I’m editing a book? I’m editing a book.

In many ways, I watched this book grow up. And now that it’s out, it should be on your shelves. Find it here and read it as soon as you can. It matters that much.

This the sixth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

As I’ve noted in my post last Wednesday, there were a couple of major projects I’d not planned on doing that appeared out of the sabbatical ether, one of which is very special to me. 

So often in my role as a professor of writing, I am in the position of helping younger writers launch big projects they will most likely complete well after they’ve finished school, if they ever find an end to those projects at all. Well after they are no longer my student or someone I see regularly.

These ideas are usually rough, vastly more expansive than any one story or even book can effectively express, and often not even actually the project the writer wants to tackle in the end.

Shorter: I’m often helping with the heaviest lifting in the writing process, the winnowing.

Sometimes, however, writers come to me with a concept that is ready to press forward immediately; a project with a sense of itself; a message in need of an audience as much as an editor or creative consultant. 

Such was the case with Kathryn’s work. When she was a senior in our undergraduate program and a member of my advanced creative writing class, she stopped by my podium on the way out one evening and asked if I would read an essay of hers that had recently been published. I knew her as an avid reader and, primarily, as an author of science fiction, so I was curious to see what she cared about in nonfiction.

Note: please visit her author site, Speak the Write Language, and find her publication list. She’s prolific, gifted in all phases of writing, and a voice you should hear from.

So, of course I said yes, read it a couple days later, and immediately told her it was fantastic. Because it was, and is, as you will see in the version that made it into her book. I also told Kathryn that it felt like she had more to say in essay form.

And then the term ended and Kathryn graduated and for a while we touched base at church from time to time, not really finding space to talk about her essays in any substantive form. A couple years later, she ended up back in my classroom—this time in the M.A. program—and she told me that she had, indeed, more to say. Had done a lot of growing. Needed to respond to the first essay she’d shown me because she didn’t see the world in quite the way she did back then.

She asked if I would chair her capstone committee and work with her on creating a collection of essays on growing increasingly aware of what it is to be black and a woman in an America that is not and may never be capable of becoming post-racial. 

Six months of work and what at the time seemed like four-ish essays later, the infant version of what would become Black Was Not a Label  came into being. It was, even in its still-developing form at the time, stunning. An associate dean who reads all the graduate projects before they are approved pulled me aside at an end of the year event and said, “These are stories that people need to read.”

I agreed and encouraged Kat think about expanding the collection by a few more essays and then look for a publisher. It was that good. Then she graduated. Continued working as a freelance writer. Took an internship at a local publisher to consider a job in the industry. Submitted a couple places.

You know, generally lived the life of an emerging writer with all its potentials and frustrations. 

Then came the ebullient message. A new publisher had read her manuscript. Had offered a contract. Had allowed her input on who should get to help prep the book for publication. And Kathryn thought of me.

I said yes, slid a couple projects to the side (one likely permanently) and jumped in. The work was in the small matters. The turns of phrase. The transitions from idea to idea. The order of the pieces toward a more cohesive pathway that leads to a singular read of the many (now almost eleven) parts. 

Part editor, part encourager, I spent the summer working the book through with her, reminding her over and over that these were, indeed, stories y’all need to hear. Stories she needed to tell.

Kathryn and I at her book launch, an event I was honored to help facilitate.

In August, when my part of the work was done, I took one last pass over the document, reading it as part of the audience for the first time. Then I wrote my editor’s note that is now included the book. It seems a fitting way to close this post. 

This is book of echoes, at once a path through a pain-shrouded past and a map toward a future where healing is possible. But first, as Kathryn tells both versions of herself in “Erasure,” we must look at what we have been too afraid to examine. We must slow down and consider the wounds, opened and reopened for centuries, that create the world where these words were framed and formed. We must listen with no other intent but to grieve and allow that sadness to reshape us.

There was a moment in the editing process when, like stopping on a long hike to look back on the expanse of trail one has covered, I paused to reflect on the scope of the work being done in these pages. Rather, I was brought up short by these lines:

“…but this is not helplessness. It is weight. I sit constant beneath the knowledge that there is little to be done—that to try would be to strain against centuries upon centuries of strivings turned to death turned to mourning turned to moaning ghosts hurling their laments from the broken boughs of ancient trees.”

Black Was Not a Label is a reckoning of the most intimate nature, one that demands—gently but persistently—to be read more than once. The first passage through these lines is personal, a shared space between you and the author’s experiences. But the return trip is where you will begin to hear the call and response of these separate passages now collected as one volume. Pay attention to the way these words move like spirits to connect the weight and strain of our past to move through soul-deep hurt toward a hope that remains even still.   

Books — Heavy

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Heavy

Kiese Laymon, Scribner (2018)

Find this book here. Check out Laymon’s website here.

I spend my time—writing, reading, and teaching—moving between the ways we consider some stories true and some invention, most often left in the uncomfortable in-between where neither of those descriptors fit because they both apply.

This is likely why Kiese Laymon’s Heavy was such a powerful read when I encountered it. Laymon lays bare his life in a stunning fashion, wrestling with the truths and fictions of growing up Black and male and large in America. Constructed, in some ways, as a letter to his mother, the author frames the entire work in the midst of that contested space, as can be seen in the last lines of the introductory chapter. 

“I wanted to write a lie.

You wanted to read that lie.

I wrote this to you instead” (10).

The constant metaphor of the book is weight: physical, spiritual, emotional, and cultural. Sometimes those burdens were visible and others so embedded in his experiences it took years to identify all the ways he’d been carrying them. In some instances they led to stark truth, while in others they birthed inventions required to survive, even as those inventions ate away at him.

Truly, this is a stunning work that lays bare the effort required to endure the shadowy spaces where we either make our stories concrete truth in order to preserve a fundamentalist’s certainty of our self-perception or shade our truths with self-preserving fictions because the rawest parts of ourselves are most difficult to look at.

Resisting both of those impulses, though, is exactly central to Laymon’s efforts in writing Heavy and the dominant preoccupation I carried throughout my reading of his work.

“For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require a vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory” (86). 

This is the benefit of a work like Heavy. It holds us in a posture of attention, both to the weight Laymon carries and our own burdens. But, if we’re attentive and willing, it also forces us to consider the ways we may have weighed on others, intentionally or not. And that is work we all must do.