Today we bring you selections of three interviews from this year’s Portland Book Festival. Jon Mooallem talked with John Notarianni about his book “This is Chance: The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held it Together.” Aida Salazar spoke with Jenn Chavez about her book for middle-grade readers, “Land of the Cranes.” And Shayla Lawson spoke with Tiffany Camhi about her book of essays, “This is Major.”
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re going to bring you three interviews today. They were all recorded as part of last year’s Portland Book Festival, which is put on by Literary Arts. We’ll start with the author, Jon Mooallem. Mooallem is a writer at large for the New York Times magazine. His most recent book is “This is Chance: The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held it Together.” It tells the story of the devastating 1964 earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska, and Jeannie Chance, the radio journalist who spent nearly three days broadcasting live on the air after the quake. Mooallem spoke to OPB’s John Notarianni. They started with a clip of Jeannie Chance on the radio the day after the earthquake: ‘... leveled. Anchorage has sustained a great deal of damage, and it has been a shattering blow to a very proud people. However many of us have enjoyed - actually taken a great deal of pride - in seeing the way the people of Anchorage, Alaska can rise to the occasion. Those of you whose services are not needed at this time, our urge to you is seek shelter, seek warmth. Be sure that you have … plenty of food in your house, flashlight batteries. Use them sparingly because we have no idea how long it will be before the power will be back on. There has been extensive damage to the power lines throughout the greater Anchorage area, both to the city power and to…’ [fades out]
John Notarianni: Tell me a little bit more, Jon, just about who Jeannie was. What brought her to this moment?
Mooallem: So Jeannie was 37 years old at the time. You can hear a kind of a little bit of a Texas twang in her voice there. She’d come to Anchorage with her husband and three kids from Texas just after statehood in 1959. They were part of this wave of people who were just a lot from Texas, but from all over the country, who are just coming up to Alaska looking to it as a kind of promised land where there were going to be all these new economic opportunities for them and a chance to reinvent themselves. They’ve been struggling in Texas and when they got to Anchorage, it turned out they were still struggling. Her husband was a mediocre used car salesman and Jeannie was not the sort of person who was going to sit around and just watch her family struggle. She took upon herself to go find some work and she, after doing a number of things, talked her way into this job at a radio station to be a news reporter. And I think it’s important to understand at the time, especially in Anchorage, which was a fairly conservative place, to be a woman in broadcasting, generally meant you were going to host a show about cooking tips and recipes swaps and homemaking. And in fact she did that for, for a time, but she just had this incorrigible work ethic, and ambition to do very important things, and fashioned herself into this roving news reporter who would drive around in her car with a mobile radio unit, covering crime and government and the military bases or whatever was going on in Anchorage. She was really nosy. She just loved to be up in there, figuring out what was happening and telling the city about it.
Notarianni: Yeah, well in the opening hours of the disaster, you have this portrayal of Jeannie in the midst of chaos, just frantically receiving messages and dispersing messages. But at other times you write about how hard she was working to make people feel connected to one another. But this was something she was actively thinking about and actively trying to do when she was on the air. I wonder if you could tell me about the loneliness of disaster and the role that Jeannie’s broadcasts played in trying to help soothe that?
Mooallem: I think it’s frankly much easier thing to explain now than it might have been before the pandemic. So the earthquake happened on Good Friday, and it happened just before the sun was setting. So you have to imagine that here’s a community that all of a sudden it’s lost power. There’s no way to see anything, the radio stations were actually out for a while. There’s just no communications, no phones. And what you find in these accounts is these pretty chilling confessions by people saying, “I looked around my neighborhood and it was like, we’ve been hit by a bomb and I just thought, well, are we, do we have it the worst? Or is every place like this? Or maybe we’re the lucky ones.” Someone said he imagined he was the last man. That was how desolate things felt. So into this first hour after the quake, there was really no way to tell how bad it was, and what people were facing. And when the radio station was able to come back on the air, about 50 minutes after the quake, and Jeannie, who was really the only one at the station, because she just happened to be downtown when the quake hit, running an errand for her son. She was really the only one that had a lot of concrete firsthand information about what the city looked like. And I talked to a number of people who heard her broadcasts, especially in that first very earliest phase of the disaster who said she wasn’t telling us anything comforting. She wasn’t saying it’s going to be okay. She was telling us this building fell down, and there’s bodies over here, and very, very terrible things. But just the fact that someone was there talking to you, and giving you information about what had happened, it sort of allowed your reality to regather around these facts. And you could reorient yourself, and you could know that you were still here, you were still part of this community, even though they were fractured. And I think that’s just an invaluable thing, especially in those bewildering emergency phases.
Notarianni: Obviously you have this huge archive from Jeannie herself. There was also a group of sociologists that showed up, and they did a huge amount of studies on the ground. And I thought that these were fascinating characters and the assumptions that they went into this disaster area with, compared to what they found is really, really interesting too. They were funded by a grant to study for nuclear war preparation. So let’s just start there. What were they looking for and what did they end up finding on the ground?
Mooallem: So these were three sociologists at the Ohio State University who had just started this think tank called the Disaster Research Center. And the military approached them out of the blue. The conventional wisdom was that if a bomb is dropped, people are going to go crazy and they’re going to rob and beat each other up. And so they wanted to almost use these natural disasters as a laboratory to get at that problem and see what happened. And this was their first big trip to come to Anchorage, and study that supposed mayhem. And what they [found] at every turn, despite how hard they kept looking for chaos, was that people were generally behaving really well, working together in very collaborative and productive ways to keep each other safe and solve problems. And it really was the beginning of a field of sociology called Disaster Studies, that kind of upended all of those rumors, all of that mythology, what real human nature is and the darkness that supposedly unleashed by situations like this.
Notarianni: And one of the things that I thought was interesting in this is when they were asking people like, well why do you think, why do you think everything was peaceful? Why was there just this spirit of people getting together? And they all said, well, you know, it’s because we’re Alaskans. It’s because it’s what we do,it’s part of the identity of Alaska. Uh they uncovered some interesting things or maybe the course of the history of this research has uncovered some interesting things about that idea of we do this because this is a unique part of the character of these people. A sense of exceptionalism. What did you find about that sense of exceptionalism?
Mooallem: In short, that sense that your community is a-typical, is one of the most typical things about disasters. They would be told this again and again that it’s New Yorkers being New Yorkers or it’s New Orleanians being New Orleanians. And it’s basically because [we] are primed to expect a kind of breakdown of society, so that when it doesn’t happen, when the opposite happens, and people really work to hold things together, the assumption is, well, it just has to be something special about us. Because we’re rising above human nature, rather than just animating human nature.
Notarianni: I’m so curious through the lens of writing this book and living with these characters for so long and living through this last year of life. How does the process of writing this book, how has it changed how you’ve gone about dealing with everything that’s happened in 2020?
Mooallem: I think in some ways, I can’t say that it’s kept me from being surprised, because like everyone I’ve been bewildered for most of the year. But I worked on this book for six years, and it came out the week when big American cities were starting to lock down. I think I had internalized the idea that there’s an instability to life that we don’t often think about. And so in that sense, it almost felt like a familiar feeling that I lived through vicariously when some of these unthinkable things started happening. And then the other thing was, there’s a little bit in the book right after the quake happens when Jeannie is looking around. And I say it’s something that sociologist came to call normalcy bias where she’s looking around, she’s saying, well that that building lost some bricks, but everything else seems fine, and it’s just these observations rack up until she can’t possibly explain it away anymore, and she has to just accept that this is just a catastrophic event. I think it’s, as I see what’s going on in American society right now, some part of me feels like we’re just all trapped still. Or at least a lot of us are trapped in that phase where, because we’ve been encouraged to deny the seriousness of it in a lot of ways, that it almost hasn’t really sunk in what’s happening, and we’re still fighting against it.And that makes me really sad, it makes me sad that I wrote this book about a disaster through the three days after of a disaster where people really banded together and do right by each other, and we’re still like on page 20 of it, and we’ve been dealing with this since March. So that’s where I’m at.
Miller: That was the author Jon Mooallem talking to OPB’s John Notarianni about the book. This is Chance. Today we’re bringing you a series of conversations from last year’s Portland Book Festival. Next up, Aida Salazar. Salazar is an award-winning author and activist based in Oakland, California. Her second book is the middle-grade novel called “Land of the Cranes.” It tells the story of Betita, a 9-year-old Mexican American girl who lives in Los Angeles until she and her family begin to experience the brutality of the U.S. immigration system. She’s eventually separated from her father and is incarcerated with her mother in a family detention camp. OPB’s Jenn Chavez had Salazar describe her main character.
Aida Salazar: She has a very sweet outlook in life. She believes a myth that her father’s told her her entire life, and that is the reason that they migrated is because they’re trying to fulfil a prophecy and it is that the Aztecs emerged from a place called Aztlan, which has been translated to Land of the Cranes. And they left Aztlan to build a great city in the navel of the universe. And then one day they were to return to Aztlan to live among the cranes. So she believes she’s a bird, she’s a dreamer. She’s undocumented as was I as a child. I was brought over when I was nine months old. And the parallels are, that’s pretty much where they end, because of course I’ve never been in detention. But I do know what it’s like to live in the shadows. I do know what it’s like to be a child and not understand whether or not you’re legal, whether or not you belong in this country. And I know what it’s like to fear deportation, La Migra. Betita uses her poetry as a way to rise above her confusion, as a way to show her feelings
Jenn Chavez: To Betita, her identity as a crane is very important to her and her membership in a community of cranes. How does that metaphor about the cranes and Aztlan allow you to talk about or think about borders specifically?
Salazar: Well, if we think about how the entire globe was populated, it was through migration. And if we look outside of humans, which are not too different than any other animal or species on the planet, they migrate for well-being, for safety, for shelter, for food, and humans are not unlike that. And when animals migrate, they don’t know physical borders. It’s humans who have drawn the lines in the sand, who have erected walls, who have created these boundaries to keep others out.
Chavez: When you were writing this, what were your thoughts about the way adults talk to children, about the way they prepare them for things that might happen, how children deserve to be trusted to know things that might be scary?
Salazar: Part of this was written because I really felt a moral imperative to be able to discuss a very difficult situation and circumstances with children. So many children experience this and beyond these kinds of cruelty and there is no avenue, there is no way to discuss it. And I wanted to unpack it for readers, for young readers in particular. And I wanted to make sure that they could receive that information in language that was appropriate to them. And because I’m a poet, I felt like there was no better way than to deliver it through metaphor and through imagery and figurative language. And so children, I think, are experiencing it. Many of them now, especially during the pandemic, are so attached to screens. So that information is coming in, but there’s no mediation, there’s no way to address it. And I really wanted to create that in this story.
Chavez: And like you said, the story is written in poetry and it’s also told by a young poet. And throughout the book, Betita writes what she calls crane poems, short poems and she draws illustrations along. They’re a constant throughout the book, and they really become very powerful for her and the people around her. What is the power of poetry in this story? And not just telling the story, but to the people in the story?
Salazar: I wanted to teach children agency, that if this young character Betita, nine years old, can be inside a detention center, exposed to unspeakable cruelty, and is able to access poetry, and the imagination, an expression, self-expression in her darkest hour, then you can too. In some ways, I wanted my book to be a roadmap for young people, to give them the power to also use the arts as a means for liberation.
Chavez: Why do you think it’s important for your young readers to experience a dark place like this, a detention center through the eyes through the experience of someone who is their age?
Salazar: I guess the short answer is just because it’s happening, and because I can’t look away and I don’t want others to look away, because I have faith in children, and they are inheriting a disaster. And I want them to begin to think about ways to help us out of this mess.
Chavez: I wonder what you would say to readers of your book who are latinex children or from immigrant communities of any origin.What would you hope that they take away from this?
Salazar: One is that they matter. That their lives [matter], though they are dismissed and marginalized in the larger world on tv, in the news, in their schools and their languages. You know, we do live in the margins and we are dismissed. But they do matter. Children do matter, latinex children do matter. There’s this Mexican saying that says, ‘they tried to bury us but they didn’t know we were seeds’, and I really feel like the children are that. I hope that they see Land of the Cranes as a road map and that they find the courage within themselves to make the world a better place.
Miller: Aida Salazar is the author of “Land of Cranes.” She was speaking with OPB’s
Jenn Chavez. We will have more from last year’s Portland Book Festival after a break.
Miller: Shayla Lawson is a poet and essayist. Her most recent book is called “This is Major.” It’s a collection of essays on the Black American experience, specifically through the eyes of a Black woman. Lawson spoke with OPB’s Tiffany Camhi as part of last year’s Portland Book Festival put on by Literary Arts.
Tiffany Camhi: So, when you set out to write this, you wanted to center Black women but this book is very personal and you do also a lot of historical research. I learned a lot of new things about Diana Ross, Nina Simone. You talk about the origin of the word hipster. How did you go about decentering whiteness as you were writing and researching this book?
Shayla Lawson: That’s a good question. It took a lot of work for me because one of the things that I had to recognize is how, even in reading a lot of BIPOC lit, it’s still an issue. The ways that our stories are told, who our stories are told by, still tends to center a misogynistic and patriarchal view of the ways that we interact with each other, even sometimes things that are written by women, because none of us are removed from these spaces. So I had to spend a lot of time listening to who these women were. I used a lot of archival information as opposed to biographies, a lot of interviews as well. In some cases I had to kind of read through the text of what was happening in an interview. I found this really short interview that was supposed to go in Seventeen Magazine with Nina Simone. And in the notes, the interviewer had talked about how hostile Nina Simone was and how the angles of her face were alternately homely or good looking. If I’d just allowed myself to accept the perspective that this reviewer was approaching Nina Simone from, I would have been writing a different text. The librarian and I [laughs] got really invested in just trying to figure out what happened. Because the interview was never printed, it was never published, it was never finished. I had gone to the Schomburg [Center for Research in Black Culture] in New York to read letters between Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin and Nina Simone and Toni Morrison, all these different people who had been in conversation with each other in different lengths. And I realized that the day that Lorraine Hansberry died was the day that they were doing the interview, the Seventeen Magazine interview. And just thinking, in the midst of being terrorized by this interviewer who has this very particular inclination of you being a difficult and hostile person, to get a phone call to find out that one of your best friends was gone. Those are the kinds of things that I wanted to figure out how to pay honor to, was not just these achievements that we associate with certain historical women but also who they were and what their personal lives looked like. I love that Ntozake Shange’s archives at Barnard actually included documents from times when she had heavily been in debt, especially coming off of her cancer. And I just thought how -- there’s part of me, at first I was like, how embarrassing -- but then there’s another part of me that was like, how open, how amazing that she actually shared. Because so often with writers, we hide how poor we are, like how hard it is. You get this level of ubiquity as a writer, journalist, some social media critic where people think that translates into money and often it doesn’t. And there were whole dinners that Ntozake Shange had paid for for people -- because of having that career of being in front of people -- that she couldn’t afford. And so that was really moving to me. I definitely wanted us to know that these women were human. These stories are very human. And I wanted to share very human stories about how I approached myself as well. I don’t need to be a hero in this book or somebody that’s impervious to pain, as Ntozake Shange puts it. I needed to be somebody that people felt was real. Because I get tired of not being able to be ordinary.. always having to be somebody extraordinary, somebody who can get over all of these things and is better than all of these things. I’m like, “No, sometimes I want to be just as plain and as simple and as petty as everybody else.” [Laughs]
Camhi: So I just want to say, as a fellow BIPOC person, there are a lot of experiences you write about that I kind of share with you. But it’s not exactly the same; I’m Filipino American, you’re Black American. I am clearly brown skinned. I also grew up in Indiana and you grew up in Kentucky, not far from where I grew up. This part of the US is pretty racist. And in the introduction and in the essay “For Colored Girls,” you write about coming of age in Kentucky. So how was it for you revisiting this time of your life?
Lawson: I tend to have a rule for myself that I kind of give things at least seven years to germinate before I put them out in the world. I need to have had some relationship to recovering from them or processing them before I turn them into stories that I can share with people and figure out ways to extract and manipulate the details to turn them into something that’s narrative and just not something this personal experience. So by the time I started writing about Kentucky, because this book is really the first place that I have very explicitly written about my experiences in Kentucky, I haven’t lived there in probably 15 years at this point. Unfortunately that’s mostly by design because I was treated so poorly while I was there that I didn’t have much motivation to go back. Additionally it’s very difficult for BIPOC people to keep jobs in Kentucky. So during the time that I wanted to stay, it was impossible for me to find employment that would necessitate me staying there or could keep me there. So it was actually delightful to get to claim my Kentucky identity. Because I spent a lot of time, especially living in Kentucky, with people asking me where I was from. And when I would tell them that I grew up right here in Lexington, [they’d say], “No you’re not! You’re from somewhere else.” I’m like, “No, I’m not.” [Laughing] “This is literally what I know.” So to hear somebody else’s story about me for that long and to finally be able to tell my own and to identify Lexington as a place that I come out of, to identify Kentucky as a place that I come out of and really rep that, felt good.
Camhi: Portland is a reoccurring character in your essays. And this is the city where you held what reads like some soul sucking jobs where you were regularly gaslit by your white coworkers. I want to ask you what that experience was like for you. But I would also like you to just read a passage from [your book] -- it’s about Portland -- and [share] your thoughts on it. Do you mind reading that?
Lawson: “There is absolutely nothing more important to the liberal residents of my gentrified neighborhood, one littered with Black Lives Matter signs, than to protect their sense of feeling ‘not racist,’ despite their inhospitable prejudices against our presence. In this, Portland is not alone. Cities across America are carving liberal, predominantly white, enclaves out of what used to be socially and culturally mixed, or predominantly Black, neighborhoods in nearly every state. But I question Portland’s loyalty to the cause of Black Lives Matter. When I consider my time living and working in Portland, I remember two situations in which the only responsible thing for me to do was to speak up at the discrimination against, and erasure of, Black people. In both cases, I was met with a clear assertion from the so-called liberal residents of this white utopia that it would be better if I found a new place to go. To work. To live. I lived there for three years. I moved, both jobs and houses, so many times. So often, as I cleared my desk or stuffed my belongings into the back of my car, transporting myself to another part of the city -- from education to advertising, from the suburbs to downtown -- I wanted to ask them: if the history of Black lives in America, in our own neighborhoods, does not matter ... what does?”
Camhi: Thank you. That just reminds me, and you write about this, that Portland and Oregon is racist in a different way than it is in the South, like where you grew up. And I feel like people are, I don’t know, it’s like a backhanded racism [in the South ?], or like they’re really nice about it. But here it’s more like, I don’t know, there’s something like there’s an undercurrent of evilness and I think it’s because Oregon was blatantly founded on racism. And I’m wondering, did you know that before you moved here?
Lawson: I moved to Portland after living in Indiana. And I have lived in the Netherlands. I lived in Italy. I’ve lived in Kentucky. I’ve lived in New York. I’ve lived a lot of places, so having a place say explicitly that they were founded to be a white utopia didn’t necessarily intimidate me because, have I lived in any place that was centered around my safety or my comfort? No. But it was very, very different for me to understand what that meant on a deeply kinetic and psychic level when it comes to actually experiencing that in Portland. So, if I had to compare my journey from Indiana and the South and, also, I’ve taught in the Deep South before. I’ve taught for Mississippi University for Women, so I’ve spent some time down there. The racism, well there’s a relationship to civility that the South is really attached to, this way of being mannered and showing a little bit of culture, that’s not just for show. There is kind of a deep sense of, being hospitable is important. But Southern racism was very much me knowing I was never going to be able to find a job as an architect in my hometown -- and everyone else also knowing -- no matter how many interviews that I went on. And then, Southern racism was also growing up and being called the n-word. Me and my friends often talk about what is the experience that we remember. Whether my friends are from Maryland or Tennessee or Kentucky, Alabama; we all have that memory of having that particular experience. The problem with Oregon racism is that people are attracted to it as a place, as a way to hierarchically establish that they’re above the rest of the country. So that’s the way that they think of themselves in the culture. They think of themselves as being more literate. They think of themselves as being more culturally aware, more privileged. And more privileged in a way that incites this white saviorism where they believe that they need to espouse this gospel of the way that they’re living to other people because the poor Midwest, the poor South, the poor everybody else who doesn’t know that there is an elevated way in order to handle these issues. But the problem is the minute that you raise your hand and you say, “Hey, I’m from these places that you call out and what you’re doing is actually worse.” their implicit response is to destroy you. And I think that that is markedly different than what goes on in the South at this point.
Camhi: Yes, at least in the South they’ll claim their racism. [Laughs] But here, if you have a Black Lives Matter sign, it’s fine. You’re not racist.
[Laughter]
Lawson: Everywhere. You’re not racist. The thing about the South is their idea is very much, we’re going to cut off your advancement at the root. [Laughs] There’s just not going to be any place for you to go, past a certain level. You have this very clear relationship to a glass ceiling. In Portland, what’s insidious is they keep inviting people of color in. They keep asking us to come as a way to replace the Black, Asian, Indigenous, Latinx communities that they have destroyed -- that they have historically destroyed -- with demarcations for boundaries of where we could live, with Vanport being an actual flood that was allowed to happen to leave a large percentage of, not just Black, but also poor white people and other pockets of people of color homeless. There are very targeted things. One of things that I mention in the book is, in the 1920s, I believe, the mayor and all of the elected officials of Portland taking a picture with the Ku Klux Klan. And that being printed in the Oregonian as, “mystical organization has things to tell Portland leaders about how to handle its color problem, it’s negro problem.” Those things are very recent history. And Portland still has this ability to have a very short memory. The South has a very deep memory. And I think that’s one of the things that makes it a little bit more, at least from a psychological level, habitable. Portland’s way of managing its history is toxic. Because it believes that something could have happened, for instance, what is going to be our relationship a year from now, two years from now, to the protesting? How historically are we going to manage that? And how quickly is Portland going to also sweep that under the rug as something that, “we were all on the side of the protesters, none of us were gassing people.” And that’s the thing that’s why I refer to it as being so insidious. It’s because it’s a devious attention to maintaining a liberal veneer in order to allow white people to feel that they are good. And that is what white supremacy has always been based on, is this idea of, not just the idea of being better, but good as a relationship to whiteness as a spiritual calling, that it can do no wrong. And that if we alienate ourselves from the white people who are supposedly uneducated and the pudunk hoohas who live in other regions, then we can show that we have a version of whiteness that works. And there is no version of whiteness that works; there’s no version of white supremacy that can be sustained. Especially considering the marked ways in which people of color are outgrowing the population of white people in the US. I mean, right now, people the age of 15 in this country are predominantly BIPOC at this point. And so we are going to see a cultural shift in this country that Portland is one of the last white supremacist strongholds. And we don’t talk about it that way, but we need to. Because they’re continuing to try and figure out ways to promote it as liberal, to promote it as open, to promote it as something that we can use as a prototypical model for a different kind of liberal city that we can export when in fact it’s doing more damage to what it’s like to be a person of color. Especially a person of color who is trying to move up into the different echelons of what work life looks like. It’s doing more damage, to that as a possibility for us, than good.
Camhi: Could you see yourself coming back here? I think you’re in Brooklyn now? In New York?
Lawson: Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah. I could see me coming back there to do some kind of project but I would never live in Portland again, now. I think it’s a great opportunity and I see why a lot of BIPOC people are moving out there because I was definitely part of that herd. But we need these societies to die off and the more of us that keep propping them up by presenting them the opportunity to say, “See this is working for this one person of color, so obviously the problem is you.” But a lot of people that I know, a lot of the BIPOC people that I know that come to Portland, three to five years is the max that they can manage before it starts to do actual psychological damage to them.
Camhi: Okay, cool. Well, I’m at six months so I’ll check in with you.
[Laughter]
Lawson: Good luck. Yeah. [Laughing] Check in with me at any time. I love hearing from people who are really struggling with Portland. Because I think it’s important to talk about and sometimes we don’t feel like we can because we get like our dream job or we get this lovely opportunity to live next to beautiful parks and bookstores and great food and awesome yoga classes and all these things that, especially as BIPOC people, we’ve been told we couldn’t have in our communities, that we couldn’t have communities where we had all these things. But we end up sacrificing a lot, in terms of the ways that we look at ourselves, in terms of the ways that we look at the availability of community and it can be very lonely and very divisive. But [laughs] I feel like I’m not really saying anything new because if we look at what happened in Portland this summer, that doesn’t happen to a place that’s healthy. That doesn’t happen to a place that has a really strong relationship with cultural integration. And, if we notice we have not seen those kinds of things happen in the South, irrespective of the fact that it is still a bastion for racism. But yeah, it’s a different thing. And we need to look at it; we need to look at it for what it is. It’s not an anomaly that the biggest protest issues that we had in this country were in Portland.
Camhi: Okay, well thank you for that quick little therapy session. [It] helped me. I’m not sure about anyone in the audience.. [Laughs]
[Laughter]
Lawson: I hope so. Hope it helped someone. [Laughing]
[Laughter]
Camhi: But let’s get back to your book and your essay on Diana Ross. You write that part of the reason that she still is successful is that she accepts herself. I’m wondering, are you at that point now in your life? And, if so, can you tell us all how you got there?
Lawson: [Laughs] I’m working on it. I think Diana Ross is a beautiful model of that and I love watching her interviews and listening to her talk and, especially as a woman and as a woman of color, slanting the dialogue around hurt[?]. Because that whole diva idea of being self involved, I think doesn’t do women very much good. It’s often an act of self preservation for us to love ourselves. So I’m working on it. I’m doing a lot of.. I find meditation really helpful. So that’s one of the places that I go the most is to try and go into my brain. I think the best advice I have gotten recently, especially coming off of the book, is talking to my younger self kindly. When I hear my younger self -- because that’s where a lot of my self doubt is -- say, “You’re no good, you’re going to fail, nobody is going to like what you do, nobody likes you”; going in and specifically sitting her down and talking to her and be like, “Hey, I know that you say these things because at some point they were protecting you. But you don’t have to do that anymore because I grew up and I’m here to look after you.” That actually brings a lot of joy to me, a lot of joy to my heart.
Dave Miller: Shayla Lawson is a poet and essayist. Her latest book is called “This is Major.” She spoke with OPB’s Tiffany Camhi as part of last year’s Portland Book Festival, put on by Literary Arts.
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