Bonus Episode: Representing ‘MY’ Black Experience featuring Theresa Okokon

This episode features our conversation with Theresa Okokon, which was hosted live and in-person on November 1, 2025 at The LAVA Center in Greenfield, MA. Special thanks to Straw Dog Writers Guild and The LAVA Center for co-hosting this event.

Theresa Okokon is an award-winning writer, storyteller, and teacher. A Wisconsinite living in New England, she is the co-host of Stories From The Stag, which has over 23,000 subscribers on YouTube. In addition to writing and performing her own stories, Theresa also teaches storytelling and writing, coaches other tellers, hosts storytelling events, and collaborates with nonprofits on narrative-driven special projects and events. An alum of both the Memoir Incubator and Essay Incubator programs at GrubStreet, Theresa’s memoir of essays about memory, family stories, and the death of her father — titled WHO I ALWAYS WAS (Atria Books, 2025). Her essay Me Llamo Theresa, which is in WHO I ALWAYS WAS, was originally published in Hippocampus Magazine and was nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize. 

Purchase your copy of WHO I ALWAYS WAS via Black Writers Read's Bookshop link here.

Please visit Theresa’s website at theresaokokon.com to learn more about her and her body of work. 

You can find The LAVA Center online at thelavacenter.org and Straw Dog Writers Guild online at strawdogwriters.org. 

Find Theresa on Instagram: @ohh.jeezzz

Find The LAVA Center on Instagram: @thelavacenter

Find Straw Dog Writers Guild on Instagram: @strawdogwriters

Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread

Find Black Writers Read online: https://blackwritersread.com/

Support Black Writers Read on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/blackwritersread

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:08

I think being a person of color in general in the United States, there is uh, or at least in communities like the one that I grew up in, which is like an almost entirely white community, there is a lot of um othering. Like you're gonna experience a lot of othering, like you're not one of us, you're different from us. And then at the same time, there's a lot of like um you are the representation, you know, like you're the representation of blackness, you're the representation of Asianness, whatever. Because like you're the only one who they know, kind of thing. Um, and so there is, I do feel sometimes like writing a memoir as a person of color can feel like that as well, as though like someone is going to read my book and then see it as a representation of blackness, which it is not. It is a representation of my blackness and my experience with being a black person in America, but also my experience of being a black person in America is very different because my parents are immigrants, and that was like part of what I needed to learn and figure out as I was growing up, and that's hugely in a way that like I didn't understand when I was a kid. There was this whole like black American culture that I only literally only knew about from television, and so then then it was like, well, you're not that and you're not this, so what are you? You know, like you don't make sense in either category. And I think that a lot of children of immigrants kind of experience that, that it's like you're not you're not enough of the culture that you come from, and you're not enough of um like that culture in America, and you're certainly not white, so you just sort of like don't fit in kind of anywhere. Um and that's very much what my upbringing was like. Um, and some I do sometimes still get like, I don't know, like nervousness about people reading my book and being like, well, that's not that's not the black experience at all. And I'm like, well, it certainly isn't. I never would have claimed that it is. I'm just one person. I can't be your representation for anything other than your representation for Teresa Okoken.

SPEAKER_08 2:30

Hello and welcome to Black Writers Read. My name is Nicole Young Martin, and I'm the founder, producer, and host of this podcast. Thank you for tuning in for this special bonus episode of season six of the series. Launched on Juneteenth, 2020, Black Writers Read was created as a platform to showcase, celebrate, and honor the words, work, and traditions of Black writers from across the country, across genres, across experiences, and across the African diaspora. Black Writers Read is a behind-the-scenes conversation into the craft and what it means to create as a black author in today's society. Since starting this series during the summer of 2020, we've hosted almost 100 authors representing 15 plus genres from six countries and 26 states. This episode features our conversation with Teresa Okoken, which was hosted live and in person on November 1st, 2025 at the Lava Center in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Special thanks to Straw Dog Writers Guild and the Lava Center for co-hosting this event. A little bit about both organizations before I turn it over to my interview with Teresa. I've been fortunate to have partnered with both the Lava Center and Straw Dog Writers Guild for several live in-person events. This event continues in that tradition. We had a packed house and engaged in an amazing conversation with our guest author and with members of our audience. The Lava Center is a community arts and humanities space, arts incubator, and black box theater in downtown Greenfield, Massachusetts. The Lava Center is a place where all, including marginalized communities and individuals, can have their voices heard. They are an arts incubator, providing many opportunities for creatives and their work to be nourished. Straw Dog Writers Guild supports writers of all stages, abilities, and genres who are based in the four counties of western Massachusetts through workshops, an annual conference, open mics, book fairs, and special events. I am a proud member of Straw Dog and have been since the late 2010s. It is because of them that so many of my writing projects have received such great support. You can find the Lava Center online at thelavacenter.org. That is T-H-E-L-A-V-A-C-E-N-T-E-R.org. And Straw Dog Writers Guild online at Strawdogwriters.org. That is S-T-R-A-W-D-O-G W-R-I-T-E-R-S.org. Western Massachusetts is such a special place for writers, and I'm glad to still be a part of this wonderful community. I'm so excited to share this conversation with you all. As I mentioned at the top of our interview, I wanted to meet and chat with Teresa for some time. During this event, we talked about her memoir, Who I Always Was, which was released in February 2025 by Atrea Books. It is available for purchase wherever you buy your books. You can get it in hardcover, paperback, and an ebook. Please visit Teresa's website at www.teresaocoken.com to learn more about her and her body of work. Her website again is www.t-h-r-e-sao-k-o-k-o-n dot com. I now like to take us back to early November to this very fruitful and engaging conversation. Just an FYI. During the question and answer portion towards the end of the episode, the questions posed by members of the audience are fairly quiet because this was a very low-tech event. As an independent and self-funded producer, unfortunately, I cannot afford additional amplification and sound trust. It's very expensive. I hope that the low sound on the questions do not deter you from listening to these amazing questions because they are so good. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode, and I hope that you'll enjoy our conversation as much as I do. Now I want to get today's conversation started. I've been wanting to chat with Teresa for some time, actually. I remember through um, because I'm also a member of the Boston Writers of Color out of Grub Street. And I remember when I heard that you were writing a book, and I was like, oh, because I also know you've been teaching in the area and do you do a lot in the region and you've published some amazing essays. And I was like, I'm getting her on. And so it first started, I got your contact, I I forgot her name, but she was the coordinator for the black, um, for the Boston Writers of Color through Grup Street. She gave me her contact information, and then I think I reached out to you on Instagram and I was like, I want you on. And so now this is happening, and it's happening in person, which thank you for taking the drive.

SPEAKER_04 7:29

Happy to be here. Yes.

SPEAKER_08 7:31

So she's based in um greater Boston. So Teresa Um Akokin is an award-winning writer, storyteller, and teacher, a Wisconsinite living in New England, which I'm originally from Detroit, though, Midwest, is the co-host of Stories from the Stage, which has over 23,000 subscribers on YouTube. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Oh, I did I did some research on her. I did some research on her. Yeah, it's a lot. You have a great base there. In addition to writing and performing her own stories, Teresa also teaches storytelling and writing, coaches other tellers, hosts storytelling events, collaborates with nonprofits on narrative-driven special projects and events. She is an alum of both the memoir incubator and essay incubator programs at Grep Street, which is not a great at Boston. They also host workshops and things like that virtually, um, similar to Strawdog. Teresa's memoir of essays about memory, family, stories, and the death of her father, titled Who I Always Was, was published by a tria books through Simon and Schuster earlier this year in February. Her essay, Malamo Teresa, which is also in Who I Always Was, was originally published in Hippocampus magazine and was nominated for a 2020 pushcard prize, which is awesome. Yes. Today we will be talking about Who I Always Was, which is available for purchase wherever you get your books. Please, if you can't, buy it on bookshop.org. When Teresa was nine, her father traveled to her his hometown in Nigeria to attend his mother's funeral and never returned. His mysterious death shattered Teresa as her family's world unraveled. Now, a storyteller and television co-host, Okoken sets out to explore the ripple effects of that profound loss and the way heartache shapes our sense of self and of the world for the rest of our lives. Using her fat her grief, excuse me, using her grief and her father's death as a backdrop, gifted storyteller. And this is a quote from um Naima Avishai. I hope I pronounced her name correctly. Havashia. Thank you. Author of another Appalachia, Okoken delves deeply into intrinsic themes of blackness, African spirituality, family abandonment, belonging, and see in the seemingly endless, unrequited romantic pursuits of a black woman who came of age as a black girl in Wisconsin suburbs, where she was, in many ways, always an anomaly. Teresa will begin by sharing excerpts from Who I Always Was, and we'll chat as this is a conversation. Please feel free. Um, once she's done reading, if you do have a question, you can ask it. I'll see where an appropriate place to insert it. I'm also going to do QA at the end as well. So please help me in welcoming Teresa Oko. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:29

Thank you so much for the warm introduction and thank you to Lava Center and Straw Dog for hosting us here. I'm really excited to be here. Um so thank you for having me. Um so I'll get right into it. Um, usually the essay that I read from is the last essay in the book, which is called The Okokan Family Orchestra. Um and that essay I really feel like is a great encapsulation of like kind of what the feel of the book is and in many ways what the book is about. Um but since this event was um titled under Celebrating One's Roots, um I decided to read a different essay. Um so the essay that I pulled to read is called Blackity Black. Um so the original name of my book was, and we'll talk about this more, but the original name of my book, well, the original, original name of my book came up for my own life. The name after that was the Okoken Family Orchestra, and that's the name that sold. Um the book sold under that name. Um at the very last minute, like within a year before publication, like book is going to print. We had to change the title because marketing was like, that title doesn't make sense. It's not a book about music, and no one is gonna know how to pronounce her last name. So we can't have words that can't be pronounced in the title. Um, and we arrived at the title, Who I Always Was, and I think we'll talk about how we arrived at that title, but my agent actually wanted me to call the book Blackity Black. And I was like, Yeah, I can't do that. I wasn't, I like considered that a holder title for this essay. I was like not even comfortable that that was the title that this essay was going to print with. Um, and we'll talk about why, uh, because it kind of comes from a conversation that I had with a friend of mine. But my agent is um a Jewish woman, and she grew up really feeling like um she was very Jewish, heavy on the ish. Um, and she really related to this essay. And because she said that, like, as a Jewish woman who sort of like was constantly told by others and sometimes by herself that she wasn't Jewish enough, um, that reading a book about a person and an essay about a person who was constantly told that they weren't black enough was just like really relatable in a way that she hadn't always experienced on the page. And so that's the essay that I'm going to be reading from. So this essay is called Black the Black. When Megan the Stallion hosted Saturday Night Live in 2022, her opening monologue included the phrase hood rat stuff, hood rat stuff with my hood rat friends, and also spoke to Megan completing her bachelor's degree. I almost cried when she performed Anxiety, my favorite song from her latest album, and her closing skit had a joke about the concept of duality. At the time, I was working through revisions um of this essay collection and had just workshopped an earlier version of the essay White Kids. The workshop readers asked how some of the essay characters were doing now, and I responded, oh, you know, Midwest married two kids and a dog. And and one of the and one of the readers um said that while it was clear that the narrator, i.e. current Teresa, got out, it was not yet clear how. I posted about Megan's Saturday Night Live performance on Facebook, and my best friend from high school commented, can't even imagine what it was like for you to grow up as we did. I think about it a lot. Her comment made me feel at the same time deeply seen while deeply reflective and thankful that I no longer feel the need to constantly prove myself. I have precious few things in common with Megan the Stallion, including where and how we grew up. But somehow, her duality feels akin to mine. Somehow, watching Megan the Stallion on Saturday Night Live reminded me of witnessing myself trying to compose this book. In my sophomore year at Homestead High School, the other black girls in my grade started a club called Sisters of Enzinga, named for an Angolan queen who is honored and remembered as a protector of her people. I was the only black girl in my grade whose parents were African immigrants, and the only black girl in my grade who was not invited to join the club. I was silently devastated. But I never had any means for responding to this devastation. Sisters of Nzinga was one of the many reminders that no matter how much I tried to be like the other black girls at school, I would fail. Because if I wanted to be in any way true to myself, I would never be enough for what seemed to be expected of me. If high school me told my mom about Sisters of Nzinga, as I'm sure I did, the only response I can imagine her having was that I didn't need a club to connect me to Africa. I had her. I had Uncle Atu, who sometimes gave us fonty language lessons on Saturday mornings, so that we could understand even better who we were and where we came from. And even though he was dead, I had my dad. We are black. We are African. After my experience with Sisters of Nzinga, it did not occur to me that any of the black girls at my college would want to be friends with me. There were a handful of other black students at UW Green Bay, most originating, of course, from Milwaukee, and I was completely blind to any attempt they made at befriending me. In my first month on campus, another black freshman named Reagan walked past me in the hall and waved. I responded as though her tongue were about to lash out at me in mock in the mockery I'd come to expect from my childhood playgrounds, diverting my eyes and speeding off in the other direction. When my mom tells me about meeting my dad, she says that despite how generally shy she is, she was never nervous to exchange smiles with him at the library at Marquette. We are both African, she says, and Africans say hello to each other. Similarly, after Reagan tried to wave at me in the hall that day, she was just one black girl saying, Hey girl, to another black girl. Luckily, she kept trying, and I got better at noticing. Reagan would become one of my first black friends who never made fun of me for who I was and never expected me or anyone, I'm sorry, never expected me to be anyone or anything other than who I am. Sure, she thought it was a bit odd that before the black student union soul food dinner my freshman year, I had never even eaten collard greens. But she learned how to pronounce my Nigerian middle name, and she was the first friend to ever call me Amy. Reagan listened to 112, Maroon 5, and Jagged Edge, and I would drive to Green Bay's branch of the exclusive company CD store to buy the new Ani, Sleater Kinney, or Jurassic 5 as soon as they were released. This mismatch of our musical tastes wasn't a problem. Not for her and not for me. It no longer mattered to me if I had everything in common with my friends. And more importantly, I was less and less seeking external validation for my blackness. But even Reagan recently asked me how I got to be so black, like blackity black. It wasn't a question I could answer because identity doesn't have a when. It doesn't subscribe to a timeline. It didn't happen all at once. Rather, I've spent my entire adult life inching towards my identity, a self-defined, internally validated version of me. At some point in 2018, my siblings and I decided to get a sibling tattoo. We spent months texting ideas back and forth. Among the vetoed suggestions were a Totoro, one of our favorite childhood movies, a slice of mushroom pizza, my big sister's favorite topping, and a Sankofa, my little sister already had one on her shoulder. Sitting around the kitchen table at my mom's townhouse one night, we finally agreed on a paintbrush. In the backyard of our split-level childhood home in River Falls, we had a birch tree. We called it the paper tree because its white bark, the first we had ever seen, pulled off like sheets of paper. It was the only tree of its kind in the yard. And using a big bucket of muddy water and house painting brushes from my dad's to our dad's toolbox, we would paint the tree brown. Don't you guys think it's weird how we used to do that? I asked as I sketched this the paintbrush for our tattoo. Like we painted the only white tree in the yard brown. What do you think that meant? Don't you think that meant something? My little sister rolled her eyes and quickly retorted, No, Teresa, it doesn't mean anything. Not everything has to mean something. This isn't one of your stories. Just draw the tattoo. Which admittedly was a fair response. Sorry, not sorry for being the writer in the family. Hard shrug. As I passed around the paintbrush sketch, a rounded-off handle with a row of teeth spanning about three times the width of the handle itself. Someone remarked how it looked like a hair pick. And just like that, we arrived at a unanimous decision. Our dad's hair pick. It was a black, hard plastic comb with a black power fist embossed on the end of the handle. Certainly, my siblings and I each have different have a different relationship with the hair pick and with the black power fist in general. For me, what has always stood out about the fist is the way the thumb wraps around the other fingers. And if you'll indulge me to alter this visual a bit, that reminds me of how my dad's memory wraps him around the five of us. Me, my mom, and my siblings. I often think of my family as a party of five, but really we are six. It took another year or so for my siblings and me to finally get our tattoos. My little brother didn't quite want to follow suit with his sisters, so he opted instead for two symbols, one from Ghana and one from Nigeria to be tatted on his knuckles. My sisters and I each got a carbon copy of the same hair pick. Affie's on her hip, Veronica's on her forearm, forearm, and mine on my chest. We decided to add a swoop to the comb, like a parenthesis laying on its side, borrowed from the Ghanaian dua fe symbol for beauty. My sibling tattoo was my seventh, and the healing process was incredibly challenging. Like any fresh ink, this one was perfect on day one. It was surprisingly unpainful to receive. The lines were crisp. The photo of me and the photo of me admiring it in the mirror at the tattoo shop is one of my favorite images of myself. Placed directly above my heart and therefore conveniently covered by everyday clothing. This tattoo, however, began to bleed. And puff and peel and scab more than any tattoo I have ever had before or since. In the weeks that followed, I would catch myself eyeing it in the bathroom mirror. I was silently devastated and tinged with an uncomfortable feeling akin to shame or embarrassment. I have spent my life wanting to feel like I was part of something, a member of a club. When I made that post about Megan the Stallion on my Facebook, I copy pasted it to I copy pasted the text to my black people who watch TV group, a community I joined because while it's nice to be seen by my white friends from high school for how much of an outsider I was during that time of my life, it's even nicer to talk about that with people who might have a shared lived experience. I'm a member of the Black Girls Who Love Fur Babies group and the Black Writers of Color group and a co-founder of Boston BIPOC Yogis. But all of these clubs, all of these groups are only on Facebook. And is Facebook even real? Is my belonging real? Do I really belong to and with anyone? I don't like to admit it, but part of me knows that when I got my sibling tattoo, I was in part efforting to brand myself with my blackness. It is permanent ink in my melanin. And now that it's there, no one can deny me of it. I don't like to admit that it that I felt this way because while I'd rather feel I don't like to admit that I felt this way because what I'd rather feel is over it, self-defined, self-knowing, non-seeking. I want to be the person my mother and father and uncle Attu raised me to be. I want to be the person I believe myself to be, the person I tell myself I am. As I reclined in the tattoo chair that day, I imagine that part of my mind drifted back to this oversized Looney Tunes t-shirt that I bought when I was in fifth grade. The t-shirts mentioned earlier in the book. If you grew up in the 90s or early 2000s, you may know the one I'm talking about. Yes, it was that t-shirt. Okay. My mind drifted back to that oversized Looney Tunes t-shirt that I bought back in fifth grade. Was I doing that again? Adorning myself with a mere caricature of blackness and hoping that everyone would interpret it as identity. Was I interpreting it as identity? I know that not everything is one of my stories, but this is. So when I think about the healing process of my sibling tattoo, the way it peeled and scabbed and bled, when I look at it in the mirror today, its lines less sharp, the negative space blurred, it feels like a metaphor placed on my heart. I know what the tattoo is. But if I'm honest, I cannot be for sure that anyone on the outside looking in at me would. And sometimes I'll look at my reflection in the mirror and I'll tell myself, it's better this way. Better that what I was efforting to do failed. Better that every time my chest is bare, I'm reminded that the only interpretation of me that matters is my own. I need only to find myself to and for myself. So I cannot tell you or Reagan or anyone else how I became so blackity black. I don't owe that to you or Reagan or anyone else but myself. What I will say is that this is who I've always been. It just took me a while to communicate it. Took me a while to know it, took me a while to realize that I don't need to be a member of any club to prove it. I like to believe that this version of who I am is permanent, like a tattoo. And for the most part, I know it is because I know that it's who I always was. But after more than four years of working on this essay collection, the one thing I have learned for certain is that with time, all stories alert.

SPEAKER_08 26:40

Thank you. So as I do with the live stream, I give bouquets and like abundance of gardens of flowers. Your book is craft. Thank you. Like I'm telling y'all, especially because there's a lot of writers here, please pick it up. It is craft. Like I even asked some questions about how research and particular choices that she made shows up. Like this book is so brilliantly written.

SPEAKER_02 27:11

Thank you. I am a craft nerd, so I've heard.

SPEAKER_08 27:16

And it shows up here in the book very prominently. And then also too, I think the other reason why I love it so much is you are just so unapologetically yourself, like just throughout the entire book. So thank you. Yeah, especially me.

SPEAKER_03 27:32

I'm working I'm working on my first memoir now, and I'm like, oh my God, like, yes, yes, like just I read Goodreads review recently, which you're not supposed to do when I do it anyway, it's just a mess because um I read one and and she said, I love how Teresa doesn't care if people like her. And I was like, Do I not?

SPEAKER_04 27:51

I was like, I guess that's what I'm giving. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_08 27:56

Yeah. But we need to live in the world where we can be ourselves and just everybody else just deal with it. So yeah. So I have a couple of questions. Yeah. And I hope that it prompts questions here in the audience. So the first question that I always start with what is the origin story of who I always was? Why this title and why this story right now?

SPEAKER_03 28:20

Yeah. So um I came into writing by way of storytelling. My bachelor's degree is in social worker. I graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay in 2005. Um, I moved to the Boston area in 2010. Um, and in 2012, by accident, I started storytelling. Um, so I was like doing live storytelling, telling stories about my own life. Um, and one of the early stories that I told is um about how I came to be called Teresa, which is my first name, but it's not the name that my parents intended for me to be re referred to as. Um, I was supposed to be called Amy, which is my middle name. Um, so that was one of the first stories that I told um through Massmouth, which was a local storytelling organization in the Boston area. Um, and uh people just liked it and people liked other stories that I was telling. And then people were like, oh, you should, you should try to publish your stories. And I was like, they're not written down. Like, where would I? I don't, I didn't know how to write them down in a way that like somebody else could read them. I knew how to write them down so that I could then perform them, but it relied on like my physical voice coming out of my mouth to make the story make sense, you know. Like sometimes there was just an ellipses, you know. Um so I finally realized that the only person saying no constantly to the idea of me publishing my work was me. Um, and so by that time I was um hosting a television show, a storytelling television show, which is called Stories from the Stage. And a woman came onto the show, her name is Grace Taluson, and she was performing um a story that was an essay from a memoir and essays that she had coming out in like the next year or two. Um and I was like, okay, so when it comes out of our mouth, we call it a story. When it's on paper, it's an essay, and Grace knows how to do both. I'll just follow Grace around until she teaches me how to do it. Um I ended up taking the essay incubator with Grace. Um, and by the end of that class, I realized that I was writing a book. Um, one of the first essays that I worked on in that class was Meyamo Teresa. Um, it was a story that I had told as like a five-minute version, a seven-minute version, and a 12-minute version. Um, and now uh I worked on it for years um to create it into the essay that it is today. That's the essay that lives um in this book. Um, so that was really the first essay that I wrote for the book. Um, and yeah, it was in that class with Grace that I realized that I was writing a book. And for those of you who are writers and you you take writing classes and things, for me, the way that I knew that I was writing a book is that it felt like um all of my essays were like looking at each other. The way that I thought of it was like if you put like um three droplets of food coloring into a sink, it all is gonna eventually merge and go into the same place and become one thing. And it felt like no matter how many droplets of different essays I was putting in that sink, they all were going to the same place and merging together. And so I was like, I think that means it's a book. I didn't know how to write a book, so I took another class that taught me how to write a book. Um, and then this book was born. So yeah. Yeah, and it's the title, the title came um, well, I told you a bit about how um, okay, so the first title was Fables from My Own Life, which was a line in a story that I told on stage once. Um, and that was the title of my book, literally, because one of my friends in the audience that day was like, if you ever write a book, that's the title. So I was like, Well, she said it, so it has to be true. Um, so that was the title. Then in my first round of workshop in the memoir incubator, the class where the first draft was written, um, my classmates were like, Fables are stories where the characters aren't animals. And I was like, it's called alliteration. Like I was like, cute title. They were like, you can't call it that. It does, it literally doesn't make sense. And I was like, whatever. I'm not like a literature person, whatever. So um for a while it didn't have a name, and then I wrote the essay that's called the O'Koken Family Orchestra, and my instructor just really loved that title. Um, and so that became the title of the book for the longest time. That essay is also about uh the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technical Dreamcoat, which is like a foundational musical in my family. And so I was really happy with that title. Um, I sold to my agent under the, or signed with my agent under that title. I sold to my editor under that title. My editor then um went to the marketing department at Atria Books with a sample of five essays from the book to like start thinking about a marketing plan, cover design, that kind of stuff. Um, and the Okoken Family Orchestra was not one of those five. And they were like, this title makes no sense. Like, why would we name the book that that doesn't make sense? And she was like, Oh, you just don't get it. You just have to read this one essay. It's a brilliant essay. If you read that essay, you would understand why that's the book title. That essay is also the last essay in the book. And marketing was like, you can't name the title, you can't name the book something that most people will not be able to pronounce, and that you have to read the entire book to understand. That doesn't work. And they were like, you have to change the title. So my editor emailed me and was very worried that I would be like really combative because that's my personality, and just like debate her. But I was like totally fatigued and exhausted by that time, and I was like, I don't care, change the title, whatever. What's in your title? Um, so we're just on a Zoom um talking, and at some point I said the words who I always was because I think because we were talking about that Blackity Black essay, and my agent was just writing down things that I was saying, and she's like, You just said this, how about this for the title? And I was like, sounds good. That's how the title was born. Um, I probably should have like Googled it to make sure. I don't know. There's nothing, nothing else really comes up too much if you Google it. Probably other people Googled it to make sure, I don't know, marketing. Um so yeah, that's how we landed on the title. And then I still had another, like at least one round of copy edit um after that. And in that copy edit round, I realized that that phrase or variations of the phrase were all over the book, so much so that I had to edit some of them out because I was like, it's gonna feel like I'm beating the reader over the head with this title with how frequently I'm saying this phrase. So it was sort of like the title that was always there, it just was hiding from me.

SPEAKER_08 35:10

Research is an important component in your book. I'm actually gonna start because my question, this is a little further down. Yeah, sure. But research is so important in this book, and it actually opens the book, which is why I'm moving the question here. Research is an important component in your book, so much so you include what could be seen as footnotes and about what you discovered, and you open the book with in-depth research. Why was research an important part of your writing process?

SPEAKER_03 35:36

Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that question. Um, I so the prologue of the book, which accidentally is perhaps the longest essay in the book, um, is uh it is structured after Wikipedia. That's how I like kind of arrived at the structure of it. It has like body text, and then in the body, on sort of like almost random words, there will be like a the little subscript for a footnote. And then you can either it's written so that you can read it front to back without jumping to the footnotes, or you can get to a footnote, flip to it, and come back. It works both ways, which was not easy to create, but that's the way that it's written. Um, and I had done all this research for the book that was like research about like um the history of colonialism in Ghana, which is where my mom is from, the history of colonialism in Nigeria, where my dad was from, um, what was going on throughout both of their countries during the time that they were immigrating to the States and meeting each other and like trying to find connections and overlaps and all those kinds of things. I had done all this research and then I had written dozens of drafts of an essay that was trying to like tell why any of that mattered and connected to who I am and like my life. Um, and I just couldn't find a way to make it connect. And I landed on this um, this probably because I was like looking at Wikipedia doing research. I landed on this uh this structure. Um and yeah, I I think oftentimes people think that when you write a memoir, it wouldn't involve any research because it's your own life. But even like looking at past artifacts from your life is part of the research process. So um I had like an autobiography that I wrote in eighth grade and was able to find that and reread it and use um elements from that in the memoir. Um, photo albums. My mom has moved house a number of times. We've lost a lot of photos because basements in the Midwest flood quite a bit. Um so we've lost a lot of our photo albums. And eventually I took the majority of the family photos to my home in Boston. Um, so I was able to look through those. Um, my brother has a number of artifacts like videos and things like that from my family growing up. And I, you know, I graduated from college in 2005. So I'm like early Facebook days, you know, like early adopt, like when we used to use Facebook as just like private messaging on your public page, you know? Um, so all of my Facebook memories and all that kind of stuff was like a huge part of the research that I had just to like remember how I felt at the time when something was happening. Because when I look back at my life, I see it with like a much clearer lens on it, you know, and I don't always remember how something felt at the time. And I've never been a person who journals the closest thing I've ever had to a journal is Facebook. So all of those like status updates from 2005 until like 20 years of status updates, you know, all of that is is what I would look at. I looked at text messages. I've I don't think I've ever deleted a text in my entire life. So I looked at text messages, I looked at old emails, all kinds of things like that. Um, and then also just like I didn't, I really didn't do any kind of like academic research in any way. And all actually um Kirkus reviews, my my review from Kirkus is hilarious if you want to read it. Um they did not like the book, but it was also like the way that they said it was very funny. Um, but anyways, my review from Kirkus sort of criticized my like um internet research, you know, and I was like, what how would you research? I was like, it's a memoir. What what did you want me to do? You know, like what would I do, you know? Do you have academic papers on on your life? Because I don't, you know. Um, yeah, I did, I I looked at the internet and also like I don't know, maybe that comes from you know, being I was born in '83. Technically, I'm a millennial, although I consider myself a Gen Xer. Um yeah, that's just like the way that I live is like you look stuff up, you look stuff up online, and then you incorporate it into like the way that you're like, I was listening to a podcast. Blah blah blah. That's just the way I talk, and that's also the way that I write. So yeah. It explains a lot. Yeah. You catching the vibe? I do. It's really just who I am.

unknown 40:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 40:19

Sorry to put more of your business out here. So you are the exact same age as my best friend. And I was like, because you remind me so much of her. What is your astrological sign? Aries. Okay, yep. She's a Sagittarius. So yep, I'm seeing a lot of yeah. Yes. Yeah, I was like, yeah, I've seen a lot. And you said you're combative about like your stuff. And I'm like, yep. And it comes out here, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 40:43

Like, I think I think my book is very much um, it's very much a book that's rooted in like the time that I grew up in. For me, I think part of what I wanted to achieve in the book is I wanted it to feel like the 90s. Yeah. I wanted it to feel like the early 2000s, because that's when the book is taking place throughout. And so other research that I did was like, you know, drinking country croc lemonade, because that's what I used to drink as a kid. Like the amount of time that I spent trying to find that microwave popcorn that was neon colors is ridiculous. Like I was I ate craft macaroni and cheese for the first time in years because I was like, I need to just like smell the smells and taste the taste and be in that time. It wasn't hard for me to like listen to the music from the 90s because that's all I listened to anyways. But um, but yeah, that was that was the research that I did. And then this is the book that was born, which which feels really true to like who I am. Um, but yes, has been criticized for being too millennial. And I'm like, is that an insult? It's not an insult. It's not the insult you think it is, bro. It's like, yes. Why are you like finding your roots? I don't know. Like, what is it? What did you think? Who do you think I am? Like it was born in '83. I'm a normal fucking person. Yeah. Yeah. Not a scholar, just a lady. Just a lady. Yeah, lady who wrote a book.

SPEAKER_08 42:05

I need to find that Kirkus. You said it's funny. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_03 42:09

I made a I made a reel to it that was not approved for me to post. Oh maybe one of these days I'll just post it anyway. Yeah. Tell me what how do you spell that Kirkus? Because I've never K-R K-I-R-K-U-S. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 42:28

And Darlene, as you're working on your book, yeah, get ready.

SPEAKER_03 42:31

That's what I'm saying. Yeah. There's like three big reviewers, Kirkus, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly. Publishers Weekly and Booklist both gave me like stellar starred reviews. And Kirkus was like, it's fine. I like to joke about it.

SPEAKER_08 42:52

Oh, good. I love this. So I typically, so before I ask this question, I want to put out I typically ask craft related questions because me, I'm learning about writing. Y'all are just invited to the conversation. But this question, it's a mix of craft and a little personal. And this is why y'all have to read the book. So you mentioned at the beginning of the book how important it was to involve your mom in the process. You actually, there is a like mother, I think there's like a mother's note at the very beginning. Yeah. Which I think is super sweet.

SPEAKER_03 43:26

Yeah, it begins with a mother's note instead of an author's note.

SPEAKER_08 43:30

Yeah. And she also shows up a lot beautifully in the book, especially in the a co kid family, or where you're like, my mom sings, but not nicely. But she loves to sing. And I've got my voice from her.

SPEAKER_06 43:44

Yes, I read your book.

SPEAKER_08 43:46

I'll true, all true. Yes. Um, and just like the um insight on Ghana. So why was it important to, and and I'm gonna, and the reason why I wanted to ask this question, because I'm in the middle of writing my memoir and I've taken a lot of classes and I've read a lot of memoirs. My favorite um genre, and people are like, you don't owe anybody anything. You can write when these people are alive or dead. You don't have to like ask their permission and dent. But I'm like, but you have to live with it.

SPEAKER_04 44:17

Yes, you do.

SPEAKER_08 44:19

Yes, you do. And that's where this question is coming from. So why was it important to you to involve your mom? Because from what I've read, your mom was heavily involved in this process. And the acknowledgement that you give your mom in the acknowledgement section is really beautiful as well.

SPEAKER_03 44:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 44:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:35

Yeah. My mom and I are very close. Like we're good friends. And that came like over time as we were adults. There's a whole essay in the book that sort of talks about like how my mom and I became friends instead of just being mother and daughter. Um the the book opens with an uh a mother's note instead of an author's note that sort of talks about like usually in memoir, the the author's note talks about the concept of like artistic truth, essentially. Like, how is how is the writer approaching the fact that like these are only my memories and I can't be responsible for other people disagreeing and all those kinds of things? And um, that was a conversation that I had with my mom at one point, and so that's that conversation, part of that conversation appears in in the mother's note, which one interviewer was once like, oh, it's like when you don't want to go to gym class, so you get a note from your mom. And I was like, Oh, I did not realize that um, but that's really cute. Also, my mom is a pediatrician, so it also works. Um but the rest of that conversation, I think what's what's in the author's note is her saying, um, like it's fine as long as you're telling the truth. Um and her also saying that she doesn't believe in not airing dirty laundry, yours or others, um dirty laundry. And that's very much the way that my mom is. She's a very, very quiet woman. She's the type of person who would like never be on a stage. Um, but uh she is feisty. Like she's she's the feisty spirit. Um the longer part of that conversation is I called my mom. I was feeling, I was writing some drafts of sort of the family-heavy essays in in this book, and I called her because I was uncomfortable with how much of her story I was telling, because her story belongs to her and not to me. Um and she goes, uh, I like couldn't find a way to put this whole conversation in the book, but she goes, you know that book, The Glass Castle? And I was like, The book I gave you? Yes. Yes. And she goes, Yeah, so that book is called a memoir. And I think that what you're doing is writing a memoir. And I was like, I am in a class called the memoir incubator. I also think that what I do is writing a memoir. She's like, Did you know that it's called memoir? And I was like, I did not. Um, and she's like, So in the glass castle, the first part of the glass castle is the writer, the author, seeing her mother on the street. Um, and she begins her own story by talking about her mother, and that's what you have to do. You can't talk about yourself without talking about me because I made you. And I was like, um, so she was like, You can't, you don't have a story without my story. So that's why it makes sense for you to be telling my story as well as your story. And she also said, which is in the book, um, I wouldn't tell you these things if I didn't want you to tell other people because I know that you're going to. And like that's basically why I tell you, is because someone should tell it. So yeah.

SPEAKER_08 47:45

This segue so nicely into the next question. As a black woman author who grew up in the US with immigrant parents, so of course you have, I forgot what it's called, but it's like that by bilateral is not the right word. But I've heard like yes, yes, you get what I'm saying. And the I grew up like my family came on that lovely cruise ship multiple generations ago and everyone went back. So I grew up very US. So you yeah, you get the term that I mean, you know. What are some advantages and challenges of memoir? A genre that can uncover so much for both the writer and the reader. Yeah. How does this particular genre, especially being creative nonfiction, provide the platform for your mission and work as a storyteller and as a writer?

SPEAKER_03 48:26

Okay, I might need some of that repeated.

SPEAKER_08 48:27

Um I ask very heavy questions.

SPEAKER_03 48:30

My first, my first thought on that, I think. Um I think being a person of color in general in the United States, there is uh, or at least in communities like the one that I grew up in, which is like an almost entirely white community, there is a lot of um othering. Like you're gonna experience a lot of othering, like you're not one of us, you're different from us. And then at the same time, there's a lot of like um you are the representation, you know, like you're the representation of blackness, you're the representation of Asian-ness, whatever. Because like you're the only one who they know, kind of thing. Um, and so there is, I do feel sometimes like writing a memoir as a person of color can feel like that as well, as though like someone is going to read my book and then see it as a representation of blackness, which it is not. It is a representation of my blackness and my experience with being a black person in America, but also my experience of being a black person in America is very different because my parents are immigrants. And that was like part of what I needed to learn and figure out as I was growing up. And that's hugely in a way that like I didn't understand when I was a kid. In so many ways, I feel like that's connected to the ways that I did not fit in with the other black girls at my school. Um, because they none of the other black girls at my school were immigrants. And so there was like this whole culture. Part of it is like first we lived in a town where we were literally the only black people, then we lived in Milwaukee where there were, or outside of Milwaukee where there were lots of black people. Um there was this whole like black American culture that I only literally only knew about from television. And so then then it was like, well, you're not that and you're not this, so what are you? You know, like you don't make sense in either category. And I think that a lot of children of immigrants kind of experience that, that it's like, you're not, you're not enough of the culture that you come from, and you're not enough of um like that culture in America, and you're certainly not white. So you just sort of like don't fit in kind of anywhere. Um and that's very much what my upbringing was like. Um and some I do sometimes still get like, I don't know, like nervousness about people reading my book and being like, well, that's not that's not the black experience at all. And I'm like, well, it certainly isn't. I never would have claimed that it is. I'm just one person. I can't be your representation for anything other than your representation for Teresa O'Koken. Outside of that, like, I'm not even your representation for my big sister, you know? Like she has a different life than I have had. So yeah. Then ask the second part of the question.

SPEAKER_08 51:26

Um Yes, I have these very wordy questions. Um, how does this particular genre, especially being creative nonfiction, provide the platform for your mission and work as a storyteller and writer?

SPEAKER_03 51:39

Yeah, okay. So um after my book came out, um uh a girl who appears in the book, her name in the book is Bianca. Um, the real Bianca contacted me on we're Facebook friends. We don't really talk anymore, but we're connected on Facebook. And she reached out to me and she was like, I mean, it's it's an experience that I don't know what it's like to, I don't know what it's like to read a book that's like right next door to your life, you know? Like I know what it's like to read a book that is your life, I know what it's like to have your life be in a bookstore, but I don't know what it's like to have parts of your life be in a bookstore and you didn't choose for it to be there, you know? Like that's that's an experience that I can't relate to. And so she reached out to me and was talking to me about what it was like for her to read it. And part of it was luckily quite healing for her to read about our childhood friendship. Um, because she had had our friendship deteriorated, um, which is not in the book, but our friendship deteriorated as we sort of moved towards high school graduation. And she really worried that I held on to the deterioration and not to the good parts, like not to the foundation. Um, and she was like, it was so um reassuring. I think she said it was reassuring to know that I was for you who you were for me. Um, which was amazing, you know, like that's I've never experienced what that would be like. So that was that was really amazing. And the other thing she said is that she was like, you know, I can there's so much of your life that I don't relate to at all. Of course, this is like a Midwestern white girl, you know. Um she was like, there's so much that I don't relate to, but there also is so much that I really do relate to. And it's like things that when I talk to people about it, they tell me, like, that's not important. Stop talking about it. Um, because there's quite a few stories in this book. There's a whole essay that's like about my sexual first and the extent to which, as you know, a person who was socialized as a girl in the 90s, I was like taught it was like very no means no culture, not a whole lot of yes means yes. Um, and so consent was sexual consent in many ways was like done with silence. Yeah. Um, and getting boys to like you in many ways was done with silence. So it was like to get the boys to like me, I like I think the way I described in the book was like create proximity, um, but like aloofness at the same time. Um, and like there's there's a whole scene about like giving my first hand job, and it was this awful experience of just like wanting this boy to like me, you know, like wanting boys to like me, wanting them to see me, wanting them to see me as like a person who was like funny and interesting, but they also wanted to like go out with, you know, it didn't work out. Um, that's because I'm gay. Anyways, there's so much of there's a lot of that in in the book. And she was like, she's like, it was so relatable to like read about like what it was like with the boys at our school, to read that in a book. I've never read in a book what it felt like to be with boys like that at our school, those kinds of boys that we experienced. And um I really believe in what I call like tiny moment stories that, like, yes, probably like the most, you know, sort of like titanic kind of thing that ever happened in my life is the death of my father. And that is in in many ways the center of this book, but that's not the only thing that has ever happened to me. And I think that the story about me um moving my childhood bedroom from one room to another is just as important in understanding like who I have become. Um, and so I really believe that like telling those like tiny moment stories, those smaller moment stories are just as important. And I feel like this book is really filled with those kinds of stories.

SPEAKER_08 55:42

So I'm about to reread a section.

SPEAKER_00 55:44

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_08 55:45

This is my favorite section. Thank you. And it also pretty much encapsulates why I wanted you for voices of resistance. So this is from Blackity Black.

SPEAKER_04 55:58

You're about to hear your words. Here we go.

SPEAKER_08 56:00

And I'll hear it again from the bottom of page 251. So I cannot tell you or Reagan or anyone when or how I became so blacky black. And I don't owe it to you, to Reagan, or any or anyone other than myself. What I will say is that this is who I've always been. It just took me a while to communicate it. Took me a while to know it, took me a while to realize that I don't need to be a member of any club to prove it. I like to believe that this version of who I am is permanent, like a tattoo. And for the most part, I know it is because I know it's who I always was. But before but after more than four years of working on this essay collection, the one thing I've learned for certain is that with time, all stories blur. So one of the reasons why I believe this is so important for voices of resistance, and you are like, I am this craft nerd, I am black of immigrant of the immigrant black American of the immigrant experience, I am an Aries, which was a dreamly fire side, and all these things. And I am not the black experience, do not come at me because there is not like even when you see here, like you just look at us very different. Different lives, very different lives, very different, you know, very, you know, very, very different. We both grew up in the 90s. I listened to like Joe C and SWV and all of them.

SPEAKER_04 57:33

I tried. Yeah, you tried. You probably listened to Lisa Lobin's step. And you probably listened to like Lincoln Park and a lot of Milanas, also the brandberries from my life.

SPEAKER_08 57:48

Johannes Morrison puts on a really good concert. My husband and I have the sphere we want, yeah. And and even and even in like like connection to the African continent, I have like 90 something percent of the African continent, but so little of Ghana, but a lot of Nigeria. So which I'm when I which girl, when I found that out, I was like, I am so black, I got like five percent white ancestry, and it's all from like the bastard parts of Europe. It's Wales, Ireland, it's Scotland. I was like, oh my god, I'm super black.

SPEAKER_03 58:23

Yeah. My brother and I always joke that whenever black Americans like identify so much with Kenya, we're like, you're not fucking Kenyan, you're Nigerian.

SPEAKER_04 58:33

You are Nigerian, we all are. It's easy access, folks. Yes. Sorry about it.

SPEAKER_08 58:39

My DNA says I'm 33%. I bet you are.

SPEAKER_04 58:42

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 58:45

I love it.

SPEAKER_08 58:48

So this question, the reason why I wanted to read through that is because this leads really nicely into this question. Considering the mission and themes that emerge in your work, including blackness, African spirituality, and belonging. Belonging is huge. And belonging is something we all fight for. And I think in trying to fight the belong, we lose a sense of who we are. Yeah. Um, how does celebrating one's roots, as you do in who I always was, through writing perform as an act of resistance?

SPEAKER_03 59:21

Well, yeah, I mean, I think, especially in the time that we are living currently, I feel like a constant pressure, which I'm sure that many of you can relate to, to like be doing more and like standing up more, protesting more, and doing anything more. Um, and I'm like, well, I write, you know, like that's that's what I do. I write and I teach other people to write. And for me, that is my act of resistance, that like telling a story um unapologetically as a black woman is my act of resistance. Um, and in many ways, it is like everything I can give and the most that I can give as well. Um, um is that. Uh I think also part of part of what I wanted to demonstrate in this book and um like in the prologue in in particular, um is like this. It's one thing, it's so it's one thing to be a child of immigrants, but like more specifically, the the countries that my parents came from are not friends. Um, like Ghana and Nigeria tend to be very much at odds with with each other. Um I my last name, Okoken, is an extremely um Nigerian name, like a it's a name that other Nigerians will often recognize as Nigerian. And my face is exactly like my mother's face. So I look like a Ghanaian and I have a Nigerian name. And I have had Nigerians say to me, like, what is unexplained, um, kind of thing. Uh, because it's, you know, if Nigerians look like Nigerians, Ghanaians look like Ghanaians, and we don't we don't look the same. It's a it's a different face. And so um to even be telling the story of like um these like two separate countries um and two people from these two separate countries who just fell in love, you know, they they fell in love, and I grew up and like sort of came to know this like conflict between these two countries. It's a cultural conflict that like still exists to this day. Um, there's a lot of debate over like who has the better Jolof Rice. And like I I was just when I learned about that as an aloe, I was like, I had no, I had no idea because the only Nigerian and the only Ghanaian that I knew were deeply in love with each other. So I didn't know that there was this, um, that there was this conflict. And so the reason that I mentioned that is because I think that all of that is like like part of my acts of resistance is like there actually isn't just like an eternal conflict, there's act, there is also deep love here. Um, that these stories are like not always the ones that you're going to anticipate. There's also other parts to the narrative here as well. And my family just happens to be a sort of like interesting and specific example um of things that like kind of go against the narrative that one might expect.

SPEAKER_08 1:02:22

So before I pose my last question, I want to open it up to the floor. Does anyone have questions? We have time for maybe like two or three. Yes, sir.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:30

Thank you. Um we live in a time of evolving through media actors and writing and of course interactive communication and writer you want. How do you navigate the the Facebook to the TikToks and the performances and the physical print and the electronic and all that stuff in order to Yeah, that's a great question.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:26

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of pressure, and like the advice that you'll always get as a writer is like, you have to be on social media, you have to be on, you have to have a TikTok, you have to be doing these things. Um and I don't probably come as a shocker, but like I don't care. Um I I have an Instagram because I like Instagram. Um, I'm not sort of like constantly posting about my book. Like when I have an event, I post about it. Um I, you know, I have a Facebook, I'll post there as well. I don't have it, I only have TikTok because sometimes when TikTok is mentioned in like a news article or something and you click on it, if you didn't have the app, it won't open. So I had to get the app so that I can look directly at TikTok um to see things. But usually I'm old and so when I look at TikToks, I'm looking at Instagram Reels. Um but yeah, I just don't. I personally made the decision that I was not gonna fully engage in that way. Like I'm just I also made the decision that like I love doing um talks like this. I love doing events, I love talking with people who have read or might be interested in reading the book. Um, but I made the decision that my job was to write the book, my job is to talk about the book, my job is not to sell the book. Um, so that's why there's no books for sale here today. Um I suppose that ultimately impacts like the bottom line. Um, but I'm like, I don't know, that's just not that's not my problem. Is it um sure? Like I was given an advance, which I'm like contractually not allowed to tell you how much it was. It was not allowed for me to not have a lot of other jobs, we'll say that. Um but and like in theory, like my book sales are supposed to pay back that advance, but I'm like, if you want me to pay back the advance, then you should be doing things that make it so that I am put in places that will pay it back. And if you're not gonna do all those things, which they don't, if you're not gonna I'm not a marketer. I wrote a book.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:28

Yes. Yeah. I mean, your your agent presumably gets paid based on revenues of sales. Yep. So do they try to drive you towards that that additional presence on social media?

SPEAKER_03 1:05:42

That's a great. So so I my agent is Brittany Bloom. She's wonderful. Um, she's like a pretty big name agent. Um, she's the same person who agented Crying and Hmart. So she's a pretty big deal. Yeah. Um, I was uh published by Atria Books at Simon and Schuster also. A pretty big deal. My editor at Atria is the executive editor at Atria. Um, however, I am like just me, like I'm just a girly, you know, just a girl from Wisconsin. Um, there were times that I would like email my agent, or my agent always gets back to me quickly. I would email my editor and not hear back from her for a while. And then I would like see on, I remember distinctly, I saw, I was like emailing her, she wasn't responding. And then on Instagram, Atria Books publis or posted something about Charlemagne the God's um book coming out. And I was like, oh, that's why she's busy. She's dealing with Charlemagne the God. He's obviously more important than my book. Um so I'm a very small fish in a very big pond. Um my uh like my publishing house, my editor, publicist, um, marketer, and my agent in the like lead up to the launch of the book did a lot to like get me out in front as much as possible. Like my book debuted in airports, which is unheard of. It's unheard of and was crazy. Um I was on um the New Yorker magazine uh celebrated their 50th anniversary this year, and Atria Books bought a page, uh a full page ad and they included the cover of my book on on that ad. So they were doing things to get me in front. But the way that like, you know, big big house publishing works is it's a very quick cycle, you know. Like you, as like a not famous person writer, I was like in front of them and had their attention for like four weeks. And once, you know, two weeks prior, two weeks after, once that was over, I was on my own. You know, I was I um had a super successful book launch, and that was in large part because I have done the work to be part of a literary community in New England that was ready to show up and be supportive when my book came out. Um, but that wasn't because of who my agent was. It wasn't because of who my editor was. That's because I like care about my community, you know? Um, so they really didn't pressure me to be more on social media um and those kinds of things. And if they had, I would have been like, you're gonna then like you're gonna need to support me to do that. I don't have to be like, I have a mortgage, you know, like and TikTok doesn't pay me. So like if you want me to do it, you're gonna need to find a way that it pays my bills because I have to, I still like have a job, you know, that is not just writing the book or even teaching writing. I have a day job as well.

SPEAKER_08 1:08:39

Yeah, yeah, thank you. And thank you for that. And I just wanted to insert too, and also I talk with authors offline a lot, and I'll get to your question, and like the hustle that they do. So much for the bit. So there's the writing the book and there's the business of the book. And it's insane. And I'm like, but they're not paying you right to do the hustle for the so thank you for sharing why you didn't bring your book. I was like, thank God.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:09

I'm not doing it. It's not me. No, thank you. Please buy it at the local bookstore. Yes, your library carrier.

SPEAKER_08 1:09:18

Yes, thank you. And thank you for sharing that. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:22

This is more of a personal question after having read your book. Um I wrote it, I know it's in it. Right. But it's just something I like, I was so curious about it. Your mom, dad's family doesn't talk to you and never really did. Correct. Has that changed at all? And then my second part is will you ever go to Nigeria or Ghana to like try to connect with your family or just to see these countries where your relatives' ancestors are.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:48

Yeah, yeah. Great question. So my mom is from Ghana. I've been to Ghana three times. I was just there um last fall because my uncle Atu, who's pretty prominent in the book, actually passed away. Um in the like summer of last year. Oh, so my book was actually originally dedicated only to my dog. Um, but right before print, um, right before print, my uncle Atu passed away. And so now it's also dedicated to him. Um so yeah, so I've been to Ghana and will continue to visit Ghana. Ghana very much feels like home um for me, even though I've never lived there. Um, I have never been to Nigeria, and I don't think that I ever will. Um, my dad's family still does not talk to us. Um, it was part of the process. Um, I don't mean to scare any memoirs here, but like when you publish a memoir, there is a part of the process that's just called legal, where like a literary attorney reads the whole book and is basically looking for potential lawsuits. Um, and during the legal process, because um my book contains sort of, I don't know if I would call it accusations, it's in many ways generally involved, generally believed that my father's family was involved in his death. Um, and so uh the in the legal process, it was asked, um, is his brother still alive? Does he have an estate? Will the estate come after you? There were a lot of questions um around that. Um and we ended in a place that that felt fine and and uh the book is is as it is now. Um but no, I certainly have we have not heard anything from my father's family. I would be shocked if if any of them read it, except for my cousiny man. Um, my cousiny man, if you read the book, um, is the only person in my father's family besides my father's mother who really ever spoke to us. Um and he was instrumental in me writing this book and super supportive and read the final drafts um and was like, yes, that's that's the truth, and that's the story.

SPEAKER_08 1:11:55

Shall I have time for two more questions? Yes, Darlene.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:58

So I'm sitting here really enjoying the fact that your book is uh consist about because I've taken a lot of memoir workshops, and um one of the things that they encourage is writing about a slice of life, right? Um kind of like reading, kind of like a novel. Yeah, and I'm noticing that a lot of the stuff that's coming out right now, like Ocean Wrong, um Roske, um, they're basing it on essays and and vignettes. And that's my style of writing. And so I'm kind of like really excited to hear this. Love that. Um but at the same time as a woman of color, right? I find that there's this level of pressure, right, to be Trump focused sometimes, this emotional thing, um, you know, pulling up people's heart strings. And you know, I right, which I do very well because I have that kind of life. You live the story, yeah. So how did you work to balance that?

SPEAKER_03 1:13:02

I mean, you know, that's a great question, and sometimes I'm not sure that I did that very successfully. You know, there's I thank you. There is I I am a person who has experienced a good amount of trauma, and I think like just being a person of color in in this country, that's going to happen. Um, and that is in my book. Um, but I also really believe that you don't owe anyone your blood. Like, I don't need to bleed on the page for you. Um, I don't owe that to you as a writer, and I think that there is a pressure um from writers of color or to writers of color to bleed for you, bleed on the page for me, you know. And and you just you just don't owe that to anyone, you know. Like I wrote the story that I wanted to write, and that story included discussions of my trauma and my understanding of it and my coming to terms with it and my making story of it, um, because that's the book that I wanted to write. Um, but there's there's very little that I held back on in the book, but I that also is like, I'm just a person who doesn't hold back very much. Like that is that's kind of just who I am. But when I'm teaching and I have students who are like, that just isn't, I don't want to have to do that. Um, the one uh book that always comes to mind for me is Roxanne Gay's um Hunger, where she quite explicitly says, I'm just not gonna tell you the story of my rape. Like, what I'm gonna tell you is that it happened, and you don't need more detail than me telling you that it happened. I don't owe you more detail. And if you don't believe me because you don't have the detail, perhaps close the book at this point. Like you just don't owe it to anyone. Um my book is in essays because that's the only way that made sense to me to write it. I because I came into writing by way of storytelling, and you know, also I think culturally storytelling is just sort of like the way I was raised and you know, the the kind of family that I grew up in, it made sense to me that it would be in like snippet stories and not in like a you know, a start to finish whole long thing. Even now, when I think about could I rewrite this as like a straight through memoir, I can't imagine doing that. Um, the cover of the book, however, says a memoir, and that was again a marketing decision. The original cover, the cover on the arcs, the advanced reader copies, is memoir and essays. Um, but marketing felt that essays wouldn't sell as well. Um and the consequence of that is that then readers read it and they review it and they're like, they're like, oh, this is weird because it's in essays. And I'm like, that's fucking what it is. That was on purpose. I think the table of contents even says essays. Like I was trying to not hide from you that it is a memoir in essays.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:53

Consider it a poetic memoir, kind of like what Ocean Bahn did. The reason why I'm asking is I actually had somebody discourage me from writing a memoir. Please don't listen to them. And the reason why they said that is because they felt like the market was saturated. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:08

What? It's a lie. It's a lie. So a thing, a thing that writers get told that that essayists get told all the time is that there's nobody wants to buy essays, nobody reads essays, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um I think that if an agent tells you um your book of essays is not going to sell, for me, what they're saying is I agent do not know how to sell your book of essays. Yep. That's not that your book of essays is not going to sell. There are plenty of essay collections that continue to come out every single year and they continue to do well. And also, like, I don't know why we we talk all the time about like the TikTokification of the way that our um our attention spans work. Sorry, there's a fly. That our attention spans work in that way all the time in all other kinds of media, except in essay writing. Like everybody likes short form except when it's essays. No, that's a lie. It just it's just that that person has a had a hard time selling essays. Maybe that person is a writer who tried to get their book of essays signed and they weren't successful, but that doesn't mean that it's not gonna sign, and it doesn't mean it's not gonna sell.

SPEAKER_08 1:17:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:19

That's a lie.

SPEAKER_08 1:17:20

Yeah, then one more question. Yes.

SPEAKER_07 1:17:23

Um I'm a writer and uh student in our literature lifestyle. And the things you're talking about is so much like some of the best short swear writers, Tony Kid and Baron. She says, right in the front of her book, she says, you know, it's not good to write essays or non-fiction. Because all of a sudden here comes your mama, and here comes your uncle and moral the action, so I just write straight up fiction. There was a very angry writer named James Allen first wrote Elbow. And people got on him, they said, You black man, how come you this story is why I like country music? It's because I like country music. And there's particulars in his book, there's slices of life and lessons. And so many best short story wise, it's all about the incident. Yeah, like the front, it's about her brother, he's challenged, you know, running. Yeah, and then she has one called The Apprentice, that organizer with a young kid.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:32

Yeah, the small moments, yeah.

SPEAKER_07 1:18:34

Yeah, and um and there's so many incredible short story collections like that. Yeah. So what these and the other thing is nowadays, everything is hype, but that's the word hype. So Claudia Rankin. Yeah, beautiful book. My all-time friends are saying, Ernie, what the hell is this? Yeah, it's a book of paragraphs. Look, paragraphs or prose. This isn't poetry. Get out of here. So it's all becoming, you know, mixing together.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:04

Well, because ultimately genre is a thing that we made up, you know, like writing is writing, and then we made up genres for it so that we could categorize marketing, mark where the book was gonna go in the bookstore, you know? The the difference between um poetry and prose is like paragraph structure. I mean, sometimes, you know, it's it can be a very thin line, a very slight line between those genres. And and we make up the genres because we need to categorize things. And also that's just like it's marketing and it's also just like the way that our brains work, you know? Um, but I deeply believe in in the essay format, and it really bothers me. I mean, I was told as as I was writing this book, you're never gonna get signed. It's never gonna work, it's never gonna work. And I just didn't listen. I was just like, okay, it didn't work for you. We'll see if it works for me. This is the book I'm writing. So we'll do it till it works, you know? Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:20:04

I need your energy so badly because I'm writing some of my memoirs on like how my identity became about people pleasing and how do I find myself. And my book, I love Lisa so much. Lisa is just like, I'm a knee dude already. So it's like my last session with her. She was like, Well, I'm afraid of writing this and blah, blah, blah, because it won't sell, and because I do a lot of like hybrid like genres and she's like, why? She literally said to me, She's like, Nicole, why have you unsold a book that you haven't even written yet? Yeah. And and like I'm always again, people pleasing. It's like, I and I didn't realize how much like I've been working really hard to get people to like me.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:54

Realizing when you're the only one telling yourself no.

SPEAKER_08 1:20:57

Yeah, and I've told myself no a lot. And I'm like, you told yourself yes a lot. And I'm like, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:03

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just a healthy dose of delusion, is really what got my books told. Thank you. Yeah, thank you all.

SPEAKER_08 1:21:17

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Black Riders Read. Black Riders Read is available on all platforms. Please be sure to subscribe to Black Riders Read wherever you listen to your podcast to receive each new episode once they are released. And after you've listened to this episode of subscribe to the podcast, I would appreciate so very much if you could also leave a review as your feedback helps me to curate the series and it helps others to find us. I hope that you are so moved and encouraged to take your support of Black Riders Read one step further and join us on Patreon. Thank you for championing this work and helping to sustain this award-winning, independently produced virtual platform. To learn more, please visit BlackWritersRead.com. Thanks again for your support and for ensuring that Black Writers continue to matter.