Weekend Reading

"When Eloise tells Kofi she wants a divorce, he sits naked on the kitchen floor skinning an ox tongue to prepare Eloise’s favorite dish." So begins Brian Gyamfi's poem, 'The Almost Love Poem of Eloise and Kofi'.

In another life, my grandmother would have been a hairstylist. My mother told me the story once as she grew up hearing it, and it felt like legend, embedded itself in my consciousness like a bit of grit in an oyster.      I guess I’ve always mythologized my mother and her mother. Their lives as women in Japan in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s seemed to follow a Joseph Campbell-esque hero cycle with one or two major deviations, and over the years in the mantle of my brain their stories grew, nacre covered and shining.        My grandmother grew up on a tea farm in the mountains of Japan’s green tea capital, Shizuoka-ken. She was the second youngest of eight surviving siblings: six sisters, two brothers, and two “water children”, or stillbirths. The oldest brother would of course inherit the tea farm, and each of the sisters left the nest in turn to make their own way in the world. Women in those days didn’t want to be a “burden” on their families my mother says, and she uses the word again when she describes why she left home at eighteen. 

The rain could not diminish her. She was big, beautiful, cinnamon-blonde fur from head to hump, her haunch and inner ears the oily brown of coffee beans. Bent forward, she preened a black cottonwood shrub of its nascent leaves, snout obscured by verdure. Beneath us, the van’s tires crushed chunks of gravel that drifted from shoulder to lane, and, hearing the sound, she raised her head to look.

Writes 20-year old B.P. as of Nov 14th I’ve read 29 books. Everyday I wake up at around 9 AM and, over a cappuccino, get in my 50 pages. In and out and in and out – for the last few years, my new year’s resolution has been to treat my reading like my long-distance running, and, with two months left on the clock, I think I’ve been making good time. Despite how tumultuous 2024 has been, I’ve been especially lucky. In my 20th year of life, I’ve read so many books that have made an unalienable impression on my future.

I am writing this in a rocky country, another country, to which I arrived three days ago, to visit dear friends who I had not seen for a long time. I, like many of you, have been following the Cheuse Center’s Baldwin100-Reads calendar, and I have reached the final book in our summer read ‘Another Country’. 

The Cheuse Center launches its annual theme for 2024-25

In 1974, James Baldwin published the novel 'If Beale Street Could Talk', a love story set in Harlem in the 1970s but the title of which was drawn from an earlier blues song that referred to Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee. The novel is about the bonds of love, especially those within a family and those that form a family. Most importantly, and most typical of Baldwin’s work, the novel illustrates how the bonds of love empower people to battle the kinds of discrimination and prejudice that destroy lives. And, oh, Beale Street was talking the other night—Saturday night of Memorial Day weekend!

Klara Kalu writes "Navigating through landscapes scarred by strife, I question whether silence can ever truly be an option for those whose words hold the power to illuminate silenced histories. As a Nigerian writer, I think a lot about how to tackle writing about my home, my language and my experiences for a global audience, the line between authorial obligation and creative autonomy, and beckoning readers into a realm where storytelling becomes not only a craft but a conduit for societal reckoning. "

In this conversation between Klara Kalu and Cheuse Fellow, Carol Mitchell, Mitchell talks about her craft, and her debut novel, 'What Start Bad a Mornin'. Mitchell teaches at George Mason University and Klara Kalu is in her first year MFA as a fiction writer.

"As I say, it is perhaps easier to love America passionately, when you look at it through the wrong end of the telescope, across all the Atlantic water...than when you are right there. When you are actually in America, America hurts," says Rabih Alameddine, in his fabulous chats with Kat Colvert, 2021 Cheuse Fellow.