Every section in the need-to-finish part has both a love story and a school story, a partner and a teacher.

June 9 2020

Is this the first entry in more than two dozen that I’ve actually mentioned the project I’ve been working on, a memoir of interpreting? The “need-to-finish” part is a reference to a deadline that came last year July 1 for an open reading period at a small press. Form rejection–lalala–and maybe the version I just sent off yesterday is bound for the same fate.

But what I can say is that the methods I’ve used to prepare to send this version off are different, more focused, more organized, more heartlessly focused on scope, more open to looseness. So that all feels in the right direction. I’m hopeful. I like the work. As much as anything I’ve written, it makes me feel.

I think nobody could have written it but me.

(The question is does anybody want to read it?)

And that’s the animating question of a lot of the work I’m doing at the GC. Who wants to read what and how do writers handle that? How do teachers mediate the relationship between writer and reader, between private vision and public discourse? Oh, such good questions.

Questions ones asked, for sure, by people like James Baldwin.

Not a great segue, I know but it lets me talk about this unaired interview with reporter Sylvia Chase (a pioneer for women in broadcast news apparently, and I’m happy to learn about her). It went up yesterday on Open Culture (hat tip to via Mike Copperman) and it is just full of gems:

I love watching him walk around fiddling with his scarf. I love his blunt brilliance over breakfast. But I’ve seen this and heard this in other footage of Baldwin. What I think what I was most struck by here was Baldwin at home with his family. With a nephew seated next to him, he tells Chase: “They will not do to him what they’ve failed to do to me. I was seven years old forty-seven years ago, and nothing has changed since then.”

In the same breath, he tells her how he doesn’t know her personally, but he knows her “historically.” Just an amazing moment. Also, not for nothing, his mom talking about how she never thought he’d be a successful writer cracks me up, and I was moved when she says she knew he ‘had to’ write.

Maybe I’ve just been thinking about mothers a lot the last few days.

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