Where I must go

The panels I sit on at writing festivals connect me with some pretty cool authors. At the Words & Music Festival in New Orleans I appeared on a panel about memoir writing with Rick Bragg. I had the privilege of sitting on a panel called Dogs and Their People with Sonny Brewer (we’ve both had books published about our beloved dogs) at the Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock. The theme for the panel I sat on last Friday at the Northwestern Summer Writers Conference was Writer’s Point of View: How I Got Published, and one of my co-presenters was Angela Jackson. Her first novel, Where I Must Go, was published last year by Northwestern University Press.

Where I Must Go is the story of Magdalena Grace, a young black woman from an urban working-class neighborhood who attends an elite predominantly white university in the late ’60s. Angela herself entered Northwestern University in 1968 and began making notes for her book when she was still a student. She teaches African-American literature at Kennedy-King College in Chicago now, and her “How I got Published” story Friday taught our audience the value of perseverance. It took Angela forty years to finish all the rewrites of her novel while she was working to put herself through school, then teaching at various places and writing poetry and plays. “I’m not a natural storyteller,” she told them. “I am a poet. That’s different.” From a review in the New York Times:

Ms. Jackson, 58, a poet and playwright here whose collection “Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners” won the 1994 Carl Sandburg Award for poetry, said {that with the novel} she sought to breathe life into the experiences of the first wave of black students into mostly white universities, a story that she said had not been told nearly enough.

“They transformed the nature of American universities because of their activism,” she said of the black students, “which gave us black studies, women’s studies, Asian studies. Not only did we benefit from an elite education, but universities benefited from our being there.”

I had a chance to talk with Angela for just a short bit after our panel was over. Like me, she comes from a big family — five surviving sisters and two brothers. Asked if she’d be able to stay and enjoy the rest of the day at the conference, she said she needed to get home to check on her mother. Angela is single, has never been married, and lives with her mother in the house she grew up in on Chicago’s south side.

She said she wrote her novel using pen and paper, then transferred it all to a computer. She doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter to promote her writing, and said Northwestern University Press has done an excellent job in distributing and promoting her book. And, of course, a favorable review in the New York Times never hurts! Where I Must Go will eventually be part of a trilogy that follows some of the same characters in this, Angela Jackson’s first novel. As soon as I hit the “publish” button on this post I’m going to check if this debut novel is available in audio format yet — I’m eager to read it!