Please don’t expect anything profound, I’m just here to yap today — and apologize! I didn’t send out my newsletter last week because I didn’t have time between the hustle to get things done before traveling and the actual travel itself. But there IS a draft of the newsletter I intended to send out and once I have the time to give it the revision it deserves, I’ll shoot it out to y’all. In the near future, there will be a random week where you’ll get a bonus, second newsletter. THRILLING.
Thanks to the kind suggestion of Athena Dixon, who read at the festival last year, I was invited down to Baton Rouge for LSU’s Delta Mouth Literary Festival. The Festival is entirely run by the MFA students and is a massive undertaking.
Also, massive? Shaq. But not the pool named in his honor at the on-campus hotel.
I was thrilled to be in Baton Rogue with old friends like Deesha Philyaw and Denne Michele — who both read from their new works! Denne’s debut novel drops in April and Deesha’s novel will hit shelves next year. Both were phenomenal and I’m so proud I get to be in a group chat with them (Did I make the group chat? Yes. But neither objected!!)
I also got to meet new writer friends, including noam keim, who is also in Philly so a little wild that we didn’t meet until we were down on the Delta together.
But the person I’m most happy I got to meet is writer and LSU MFA student Jalen G. Jones. When Jalen picked me up from the airport I mentioned something about being Black and Filipino and he looked at me stunned, he’d never met another Black and Filipino writer before. Representation ain’t everything, but it sure does mean a whole lot of something sometimes.
I am so thankful to have been readily embraced by both the Filipino and the Black writing communities but I have put some thought toward it being time for new multiracial narratives and tropes — mulatto tears — CRINGE! I hate that the narrative of being mixed race in this country has been reduced to the angst of not fitting in when the experience is so much more expansive than that nor are our experiences always inclusive of whiteness.
On our ride to campus, Jalen and I talked about identity and what POVs we’re entitled to write from and to. Along similar lines, a professor friend texted me a few weeks ago asking if I had any reading suggestions for her rural biracial students who were struggling with whether or not they were entitled to tell Black stories.
There wasn’t much that I could point her toward, but I did have a word of advice for her students:
A lot of what they’re feeling is just the unset nature of identity in your 20s masquerading ass racial insecurity. How can you be confident in your Black identity when so much of who you are overall is still unsettled? The parameters of their Blackness is an open-ended convo they can epexted to be in with their selves for at least the next decade.
And it’s something they can only define for themselves. So the longer they spend looking for external validation and letting others set the bounds of any aspect of their identity… the longer the convo will continue lol.
The thing is, uncertainty in your self isn’t specific to being mixed race. Literally everyone has to experience the growing pains of coming into their own identity. Sometimes, this appears easier when that identity is prescribed to you and appears to be cut and dried. But almost no one fits in those pre-assigned boxes, so almost everyone will have to struggle to define some aspect of who they are for themselves whether that’s related to race, gender, sexuality, etc.
Torrey Peters is on book tour for “Stag Dance” right now and has been speaking on how feelings attributed to being trans are actually just as frequently experienced by cis people too. We all have gender anxiety. We all want to be seen by the world the way we seen our selves and the gap stresses all of us the fuck out.
Curiosity around exploring the parts of ourselves that are inconsistent with the larger narratives of our society are probably why I became a writer. If we were to buy into these narratives wholesale we’d be forced to believe the human experience is to be an aberration. But that’s absurd. I pray for a future where we’re all allowed to enjoy sleuthing out the mystery of ourselves.