Generating New Work from Research

Hello and Welcome to Sitting in Silence, the newsletter about writing, craft, worry, and joy.

I am writing today from a mountaintop in Tennessee. I’m at the Sewanee Writers Conference among fascinating and talented faculty and students. I was here last year, enjoyed myself, and I’m pleased to be back. One of the things I love most about writing conferences is that I get to be among my writing people. Literature is an industry. Being around my fellow industry mates means I can relax and communicate in a kind of shorthand. We’re all trying to do the same thing in our own ways. But no one gets anything done without a foundation to work from.

But first, I alluded to some happy personal news in the previous edition, but I wasn’t free to say anything until now. Here is the news: One, I’m going to Africa! The Black Rock Senegal program was founded by Obama portraitist, Kehinde Wiley. Artists and writers gather in Dakar to research and produce work. I’m honored to have been selected and will be traveling there soon. Two, the Library of Congress Center for the Book, Louisiana affiliate has awarded me the Louisiana Writer’s Award in October. This was such an unexpected gift. I know some of the prior recipients, several of whom I consider mentors and legends. To stand next to them…I feel like Spider-Man being brought into the Avengers. I’m so grateful to both organizations for the recognition and hope to live up to their standards.

As always, thank you to the premium subscribers who make this newsletter possible, especially those who just signed up. I really appreciate your support. This would be impossible to do without your help.

Today, let’s talk about: Generating New Work from Research.

When I was a kid, my face was always in a book. It was Mama who would drop me at my favorite comic bookstore, the Book Worm, to browse while she shopped for hair products at the beauty supply next door. I was the kind of young person who volunteered at the local library and loved it. One day in the mid-80s, a traveling salesman (yes, that was still a thing then) showed up at my house hawking the World Book Encyclopedia. My folks bought the premium maroon-colored set (with bonus volumes!) on the spot. Most nights thereafter, I’d lay on my belly near the big console TV and flip through the gold-leaf pages, absorbing information about the wide world and the long span of time. I had a special love for Volume K, which, as I recall, was the shortest of the books. I could go back to it and digest the thing in an evening after dinner (probably Chinese food Dad picked up from Jade East two exits down).

Which is to say, I’ve always loved research. But research isn’t what we always think it is. And it doesn’t work quite the way most of us think it works.

One way of doing research is going to an archive and dig into old books, newspapers, and microfiche (if you don’t know what this is, congratulations, you’re quite young!) But your everyday experiences are also research. Research is like the light of day. We don’t notice how light turns tree leaves gold until we pay attention.

This also means you may not realize what life is showing you until much later.

When I was in high school, an older gentleman pulled me aside after his presentation on the Civil Rights Movement in New Orleans to tell me about the radical actions he and his friends instigated back in the 1950s and 60s. Now, I was born in the 1970s. So the Middle 20th Century might as well have been the Middle Ages.

One day in 2004, I was trying to write my first novel. I journeyed to the heart of the French Quarter and gained entry to an archive called the Williams Research Center. To this day, it’s the researchiest looking place you’ll ever see. Full of broad, dark wooden tables. Infinite rows of leather-bound tomes. And for some reason, a velvet rope blocking access to a winding staircase that might as well have led right to heaven for as much as I knew. I came across plenty of interesting material, including a random article on Rush Limbaugh’s father, a Florida attorney.

There are things my grandmother and grandfather mentioned about their lives that I can’t recall. I only remember they made me feel loved and connected. And for decades, Mama would say things that kind of bonked off my three-inch thick skull and went flying off into the ionosphere. But one day while on a road trip with her and Dad, not long before he passed, I sat in the passenger seat taking notes of what she said. Everyone can get wise eventually, if we try.

I just wrapped edits on my third book (and first historical fiction!), The American Daughters, about an enslaved girl who discovers a group of Black lady spies intent on sabotaging and destroying the Confederacy. That book comes out of the true history I was blind to for so long.

That old guy who was talking to me back around 1993(?) That was Jerome “Big Duck” Smith. He was one of the young radicals of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who risked his life on a bus ride to Mississippi and was thrown into a jail in Jackson with three of his friends. His friends included Julia Aaron and Jean Thompson, who would help change America.

After I read that innocuous passage about Limbaugh’s daddy, I came across an old article about New Orleans Confederates running for their lives when the Union Army showed up in 1862. The images of wealthy slave owners scurrying into their fancy French Quarter townhouses, stripping off their gray uniforms before their bemused wives (or mistresses), and tossing the threads into their fireplaces has delighted me and lived rent-free in my subconscious for almost 20 years.

Whenever Ma and Grandma talked, they were telling me about stories of love and resistance. They never told me about their civil rights exploits. But they told me again and again about the importance of self-respect and standing up for oneself. Most importantly, they showed me they loved me through their actions. They showed me that self-love makes other-love possible.

Ma hopped on a plane bound for New York in 1970 to escape an abusive first husband. Grandma hummed and slipped on her immaculate white gloves in preparation for her Eastern Star meetings, meetings which I only now understand were remnants of the dozens of New Orleans-based African American benevolent associations that fought for freedom over centuries, but also provided a joyous and safe place for community and connection.

I’m working on book four now, which is currently set in the early half of the 20^th century. The other day, I was going through some telegrams and newspaper clippings from the 40s and 50s. Time and again I came across stories of resistance, innovation, and love. In one binder I saw the span of one man’s life. His name was Rivers Frederick. I found a photo of him from 1890. In 1893, at the tender age of 16, he graduated from one of New Orleans’ several Black universities. I was only vaguely aware that these universities existed (New Orleans University, Straight College, and others). And now I had the life stories of untold local ancestors. Frederick went on to become a physician and local leader. I came across a cache of telegrams and postcards all dated 1954. The addresses were congratulating him on the lifetime achievement award from the local chapter of the NAACP. It wasn’t until after I saw those files, two facts hit me. One, Rivers Frederick was the name of my mother’s middle school, which she often talked about with reverence. Two, the correspondence writers must have known Dr. Frederick was sick because he died later in 1954. The telegrams, postcards, and letters were grateful people saying their goodbyes.

What does all this mean to me?

Learning these histories, of which Dr. Frederick is one spoke on a very large wheel, has opened my eyes to the reality of the brilliant people working in my hometown 100 years ago. I know enough about my own process to know; this is the kind of jet fuel that propels my work to new heights.

One way to generate new work is to open yourself to the possibility that the stodgy, sepia-toned past was potentially more vibrant and consequential than you ever imagined.  Of course, past is also prologue.