How Dare We! Write (eBook)

Preface

What Would Edén Say? Reclaiming the Personal and Grounding Story in Chicana Feminist (Academic) Writing, Kandace Creel Falcón

As a Chicana academic navigating scholarly publication, Kandace Creel Falcón demands to push against the forces of the academy that seek to challenge or minimize Chicana, queer, and women of color feminist work. This essay details how Chicana feminists became her literary history, inspire her to add to their rich archive of work, and pave future pathways for new Latinx writers. As a Chicana feminist, writing for Falcón is: vulnerable, a call to action, and a community investment no matter where it happens.

Imposter Poet: Recovering from Graduate School, Jessica Lopez Lyman

This essay highlights the structural challenges which impeded the writing process. Internalized oppression heavily restricts Writers of Color from finding their voice. This essay addresses how the writer adapted and shifted to form a new relationship with the page.

A Case for Writing While Black, Sherrie Fernandez-Williams

There is an agony in being a black writer with slave ancestry and a long history of poverty and disenfranchisement on all sides of her family. There is a desire to give voice to those who were silenced, but Fernandez-Williams acknowledges how cut off she is from their stories and lives. Still, their hurt exists in her body and even if she wanted to shake them she cannot. It is her obligation to continue to search for them, make the connection, and search for the right words no matter how difficult it gets. For Fernandez-Williams, writing has nothing to do with gatekeepers. It has everything to do with telling the truth and resurrecting the dead.

mamatowisin: Writing as Spiritual Praxis, Nia Allery

The hidden curriculum in academe largely ignores the whole person. The author points out the dilemma for indigenous ways of being in institutions that limit learning and teaching to analyses and cognitive understandings. She didn’t think she would survive or thrive within these strictures until she began teaching American Indian Spirituality and Philosophical Thought as a world religion. She found that creative writing allowed and encouraged students to describe their inward journey and spiritual praxis, known in the Cree language as mamatowisin. With this mindset teacher and students explored openly and vulnerably the expanse of mind, body, and spirit, united.

Complete This Sentence: Say it Loud!_______!, Brenda Bell Brown

Writer Brenda Bell Brown seized this opportunity to take you by the hand and walk you through the reason why she is so adamant about writing in a manner that is firmly rooted in her Black American cultural tradition. With a great big thankful nod to her teachers—both common and academic; all familial—Brenda writes from a standard of practice that does not apologize for being “too Black!,” it celebrates it!

Crazy, Chris Stark

Chris Stark’s memoir essay addresses how viewing as “crazy” the ideas, experiences, and foundations of writing outside of the whitemalenorm limits, silences, and marginalizes many writers of color. Stark discusses how her first novel, Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation, breaks down sentence structure, punctuation, language, and style to authentically convey the intersectionality of the protagonist’s multiple marginalized identities.

Saying My Name with Happiness, Ching-In Chen

This is a personal essay about familial influences on writing. The essay also discusses exclusion due to racism and the power of naming and shaping your own story.

Dancing Between Bamboos or The Rules of Wrong Grammar, Marlina Gonzalez

Written from the perspective of a writer who is multilingual by historical default, this personal essay looks at how colonized cultures like that of the Philippines learn to concoct a cultural halu-halo (literal translation: “mix-mix”), making up words out of three (or four or five) lingual ingredients to create a vocabulary that reflects the “bifurcated tongue” and the diverging social, cultural and political impact of colonialism on writing and thought.

Intersectional Bribes and the Cost of Poetry, Sagirah Shahid

In this essay Sagirah Shahid explores her own journey as an African American Muslim woman and unpacks how her identities have sharpened the criticalness of her poetic eye.

It Happened in Fragments, Isela Xitlali Gómez R.

This piece is about how the author came to understand her writing process—in scattered particles that began to come together as she stopped forcing them. She often writes in fragmented form because that’s how her memory works: unfluid, fleeting, at times not her own.

Creating Native American Mirrors: and Making a Living as a Writer, Marcie Rendon

Part how-to, part story, Rendon’s essay is about how she strives to create and write the stories her people can relate to. This can serve as a guide to other writers seeking publication, audience, or ways to tell their own realities. According to Rendon, “we need to strive not just to find our own voice but the voice in us that will resonate with others like us.” She writes to burst through invisibility as a Native Woman, and believes the acquired practicalness of the job of writing is how others will have access to our work.

Notes in Journey from a Writer of the Mix, Anya Achtenberg

Briefly exploring the identity issues of people of color who fall outside recognizable categories of race, and are here referred to as people of the mix, Achtenberg discusses the implications of this identity on creative writing. Interrogating creative writing truisms through this lens of identity, she focuses centrally on the instruction to “write from a sense of place.”

The Thenar Space: Writing Beyond Emotion and Experience into Story, Taiyon J Coleman

A first person essay and writing exercise that considers the creative juxtaposition of past memory, present knowledge, and details from experience that work to reveal narratives that have both text and subtext. It is writing that reveals story and epiphanies for both the writer and the reader.

How Maya Angelou Empowered Me to Write, Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay

Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay is constantly fighting for her place within the literary ecosystem to write and most importantly, for stories from her kind to be uplifted. Sometimes the fight takes place inside of her head as excuses. Before she learned how to mute doubting voices, she had to defeat the idea that her story didn’t matter.

Legendary Documents, Tou SaiKo Lee

Tou SaiKo Lee explores what if? What if he had access to today’s social media in the 90s? Would a “basketball hoop” become a different story? His coming of age experiences influenced who he is today, a storyteller, a poet, and a hip-hop artist giving back to the Hmong community, providing resources and motivation to youth.

Stories that Must Be Told, Luis Lopez

Being brown in an all-white writing workshop. Knowing what limitations can be expected of other students as well as from the workshop lead. The importance that sincerity plays in these moments and how to account for it when no one has a similar lived experience.

Telling Stories That Should Not Be Passed On, Wesley Brown

Wesley Brown’s father was the repository of his family history. And the unsettling stories he told him as a child shaped his view of the world that is often a dangerous and unpredictable place. This essay examines how, as a writer, Brown came to see that the most valuable stories are those which we would prefer not to hear.

Fear of an Apocalypse: Racial Marginalization on the Art of Writing, Hei Kyong Kim

This is a lyrical essay about what writing has meant to Hei Kyong Kim and why she writes, how her marginalized identity has been a barrier to her writing, and how the act of writing has been a form of social justice for her. Kim shares her ups and downs on being a writer of color in a challenging society and how she has worked to overcome them.

Picking a Goot’ Indin (A play selection from No Res Rezpect), William S. Yellow Robe

Through an imaginary but believable situation, playwright William S. Yellow Robe renders a scene where a committee chooses which play will represent American Indians because of, or in order to get, grant money. Does it matter if the playwright is Indin?

Perfectly Untraditional, Sweta Srivastava Vikram

This is an essay about a writer’s experience—someone who grew up noticing gender inequality, stereotypes, and patriarchy in different continents—and her resolve to tell the stories truest to her.

Our Silence Won’t Save Us: Recovering the Medicine in Our Stories, Anaïs Deal-Márquez

The writer considers how women’s stories of migration and survival in her family have defined the places she creates from. This piece looks at how mujeres have found strength in each other, their recipes, their laughter, and explores what it means to tell our stories without apology in a world that wants to silence us.

Writing: Healing from the Things I Cannot Change, Lori Young-Williams

Born to a mixed-race, black/white family, Lori grew up in the white suburb of St. Paul, MN. The death of...