Father's Day
The first time I attempted to write about my father, it was an indictment
My relationship with my late father was difficult and complicated, so this day is as well. The first time I tried to write about him was in the early 2000s. I was a baby writer, and it ended up being a 20-page indictment of an essay, an indictment of all the ways he’d wronged me. When I asked my writing mentors to recommend places to submit this “essay” for publication they told me, rightly and lovingly, to keep it in my journal; it was not ready for public consumption.
It took me more than 15 years to learn how to write (period) and how to write about my father in particular, such that my essay was more than a journal entry. I turned those 20 artless pages into a 597-word flash essay, “Whiting,” re-published here in 2023 in Short Reads; originally published in 2017 in Slush Pile magazine. Afterwards, I felt I had written (said) all I needed to write (say) about my father.
But in 2021, I was asked to contribute to a Pipe Wrench magazine feature, one of a handful of writers invited to respond to another writer’s essay. A kind of digital literary dinner party. I read the main essay––about several generations of Black male pigeon fanciers in South Central LA––and my first thought was, “I wonder if my father had been involved in something like that, if he would’ve been a better person, a better father.” My second thought: “I can’t write about that.” My third thought: “I have to write about that.” My essay, “Snap” is here.
Now I think I really am done writing about my father. He shows up disguised in my fiction sometimes, and he’s in some essays I have in an anthology, Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World. But other than that, I think I’m done.
Sending love to everyone for whom this day is difficult and complicated. xo