A brief history
After having being born and raised in the San Francisco East Bay, I’m still here. For how long, I can’t say. The forces of gentrification and the new normal of toxic smoke from wildfires graying the skies make it less than appealing. But for now, I’m here.
I wrote a novel that I am going to rewrite with an editor. I self published a collection of poetry. And before that, I was an artist. Between caring for a dying parent and countless jobs throughout the years.
I lost my housing for 2021. All I can say is it gets old. On the other hand, all of the people alive that are related to me didn’t let me in their front door. And with that I learned who I am so perhaps the part of the universe that my soul is in contact with knows that I needed a year of remembering who I am because I understand how things, everything comes to me even as I have no clue about it.
The thing about literary work is that one can look at what one has written and say, “Yeah. It’s good.” But until somebody else looks at it and says, “wow, your writing took me places,” how can anyone know that they are not just filling up blank pages?
Writing influences
I didn’t know I was a writer for decades. Something began shifting when Alice Walker became known with her novel, “The Color Purple.” My friend Sharon asked me if I had read Alice Walker, and I replied, “Alice who?” I went from that response to watching her take over the landscape with what she had done by telling the truth of our existence in this country, the truth as it had never been told. I still wouldn’t realize that I was also a writer for some time.
I am not going to lie and say that Ms. Walker’s literary work is the most breathtaking that I have ever read because her first book was a narrative told in the words of a near illiterate. Yet, after I read her work, I was never the same. What I will say is that she became my favorite human being for more than several years as her narrative changed how I saw myself in the world at a time when I still didn’t fully realize that I could be a writer. That is what the public school system had done to me. Walker’s work primed the pump of my belief system.
Changing self-image
One day, I looked at a woman’s face as she read my writing. I was still young. As I looked, I thought, ‘oh my God. I’m a writer.’ Yet, knowing this, I stayed in soul crushing job after job after job, trying to survive on ‘you don’t fit in here’ after ‘you don’t fit in here’ after we’ll see about your pay grade…’ Eventually, I walked out of my soul crushing struggle to embrace normalcy, whatever that is.
I’m not an extrovert. I’m not shy in a crowd, but I can get quiet. My upbringing taught me modesty in a culture that prizes self-aggrandizement.
The start of writing
I didn’t just jump face-first into writing. I needed to discard layers of my upbringing. I spent some time creating a body of art. No one taught me to go out there and slay it. As, I knew I could write, I paused mid-air and spent time with my art because it was something I knew I could do. I took my liberation in bits and pieces. I don’t recalled how the next phase happened. I wrote one poem, and then I wrote enough poems to publish a volume. That was difficult but relatively easy for me compared to the writing that came next. A novel.