April

Hello!

It is May, and I am at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, midway through a monthlong writer’s residency. And it is time to talk about April!

I have been thinking, appropriately enough, about art and the process of making art, or really, about the conditions in which the unfettered imagination can most abundantly flourish. Flourishing I think can be related to haunting, in that they are both phenomena that may happen in the absence of the rational, and thus can be hard to direct or control.

For example, a break of eucalyptus planted to shield the Headlands barracks from the wind (and enemies) in 1908 are today so enmeshed and prolific (flourishing!) in the area that, though eucalyptus are basically very tall molotov cocktails, they simply cannot be removed. Likewise, if you make yourself available to be taken for a ride (riding the horse, riding the head, being hag-ridden) by staying at the Headlands (definitely haunted), you should at the very least be prepared to end up somewhere very different—dimensionally, mentally, physically, ecologically and spiritually—from where you began.

Similar to eucalyptus, yarrow, poison hemlock, fennel, and ghosts, what flourishes can be good or bad, it all really depends on the context. This is all to say that I am flourishing here at Headlands, perhaps because I am unusually receptive to whatever (ghosts, hags, heads, or horses) might flourish within me.

Here is what haunted me in April:

Short Story

It is so hard to choose only one of Henry Dumas’s stories from his recently re-released collection, Echo Tree (gathering three shorter published works, Ark of Bones, Rope of Wind, and The Metagenesis of Sun Ra under one roof). Look, I know I already talked about Dumas a couple of months ago. But it is too bad, because to be haunted by Dumas is to be haunted by hope and tenderness and the poetics of black spiritual life, and I won’t say no to that.

Dumas wrote strange, gothic, (black) utopian, afro-futurist stories long before these genres had names. He was writing strong sentences with weird and troubled black characters who had beautiful friendships with each other, who loved each other, and who loved their people. His geographic and topical range! He was writing intimately about the citified North and the rural South, about the boy scouts and civil rights and the Islamic Brotherhood and white vigilantes and the spirit that moves beneath the world. He is Jean Toomer but sci-fi. He is so good it makes you want to cry.

“Prayer is for people who want help,” says Fon.

A torch is pushed near Fon’s feet.

“Where’s your goddamn brother now?”

Fon does not answer right away, but seems to watch the flickering of the shadows from the torches. High in the heavens now, a star comes into view from the clouds. A thin glow from a hidden moon peeps ominously from a horizon of clouds.

“My brother is in the trees somewhere, now.” —“Fon”

Books

A three-for: Jubilee by Margaret Walker, Palmares by Gayl Jones (again), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman.

I know no one has time to read these books, but if you do, read these three together, going back and forth between chapters to finish them all around the same time. The crazy-quilt perspective of North American (Jubilee) and South American (Palmares) slavery and the post-emancipation struggle for black women’s autonomy (Wayward Lives) told through these two novels and piece of theory and “critical fabulation” is certainly mind-expanding and eye-opening. They each prove the other in their search to make meaning and intimacy from the anonymization and dehistoricization of the lives of the poor, the oppressed, the brutalized.

“Without a name, there is the risk that she [the young black girl posing nude in Thomas Eakins African American girl nude, reclining on couch] might never escape the oblivion that is the fate of minor lives and be condemned to the pose for the rest of her existence, remaining a meager figure appended to the story of a great man and relegated to item number 304, African American girl, in the survey of his life and work.” —Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Very Long Series

I am more than halfway done with Stephen King’s epic Western/Fantasy The Dark Tower series, which he began writing in the early 1980s and completed in the early 2000s. It is seven full books + one standalone novel, and multiple thousands of pages. I am currently within The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla. So far, my favorite has been The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, which at almost 900 pages, was a chunky yet extremely enjoyable immersion into the world of Roland Deschain as a young gunslinger of Mid-World, his friends Alain and Cuthbert, his love Susan Delgado, and Rhea the Witch of Coös. The best thing about this series is that it really does contain much of the King Metaverse and the origins of some of the greatest myths of his worlds (the Turtle, Randall Flagg, the deadlights).

I’ll stop here because I have nothing very interesting to say, other than that one of the best things in life is to read a very, very, very fun and long series of books. Don’t forget to read books that are very fun!

Tree

The tree of April absolutely goes to a half-broken tree which lives at the Headlands, and strikes me full of absolute terror when I pass by. I am not convinced that I am not calling down the wrath of its ancient spirits upon my head by sharing about it so publicly; but I like to think I am paying my respect by acknowledging its fierce and ghastly presence. It appears in one of the stories I wrote while I've been here (“Urim and Thummim," shoutout to the Bible!) as The Preacher. I was going to take a photo of it, but then I thought, no way. So, please close your eyes and imagine the scariest, worst tree you can. And that's it.

Until next time (I hope!),

Endria

>> Headlands hosted an Open House on May 7th, and I was very excited to see some of my fellow-resident’s incredible work. Read more about all of the artists here.