Talking Volumes guest Edwidge Danticat on the ‘literary loves’ of her life

Edwidge Danticat keeps a little notebook for her two daughters, filling it with instructions and advice for them to read one day, when she’s gone.

It’s one of the ways Danticat has found to “wrestle with mortality,” she writes in her new book “We’re Alone.” In a way, as a friend of hers pointed out, the volume of essays is a lasting letter to her girls.

The Haitian American author — beloved for novels like “Breath, Eyes, Memory” and “The Farming of Bones” as well as her memoir “Brother, I’m Dying” — is also a masterful essayist at the top of her game. In “We’re Alone,” she braids together childhood memories, current events in Haiti, the early days of COVID-19 plus hurricanes and rainbows.

She describes the panicked moment she was caught up in a shooting hoax in a Miami mall (an incident that inspired her upcoming novel). And she also honors the writers she deeply loves.

Danticat, who will be in St. Paul for the Talking Volumes series on Sept. 17, talked with the Minnesota Star Tribune about the 11th-grade teacher who helped spark her writing career, “We’re Alone” and the unexpected meaning behind the book’s title. The conversation has been edited for space and clarity.

Q: Before I opened “We’re Alone,” I thought it might be about loneliness. Instead you give these words another meaning: A writer and reader being alone together. What does that mean to you?

A: That idea of “alone together” immediately stuck with me. And it’s something that I’ve traveled with over the years, that intimate relationship between a reader and a writer. It also makes me braver, I think, especially in these essays, to talk about myself. Because, when I read an essay in which someone is being vulnerable and sharing something very personal to them, I always feel, as a reader, “They trust me. They trust me.”

Of course, we are in a world where we can feel alone in a crowd, right? But in this specific instance, I wanted to explore more that intimacy of a reader along with a writer. I think that extends beyond physical bodies. Like you can be alone with Shakespeare, just as I mentioned in the preface that I felt like I was alone with [Haitian poet] Roland Chassagne.

Q: You also include a lovely essay, “They Are Waiting In The Hills, Traveling with Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Paule Marshall and Toni Morrison,” about the connections you feel to these writers who have passed on.

A: That’s one of the things I think is most powerful about literature, that that relationship extends — it’s a journey through time. Toni Morrison often said that, “Tolstoy didn’t know he was writing for a little black girl in Lorraine, Ohio.” And I carried that over, thinking, “She didn’t know she was writing for me, a little girl from Port au Prince.”

Q: There’s a great detail you include in another essay, about one of your 11th-grade teachers giving you the anthology “Black Women Writers (1950-1980): An Evaluation,” introducing you to what you call the “literary loves of my life.”

A: So Mr. Leo Casey at Clara Barton High School for the Health Professions was my history teacher. And he taught this elective class during our lunch periods. We would write these very college-type papers. He asked me, “How did I want to leave my mark in the world?” And I said, “I want to be a writer.”

And then the next day, he brought me this Mari Evans anthology. He also gave me “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” But the power of that collective volume for me was, first of all, the heft of it. The idea that there’s a journey through literature that all these people — all these women, these Black women from all over the world — had traveled before me.

And so I started just reading through the volume. And it was beautiful to see. There were excerpts of the work, but there were also the writers’ reflections on what they were doing, which was extraordinarily valuable to me.

Toni Morrison’s “Rootedness” really struck me. To this day, I’ve taught it many times, because there’s a very powerful line in it that resonates very much with me, where she wonders (I’m paraphrasing) what it means for a Black writer to write in the presence of an ancestor.

Q: Do you find personal essays to be easier to write than fiction? Or do they have their own challenges?

A: Essays are easier in some ways. The actual act of writing is easier because the material already exists, right? And so even when I was writing memoir drawing from documents, the big challenge of writing nonfiction or personal essay is finding a structure. Finding how to frame it. How much do you know? How much do you need to tell without being repetitive? So you already have, like, the clay. And then fiction, you’re inventing the clay, right?

I think what is slightly harder is the sharing, the aftermath, because there’s always the possibility of offending people in your life, of having them respond a certain way. And then people are like, “That’s not how I remember it.” I think that part is a little bit shakier ground.

But the writing itself, I find easier. Everybody who writes personal nonfiction will say that there’s a moment while you’re writing it, in order to be brave, in order to be fully free, you have to forget that people will read it. In that freedom, sometimes there are things that you think you might have forgotten that come out through the writing that are startling, that you have to allow to come through. Part of that is acting on the premise that, “This is just for me, right?” And all of Minnesota!

Q: Do you find that you need some time and distance for personal nonfiction writing?

A: The older I get, the more I really appreciate the opportunity, the privilege, really, of being able to sit down with something and think it through. And think about everything that you can weave through, that can amplify a point you’re trying to make. To try to find these really beautiful threads through even tragic moments in life.

Q: In “We’re Alone,” you share that you’re keeping a book of advice for your girls to have after you are gone. I couldn’t help but want to hear more of your advice for them.

A: In the book that I keep for my girls, sometimes I’ll clip articles. But basically, it’s a lot of things that my mother told me. “You’re amazing.” “Believe in yourself.”

It’s little bit harder now for young women, because you’re always in a public square, in a way. You’re sort of always a witness to other people’s lives, which might look better than yours. And that can seem like a constant comparison. And so one of the things I try to tell them, it’s from Toni Morrison in “Beloved”: “You are your best thing.” “You’re enough.” It’s very important to believe that.

Q: What else do you want them to know?

A: To have an element of faith. I watched both of my parents get terminal diagnoses and then pass away, and they both really had strong faith. And I saw how that sort of eased them through. So this idea of believing in something greater than yourself meant so much to my parents, especially as they left this world.

Being the child of immigrants, you have to have drive. You have to have a passion. I feel blessed that [with] Mr. Casey I was able to express that passion to him and that meant so much in my life. Also, how your life, for the better or worse, can change in a moment. I’ve experienced that.

Q: You write about Haitians being “wozo,” a type of reed that always grows back.

A: Haiti is going through such a difficult moment right now. I have family members who, for example, in the last year or so, have had to move around so much because of the armed groups. People who have had to leave their homes.

It doesn’t mean that we are supposed to suffer more than other people. But this idea of wozo, it’s this reed that’s really inspiring, in the way that nature tends to be, in a sense of renewal after disaster.

It’s a reed that people have sung about, that people have referred to as a symbol of hope, a symbol of rebirth. This kind of rebirth that we’re always hoping for, that we’re always striving for, that we’re always fighting for.

Talking Volumes with Edwidge Danticat

Who: Sponsored by the Minnesota Star Tribune and MPR.

When: 7 p.m. Tues., Sept. 17.

Where: Fitzgerald Theater, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul.

Tickets: $32.50. mprevents.org.

An excerpt from ‘We’re Alone’

Early in the summer of 2018, I was at the opening of a library in a southern Haitian town called Fond-des-Blancs. Fond-des-Blancs, which means Fountain of Whites, is home to a large number of people of Polish lineage, the descendants of soldiers from a regiment that switched alliances from the French armies they were fighting alongside in early nineteenth-century Haiti to join the Haitians in their battle for independence from France. The mutinous Polish soldiers who settled in Fond-des-Blancs were the only whites and foreigners granted Haitian citizenship after Haiti became the world’s first Black republic in 1804.

The library we were there to celebrate had been started by a nonprofit organization called Haiti Projects, which was run by an acquaintance of mine. The opening-week program included writing workshops and conversations with writers. I participated in a conversation and writing workshop with the Haitian novelist and short story writer Kettly Mars. Our moderator, the Haitian educator Jean-Marie Théodat, asked us to read both the beginning and the end of one of our short stories, Kettly in the original French and me in a Haitian Creole translation. We were then asked to explain to the group of twenty-five or so eager teenagers why we’d begun and ended that story the way we had.

It is much easier to explain or elaborate on endings than on beginnings. For endings, you can always say that it ended this way because it had begun that way. Or it ended that way because something popped up in the middle that led there. Beginnings have more amorphous origins.

Excerpted from “Children of the Sea” from We’re Alone. Copyright © 2024 by Edwidge Danticat. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org.