Write On
by Kalela Williams
Word.
Tin House gave me the space and clarity to write.
Stuffed with clothing and books and a yoga mat and everything else I might need for two and a half weeks, my suitcase felt impossibly heavy as I half-lifted, half-dragged it up the flight of wooden stairs to the top floor of a cute, two-story house in Northwest Portland.
But I don’t think I ever felt lighter. Less than an hour before, I had stepped out of the airport, more than ready to begin a writing residency with Tin House Magazine.
I applied this past summer as an exercise to get myself back into the writing game. Up until fall 2020, I hadn’t really written in earnest in years, and I didn’t expect to be awarded a residency to work on my young adult (YA) novel, The Rosebine Papers. I thought they were calling to give me the great news that I got an honorable mention— that would have been honor enough and was the best I hoped for when I applied.
More than a cozy apartment with a little kitchen and cute mid-century furniture, what I really pulled from my Tin House residency was time. This is what a lot of people don’t understand about writing long fiction: time is everything. Time allows you to think through snarly problems in your narrative, to hone in on what you’re really trying to say—or rather, what your characters are trying to tell you.
Consecutive days to write allow you to ride on momentum. You don’t lose thoughts from the day before, or risk playing a telephone game with yourself by making cryptic notes and not really understanding what you mean days or weeks later when pick them back up. You remain immersed in your manuscript, which is where your head needs to be.
This isn’t to say I didn’t get stuck. I did, frequently.
The good news is that Portland’s vast Forest Park and its meandering smaller trails were a 20-minute stroll from my apartment, which meant I could walk myself back into my own narrative. Built in the early 1900s as an access road to a planned subdivision, the park’s Leif Erickson Drive is a wide, paved trail that kind of puts the Wissahickon to shame, as much as I love my hometown park. Impossibly tall fir trees rose above me, thick ferns fringed the hillsides, and a steep and kind of scary gully dropped on the other side. If I squinted when I walked over the metal bridge back to my apartment, I could see the pointed outline of Mt. Hood rising in the mist.
I also took part in some of the sights of Portland. I walked along the Willamette River. I went to Powell’s Books one of the biggest bookstores in the country and salivated over its never-ending shelves. I hung out with the other YA novel resident in the downstairs apartment, Stacy Egan Austin, an amazing writer and a great sounding board as I talked through what I was working on. One afternoon, we visited a historic mansion together and saw an exhibition on Vanport, a diverse WWII community. We checked out Portland’s dining scene together. I spent time with staff of Tin House Magazine and Tin House Books, talking about the publishing industry, about finding agents and editors, and about authors and books.
And I wrote more than I had in years. I worked really long days. Some nights I fell asleep exhausted, but I rolled out of bed the next morning before daybreak, ready to begin another twelve-hour day of writing (after exercise in the park and a jaunt to the boulangerie, of course).
My YA/crossover novel, The Rosebine Papers, is the story of an eighteen-year-old young woman who, after moving from Boston to a small Southern town with her mother, a renowned scholar in Black literature, comes face to face with her new home’s troubled racial legacy— and with the chasm that looms between her and her mom. I began The Rosebine Papers in my early twenties. It’s been rewritten and refashioned into various versions over the years, the original draft unrecognizable to what I’m tweaking now. It’s followed me almost all of my adult life, even though I put the manuscript down for nearly a decade before picking it back up this past fall to begin yet another rewrite.
My novel’s themes of memory and monuments and racial reckoning have always been crucial, especially to Black folk like me, but are now part of a national and widespread conversation. And of course, mother-daughter stories are timeless.
But if there is an ever an opportunity for this manuscript to see its place on the shelves of Powell’s, and those of other bookstores around the country, I’ll be able to look back to that cheery apartment on NW Thurman Street and know where it found its true beginning.
Kalela Williams (kwilliams@mightywriters.org) is MW’s Director of Writing.
Stay connected!
Enter your email address below to receive our Mighty updates!
Mighty Writers is a class 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established in 2009. All of our programs are free. We serve communities in and around Greater Philadelphia and New Jersey.