: when he drank a lot of beer his sweat smelled like gin. One night he smelled more than usual and I turned in the seat and said I could drive. He said he hated his job more than I hated mine, what did I do anyway but point to where the self help books were and say the art books were five dollars off, don't tell me what to do, it's not your place. He stared at me and the car drifted across the lanes, in front of a police car. When they turned on the lights, Dorian slammed on the brakes and stopped there in the lane. I got out and ran around to the back of the car just before a semi passed. All the cop talking to me wanted to know was if there were drugs in the car. I said no. Good girl, he said. Dorian was standing next to the driver's side door, talking to the other cop and not slurring much; I told them he was tired, he had had a few beers waiting for me, I got off work late, I had been telling him to let me drive when they stopped us. They believed me, didn't bother to check Dorian's license and see his other DUI, his resisting arrest, his three months in jail for mushrooms. I went to the driver's side and had to wait for Dorian, staring at the cops, to move. Cars slowed down, faces staring, one man tilting his head to took over his glasses. When I was getting in the car, Dorian slammed the door into my leg. He said I was his wife and the cops backed away, watching until I pulled off.

I started taking the bus home. A month later, he started not coming home a few nights a week and I tried to ignore it; I didn't want to know anything about it. Then one night the back door was open, all the lights in the apartment on. I could see my breath, like I hadn't gone inside. Anthony stood in the extra room where I had the TV, a chair, and a sewing machine I meant to sell, taking clothes out of paper bags on the floor, folding them carefully and piling them on the TV. Dorian was moving the sewing machine into the hall. He looked at me twice before telling me to get Anthony's other bags off the stairs. I said no to this, I said. Dorian didn't look at me or say anything. My name was on the lease; I was still paying most of the rent. He can't afford the other apartment, Dorian finally said, I told you that, you just don't listen. I was so angry my eyes burned. I went out the back, kicked over Anthony's bags then, hands gripping the wood rails, went down the back stairs in threes, and walked the six blocks to Eileen's. She spent a few hours going through her closets and boxes, giving me clothes that didn't fit her anymore, some she just wanted me to have, others she'd bought because she wanted to see me in them. She sold me a .22 for the ten dollars I had in my pocket, thinking Dorian would come after me, like one of her husbands did when she left him, and I had no idea what to do with a gun for weeks. Eileen took the Spanish moss a friend had brought from Louisiana down from the walls and said she wanted to take a picture of me wearing it. Please, she said. I lay on a quilt on the floor, moss over one breast, in my pubic hair, over my face.

Eileen paid for half my tattoo the next week since, she said, she'd encouraged me to let Dorian move in. She said it made my body my own again.

***

I have a picture in my album no one pays attention to, skips over to see what my parents look like: me at four, at the kitchen table in front of a pink and green cake, singing Happy Birthday to myself. I never liked pink and green but every cake I remember and my bedroom then was pink and green. I didn't have an uncle like Eileen's who rented her to his friends when she was twelve. No first husband cut a chunk out of my leg and no third husband shot up the car I was driving away from the house. My father didn't hit me like Dorian's did. My parents left me alone. I don't remember them talking to me much except my mother telling me my father was an asshole and my father telling me one night I was dumb to help kids in my kindergarten class because then they'd be ahead of me instead of behind me. When they divorced, I saw my father every day. He'd pick me up after school and we'd eat lunch at the store, behind the high pharmacy counter where I'd sometimes help count and bottle pills. When I was sixteen he and my mother bought me a used car and gave me an Amoco credit card. In college I only worked during the summer and he paid my rent. I have nothing to feel bad about so that means, I suppose, I have to be patient with everyone and smile a lot.

***

When the guy burst in the diner and said, Everybody freeze, I smiled. I hadn't left the apartment yet and Dorian was still pressuring me about Anthony; he'd brought it up as soon as we sat down. Dorian kicked me under the table. Be serious, he said. I watched the guy, about twenty, white, a little familiar because his face was so plain, wave the gun around a few times and hold it on Kathy as she emptied the register, probably less than $100, while everyone else, about a dozen at the tables and five at the counter, sat stunned and silent. Dorian kicked me again, for staring, and his eyes were narrowed slightly, like he was about to smile. The guy walked out the front door, a bicycle swerved around him, and he ran up an alley. I thought I heard sirens. You're crazy, Dorian said. If he had shot that gun, I said, I wouldn't have noticed his face.

***

I wouldn't dance with Eileen in front of everybody so she pulled me to the dark kitchen, turned on the oven and opened the oven door to warm up the room. We could barely hear the boom box. Her hands were hot and damp through my silk undershirt. She unbuttoned her flannel shirt, Dorian's, the one I was wearing when I went to her place, raised my shirt and leaned to the side so our nipples were pressed together. When she turned me I saw Anthony in the doorway, smiling. He said Dorian had a new job out in the suburbs and he was gone every afternoon.

The next afternoon Eileen, Miles and I went to my old apartment. Anthony let us in, smiling at me; he had beer boxes on the kitchen counters. Most of my clothes were gone but I found a sweater, a picture album, a coat with scarves and gloves in the pockets. The bed was new, king size, crowding the bedroom. Anthony slept on the floor in the extra room, and the chair and sewing machine were gone. My books were already packed. Alone in the hall, I clenched my fists until I trembled. Eileen and Miles carried things down to his car. I took a few plates, some silverware, glasses and a double boiler my father gave me at Christmas. Eileen opened the cabinets again. You bought it all, she said, he had shit when he moved in here, you ought to take the bed and sell it. You got any string? she yelled down to Miles. Bungee cord? She and Anthony helped me pack, Anthony setting his pots and plates on the table out of the way. When I picked up a box, he held out his arms and said he'd take it. No, it's fine, I said. He squeezed my upper arms, making the muscles shake, then, smiling at Eileen, stepped behind and squeezed my shoulders. Strong, he said. You should feel her legs, Eileen said.

***

My mother still lives in the suburbs, outside D.C., in the same house. When I saw it last, the houses still looked new and the sidewalks and curbs were clean, though the grass in the front lawns was patchier from bike and car tires, barbecues, bonfires, weed killer. It's always been quiet and safe; my mother would leave me in the house, doors unlocked, to walk to the store, take a bowl back to a neighbor, or haul rugs to the laundromat.

It was a three bedroom house because my father wanted lots of kids, preferably sons. My mother took the Pill in secret somehow and after a few years my father realized what was going on and cleared out the third bedroom where my mother had her sewing machine, a rocker, a foam mattress that I napped on, and a TV. He locked the door. If the room wouldn't be used the way it was supposed to because she didn't want any more children, it wouldn't be used at all, is how my mother summed it up. My father said nothing to me about it and I didn't want him to be angry at me, too, so I never asked if my mother was right. My mother crowded all the furniture in the kitchen and after a month or two of moving the toy chest to open the oven or pushing the sewing machine away from the dryer, I helped her move the kitchen table to the back yard so there'd be room. My father moved out when I was eight, to a small apartment near my school, and my mother took the doorknob out of the locked bedroom door. Even after we'd cleared out the kitchen she let the table rust in the back yard and we ate on the sofa, floor or her bed. Eventually she took the door down and set it in the yard, too.

Dull vague aches aren't like scars, bullet holes in walls, arrest records, restraining orders. What can't be seen is hard to explain and, even if you try, doesn't seem to exist. Too many times Dorian and Eileen would sit on either side of me, talking about my legs, eyes, hands, the way they said I walked—hard, my hips rolling. Any reaction, a sneer, a hand slammed on the bar, slapping Dorian's arm, telling Eileen I wasn't her conversation piece, was funny to them; I could never do a fucking thing.

***

Miles' cousin was selling her truck for $1000, and Miles offered to replace what needed to be replaced if I cleaned his house for a month, twice a week. Trust him, Eileen said, and she set a plate of hot pirogi on my lap. I ate with one hand and Miles took the other, spreading my fingers over his knees. No, I've never played piano or basketball, I said and pulled my hand away. In the kitchen Eileen gave Anthony a bottle of tequila, a lime and a knife and pointed him in my direction. I did a shot and Anthony fingered the rash on my collarbone from the pancake makeup. John, Shari, PJ and two people I'd never met before were watching the video Eileen picked—a woman fucking a pig, a dog, and when I looked up again there was a ram in the frame. Anthony measured my neck with his hand. Miles said, it's long, Eileen said it would be great for brass rings. My stomach got so sour I couldn't eat. I gave the pirogi back to Eileen.

After Eileen saw Miles' house she started paying me to clean her apartment, and Shari, John, and even Anthony asked me to do theirs. Eileen liked me better than the Polish woman, who didn't know much English, and she could watch me scraping food off the floor or bent over cleaning the tub.

Eileen asked a while ago where all her old wigs were. I said I threw them out the first time I cleaned.

***

My boss' boyfriend watched me from the storeroom. The store was empty; I was leaning on a road atlas, adding miles, hours, gallons of gas on the calculator. When he stepped behind the counter he placed his hand on my shoulder, said use Benadryl cream on the rash, now spreading to behind my ears. The sun's out today finally, he said, go for a walk, you look too yellow. Or just go home. Smiling broadly, he took my coat, purse and scarf from the cabinet under the register and wrapped the scarf around my neck, tucking it in my sweater. I rode ten el stops past mine and walked around for an hour, looking at stores. The neighborhood was cut off, between downtown and the expressway; there were a few apartment buildings, empty storefronts and, near the one bus stop I saw, a convenience store.

Saturday the bookstore closed early. I changed in the el bathroom and went back to the convenience store. The neighborhood was deserted, no traffic from downtown coming through, and I was surprised the store was open. I shot at the mirror behind the counter when I walked in. She was putting milk in the coolers in back and didn't flinch, frown, or gasp, just stared as I emptied the register. In an office building bathroom a few el stops away, I changed my shirt, washed off the makeup and left the wig in the trash. I had used lipstick and when I smiled into the mirror, my lips felt scraped. If they were bleeding, I thought, they'd feel better. Just the gun would make people silent and their staring at the gun made me shake less. If I fired it, they would only look at the gun and my shaking would stop. I wondered why this woman had stared at my face.

***

People I didn't know bought me drinks because the bartender said I was leaving town. When the bar closed we crossed the street to Eileen's. PJ, whom I barely knew, gave me a list of numbers, friends in South Dakota, Colorado and Nevada I could stay with. Eileen wanted me to take her coffee table and her fifties gowns to sell for her so she could visit. Anthony gave me Dorian's work number again, said Dorian still wanted me to call. Miles had another box of old shirts, sweaters, and single gloves like the box he brought the night I went to Eileen's.

Yesterday I burned the moss pictures and negatives at the park with a wig that was still in my purse. A cop passed, saw me squatted in front of the small fire with my hands over it, and kept walking. I went back to the Midas, got the truck, and drove around the rest of the day.

I left the gun in a phone booth, in the white pages in the shelf.

I've never been in an accident, broken my ankle or arm, or run out of gas.

Wednesday Morning

2007-02-08T09:50:00.000-06:00

This short story was published in Product 9, Center for Writers, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, 1993.
c Dedra Johnson, 1993

When Emma woke Wednesday morning, Kevin was still in her apartment. She heard the Harley Davidson across the street start and set off a car alarm, then Kevin’s feet sliding across the living room floor. He was trying to be quiet but the sound was annoying, like sandpaper. Emma stretched, smiled when she didn’t smell coffee or fried eggs, and laid her hands flat on the empty space around her in the bed. Kevin would be gone in a few hours.

Emma was still in the clothes she had changed into after work yesterday, her earrings had made dents in her neck and behind her ears, and she had a white rubber band around her left wrist. A book fell in the living room. She sat up.

In the bathroom she brushed her teeth and touched the curling iron. Cold. Kevin usually turned it on before he nudged her awake, trying to help. Emma picked it up, turned it on and looked in the mirror. Her black hair lay flat and she was as pale as she’d been yesterday, the pinkish gray circles around her eyes darker. Maybe she hadn’t lied when she told the other paralegal at the office that she had the flu and wouldn’t be back until Friday. She shook her head, clicked off the curling iron and put it down, and walked into the living room.

Her four-year-old daughter Pauline knelt in a chair at the kitchen table, her hands flat on the open newspaper, mimicking Kevin like she did every morning. Pauline’s brown hair was as dull and straight as Emma’s but she had her father’s dark gray eyes and round face. Emma hoped her face would get thinner. She wanted Pauline to look like her because if Pauline asked who she looked like, Emma would have to tell her she didn’t know or care where her father was. He was twenty-five now—a year older than Kevin? Emma slapped her forehead, told herself to forget.

The girl wore one of Kevin’s white undershirts, knots tied in the hem so she wouldn’t trip. “Take that off,” Emma said to her.

“Hi, Mama,” Pauline said.

Kevin sat across the room on the sofa. The bookshelves were empty, all the books stacked on the coffee table and on the end table around the lamp. Empty beer and tomato boxes covered the rug in the middle of the room. The blinds and windows were open. Someone else in the building was cooking eggs.

His pillow was on the sofa. Pauline’s Keds and backpack, neon green with dark green vinyl starts on the shoulder straps, were under the coffee table with a stack of catalogues. Emma watched Kevin open the books, look a the first page then put them in the box next to him. His curly black hair stuck up in oily peaks.

She made a wide circle around the coffee table and boxes and went to the windows. She rubbed dust off the air conditioner. A pickup truck sat in front of the building, the back full of boards and chunks of drywall. The car alarm stopped beeping.

Emma saw an arm sticking out of a first floor window across the street.

When she turned back around, Kevin looked away from her skirt and opened a paperback.

“You’re not going to turn it on?” he said. “You always want it on.”

“Hi, Mama. Mama.”

“They’re all yours,” Emma said. “I took mine out last night.”

Kevin stared at the books. “Can I use the phone?” he said. “I got to call in sick.”

Emma rolled her eyes. He talked to her like she was a sixty-year-old school principal, not a thirty-one-year-old woman with no makeup and a four-year old. She waved her hand at the phone on the floor and walked to the refrigerator. She slid the ceramic magnets, a peacock and a red horse, up the door, out of Pauline’s reach where they should’ve been, not down where Kevin let her play with them. She opened the door and stared at the buttermilk on front.

“I don’t want Froot Loops,” Pauline said, her eyes wide. Emma snapped the rubber band against her wrist to keep herself from yelling. When Kevin put his hand over the mouthpiece and looked up, Emma glared at him. He turned away.

“Yeah…Yeah…Yeah, I will,” he said into the phone.

“Jesus Christ, say something else but ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,’ ” Emma said. She took out the buttermilk and slammed the door closed. “Jesus. You sound like Pauline.”

“I want eggs, Mama.”

“I’m making pancakes,” Emma said and Pauline stuck out her lips. “Stop that.”

“Mama—“

“Shut up, Pauline.”

Pauline kept her mouth open for a few seconds then closed it, put her elbows on the paper and pretended to read again.

“Okay.” Kevin hung up the phone. He glanced at Pauline. “I need to make another call.”

Emma took out the rest of the ingredients, a steel mixing bowl, and a skillet. She kicked the cabinet door shut and looked over her shoulder. Pauline watched Kevin dial with a finger in her mouth.

“Pauline, mind your own business,” Emma said. Pauline scratched her nose, leaving a smudge, and turned the page of the newspaper. Emma looked in the cabinet under the sink. There was one garbage bag left in the box. She balled it up and tossed it over Pauline’s head. It landed on the coffee table with a soft, tissue paper sound.

“For your clothes,” Emma said to Kevin.

“Mama, I want eggs.”

“Be quiet, Pauline.”

Kevin hung up and walked over to Pauline. He smoothed her hair into a ponytail, held it between three fingers and bounced it. Pauline giggled. “I’ll make her eggs—“

Emma slammed down the spoon, spreading batter across her shirt, the counter and the side of the skillet where the drops hissed and burned black. “I’m making pancakes—“

Pauline gave Emma a huge smile, her lips stretched thin and all her little teeth showing. “I want eggs.”

“Pauline.”

Kevin slid across the floor to Emma. The sandpaper sound set her teeth on edge.

"Emma, c’mon,” he said quietly. Emma closed her eyes and pursed her lips. The air coming out of his nose smelled like carrots. He was so close she was ready to jump out of her skin. “Don’t take it out on her. It’s bad enough what’s going down. Did you talk to her about—“

“She heard everything,” Emma said. Kevin took a step back. “She sleeps right there.” Emma pointed the spoon at Pauline’s door across from the bathroom. “And she’s mine so get out of my face.”

Kevin picked up the garbage bag and walked into the bedroom. Emma wiped her face on her shirt and poured two pancakes.

“What does…’suff-o-ca-ti-on’ mean?” Pauline said.

“Where’d you hear that?” Emma said, raising Pauline’s arms to pull the undershirt off. She went to the bedroom. Kevin was leaning over an open dresser drawer, staring at his clothes. Emma threw the shirt past him into the closet door.

Emma got a T-shirt and a pair of yellow shorts from the basket of clothes in Pauline’s room and walked up to Pauline.

Pauline turned in the chair and leaned on the back, her arms dangling. Her chin rested on top the chair and her head bounced as she said, “Huh, Mama?”

“Stand up.” Pauline put the shirt on her. “Up.” Pauline grabbed Emma around the neck and Emma lifted her off the chair to put the shorts on. Emma frowned. “Now, what?”

“Suff-o-ca-ti-on.” Pauline knelt in the chair and pointed at the paper. “See? ‘Mr. Crown died of suff-o-ca-ti-on’ and I don’t know what that word means, too, ‘cor-on-er.’ ”

Emma rubbed the base of her spine with her fist and leaned over. She read the line above Pauline’s gray fingertip—Mr. Crown died of suffocation. The coroner—and pushed Pauline’s finger away. “Jesus, you can read this? What’s this?” Emma pointed to another line.

“ ’At three-four-two-a-m police re-spon-d-ed to a call—' “

Emma threw the paper across the room.

“Mama.”

Kevin walked to the closet by the front door and dragged out a black suitcase. “What is it, Paulie?”

Emma took a spatula from a drawer and scooped up a pancake. One of the open bubbles had a black ring around it, a curly hair with a knot in the end. Kevin’s. He had introduced himself to all her neighbors, laughed with her friends on the phone, took care of Pauline even when Emma was home, called her Paulie which made Emma want to scream, and now he was in the food. She dropped the skillet and spatula in the garbage then threw the bowl, spoon, and buttermilk away, too.

“I wanted one of those bowls,” Kevin said.

Pauline sat in the chair staring at her. Kevin had the suitcase handle in both hands and looked at the garbage can. Both looked like they were about to pout. She wanted both of them out.

“Fine.” She pulled the bag out of the can, tied it closed and dropped it on top of his books. “Aren’t you done yet?”

Kevin pushed over the bag. He packed the rest of his books and put the boxes by the front door. He took an empty box into the bathroom.

Emma poured milk into a small bowl and put it and the box of Froot Loops in front of Pauline.

“Kevin makes me eggs.”

Emma snapped the rubber band, picked up the suitcase and pillow.

“Spoon,” Pauline said.

Boards clanked into the truck outside. Emma opened Kevin’s three drawers and the closet. She shoved the pillow, his briefs, sweaters, T-shirts and socks into the garbage bag, which Kevin had left on the floor, yanked his clothes off hangers and dropped them into the suitcase. She put his shoes in the garbage bag. A toilet flushed and gurgled upstairs.

Emma tied the garbage bag closed and pushed it into the living room with her foot. She saw Pauline picking Froot Loops out of the milk with her dirty fingers. “Pauline,” she said, “use a spoon.”

The intercom honked and they both jumped. Kevin walked out of the bathroom, opened the door and went to the stairs. Emma pulled out Pauline’s backpack. Kevin had bought the ugly thing, a child’s gift to a child. Emma poured out Pauline’s crayons, drawings, and a blue plastic lizard.

“Mama!”

“Oh, shit, fine, keep it.”

He left the door open. “It’s her carpool. I thought it was my brother.” He went into the bathroom and closed the door.

“Get up,” Emma said to Pauline. Pauline climbed down from the chair while Emma shoved everything into the backpack and zipped it closed. She knelt to put Pauline’s shoes on then took Pauline out to the stairs and put her hand on the rail. “Go.”

Pauline hopped down the stairs. Emma leaned over the rail, waited until she saw Pauline’s shoes on the green and white tile in the lobby and heard the woman who picked her up say “Hello” then nodded to herself.

She went back into the apartment and closed the door. She would have to get up twenty-five minutes earlier to feed and get Pauline ready and herself. Emma leaned on the cool wood door and counted to ten.

###

The truck outside started, backfired and drove away. Emma sat on the arm of the sofa, watching Kevin sort through glasses and dishes. Neither could remember what he had brought in fourteen months ago and she didn’t want him leaving anything he might say later belonged to him.

“Pauline’s reading,” Emma said.

“She is?” Kevin smiled.

Emma folded her arms. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know.” He opened the storage compartment below the oven.

“You taught her. Somebody taught her. I know they don’t at day care, why didn’t you tell me? You’re just trying to make me look bad, all those are mine.”

He slammed the door closed. “I didn’t, I’m not.”

“Then—“

“Maybe if you paid attention—“

Emma picked up his gold watch from the coffee table.

“Don’t do anything to it. Please.” He took two beers from the refrigerator and set one can on the table. When Emma dropped the watch on the sofa, he opened the beers, took his to the sofa and sat. Emma plopped into a kitchen chair and held her beer between her hands.

“Take that air conditioner, too,” she said. Kevin drank half his beer in one swallow and wiped the can across his forehead. He raked his hand through his hair, rearranging the peaks. A bus passed, shook the street and the glasses in the cabinet.

“The street vibrates ‘cause everything under the buildings is hollow,” Kevin said. “They stored coal down there.”

Emma snapped the rubber band. The marks on her wrist were the color of the circles around her eyes.

“Pauline’s smart,” he said.

“That lamp’s yours.”

Emma lay her head on the table and pressed the skirt over her knees. She watched Kevin swallow the rest of the beer. The neighbor across the hall slammed her door and her heels thumped down the carpeted stairs. Emma closed her eyes and fell asleep.

###

She felt cold plastic on her arm. Emma sat up, her jaw and teeth sore from lying on the table, and Kevin poked her arm again with the phone. She took it, wiped it off on her skirt and placed it on her ear, her eyes closed.

“Hello.”

“This is Linda at the day care? Pauline needs to come home. She’s not feeling too good.”

Emma licked her teeth. “I forgot to comb her hair.” But the woman had already hung up. Kevin stood next to Emma, holding the phone and watching her. She hung up and he set the base down. Pauline’s bowl had been washed and lay on the drain board. Kevin’s boxes, suitcase and garbage bag were next to the door. Emma looked at him.

“I called my brother. He’s on the way.” When Emma slapped her hands on the table to stand up, he said, “I called him.”

Her armpits felt slick. She got a paper towel, wiped them dry and threw the towel in the empty garbage can. He was still there and she had to leave to get Pauline. She saw a piece of tinsel on the rug and knelt. She picked out the tinsel and a hard shred of cheese. She didn’t want him there when she came back with Pauline. He would cuddle Pauline, put a cold towel on her head, sit her on his lap until long after his legs should’ve gone numb.

“I have to get Pauline.”

“Okay.”

Emma pulled curly hairs out of the rug; she would even have to clean him out of the rug, the furniture. His watch on the coffee table read 11:15. She stood, rubbed fibers off her legs and dropped the cheese shred and tinsel near his watch.

“Give me the keys,” she said.

Kevin paused, looked around the room. “I can’t get back in if the door closes. I’ll go get her and—“

Emma walked to the bedroom. She took her keys off the night stand and stepped into her shoes. She squatted, spit on the hem of her skirt and wiped a mud spot off her left shoe. She took a deep breath and looked down at herself, Pauline’s fingerprints, mud, and drops of pancake batter on her skirt.

Kevin took another beer from the refrigerator.

“Maybe I should leave tomorrow,” he said quietly.

“I want you gone already.” She unplugged the lamp and set it next to his suitcase. “Just leave the keys.”

He nodded. Emma looked around the living room, tapped her foot twice then opened the door.

###

The day care center was fifteen minutes away, a storefront between a warehouse-sized grocery store parking lot and an Afrocentric bookstore called Uhuru. Emma double-parked next to the day care center’s green minivan.

When she got to the sidewalk, Linda, the owner, opened the door. Linda’s red braid was tied into a knot at the back of her neck and her pants, white with blue check marks, looked like long boxer shorts. Boys and girls holding hands walked out past her. Pauline lay in a corner of the cluttered room on a yellow mat.

“Hi, Mom,” Linda said.

Emma hooked her sunglasses on her collar. Linda dragged out a picnic basket and red cooler while her helper carried Pauline out on her hip.

“Let’s go,” Emma said.

Pauline kept her head on the woman’s shoulder. Emma swallowed a bubble of panic and jealousy, touched Pauline’s forehead. It was cool. “Good. I can’t take her anywhere today.”

Linda put her fingers to her lips and the children stopped chattering. The helper gave Emma Pauline’s backpack and Emma took her daughter.

“Did you know she reads?” Emma said to Linda.

The helper picked up the basket and cooler. Linda locked the door. “Does she?” she said. She patted Pauline’s back. “Bye, sweetie. You are a very smart girl. C’mon, kids, this way.” She took the lead girl’s hand and walked up the street, the others and the helper trailing after her.

Pauline jerked. “What?” Emma said. Pauline covered her mouth. Emma put her on her feet, bent her over the curb and watched her throw up milky water that ran under the minivan. Emma sighed and wiped Pauline’s mouth with her skirt.

“Is that it? Is it all out?” Pauline held out her arms for Emma to pick her up. “Should I take you to the doctor?” She actually wanted to ask Kevin if she should. She picked Pauline up and put the backpack on her own shoulder. She checked Pauline’s forehead again as she smoothed back her hair.

“I forgot to wash your hands,” Emma said. A bus pulled up to the stop on the corner, blocking Emma’s car while she lay Pauline across the back seat. Then she changed her mind and strapped her into the child seat in front. She leaned on the minivan, drumming her nails on the roof of her car while she waited for the bus to move.

###

Emma crossed her fingers and opened the apartment door halfway. Kevin wasn’t on the sofa. She smiled. She moved Pauline to her hip and pushed the door open with her foot. It hit something that sounded like tissue paper. Emma threw down her keys and Pauline’s backpack. Pauline jumped.

“It’s okay, Pauline.”

She closed the door. The lamp lay on its side in front of a paper bag with glass baking dishes, a double boiler, and Emma’s alarm clock stacked in it. She pushed the bag under the kitchen table.

She brought Pauline into her bedroom and put her in the middle of the queen-sized bed. She took off Pauline’s Keds then rubbed and squeezed her feet until Pauline squirmed away.

“Do you feel better?” Emma pulled down the blinds, making the room gray. “It’s good to throw up, Pauline. You get the bad stuff out…Everything’ll be fine tomorrow, sweetie, you’ll be fine.”

Emma straightened the living room rug with her foot and sat at the table. She tugged at the rubber band on her wrist but didn’t snap it. Someone pounded up the stairs. Emma looked at the bottom of the door. Shoes passed, broke up the line of light, and climbed to the third floor.

She put the bag of clothes and the bag of garbage in the hall. She pushed the four boxes out and stacked them. The suitcase was light. She lifted it over the boxes, dropped it in front and set the lamp on top of the boxes. A door slammed downstairs. She put the garbage bags on either side of the boxes, pushing the bowl and skillet into the center so the bag would lean, then locked her door. She put her hands on her hips. It all looked the same, just emptier.

Emma tiptoed into the bedroom and touched Pauline’s foot. Pauline held out her arms. Emma picked her up, wrapped Pauline’s legs around her waist. She patted her back as she carried her into the living room.

“Hold on.” Pauline wrapped her arms around Emma’s neck while Emma bent to pick up Pauline’s backpack and toss it on the sofa.

Emma sat at the kitchen table, facing the door, rubbing Pauline’s back with both hands. It was quiet until rain started, hitting the windowsills and air conditioner like gravel.