Happy National Book Lovers Day to all of us loving the books! 😘📜📚I’m always late to internet parties. My 2nd published novel was in reach, cutely matched my robe I haven’t been out of today since I’m on to the 8th novel I’ll write thusfar, so I thought “Why not?” join the party with it.
CONCEPTION (St. Martin’s, 2008) would be headed to college now were it a baby, as time led me to see my substantial works like my babies that never go away or cease to surprise. I dove into it 20 years ago in Bed-Stuy, living with day ones Nemiss Chiyork and Chosan Kef before I started an English PhD program. I knew @uchicago would make me read my butt off, I had to get the bulk of what I’d edit on paper before.
It’s the story of 15-year-old Shivana and her unborn child, and history and forces and conditions that make Shivana hide the pregnancy to seek an abortion while the baby tries to stop her so it can be born. It tells how it tried to get here many times in history, but we know Black women face (un)imaginable distressing to explain why even our wanted babies don’t arrive.
Nothing I print is direct transfer of my life. But what I share fully with this was a 14-15 year old teen mom. An existential crisis conversation with my agent who first sold me at age 26 led us to wonder if anybody would have thought of my debut she sold me on if my mom or our people had made a different decision about my unorthodox pending arrival. She -a past and present notable editor- concluded no, fiction doesn’t work like that. I alone was born to write it.
CONCEPTION arose from wondering what happens when lives once here, if only in the mother’s body as an egg or little more, must go back where they came from. Its writing led me to think we try again until we get lucky to make it.
I had a Brooklyn brownstone ball that summer. I needed it. CONCEPTION is about loving life and seeking the light but it comes at high and dark costs as for us all. Genius writer Kim McClarin reviewed me as a “a gifted young novelist,” a sophomore jinx thwart and push I’m still grateful for. Bayo Ojikutu, one of the foremost African writers in America, blurbed it as “desperately calling for a new day,” as I definitely aimed to changed views on lives and origins like my mine, my mother’s and more.
You gotta read the book to find out if the baby made it. I did, thank God.
negression 