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

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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.