Posts Tagged ‘ancestor trouble’

Art & Kinship:  Emily Raboteau’s Lessons For Survival

The first subject of my new Art & Kinship series is Emily Raboteau, whose work I’ve been reading with admiration for almost two decades. Her new book—Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse”—is out today. In my latest newsletter, some thoughts on her work broadly and this book in particular, along with photos of Emily and her ancestor wall, and her reflections on creating this memorial to them after the passing of her dad as she wrote.

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Family stories we “can’t tell”

I’m teaching a creative writing workshop—Family Stories We (Tell Ourselves We) Can’t Tell—for the Miami Book Fair, as part of the festivities around the 2024 Miami Big Read featuring Madeline Miller’s Circe. We’ll gather in person at the Miami-Dade Wolfson campus. The workshop is priced for accessibility and size-limited for intimacy. For more details, or to register, go to the Miami Book Fair site.

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Christian Nationalist News and Private Jets

Over the past century, my family has given an enormous amount of money to extreme evangelical Christian preachers, back to my great-grandmother in Dallas, who was so poor afterward that she couldn’t buy food or firewood. Nowadays, my mom and stepfather also get their “news” from Kenneth Copeland’s Christian nationalist Victory Channel. Copeland is the preacher with three private jets who asked his supporters for donations so that he didn’t have to fly with “demons” on commercial air travel. Recent guests include Lauren Boebert and the former president.

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