Truthtelling & True to Form
Where I've Been and Where I'm Going
I haven’t written recently for a lot of reasons:
I have very limited extra brain capacity when I’m teaching.
The very little extra brain capacity I have is often dedicated to getting through manuscript edits or caring for my dad.
Ongoing genocides. Plural.
This was one of my roughest teaching semesters to date. Granted: I haven’t been doing this full time long at all. Which unfortunately means the probability that this will be a cakewalk compared to what might be in store is pretty high.
The good news is that even in spite of that, I still feel like teaching is one of the things I’m put on this earth to do. I’m encouraged by the fact that even though I had a subpar semester, my response was: How do I learn from this, try again and make it better?
How do I do better?
That’s been a refrain all semester long. It’s not just a question of teaching, but about living a meaningful life. How do I do good in this world? What is the good I will do?
It always comes back to teaching and art for me.
I had a conversation with my friend, Hugh, yesterday that reminded me—all of us are storytellers. Precious few are truthtellers.
It’s something I realized as I witnessed the journalists from Gaza lay down their lives rather than be silenced and have the truth erased.
Truth telling requires clear vision—an unwavering ability to make plain the structures of power that undergird our lives when most of us would rather not see it. It’s not just that those in positions of power benefit from our refusal to see, because it means we will not fight back; but most of us would rather live in fabricated ignorance to protect a semblance of comfort.
I’m fighting with a lifetime of choosing comfort over clear vision.
I really admire those who accept their responsibility, knowing that it shakes the very ground we walk on. Who don’t know where we will go from here, yet, but anything has to be better than where we are. Who trust that we will figure a new world out—together.
Those are the folks who do better every day of their lives.
In the midst of everything, the cover for my debut, Love Requires Chocolate, dropped.
In case you didn’t see it, here it is:
There are also preorder links available now, too.*
*As someone who counts a lot as a coping mechanism, being able to see your sales rankings on a variety of platforms is simply not good for me. But I persist.
Being at a point to share preorder links and covers is wild to me. I’d been in the habit of saying that I didn’t know I could be an author, but I think that might be a half-truth. Perhaps there was a moment recently where I faltered in my belief, but I’ve been finding some gems from the Tiny Ravynn Archive (i.e. the number of bins of childhood creative play my father mercifully refused to part with to the chagrin of my mother) that prove otherwise.
Let us consider…Exhibit A!
The first thing I found was “Ravynn’s Library: Handwritten Catalogue” of all the books I owned and had read. This would be impressive enough on its own but on the last page, the image to the right, amidst a list of fully published authors, I had written my own books as part of the catalogue. I still have Lilac Goldberg and the Prankster Mystery (see here for a TikTok I made about it).
Little Ravynn knew exactly who she would be one day; my recent life has been just trying to get back to who I always knew I was.
Exhibit B: My Comics Collection.
I found the Book Catalogue when I was actually looking for this. I used to cut out my favorite comic strips from the Virginia Pilot on Sundays and paste them onto more than 30 sheets of paper, front and back, all bound together by binder clips and decorated with my little kid handlettering. I drove my parents batty because for some reason it was urgent I find this. I knew we had it; we never throw out my creative work, but it took days to locate it.
This feels like the biggest clue to who I am today. The person who would grow up to write X-Men comics that almost got her expelled in the 9th grade. The person who would study French bande-dessinée in college, then American superhero comics in grad school. The person who, as we speak, is designing a Black Comics class for the spring.
But the thing I noticed that’s really something wild: I had inexplicably saved the 2003 Newbery and Caldecott winners page… (Exhibit C)
I can’t be sure, but I imagine I probably thought: Maybe I could do that one day.
Everything I used to do, everything I used to be, tells me that I knew I would be this person I have grown up to be. I’m glad I have these portals into my younger brain and that I’m able to honor who I was with who I am.
True to Form.