The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

It seems sometimes like Eleanora Fagan Gough suffered just so Billie Holiday could sing. After a functionally parent-less childhood that was punctuated two incidents of rape, and after working briefly at a brothel, she began performing for tips - and taking on the persona of Holiday - in New York nightclubs when she was in her late teens. The Suffering Artist is by no means a new concept, but many of our poets and singers endure a more existential, less tangible sort of pain. It's amazing Holiday made through adolescence at all, let alone with her voice, which, when considered along with the singer's biography, seems to hold years of memories within its often doleful tone.

Recently, award-winning children's author and poet Carole Boston Weatherford wrote an illustrated faux-memoir of Holiday's life. SOTC reached her by email and had a little exchange about the writing process.

This week she'll be in town, at the True Colors/Amazon Bookstore Cooperative to promote the book on Feb. 27th at 7pm, and then for a keynote speech and workshop on the 28th at the University of St. Thomas.

SOTC: A lot of your writing focuses on historical figures and events - Billie Holiday, Jesse Owens, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. How do you balance personal expression with historical explication in your poetry?

Weatherford: I try to evoke the sentiments conjured by the historic moment.

SOTC: By the same token, are you able to feel Billie Holiday's biography as something personal?

Weatherford: Billie is my muse and the poems flowed out of me as if I channeled her. She let her story come through me. I have long empathized with her.

SOTC: Would you say that politics is among your chief inspirations? Or maybe more specifically, race as it relates to politics?

Weatherford: As an author, I mine the past for family stories, fading traditions and forgotten struggles. The amazing, and at times agonizing, journey of African descendants is a source of inspiration for me.

SOTC: Be it for racial equality, social open-mindedness, or historical knowledge - do you hope to create a sort of awareness with your poetry? Do you want your readers to learn something?

Weatherford: I want my readers to sense how my subjects felt at historic junctures.

SOTC: On a personal level, when writing about a difficult topic - like the burning of a church, or the struggles of breaking through racial divides - is poetry a means for you to make peace with it?

Weatherford: Poetry is my way of honoring those who faced hardships and fought tough battles. I write of these struggles so we won't forget.

SOTC: You speak about poetry being able to turn words into music. I imagine the making of this music is an innate process - there's no formula for it, but rather it's something you have to feel out. How do you know when a line or a stanza works and when it doesn't?

Weatherford: The language has to sound right in my mind's ear. In that respect, the process is organic, second nature.

SOTC: I like the thought of turning these painful, but incredibly important, national memories into music. Do you think poeticizing the past makes it more palatable?

Weatherford: I don't want to make the past palatable.  I want it to nudge readers toward justice.  My poems are testaments from my ancestors whose voices were muted or marginalized. I write what I write because the ancestors choose to speak through me. I only hope that I do them proud.

Dwight Wilmerding, the protagonist of Benjamin Kunkel's 2005 novel Indecision, is acutely aware that other people have trod in his existential shoes. An ambivalent part-time tech support worker, he feels "like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world. But knowing the clichés are clichés doesn't help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it."

Sometimes I like to view my own life as a series of progressing archetypes. Just in the last five years, there was what might be called the 'tweed phase,' then the 'On-the-road phase,' and now I'm squarely in the middle of an aspiring-artist-in-a-restaurant phase.' Maybe I enjoy this because viewing life as an archetype is the first step toward viewing life as a narrative, which then leads seamlessly into exploiting one's own life for fictive or ostensibly non-fictive purposes.

Regardless, in this latest incarnation, I work with about a dozen other server-artists - actors, musicians, writers, DJs, a couple divas without a particular craft - some accomplished, some aspiring, many in-between. And while we grumble about our job-job, all of us need it. But not necessarily just to pay rent.

There's the money aspect, for sure. But for a lot of us, it keeps us sane. Last summer I quit the restaurant game just to freelance. About two weeks later I started talking to myself uncontrollably. Like I had inside jokes with only me. Not long after that I pretty much lost any capacity to interact with other humans. This is what happens when you sit in a room with a keyboard for too long, and no internet connection. When I started working for tips again, it was a welcome exit from the world that is my laptop.

So I found solidarity this weekend, like happens sometimes, in an article from the New York Times (thanks Max2 for the link). Caitlin Kelly, a bona fide journalist - and beyond that, an author - writes about her job as a salesperson peddling fru-fru garments in an affluent New York 'burb.

Something had to change. Working alone at home as a freelance writer, which many people dream of, wasn't working for me. The relentless isolation of connecting primarily with others online and by telephone was killing me.

I needed a steady, secure, part-time job, something I could leave behind at day's end, with lots of people contact. I craved a new challenge, a chance to learn and perfect some fresh, useful skills.

She goes on to describe her double-life, a daytime intellectual who moonlights getting bossed around by soccer moms. Pretty existential stuff. I like the message though, which is that artists don't have to be artists all the time - oftentimes it's detrimental to mental health.

Why I'm really writing this blog post: See, Mom? See, Dad?

Saturday mornings we do a wicked brunch. In winter, we get to work at 6:30 am and leave after 4pm, which means we usually don't get to see the sun. The kitchen sends out literally a thousand plates or more, in about a four-hour time period (10-2; the other hours are for side work). Each server ends up watching roughly eighty people go in and out of his or her section, many of these people requesting a medley of drinks because for some reason people really like liquids with their breakfast - coffee, oj, tomato juice, bloody mary, beer chaser, and a round of waters for the table (please). After the shift, the kitchen still a chaotic mess (though unseen to civilians), the Ecuadorian line cooks all hug each other and the bar sends them a shot of tequila. The servers high five and breathe our collective sighs of relief as the last customers leave. We clean the restaurant, roll our silverware, bitch about our tables, count our money and go home to nap before going out before waking up to do it again on Sunday. It's exhausting, but there's camaraderie. Best of all, I get to forget about all my deadlines. Why would I want to give that up?