Before I realized I was writing a nonfiction book about my ancestors, I wrote what ultimately became the second chapter of Ancestor Trouble as an essay for a reading with Alexander Chee at the KGB Bar. I’d been trying and failing for a couple years to write about my great-grandfather, Charley, and his story at last took a preliminary shape as I scrambled to put together something new for that night.
Ancestor Trouble received a starred review from Kirkus! “The current wave of interest in genealogy, heredity, family history, and responsibility for past injustices crescendos in a comprehensive work combining personal narrative and reporting,” the reviewer says. “Exhaustively researched, engagingly presented, and glowing with intelligence and honesty.” ⭐️ This part made me laugh out loud in recognition: “These ruptures seeded a project . . .
Next June will mark twenty years since I first blogged, on a Blogspot site, on impulse. That day I figured I’d tire of the blog, that it would quickly become one of my many abandoned writing practices.
The days are growing shorter, the trees on the land across the way will soon shed the last of their leaves, and I have been reading the poems of W.S. Merwin and the fiction of Lauren Groff, and teaching myself how to write essays again.