Excerpted from “Sinister Wisdom”, Issue #70 (Spring 2007)

Sherry Quan Lee’s book, Chinese Blackbird, is a fascinating narration of how race is lived in the United States today. Born to a Black mother and a Chinese father, much of Sherry Quan Lee’s life was spent understanding race as she lived it in the United States.  In the opening poem of the collection, she writes, “I am pregnant with myself / gestation: fifty years.” She comes to poetry later in life, but with the emotional power and languages of a convert.

Quan Lee describes her lfe, “Like a magnolia / –whose sepals never fuse00 / my life is disparate / here a Black / community, //there an Asian / community, // everywhere, white.” Chinese Blackbird is the narrative of Quan Lee’s life and her exploration of race, gender, love, and marriage. It is fierce and tender, angry and understanding, hurt and honest.

Some might call the book, not a poetry collection, but a textual gathering of one woman’s life. Indeed, the poems are accented by photographs of Quan Lee and her family and her birth certificate. They are important visual moves in the collection, adding connection for the reader to these poems. Many of the poems are written in the style of prose poems, such as “Magnolia Cafe,” “Mother’s and Mine,” and “I Ask My Husband if He Thought I was a Lesbian and He Said Yes.” This density of language and narrative builds throughout the book to Quan Lee’s final assertion of herself as an autonomous Chinese/Black/Woman in “I Am the Snake I feared,” she writes,

Sometimes I think I’m whispering
when you complain I’m hissing.

I’m sorry if my word are noisy, but

I haven’t left. I’m not leaving.
Only my thoughts wander

I am home, for the first time
in fifty-four years, venomless.

Quan Lee’s poems and this book, Chinese Blackbird, are the examples of the space and legacy that Jorddan and Lorde dreamed when they wrote their truth on the page.

Posted by Victor Volkman - 29/11/09 - 0 comments

 

I have only a few chapters still to read in Sharon’s new book.  It is an honest and difficult, and important story.  Some parts of the story are hauntingly familiar, some parts of the story are hauntingly not familiar at all.

 Sharon Doubiago is one of my writing mentors.  She has strong connections to Minnesota/Minnesota writers, although this story is located in California where she grew up as a girl.

 

Sherry Quan Lee

Wild Ocean Press Announces the release of Sharon Doubiago’s Memoir My Father’s Love: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl 

 

My Father's Love

In this first volume of her two-volume memoir, prize-winning poet Sharon Doubiago writes an extraordinary story of growing up in the 1940s and 50s in South Central LA and the desert mountain town of Ramona in San Diego County. My Father’s Love addresses the current controversies of memory and memoir and sets new standards for the genre by adhering to historical records, letters, diaries, interviews, and a drive to know the unfabricated truth, while weaving these, in stunning language and imagery, with remembering and reliving. This book attempts to understand her family rooted deep in the history of America, in both its Southern aristocracy and its victims. It looks at the world through the eyes of a child who knows what love is, a girl labeled beautiful, a victim of rape, incest and psychological terrorism, depicting the genesis of an American epic poet. It will change your perspective of the world forever.

 To order, go to: http://www.wildoceanpress.com/

 

or: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=doubiago&x=0&y=0

 www.sharondoubiago.com

 

Posted by Sherry - 20/11/09 - 0 comments

 

From: victor@LHPress.com 

Subject: [ LHP/MHP titles available at Harvard Book Store, Boston

Because we are signed up with “On Demand” the Espresso book machine company, any place that installs the Espresso
> book-on-demand-printer can buy LHP/MHP books. The books are printed and ready for the customer in
> about 5 minutes time. The newest one was just installed at the Harvard Book Store in Boston, Mass.
>
>
> “First book published in America inaugurates Espresso unit in Boston”
>
> The independent Harvard Book Store inaugurated its new Espresso instant book machine, which can print a library-quality paperback book in just four minutes, on Sept. 29 by ordering it to spit out a copy of the first book published in America.
>
> The book, now in public domain, is Facsimile of First Edition of The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre, commonly known as the Bay Psalm Book. It was the first book ever printed in the American colonies, in Cambridge in 1640.
>
> Author E.L. Doctorow – who was doing a reading later in the evening at the store – was on hand to help celebrate the machine’s christening.
>
> In a contest to name its new Espresso machine, Harvard Book Store selected the name Paige M. Gutenborg from a variety of entries. The store received more than 500 suggested names.
>
> The Espresso machine addresses two of the problem areas of the publishing business. First, publishers have always had to print and ship books to stores, which is costly and time-consuming. With a machine like the Espresso, all that needs to be shipped is a digital file. And at the end of a book’s shelf lives, those that go unsold are returned to publishers, who, according to the traditional consignment business model, buy them back. Again, this is costly, and for years authors’ royalty statements will show the cost of returns deducted from the money earned from sales of their books. With an Espresso, the bookseller need only print a book when a customer is ready to buy it, and returns could become moot.
>
> That’s still largely hypothetical, however. Only a few publishers have signed with On Demand Books, the company that makes the Espresso, to deliver digital files to its bookstore machines. But On Demand’s offerings expanded significantly – to the tune of two million public domain books – when it signed an agreement with Google earlier this month.
>
> On Demand as this was written had 16 machines installed at various stores, libraries and universities, and planned to make another 64 available in 2010. The machines are priced at $75,000-$100,000 each and have the capacity to generate around 60,000 300-page books a year.
>
> Confused: watch the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyNSap5XSv0 

 
>

Posted by Sherry - 12/11/09 - 0 comments

 
I AM ALWAYS EATING

 

 

I am eating my lunch.  Seems like I am always eating.  I am hungry when I get to work and I’m hungry when I get home from work and I’m hungry when I go to bed, and when I wake up.  It’s not as bad as it sounds, I don’t always eat when I’m hungry, and I’m only ten, okay fifteen pounds overweight, but if you imagine a bowling ball in my tummy, the rest of me looks kind of good—I’m not a kid anymore as the saying goes, though the new sixty is the old what?  Twenty? Okay thirty.  Okay, sometimes I eat when I’m not hungry.  And, no, I don’t eat what I should, I eat what I want.  I like comfort food.  And I like food that reminds me of childhood, which is interesting because we were poor—need I say more.  Okay, our neighbor worked for Wonder Bread so we had our fill of Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies.  Forget the Snowballs, none of us, my four siblings and I, liked coconut!


Where is this leading?  To storytelling.  Recently my friend Lori and I taught a storytelling/writing workshop.  We used various prompts to encourage the participants to write about women in their lives:  mothers, grandmothers, sisters, friends, mentors!  One of the storytelling prompts was food.  Who would have guessed that food would be the specialty of the day.  The hot lunch provided us provided all the sensory sensations we needed to get started:  taste, smell, sight, touch, sound!

 

We started by listing the foods we grew up with.  Amazing.  Naming.  What do the foods we listed tell us about who we are, about our families, about our race, our class, etc., etc.?  And yet, don’t try to assume who we are by the food we ate. We may have eaten Jell-O, but we may also have eaten drunken string bean chop suey!  Here’s my shout out:

 

Food Shout Out

 

Drunken string bean chop suey

Nankin Special Chow Mein

White Castle Hamburgers

Scrambled Hamburger

White rice

Hostess Cupcakes

Campbell Chicken Noodle Soup

Gingerbread

Swiss Steak

Goulash

Egg Fou Yung

Jell-O

Gov’t canned meat, powdered milk, and cheese

Salvation Army turkey at Thanksgiving

 

Have some fun, write your own list.  Have your friends write a list.  Pick something on the list and write a story about it.  See where that story meanders.  Discover a deeper meaning of White Castle Hamburgers!

 

And, to end where I should have started, I include here as reference, my intro to the hour presentation the participants and co-teacher guides gave, sharing our stories.  Food being one of them.

 

Also, check out these food Web sites.  They’re not just about food.

 


http://fairychef.blogspot.com/

http://tanglednoodle.blogspot.com/

http://www.lakitchenchicana.blogspot.com/

 

 

I would like to thank the UWOC council for inviting Lori and I to participate in today’s annual Fall Welcome and I would like to thank the women who participated in the workshop.  Lori and I met in a writing class in 1996, the year I graduated from the University of Minnesota’s MFA program.  I had never taught a class before, but Carolyn Holbrook gave me permission, and I taught my first class in a neighborhood coffee house.  Lori and I lost touch, but later reconnected at the first ever teleconference for Women in Education, organized by Dr. Nancy Barcelo.  Since, Lori and I have collaborated on a performance, Chinese Black White Women Got the Beat which we performed at several venues, including a reading sponsored by UWOC.  And we have been co-teaching interdisciplinary writing workshops for women of color.  Our workshops balance critical thinking and creative writing with in-person and online discussions.  Storytelling is the backbone of the workshop process as each participant recognizes the truth and substance of her stories, as well as the stories of other colorful women.    We examine the words/the lives of writers who have paved the way–wise women who have sorted through the muck, survived the muck, and risen above it:  Toni Morrison, Nikki Finney, Shay Youngblood, Edén Torres, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzuldúa, Wang Ping, Linda Hogan, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toi Derricotte, Joy Harjo, Evelina Galang, Michelle Cliff, Sandra Cisneros, and many others.

 

Our workshops incorporate a holistic mapping process, written and visual.  We embrace our stories in all of their complexity in order to understand and challenge social or cultural obstacles to living healthy and productive lives.  We look in a mirror and see beauty, strength, wit, and wisdom.  We look at each other and see the same.

 

Storytelling.  It’s monkey mind.  It’s conversation.  It’s crafting our lives by crafting our words.  It’s claiming the past and imagining the future with no rules of craft or politics except the ones we, individually, choose, the ones that work for us.  Stories that save our lives enter the world like angels flapping their wings, creating music, something like jazz.  Someone will be listening.

 

The goal of our workshops is to break silence and invisibility by reading, writing, contemplating, and conversing; and, to imagine a future by breaking through barriers that have shut us out and shut us up.  Participants look within and without–and shout out, bringing their stories of survival and growth to others.

 

The UWOC storytelling workshop focused on the colorful women in the lives of the participants.  Lori and I did our best to condense our usual 3-4 day/ 4-6 hour sessions into a one day, six hour session.  Lori will tell you how that process worked.

 

Thank you.

 

Posted by Sherry - 04/11/09 - 5 comments