Uasouthern festival of books and its an amazing event that brings authors from all over the country to nashville each fall to be with the thousands of readers and writers from around the region. For those of us would enjoy being here, f were lucky that its a free event so thanks to a lot of the Community Support remember that the festival does depend on individual donations among other sources to remain free so please take the time to donate and what you can to help keepit free and any amount helps. Whatever amount you can spare. You can donate via the website, behalf or in person at the headquarters tends throughout the weekend and any amount is appreciated. Now let me introduce the authors, kendra allen who is the author of when you learn u that alphabet and jennine cap crucet who is the author of my time among the whites. So kendra, i think you said you want to go first. What were going to do is each of the authors is going to read from their book and we will have discussion back and forth and talk about the books and about their writing and their lives if they want to and we will have an informal discussion so kendra, let me give you an introduction. Kendra is the author of when you learn the alphabet, raised in dallas texas and is currently an mfa candidate at the university of alabama. Her work which has been described as raw and witty has been published in december magazine and in brevity magazine where i read trash just to bring it back intomorrow. Thank you. Thank you, im looking forward to hearing a little bit more about your work in a few minutes. Next we will talk with jennine cap crucet, her book of essays is my time among the whites notes from an unfinished education. Janine is the author of two previous books and an opinion editor for the New York Times and her novel was a New York Times review editors choice and the winner of the 2016 International Latino book awards and was cited as the best book of the year by nbc latino, the guardian and the miami herald. Its been adopted as an oncampus read at 25 american universities. Her short stories has been honored with the iowa short Fiction Award and other awards and she was raised in miami florida, an associate un professor at the department of english and institute for ethnic studies at the university of nebraska. Sowelcome and you talk a little bit about your book for you read. I feel maybe we should have a discussion about this. Im from miami, thats important to me. Specifically im fromhialeah. So thank you for coming and bringing a little piece of home here today but that is very important and ive been on this list, 305 is the area code. I feel ive got to have it with me all the time. That sounds like somethingwe will wind up talking about today. So this is my essay collection, my time among the whites, notes from an unfinished education and this came from a deep desire to have Difficult Conversations about race or concepts of race and concepts of citizenship, particularly since the 2016 election and i elhad a lot of friends, a lot of white friends were shocked by the Election Results weor the purported electionresults. And i think i went on record inthe New York Times in may that year being like a ,trump is going to win this. You need to talk to your people. Talk to your family, that ework has to happen. I know part of where this book came from was that i wanted to have these conversations with friends and longer ways and some of these are based on pieces i published in the New York Times and i would write these 6000 word pieces and then they would say all right, send us 1000 words or 800 words. Id send like 1500 and do this and my editor would be thats not what i asked for. So we worked together to get that one or two ideas and i would hear from readers and i was happy to hear from readers because it meant the conversation was happening but they would ask questions that those other 5000 words didnt make it addressed so i started to see that its hard , especially now that we traffic and soundbites and things cant be communicated that way when there vitally important as they are now and when actual peoples lives are at stake and they have been for a long time so im going to read a little bit from an essay in yourcold nothing is impossible in america , the second essay in the book and im going to read from the beginning for just a bit and talk with you today. So this is from nothing is impossible inamerica. When nonlatino americans meet me and learn my family is from cuba they often ask me one of two bizarre questions. The first is if ive ever been to cuba, a question so layered and brought for me that i learned to respond by asking why would i have ever been to cuba . Then just seeing what they say. I almost relish their awkward answers and the assumptions they revealt. I got this question a lot when i lived in minnesota, a place where many students brag about their scandinavian heritage and it never once occurred to me to ask within seconds of meeting them if theyd ever been to sweden. The second question less common though still fairly fraught isnt even a question. Thats weird, interesting or funny they say. Janine isnt a very cuban name. You are correct i say, itis not. I also want to y,feel that uncomfortable pause that follows with a story about the American Dream that goes like this. Two kids from cuba meet teenager in florida. I have names given to them by cuban parents who mistakenly assume they live in cuba cipretty much forever. They mark them as ethnic minorities in the united states. These names in their new home country impacts everything about their lives. Their educations and the premature end of those educations and what areas of the city they can look for ahome. They married young, start a family young and because they are lightskinned una reason theres a chance their americanborn offspring could avoid at least some of the elements of the systemic prejudice they encounter despite having worked hard to learn english as almost eradicating the accents, this is after all a story haabout the American Dream which means that many thingswill need to be unjustly eradicated. In this version of the American Dream they think that takes to change their destiny in this country is picking the right name for your child. They are not totally wrong. As john oliver on his show last week tonight pointed out when in his preelection efforts to make Donald Drumpf again he told an apocryphal story about the candidates grandfathers amy change the last name from drumpf to trump when heimmigrated from germany. He asked those voting for the man to take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you just met a guy named Donald Drumpf. The joke plays on scene ofthe and oliver is only pointing out a reality for Many Americans , the reality the couple had lived through and saw as an opportunity to alter what they hoped was better. Because of the experience of living with their own names, my parents thought giving their american child a distinctly ethnic name came with unfair quantifiable consequences. They sensed this long before Research Studies would show which names on similar remnant resumes to count as qualified for a job and how they weathered those consequences themselves, they felt an understandable reluctance to have me inherit them. This is how i came to benamed after the 1980 usa runnerup. Its not fiction. My parents had a loose plan to name me after the winter and they had settled in on a may evening to watch the pageant with that intention even though i wouldnt be borne up until july 1981. Theyve always been the type to plan ahead. I was not just their first kid but also the firstborn in America American in our family. Perhaps they saw a suitable american name was needed to complete the immigration from cuba to american. What better placeto find a name and an american beauty pageant . Bob barker was close back then, they must have liked the way the name sounded in his price is right draw. The man who made his living encouraging people to spend a wheel and asked them how much they got random crap was worth withoutoverestimating would determine the name that would identify me for the rest of my life. Imagine talking with that provoked black ball, janine. His pointy white teeth seething that last syllable like a cartoon cat. Inalthough my parents, my names are maria and evaristo were rooting for her janine scored , a. K. A. Miss arizona didnt win. The winner of the pageant, the person after whom i was supposed to be named was sean weatherly. That years miss south carolina. I can almost hear my parents deciding to that naming after the winner began that sean was a boys name is like evidence to the contrary ending right in front of them wearing a crown. So close enough. There was my name, janine. Spelling they thought, they spelled it jennine but they agreed the spelling was all swrong. The vowels in her name making little sense, that early i right after the j. Lets change that to anactual e. D in english area and while were at it lets change the original e2 and i, throw in next and for balance. Lose a, and what is that sound doing in there anyway but lets keep that last eat because in english to always put a silent e on the end. Daughter named area they had no idea that in altering the spelling that they were undoing thework of making the name something that would help me pass. Although im sure the soundof it has opened doors that might have otherwise been unfairly closed, people looking for it as a marker of my parents immigrant status. When seen in writing the spelling always flagged for certain people, people looking for it as a marker of my parents immigrant status, and alterations betraying the reason they went with that name in the first place. The first real short story i ever wrote was a College Short fiction workshop tried to explore this moment cobetween them and negotiation of it. In a 19yearold woman and her husband of two years are discussing what to to name their baby if its a girl. L. The husband is confident it will be a boy. The womanf f decides to state t name on a televised beauty pageant which shes never seen and they proceed to watch it together, the woman feeling huge at the sight of so many skinny white women. At some point the husband brings hera sandwich. He is used to having her bring himsandwiches that he cant get out of the couch. They very subtly bring up the racism they encountered because of their own markedly spanish names. One workshop repeat from my nvall College Classmate was that they didnt think this scene was loud enough and wanted the conversation to be more explicit. Their assumption being that people of color rarely sit around discussing their oppression outright as they watch tv at home. They decided they should give her a name encourages her to do so and the winners name in the story is gauge which neither parent can pronounce correctly and doesnt work in spanish at all so they go with sandra, the name of the contestant who finishes in the top 10 but scored highest in the interview portion. Historians with both characters burning, thus completing my obsession with bodily functions. It wasnt a great story. But it showed promise and at least enough to garner my professors and attention and encouragement which is sometimes all budding writer needs. I told no one in class the bstory was based on how i got my name even when they discuss improbable the scenario seemed to them, how pointedly symbolic it was, how totally unlikely it would be these white classmates told me for a cuban couple not want to honor their own heritage in the naming of their first child. Okay. Truth be told apart of me agreed with my classmates and i never fully believed esthis was how my parents chose my name until college. When i looked at the pageant results prompted by the workshop assignments and learn horrified that my names origin storywas a real back of my life. What were my parents inning for in naming me after a beauty queen . What were they trying to say about the kind ofdaughter they wanted . What were they hoping for , willing me to be with this name . Or was it more about what they were trying to prove for the country that had taken them in as children . Perhaps there line was more into with names like the first words they saw upon arrival or rescue by the u. S. Navy, us marines. Our names, a form of gratitude and in my case, a kind of skin deep hope. So ill stop there spoiler alert, i never won miss usa. That goes into different themes from their. [applause] if we can just have some time to talk back and forth about the various themes in your book and how you came to talk about that. One of the things i did notice in both of the books is you both write a lot about family connections so can you both that a littlebit . Kendra, do you want to go first . I feel like the things in my book are definitely family connected. Thats the way it always starts and when i think of family i think of my moms side of the family most times, even though i have relationships with my dads side and i think of family, and thinking about all the women on my moms side so whenever im writing anything , im thinking of my mama, my grandmother, my cousin, the things like that ikand the struggles that they probably never got to express in a way that i get the chance to, the privilege due in a book or just even people reading my work that they would never probably get the opportunity to do so i feel like im speaking through them or for them in a sense. Nbut even when i go into race and gender im stillthinking of them to. Like the turmoil that they never, black women in general are looked at last for everything. Our pain is looked at last. We are assumed to be stronger than everybody else. Whats the one word that people say . Exactly. They said theyre not in our class hitoday or things like that but when im writing about race and gender, thats the pride that i wish we could all release in real life. Family for you . I was speaking about that too, thinking about family inadvertently from my end and thinking about my moms side only and what does that mean about Family Dynamics and how that plays out against the broader sense of history but i kept trying not to write about family and i dont know coming back to that and i realized i sort of embraced it at some point in the process understanding that for such a big part of your life, whatever you come to see as your family is your universe and that is how your learning culture and your learning what are the norms around you and then some of us get the opportunity to leave home and test those things in other environments and our definitions of family and more and change and you also acquire children and family that you bring into your life and think of his family so i ended up writing so much about family as entry points because of something that allows a point of connection and im just saying im going to tell you this one little story about how my parents came up with my name and then by the end im talking about systems of oppression but you kind of came into it looking at these two people making one choice and by the end of the essay you understand how that choice is an endpoint t to all these different accidents of history that go back hundreds of years that end with this family being an American Family for the First Time Ever in its history and i found that happening over and over again and i think because im mostly a fiction writer, my first two books are fiction, my first essay collection im always like im just going to tell a story, not try to sayanything. And in the form of an essay dits like you need to say something. You know what youre doing here, its okay to build to that and come back to that story as a way to make your sceneresonate a little more clearly. I dont write fiction becauseit would be really trash. Just write poems, we have another genre that were playing off in our drama. With essays im thinking of the Bigger Picture and then i go into those small incidences of actual family life, but then its also , i used family as a way to break generational trauma and pain and cycles and thats like, i have a hard time expressing myself in speech or orally so i have to write it down and through those essay stories im able to figure out what is the actual trauma thats been tying all the women in my family together. What amis the exact moment that this relationship broke . I can figure that out in an essay form where i cant figure it out when im sitting in my family for 24 years. I couldnt figure it out and then im writing it down and okay, i get it. It sounds like we both used family as a question. At the question a essay can address and we can address what it means. Can you talk about when you knew that this was the book you needed to write right now . I think for me its the beginning of i waswriting it without even wanting to. I had asked for comments on something and i couldnt stay in the limit because it wasnt something that could be handled in that short of a conversation, even though that was what the form was demanding at the time so once i started to have several of these things and i thought that a kind of all fell under this umbrella of thinking about race and moments where i get to count or pass as white and the moments where i dont and how much of that was outside of my own control and i histarted seeing that in things that range from growing up in miami erwhen if youre a lightskinned cuban you look kind of white and by that your part of the dominant culture and you get to possess cultural norms for your community. Thats how i come to define the elements of whiteness but part of my time among the whites was when i got to be white and elevating in places like nebraska now where it was this idea of no, youre definitely not a white woman, youre not a white haperson and you know that but the context is what changed, i didnt change. My actual skin color did not change all of a sudden who i was was being told to me rather than me getting to express it. So you could hear in this answer that these were big things and i started thinking about this is connected to my family at disney world and we went to disney world all the time. Is that a particular south florida thing . Other questions would spell out from that and other times when i went to the dude ranch and nebraska and i moved there because i found out so many of my students were registered as College Students, i may first jen College Student but these students were from rural backgrounds and i am from miami and ckhialeah and we had the beach but that was my nature in the beach and a lot of it would be paved so that its real close to the water so it was sort of different. All my nature was disney world, i got to go to disney world and say im in nature. A lot of nature was this performative experience for me as a miami kid. They sort of alternative connect in ways and i realized there was a book and not just, im staring at my computergoing what is 70 . I didnt know this was a book until it was a book. I was kind of pushing back against it a lot. First of all, your title is one of the best titles of a book ive ever read, my time among the whites. Thats how i got this book. Ive had a lot of folks tell me e especially folks of coverlet color living in nebraska that you stole my memoir title. I was an undergrad and i was changing my whipmajor three or four times. And eventually i landed on creative writing. And i just found myself among the whites for the first time. Like, im from dallas. And all my life i only went to mexican or black people, my whole school life so when i went to college i was immersed into this, even though i went to art school and it was liberal which means it was even more racist than the south. Even though it was a liberal arts school i was immersed into each class so i was the only black person. I found myself knowing what colors switching was and knowing llike that i am the representative of my black people for you people. So i just found myself, everything i write was from anger and everything would be very angry things to white people and it started because when i went to college it was the year after trayvon and mike brown happened so i would go to protest with my three white roommates and not really get me like that and i would get mad and even though theyre there walking with me im like youre just here. Owyou dont understand the gravity of the situation so i would writethese essays for class and i would see how they would be received. When youre a person of color and its a big white classroom, especially workshops, the only feedback you get is this is so brave, this is so good. Youre not really helping me but okay. I would say theres this reluctance to get feedback in part because people are afraid they might offend you. Im a student, i had administrative workshops where there like how about more ethnic or i think what i heard a lot was theres so much ergoodness in here, more dancing. And for folks they be you know what, it sounds like and this is where white folks were like either way were doing it wrong. If i give you feedback i might offend you. If i dont, then im keeping something. And my sense is sort of, one of those allows for conversation to happen and one of those is a kind of patronizing reaction that it doesnt help things work better at all. So i think its better to think what might feel like a risk and then see what the pushback is against that and then listen to it, not to feel like i wasnt trying to do that. Its sort of like were going to know that. We understand it might be coming from a place of a genuineeffort , but the best of your intentions isnt snecessarily enough. We can work through it as long as the listening is receptive to what you tell them about what you really need because im thinking eabout how you talked to your roommate at the protest, i can hear again because its this weird my time among the whites and everyone says theyre kind of white but they were there and thats important too. At thebare minimum. I shouldnt have to say thank you for caring about somebody getting gunned down. So even though i wasnt getting like that, i was writing about the same things and i would be like im only writing about two things and im trying to write about these things but its not working and at the end it was just like 13 essays. And i said oh, this could be a thing. And maybe i just kept writing about these things for this moment. Lets go and talk aboutthe title of your book. When you learn the alphabet, because i acknowledged to you right before we were ertalking that the essays of that name, of that title is each part of that essay starts with a letter of the alphabet and it didnt occur to me thats what you were doing until the end but talk about that process, talkabout how you started doing that . I wanted it to be subtle like that where people didnt get it. I wanted to be subtle like that but that came about, that was the most intentional thingive ever written. My whole entire writing life, that was the most intentional thing , ive been reading out of the poetry workshop and id sitdown on the ground and wait until my next class. We only needed 25 of those pages, but yeah, i wanted something very straightd to the point, unlike the alphabet portion of it, it was like i really deep down, like a game. I dont think thats fake. But what you are of like showing how it evolved and now the severe way it has evolved. I did want to ask you the subtitle is notes from an unfinished education. What do you mean by unfinished education . I mean, at the moment, i think as long as i live in america and am an american, that, it will not be finished until that condition is no longer true for whatever reason. I guess the more snarky, not snarky but i live in nebraska now. I dont know. We just have this Big Wonderful event about the book and it was standing room only at all these white folks, were so glad. I do find it like in cities like lincoln theres conversations with people who are trying to do that was work . The way we are. You weree saying the 50000 pages of manifestoes, i wasan noticing we both, the books are both relatively, they are not 500 pages. Part of it is there is a real intensity to these conversations and real difficulty that we sort of intuitive on a form level its like you need to read many, many books of this size and from all sorts of different voices and we sort of like note that, heres this. Because all the writers are going around the issue also sounds like thats a problem with america, like we go around issues and talk around them when we can just go right to it and get past it. We spend 400 years talking about the same thing, like it blows my mind when like it so simple, like its not hard. Both of your books do go right to the issue in their different ways. About. Im going to throw something at you that i havent talked about which is do you have someone that you have read before that has had some influence on any of that . Oh. Well, i mean sorry. I just have to answer immediately for that question because with this book i was reading very quickly alexander chis essay collection how to write an autobiographical novel which is a fantastic essay collection. Of hes also a fiction writer who now is writing his first book of essays. And i even i totally nerded out and made a chart about his book and like how, like, his first and last sentences if the choices he makes structurally. But going back even further, the work of James Baldwin in trying to tell the truth. And also how does one sort of, how do you put yourself how do you sort of like turn the mirror not just outward, but on yourself and say these are the places where i have had these moments of perpetrated a kind of bigotry and let it out. Like to not let yourself off the hook in these ways. If i think when readers can see you do that, theyre more likely to listen because they understand that youre willing to go there with them and admit that we all, at the very least up unintentional acts of bigotry all the time and theres a big distinction between a purposeful act and an unintentional. And actually its in my syllabus for every class i teach no matter what, literature course, creative writing course, i welcome unintentional acts of bigotry in my classroom. And i say that because in the classroom, thats when i get to teach. When someone makes an assumption about a character, i can sort of stop the class and say remember on the first day we talked about intentional and unintentional acts, and this was a moment of like, you didnt know you were doing this. So then we can show you how it happened, we can talk about how it made you feel and what the implications of it are, and then you wet to choose. You continue you get to choose. Do you listen and say how do i make myself not do that again. And then i give you a very long reading list because im your professor [laughter] go read all this stuff, and then we come back and you write a great paper and you graduate with honors, and then you write a book and you sit, like, on a panel with a writer. See how useful it can the all be. [laughter] you can all be successful. [laughter] straight line, right . On some days i can let myself go that way. For me one of the first collection of essays that i ever read was entitled how to kill yourself and others in america. Me too. That was the first thing that i ever read that i was, like, so i can be my cup self country is self, i can talk in my slang, i dont have to great grammar, e myself on the page. That was one of my first books. I read it, like, twice a year, its an easy read. That book is my favorite book. And also belle hooks born black. Its a memoir, but the way it was written is very, like, every chapter is no more than two pages, and the way that she talks about black girlhood but also, like, feminism and womanism and all these isms, sexism, all those isms, that was one of the first things i read where i was like i want to write Something Like this, i can do Something Like this. I can see myself in this. Even growing up i always say i was in grown folks business all my life. [laughter] so even growing up i would be, like, reading these urban fiction novels that people dont take seriously but they should because theyre fire. [laughter] i would be reading, like, twisted soldier at like 8 years old. Its like Little Pockets of, like, pressure in Little Pockets of racism. And i was subtly learning those things very young, and i would read fly girl by omar tyree all the time. And it just seemed like i love coming of age stories. Like, thats my thing because i cant write one. [laughter] but i like reading them. And, like, i would just find those bigger themes within that family narrative which is back to, like, what we do, like, literally that. But, yeah. Really the biggest influence for me is music. I read music lyrics more than anything. Rap lyrics all the time. I just find myself, what are you talking about . And, like, when i read it, i can see pain or, like, i can see intention in those words, and i want to, like, mimic that in my own work where itll have, like, a sunny feeling but also, like, that literary element as well. Yeah. Theres an essay in the book that you mentioned called you are the second person which i think was i cant remember what magazine it was, i believe its an online magazine, and you can google you are the second person, and i just remember being like, i went out and bought the book immediately. I was completely floored by the power and compassion in that piece. And that also a made me think the other book i was reading in the final edits of this book, i got an advanced copy, but its out now, the Jesse Mcmillan book yeah. Moderator and that and thats up for the National Book award for essays. Thats another please, go read that book. Were all writers that are writing for these themes and collectively you can start to, like, have some thoughts, right . None of us is the one story, right . Theres that danger of, like, oh, i read this, and now i understand what all americans might think about something. The book is actually being like please dont do that, right . The idea and i think were conditioned for that. You go to college, and because we are predominantly white spaces and were invited to represent a whole group. Thats a danger that can happen. I think both of us are working to dismantle that. The minute we got any sort of privilege to do so, we were like lets try to break that down and, like, put take the power of it and do Something Else with it. Yeah. And you do both write very effectively about that in each of your memoirs, each of your essays collections about the problem, the issue of being the person within a white environment expected to represent your race. And, you know, i know that its i know that a lot of people have issues with those kinds of things. So, you know, i did when i got to that part in each one of these novels, i i thought, yes, i know. You know what were talking about. In each of the memoirs,ing you know, i knew what you were talking about. So, yeah, good. My first expose your to that, its sort of a form of microaggression, its called spotlighting. It was actually in my capacity as a counselor working in los angeles and working with first generation College Studentses from different races and classes and sort of hearing these experiences. They would talk about these things happening in class, and i would realize it happened to me as well, and its a form of microaggression, and i didnt know it had a name until years after. Yeah. Im trying to think of i didnt know what microaggression was when i went to school. [laughter] im like i didnt know when i went to college. I just remember, like, the first time my freshman year, and i had, like, a roommate. I was putting on lotion, its in the book. I was putting on lotion, and its cocoa butter lotion because i got that be right. [laughter] but i was putting on lotion, and my roommate asked me, she was, like, [inaudible] you know when Somebody Just disrespects you, it dont click in the moment, like, it click later on . So i was just, like, i had another roommate who, like, corrected her. What . Why would that do that . But then i was sitting in the watching catfish, i remember this plain as day, and i was just sitting there, and i just kept putting my lotion on, and i was like, no. And it took me weeks for me to really realize what happened. And i was, like, im going to have to hit this girl. [laughter] see, thats like a whole other thing. The only space, i already know how its going to be received if i just say anything, then you like shut down on that. And i think thats, like, the power of microaggression. Like having to break through that fear of how youll be perceived and just, like, like i said, theyll go around it. Like going through it. And that takes, like, a lot of, like, time and, like, amping yourself up to do. It sounds like so easy to be like, girl, ill slap you if you say that again. [laughter] its not that easy when youre, like, in the moment. Right. Yeah. Great. We are running out of time, but i did have, i wanted to give you a chance to if you have anything to add about your books or about anything else . I had a question for you because you were saying like, oh, new york, chicago, why did you come here when you could have also im from miami. I live in nebraska now, i lived there, like, i bought a house in that state. Like, im a resident, i had to change my license. Youre like, no. It was a a painful moment. Very painful. So i dont know, even people are like, oh, what are your talking about . I live in nebraska, but im from miami. Have you not encountered that . Ive just never been to maim. I believe you, im just never been. We have a field trip coming up. Cool [laughter]
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