Now we cookin' with grease: a metaphor.
Now we cookin' with grease: a metaphor.
On planning a first-time in-person book tour for my second novel and getting things done with a divergent brain.
What’s the last thing you made on a cast iron skillet? This isn’t a metaphor. I’m asking for real so I can tell you what I finessed on mine.
For me, it was two fried eggs I, then, placed on top of a pool of leftover stewed black beans I’d made last week. The final step was drizzling guacamole salsa on top. So good. So simple and, yet, truly a bowl of supreme flavor. The perfect smack in the mouth. It was a quick breakfast I made for myself a few days ago after looking at my bank account. Almost anything I plan to eat over the next month or so should probably come from what I already have inside my kitchen. Shit is tight. But thanks to a fridge and cabinets filled with a decent amount of groceries, I still feel quite rich. I can feed myself and that’s a big deal. Feeding myself by way of something I made with my own hands never fails to make me feel accomplished. The antithesis of how striving for something big can feel when you’re still far from the finish line of a thing you’ve never done before.
On the last IG Live I did with @ABlackManReading, I heard him say “Now we cookin’ with grease,” a Southern metaphor I’d heard before that I take to mean We’re ready to go…things are working. But this time it was being used to celebrate the fact that we’d finally were able to establish a steady Wi-Fi connection and could, therefore, get on with what would become an amazing conversation on honesty, limitations, and why I wrote Every Body Looking the way that I did. I thought about the saying a lot after the conversation was over and it made me wonder about how it feels to know you’re really onto something. Like, how do you know you’re getting something right and that what happens next is actually going to pull through?
I don’t know what I’m doing but I’ve already decided to do it. At this point it’s a life pattern: throw myself into the deep end before I have time to think about the challenge of the swim. And it’s fine, I guess. Half of the things I’ve ever done can be credited to my stubborn audacity and rarely to my expertise. A lot of the skill came later. What’s that thing all us Black millennials say when we’re going for something big and seemingly unattainable?
It’s what I’m on.
And what does that even mean, really? That I’m going to approach it all as if it’s undoubtedly going to happen. Nothing is standing in my way because the path itself is mine. It is my time. It is my season. And this moment belongs to me. This dream of touring my sophomore novel, Break This House, is already in the bag. It is not a matter of if and all about how. These are my affirmations.
If you’re new here, this is the breakdown of it all: I am planning a three-city in-person book tour in which I will be collaborating with black artists, bookstores, and cultural spaces to bring Break This House to life. I want to create experiences that elevate the themes of home, housing justice, and sustainability so that this isn’t just any old book launch. What I’ve begun to realize as an author is that I am not only writing books for readers. I am also being given the unique opportunity to contribute to communal conversations about things that are happening in our neighborhoods right now and that matter to me personally. The Housing Crisis is no longer just a buzz phrase for many of us: it is something happening to a lot of us and has been for years. I say years because in the grand scheme of things, I am only like five years old but if I’m being real this has been the experience for marginalized people since the beginning of time. But for the sake of this letter, I’m talking about 2022 “urban development” and gentrification. For instance, the company that “manages” my apartment building has slowly, but noticeably, been gentrifying our neighborhood and using superficial changes that we didn’t ask for to justify raising rent costs without addressing many of our real concerns. They’ve often made many of our apartments so uncomfortable this winter to the point that a lot of us consider relocation, which I’m sure is what they’d love to see: for us leave so we can be replaced by higher-paying tenants.
I’m not one to take things laying down and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’m witnessing this first hand. I didn’t become an artist just out of the desire to make beautiful things. I became an artist because it gives me a creative way to be evocative. I get to tell stories about what is happening and make them also be stories about what can or what will in the future. Some years ago I attended Akwaeke Emezi’s book launch for their first YA novel, PET, during which they told the audience that writing books allows us to cast spells. That it gives us the opportunity to create different narratives. In other words, when I write a book, I get to determine how the story unfolds and ends. The black people in this story don’t have to be harmed by the police because I can write something else.
And in this story, Break This House, the family doesn’t sell Grandma’s house. Someone finds a way to intervene. But that’s all the spoiler I’m going to give you.
I possess a very righteous anger and a beautiful, rageful grief that began just before my mother died three years ago. It grows and evolves more with time. So many of us have lost so much over the past two plus years from people to beloved spaces in our communities. Many of us can’t even put into words how it all feels. Some of us fear even opening our mouths knowing that, once we do, we may start to scream and never stop. That what we still have yet to let go of may be too heavy, too dark, and where would we put it?
I want my work, my books, and how I create/hold space for us to give us all that permission of release. And beyond that release, I want us to get active in whatever ways are available to us. Action makes me feel powerful and so does rest. This is my way of getting active so we can rest and commune with one another. I’m currently fundraising to make this tour happen and I want to provide you with everything you need to support in one place:
I wish I had more profound things to say about this process but I really don’t. Every time I talk about the road ahead of me, yawns audibly interrupt my sentences. Seriously, you can ask any friend I’ve been on the phone with over the past few weeks. It’s not cute. The way my brain processes information already has me exhausted and overwhelmed. Asking for this kind of help is a huge stretch for me as it is and, at the end of the day, I still want support that is given enthusiastically. I need to raise $8,000 by the end of this month (March 31, 2022!) to fund my first in-person tour. With so much of my community’s help I have already reached the halfway mark in the past two weeks. It is through this same community that I am going to raise the second half. If you know someone who has the bread to spend, an organization that wants to make a charitable donation to a Black artist, or you yourself have the capacity, I want to say thank you in advance for making that call, sending that email, or hitting that donate button. Everything helps.
I can not wait to release my second novel into the world. I am so looking forward to sharing this tour line up with you soon. It is all already in motion.
PS. I really do want to know about these cast iron escapades 👀. Hit up those comments, friend.