Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl - Age 11 12 was to be a big year. Soon there would be no more recess; real bras; and the boys would grow up into the kind from our teen novels who danced with the girls and wrote loving notes folded four square; the teachers would [...]
Tag: the writerly life
Harriet Tubman ain’t take no stuff
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl - Age 10 My birthday falls on the first day of Black History Month. So it was shortly after I turned 10 that I performed in what became one of my best secular public plays ever (if I do say so myself). I was Harriet Tubman and [...]
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Mommy, What Does Nigger Mean?
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl - Age 8 I borrow my title from Gloria Naylor's essay of the same name. In it she examines the first time she remembers hearing the word--really hearing it--in the third grade. The experience she describes, in some ways, parallels my own. Certainly, I grew up hearing [...]
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I Can Write My Name and Some Other Words Too
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl - Age 7 By age 7, my twin and I were members of the Look-It-Up Club. We had a collection of encyclopoedias called The Book of Knowledge and would pour through them during "Quiet Time." "Quiet time" was time Mommy set aside mostly during summer breaks. It [...]
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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl
I read somewhere that as an adult you become whomever you were at age 7. Part of me thinks: scary thought. The 7 year old I was—always trying to write the longest story in Mrs. Fountain’s class—with the neatest handwriting (we received a grade for penmanship) is not wholly unlike the woman I have become. [...]
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Blog Challenge Day 30: Who are you?
Day 30: Who are you? In case the blog challenge hasn't answered it for you by now... I am an honest, creative, stubborn, inquisitive being with an uncanny love of sweets, especially tropical Mike and Ikes and ice cream--uncanny because of my tendencies towards being a bit of a health nut: I'm a Kashi stan. [...]
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Blog Challenge Day 21: Shawty of the Year goes to February
Day 21: List the goals you want to complete by the end of this month. 1. Finish the books I'm supposed to be reading. 2. Finish this blog challenge. 3. Save some money. 4. Submit some work for publication. 5. Create something.
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I do it because…
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Amherst, VA May 2006 I can’t stop. Because my outside voice is quieter than my inside voice. Because my sisters found my journal, read it, and laughed. Because it never makes sense and I prefer order to chaos. I'm stubborn. Because I can shape chaos into order if I [...]
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My bad…
So I was watching Jeopardy the other night. The contestant offers a response to the question on the board. Alex Trebeck is, like, "Yes, select." Gasps and disorder come from the peanut gallery. Another contestant buzzes in to answer. The other contestant pronounces the response correctly. Alex directs his eyes to Other Contestant, "Yes, the [...]
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Let That Be the Story
" Don't forget who you are...and where you stand in the struggle." So Much Things to Say -- Robert Nesta Marley Long time; no talk, yeah? Still on my overly punctuating game you’ll notice from the three pieces of it in that short not-really-a-sentence. Pardon my geekiness: that ain’t changed. My address has—whew-ew! Fat stats [...]
darlene anita scott 