Already it has turned too chilly to sit outdoors and read, unless the sun is shining, which it was not when I wanted to sit with Payback and Dancing Girls this week. But it’s still warm enough to be comfortable in a sweater to do the raking and burlapping (isn’t
My meandery re-reading of Audre Lorde’s essays began with musings on her birthday, followed by “Notes from a Trip to Russia” and “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”. “Even if you’re new to Audre Lorde, you’ve probably seen this passage of hers quoted: “I was going to die, if not
This, her first essay in Sister Outsider, is based on edited journal entries from her travels in 1976, when she was invited to observe the African-Asian Writers conference, which was sponsored by the Union of Soviet Writers. She writes about her flight to Moscow, nine hours long, and her
It is the way of things that, in the week I was reading and writing about Audre Lorde’s first essay in Sister Outsider, I met her in another book too. In “The History of Black People” from Magical Negro (2019), Morgan Parker writes: “If you cut open my heart,
How anxious I was, about rereading this story; I had confused it with “In the Fall”, a heart-breaking story about Scott, a horse (you know the rule about spoilers and animal stories, eh?) who was once all black but became grey around the eyes by the time that story
