writing – Page 126 – The PBS Blog

Beyond The Colored Line – Part 1

Today is the debut release of Part 1 of Book #2, “Beyond The Colored Line” in the Stella Series.Below is a reminder of what this book series is all about:

Stella is a work of Historical fiction, and is distinctive in its focus on one woman’s road to self-discovery against the backdrop of the African American fight for justice, racial equality, and freedom. The 3-Part series focuses on the history of one family in their struggle for racial identity. Discover in this Trilogy how 3 individuals living in separate time periods strive to overcome the same struggle, carefully knit together by one blood.

Log-Line for Book 2:

“Determined to be accepted by society, a black woman desperately seeks to hide her true identity when a prevailing conversation with her aunt provokes her to pass for white.”

Find out in this Stella Sequel what’s truly Beyond The Colored Line.

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Disclaimer: The following post is excerpted from a book written by Yecheilyah Ysrayl and is property of Yecheilyah Ysrayl. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stolen. Permission is only given to re-blog, social media sharing for promotional purposes and the case of brief quotations embodied in the critical articles and reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by Yecheilyah Ysrayl.

Part 1
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September 4, 1923

“You’s white.”

Margaret and Josephine had their hands on their hips again, Josephine taking the lead role as always. The soft wind swayed the handmade dress in all directions, hovering well below her long skinny legs. Her hair was pulled up into a collage of pony tails with twists that never really wanted to stay together. Stella got lost for a minute, slightly envious. She wished her hair was that thick. But instead she was given a sandy blonde that could never keep a braid. School had just started at Crestwood Elementary of Belvedere City, just south of Boone County, Illinois. And already Stella could see this would not be a good year, same as the others.

“I’m not white; I’m Negro, same as you,” said Stella.

Josephine rolled her eyes, “You look white. You sound white. I thinks you white.”

The girls laughed. Meanwhile, Stella’s blood boiled, the blush of anger showing quickly in the space of her cheeks and around her ears.

“You’s white cause we say you’s white,” said Margaret.

“That’s right,” co-signed Josephine, “What kind of name is Stella anyway? What you some kinda slave?”

“Naw,” said Margaret, “she ain’t no slave, naw, she massa.”

Josephine turned her head slightly, laughing hysterically in Margaret’s ear, who saw it coming out the side of her eye.

“Josephine!” yelled Margaret. But it was too late. Stella was already on top of Josephine, pulling at her neatly pressed hair and slamming her face into the dirt. Stella could hear the screams of the teachers nearby calling her name, but she just couldn’t stop.

“I’m not white! I’m not white! I’m the same as you!” Stella yelled.

Josephine was crying now, as Margaret tried to peel Stella off of her.

“I’m Negro the same as you!” she yelled.

Later That Day

Judith stood by the door tapping her feet impatiently against the hardwood, and burning a hole in the back of Stella’s head, who sat silently on the sofa with her head down.

“You’re going to have to learn to control yourself Stella.”

“But ma–“

“Did I ask you to say a word?” scolded Judith, answering the door at the same time. Expecting her guest, she opened the door before the bell rang and gracefully let in Mrs. Velma Conner, Stella’s teacher.

“Good afternoon”, said Judith. “I’d like to apologize again for what happened today. May I offer you some coffee?”

“Never mind that,” said Velma. “I don’t specs to be here long.”

“Well let me offer you to a seat then,” said Judith.

Judith sat beside Stella as Velma took the sofa across from them and cleared her throat.

“Stella seems to be having a very difficult time adjusting. Her temper is far too easily tickled, if you catch my meaning.”

“I do,” said Judith.

“We think perhaps she would be better off in a more comfortable environment, somewhere more of her liking, if you catch my meaning,” said Velma.

Judith straightened and looked Velma in her sparkling blue eyes, “Not exactly.”

“Well, Ms. May, the accusations from some of the children are hard to ignore.”

“What accusations?” Judith interrupted.

“Well, you know, children will be children,” Velma laughed slightly. “It’s just that they don’t take very well with our kind. Surely you’d prefer for Stella–.”

“Our kind?” Judith interrupted again.

“Why yes,” said Velma, shaking her head.

“You don’t have to say anything more, Mrs. Conner.”

Judith stood up, smoothed the apron hanging from her waist and approached the door.”

“Stella May?”

“Yes mama?”

“Go on upstairs so me and your teacher can talk.”

“Yes ma’am,” said Stella, hurrying off upstairs.

Velma remained seated, “Is there a problem?”

Judith smiled, “No, there’s no problem. But I do want you to leave my house.”

Velma stood, pointed her nose into the air and walked toward the door, clearly offended.

“By the way, the school has placed Stella under suspension, you understand why.”

“Oh, I do,” said Judith. “You see, defending ourselves, is what we’re taught.”

An expression of confusion spread across Velma’s face as she stared into the green eyes of the white woman in front of her, disgusted that she would stoop so low as to lay with one of them.

“What we’re taught? I’m not sure I’m following you,” said Velma.

“Oh yes,” said Judith, “It’s one of the first things my Negro father taught me, you know, our kind I guess.”

The pink rushed to the woman’s nose as she hurried out the door.

And that’s how things had been for us growing up. I couldn’t understand what made mama so strong. She loved daddy with every bone in her body, but they couldn’t be together. Society would never have of it. Mama was Negro sure enough as she was white, but Papa didn’t trust it. I thought about Papa that day and all the other days like it as I stood at the top of the stairs and watched as my mother waved goodbye to my racist teacher, with a smile on her face.

– Stella May

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I really hope you enjoyed the first part of my book! The fun continues with Part 2 next Thursday. If your enjoying yourself so far, would you mind sharing this on your social networks? Thanks a lot! Also be sure to come back for the continuation next week. And that’s not all, for your convenience, I’ve provided the link to the prologue to Book #1. I love writing and learning and sharing what I’ve learned and I’m really excited to be sharing this journey with you.

Prologue to Book #1

Writing Poetry

So I was thinking about poetry a lot this week. I’m in the midst of this like wondering moment if you will; a pondering of thoughts concerning poetry. I noticed that the inspiration I have to write poetry is different than the inspiration to write in general. It’s not like just sitting down and just writing but more like a wanting to express myself in a deeper way I suppose. To be more detailed, and filled with expression. For me writing poetry specifically cannot be forced. I don’t know if I could be asked and then write on the spot. It doesn’t come to me that way. For me it has to flow naturally, almost like breathing, it has to be inside of me and then I can let the words exhale from within me. Not to just write but to do so creatively, metaphorically, symbolically, lyrically. When I started writing poetry it was for reasons many start to write. I wrote what I could not speak, and what I could not speak I wrote down. Finding compassion and solace in the spaces between the words. And often going back to read what I felt and to see if I could still relate to those feelings or if I’d grown some.

Does the writing of poetry for you involve a similar process as writing in general or is there a different method involved?

Words Are Worth It

Corroded behavior reveals the unpolished stains left dangling from the heart
Brimming from the mind and falling from the mouth
A surge of power tap dancing in the air and building meaning on the ground
A melting pot of consonant sounds and vowels finding way to my skin
Seeking to build homes in the goosebumps on my arms
Making noise
Unnecessary sounds like the mimic of my own voice
But you do not live here
Have not walked on top the coals that once found residence between my toes
to know what this ground taste like
a skin black leather like strength
I was not born among glass
and will not break easily
I doubt then that this impression will go successful
Sneaky words
Empty tongues
Idle existence
a reverberation of shame creaking against emotion is your birthplace
dare you seek to give of me a world of illusion
a day dream of fairy-tale hopscotching around in my mouth
an elusive sleep walk
a collection of letters too light to gravity the ground
too corroded to fly
bouncing off the walls of thought
dare you pretend the taste of burnt ash that fell from mouth and consumed a life
did not first have a home in heart
all these bodies collecting black and bruise
bruise and black
and bone and stitch
I am no fool
Dear Words
I choose to choose you carefully
To examine your wings before deciding that they should take flight
To taste your essence one syllable at a time
Seasoning as needed
You see words,
I’m on to you
I know how powerful you really are.

Guest Feature – Top Five Reasons You Should Be Reading Poetry

by Nickole Brown

(Found this on BookPage, excellent piece on Poetry)

5. Because it’s unnecessary.

Yes, unnecessary, absolutely so, but only in the way that beauty and truth are unnecessary. Like an elegant armful of cut tulips brought home dripping from the store among all your pragmatic sundries, like my grandmother’s false lashes glued on every morning to her come-sit-your-handsome-ass-down-here wink, like that baked-bread smell of a newborn’s crown.

Poetry may bear witness, but it is rarely the hardy mule carrying news or facts. No, its burden is unquantifiable, and similar to a penny tossed into a fountain, its worth is in the wishing. As William Carlos William wrote, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Put another way, C.S. Lewis said, “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. . . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

4. Because it’s a throat full of word music.

For the poet Patricia Smith, the word was anemone. She was nine years old when her fourth-grade teacher asked her to pronounce it. She writes that she “took a stab and caught it, and / and that one word was uncanny butter on my new tongue.” For the poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, she loves it when plethora, indolence, damask, or lasciviousness work, in her words, “to stain my tongue, / thicken my saliva.” For me, some days, it’s the word fricative. Other days, it’s ardor, aubade, hydrangea; I’ve held each of those words like a private little bubble of air popping around inside my mouth. Donald Hall calls this “milktongue” and names it as the “deep and primitive pleasure of vowels in the mouth, of assonance and of holds on adjacent long vowels; of consonance, mmmm, and alliteration.”

3. Because it fosters community.

Robert Pinsky knew this when he started the Favorite Poem Project when he was U.S. Poet Laureate—people love to share poems that speak to them. And not just poets, either, but postal workers and dental technicians and racecar enthusiasts, too. Almost everyone carries a poem with them, even if only a scratch of a line or two deep in memory, and reading poetry can place you squarely in the chorus of people hungry to share those lines. Consider, for example, a casual late-night post I made on Facebook last February, making a request of the Internet for poems of joy and happiness. Within hours, over sixty comments magically arrived in my feed, recommending poem after poem. . . poems by Naomi Shihab Nye and William Loran Smith and Robert Hass, among many others. I read them all, and suddenly, I was much less alone; my dreary winter was flooded bright.

2. Because it welcomes what’s inexpressible.

I’ll confess: it was fiction I studied in graduate school. But when I finished my program, I found the cohesiveness required of a novel to be false and hardly conducive to the fragmented, often discontinuous memories I carried. When I wrote my first book, Sister, I needed the white space between poems to hold the silence between the remaining shards of my childhood. With Fanny Says, I needed a form that would allow me to mosaic together a portrait of my grandmother with only the miscellaneous bits of truth I had without having to fudge the connective tissue between them. You see, poetry doesn’t demand explanations. In fact, most poems avoid them, often reaching for questions over answers. Now, this doesn’t mean poetry is necessarily difficult to understand, no. It means that it simply makes room for things that are difficult to understand. John Keats called this negative capability, as poetry is “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” To me, this acceptance of what cannot be explained is one of the best reasons to read poetry.

1. Because it calls for a life of awareness.

People often assume poetry exists in the realm of thought, lost in philosophical inquiry and romantic meanderings. And most early attempts at writing poetry fail because of this, or worse, because beginning writers travel those easy, hard-wired paths in the brain geared towards survival, which are inundated with years of advertisements, televised plots, and habitual speech. But poetry demands awareness, a raw, muscular devotion to paying attention. You have to live in your body, you have to listen hard to the quiet ticking of both your life and those around you. Like an anthropologist, you have to take down good notes. Poems require a writer to write from all the senses. As Eudora Welty said, “Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way, all over again.” To me, poetry can make even the most quotidian of things—a tomato on the counter, a housefly batting against the window, your bent reflection in a steel mixing bowl—something extraordinary. Poetry notices things. It scrubs your life free of clichés and easy answers, and the best poems make everyday life strange and new. Poetry requires you to be awake to write it, and reading effective poetry is a second kind of awakening.

The Stella Trilogy – An update

As many of you know, I have a few projects that I am putting out this year. One of them is The Stella Trilogy. It began years ago when I was helping a student with a creative writing assignment. I am not sure what it was exactly, but it had to do with descriptive writing. To make a very long story short, I wrote the first scene to Book #1 which was at the time not a book at all. It wasn’t until years later, after the paper had collected enough dust on my computer, that I realized how much I adored the layout of the scene and how I wanted to make it better. I wanted to expand it and to add to it. But what I enjoyed most about it was how short it was. I noticed then how writing the short had made me so content. It was basic, sweet, and engaging. I decided then that I would try my hand at writing short stories, and The Stella Trilogy was born.

As I prepare to send Book #2 in for editing, I would like to share some of it (unedited) with you. Because of the length of this series, it is broken down into Parts instead of Chapters. And I intend to release the first 4 Parts to Book #2 right here on The PBS blog. As I do so, I would love your feedback. 🙂

About Stella:

The Book:

The Character:

Just barely two generations from slavery, Stella is the daughter of Judith May. Mother and daughter share the blood of a black woman and her white slave owner. Unable to cope with the teasing and bullying from both the white and black kids, Stella struggles with identity and a place to belong. She does not feel she can find her rightful place among the blacks and neither among the whites. That is except on Saturdays. Stella loves Saturdays! Where her and mother take occasional walks on the town and enjoy all of the privileges that come with a light skin tone. Eventually, after a discussion with her Aunt persuades her to pass, Stella decides to live her life as Sidney McNair, a white woman. But living Saturdays isn’t as easy as visiting them.

I’m giving these parts away for free because one of the things I enjoy about blogging is the direct feedback at our fingertips. So before I publish this second part, I would like to broaden my platform and make it easier to connect with my readers. I am scheduling the post now and the first Part to Book #2 will post next Thursday, April 16, 2015. I will then proceed with the following Parts over the next 3 weeks:

Beyond The Colored Line:

Part #1: 4/16/2015
Part #2: 4/23/2015
Part #3: 4/30/2015
Part #4: 5/7/2015

“That’s the story of my life: Was I white? Was I Negro? Race wars always concerned these two groups of people, and there ain’t seemed to be much place for a mulatto” – Stella May

Writer’s Quote Wednesday – Derek Walcott

Today’s quote for Writer’s Quote Wednesday is from Poet and Playwright Derek Walcott:

“… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element….” – Derek Walcott

I think this is such a great motivational quote for writers. It has a way about it that can be explained in much more detail than what I can give but in short, it reminds me of the living attribute of words. Just the power of words and how breathing language is. I think that when we seek to create vision for the reader it’s much more than the language aspect in the literal form. It is not merely collaborating strings of words together for English sake, but it is feeling. Experiencing the moment and then putting that moment into words. Personally, I think some of my best writing has occurred during times where I did not purposely set out to write, but the language itself was so moving, and so feeling, that I simply had to.

About the Author (from Poets.org)

“The recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, Derek Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, the West Indies, on January 23, 1930. His first published poem, “1944” appeared in The Voice of St. Lucia when he was fourteen years old, and consisted of 44 lines of blank verse. By the age of nineteen, Walcott had self published two volumes, 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949), exhibiting a wide range of influences, including William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.

He later attended the University of the West Indies, having received a Colonial Development and Welfare scholarship, and in 1951 published the volume Poems.

The founder of the Trinidad Theater Workshop, Walcott has also written several plays produced throughout the United States, The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1992); The Isle is Full of Noises (1982); Remembrance and Pantomime (1980); The Joker of Seville and O Babylon! (1978); Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970); Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; and A Branch of the Blue Nile (1969). His play Dream on Monkey Mountain won the Obie Award for distinguished foreign play of 1971. He founded Boston Playwrights’ Theater at Boston University in 1981.

About his work, the poet Joseph Brodsky said, “For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or ‘a world’; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.”

He currently divides his time between his home in St. Lucia and New York City.

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And that’s it for Writer’s Quote Wednesday!

Don’t forget to check out Colleen on Silver Threading to see how you can join the fun.

http://silverthreading.com/category/writers-quote-wednesday/

The Body Language of Writing

I love simplicity, what a lovely analogy.

*Don’t Forget: I’m doing free #Book #Reviews from now until whenever. If you would like me to review your book for free, send me an email at ahouseofpoetry@gmail.com for details.*

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