True Stories, Well Told: From the First 20 Years of Creative Nonfiction Magazine by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781937163174
Publisher: Fourth Chapter Books
Published: 2014-07-05T14:00:00+00:00

TOI DERRICOTTE is Professor Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh and the co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation, North American’s premier “home for black poetry.” She is the author of a memoir, The Black Notebooks, which received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has five books of poetry: Tender, Captivity, Natural Birth, Empress of the Death House, and The Undertaker’s Daughter.

Toi Derricotte on “Beds”

I wrote the first draft twenty years ago. I had always wanted to write about the violence in my childhood in a more extended way than I had in my poetry. I had journaled about it for years, but I needed to find a form that would hold emotional complexity and, at the same time, give me a sense of freedom as I recalled memories and emotions as tangled as fine gold chains. I needed a container. I came upon a prose piece in which the writer had used the furniture in her childhood as a way of organizing memories. Reimagining the beds I had slept in helped me to locate the writing in specific places and times and opened up a range of memories and feelings.

I wrote many of the sections in one day. It was far from a work of art. As I worked through unburied trauma—as well as the trauma of writing about it—I had to reflect and re-see. After a hundred revisions, I saw that the writing was an object separate from my experience, something that existed between a reader and me. Often I’d find myself fearfully “out there” (I have been afraid of high bridges all my life!), in a place where I lacked emotional and/or artistic resources. But inspiration always arrived, like angels, and lifted me up so that my feet never did dash on a stone.

When I dotted the last “I,” I truly felt the click of a box. My obsession had lifted. I had worked myself around to a different way of seeing my past, and to a different relationship with my father. Rather than being his victim, I had made something that had a kind of truth, clarity, and beauty.

“Beds,” renamed “Burial Sites,” is the central piece in my book The Undertaker’s Daughter. Writing it changed my writing as well as my life.

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