sarah HANNAH gómez

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Wished-for mentor? Hero? Creative and intellectual idol? Spiritual mother?

I just finished Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens , her first collection of essays, mostly from the seventies. It struck me in so many ways that I can only begin to enumerate here, but I’ll try, because I think she deserves it, and so do I.

First, people have been telling me that I’m black (or that I’m half black) my whole life, and I did plenty of my own searching and researching and reading. I read and watched the requisite books and movies about slavery and Selma; I had the biographical sketches of women I was supposed to be inspired by; I never denied that black was part of what I was. But this book made me realize that I’ve never fully comprehended what the Civil Rights movement did or meant, and how it influenced creativity, politics, and culture in the years and decades after it. Of course I’m not an expert now, but many of the essays in this book dealt directly with the movement very soon after it happened, which I thought was interesting and enlightening. I think it will help me, as other experiences in the past four years have, find a way to incorporate a black or African American identity into my already complicated self, and to see where I fit in in that community. Just as spending Thanksgiving with my birthfamily (a matriarchal, all-female, close-knit group of well-read, educated, religious, musical; strong-willed group of black women) let new roots spring out from under me, this book has given me validation in the ways I like to be creative, and it has made me see again the value in searching for background and reflecting on the now.

I also appreciated that this collection was not so tight, at times academic, at times journalistic, at times diary-like, at times just good old creative non-fiction. Without knowing it, I think Alice Walker is who I have been trying to be all this time, who I can most closely tie my creative endeavors and aspirations to. Though I’ve only read her The Color Purple before this, I can tell I will be reading more of her, and I’m glad that I went through this collection of essays before reading more of her novels, if only because I feel now that I understand and appreciate her, and this makes me curious to read the things her mind has created. The essays in this collection make personal connections to literature and literary figures she has read, researched, and loved, just as in this blog and in much of my non-fiction writing I have found that the books I love most are those that allow me to make applications to my personal life. I appreciate many books for their literary quality, for their worthiness of being a part of a canon of American literature, for the potential they have for academic study and discussion. But those are books I respect more than love. This book, this Alice Walker, I loved.

To Zora Neale Hurston I gave her due: I studied her for a year in high school and revisited her last summer while I was studying at Rutgers. I read a biography of her this past year, and perhaps someday I will pick up her folktales or autobiography when I have time. To Toni Morrison I afford the utmost respect, but she is not someone I can hope to emulate or even delve deeply into as both a scholar and a human. She is too advanced for me to find connections, though I do greatly enjoy her work. Nikki Giovanni I always enjoy reading, but since I am not foremost a poet, we are not exactly kindred spirits. But in Walker’s collection, I (cliche, I know) found a garden–I found someone else who loves scholarship as much as creativity; who sometimes has a volatile temper; who struggles with which of her minority identities she should identify with; who loves to read; who loves to write; who loves to live. I think I’ve just found a fountain of inspiration.

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As if my constant second-guessing and wondering whether I should have just looked for a job weren’t enough, this morning I was eating breakfast with my parents, and, thinking it was the Sunday Book Review, I picked this up. So now I’m even more worried that I might be doing the wrong thing. Here’s why.

One of the articles in this segment suggests that your graduate school debt not be higher than your expected future salary. My anticipated three-year-debt will be approximately twice what I can expect to make, if I get offered the higher end of the average librarians’ salary in my first year.

Another article was about how the master’s is the new bachelor’s, which basically means that I will be nothing special, right? I’m still only going to be most basically qualified for jobs, right? Or does the fact that I’ll have two master’s make me somewhat cool? Or am I basically just going into the debt that I so smartly avoided for undergrad, and essentially not making myself much more qualified than the average person, if the new average person has a master’s degree like me?

People with graduate degrees make more money than their counterparts with bachelor’s degrees, but the amount they make varies by field, and humanities and liberal arts has the lowest difference in salary between graduate and non-graduate degrees. Plus, essentially all librarians have master’s degrees, so wouldn’t the real discrepancy in that field be between master’s and doctoral degrees? So I lose.

It’s not like I can drop out at this point, and it’s not like I actually want to. But when you have a genius idea for a bookstore you’d like to open, your high school and college friends are all getting married and getting jobs, and the New York Times decides to freak you out, it’s hard to retain perspective. So here are my ways of reassuring myself.

Graduate school will make me happy, because I have never gotten the enjoyable academic experience I’ve been seeking since third grade. And mental and emotional health should not be taken lightly.

I keep complaining about my rising to-read list, and now I’m worried I’ll never find the time to read it all, but graduate school is a time when the government loans you more money than your mother makes in a year, all so that you can eat and drink and read books all day long.

Graduate school is where liberal progressive nerds come home to roost, so conceivably I should finally be able to find my people, right? Intellectual soulmates and fellow awkward smart people to be nerdy with, at last!

My big sister might be the youngest person in our family to own her home, she has a husband and 1.5 kids, and she’s not awkward like I am, but at least I’ll beat her to a second degree?

I really like learning and being an intellectual elitist, and having two master’s degrees will keep me a viable player in that game, even if I am moving to the intellectual elitism capital of the world.

If graduate school is what it takes to get me to a career I think I could be good at and be happy with, since my dream careers are mostly dreams, than that’s what matters most, right?

That should hold me for awhile. I think I just need school to start. A month til I move, about six or seven weeks til classes (and my birthday! agh 23–here comes a new existential crisis).

My latest hobby is to jot down notes and ideas when I’m reading books, especially books of literary theory. I write down interesting quotes, or points I want to think about, or things I want to look up. Mostly I use my notes to ask myself lots of questions.

It strikes me that I think this is what they call “studying.” And I’ve honestly never really done it before in my life. It’s quite rewarding and interesting, and I am enjoying it. Maybe I will do decently in graduate school, then.

Anyway, my main reading at the moment is the textbook The Pleasures of Children’s Literature , and what I was thinking about is how children’s series tend to make comebacks in the guise of being for “adults”–generally those adults who grew up reading the series in the first place. There is a mirror of this in other media, like superhero movies, contemporary remakes of things like Yogi Bear and Transformers, etc., but it just so happens that there haven’t really been any films that are particularly linked to my childhood memories.

There are, however, books that are trying to capitalize on the series I read as a child. Two books I’ve read this summer, Archie: A Celebration of America’s Favorite Teenagers and Sweet Valley Confidential , do just that. The Archie one is actually just a retrospective, but it clued me in to the fact that there are now Archie graphic novels to go with the comics, and there is also a new magazine about Archie’s adult life, and I think it’s presented as dual universes so that he can be married to both Betty and Veronica. The Sweet Valley one is a kind of high school reunion, whatever-happened-to kind of book, and in reading it I realized that I never actually read the Sweet Valley High books. I read Sweet Valley Kids and Sweet Valley Middle School (though I think that series had a different name) and then got bored with the whole thing.

My parents were forever telling me not to read crap like that. I was especially fond of the Babysitters’ Club, which they despised. And that’s another subject the textbook touches on–is there value in so-called “trash” lit for kids? Should they be allowed to read it? At this stage in my life, I do agree that those books are kind of trash, but probably not for the reasons my parents did. My parents told me I shouldn’t read them because they were written with a formula. I would say now that they were a waste of time for me to read, at least in the excess that I read them, in that, at a developmental time in my life, they were telling me that normal life was blonde, upper class, etc. So in that sense maybe it would have been good for me to read less of them and search out more “difficult” books and more books that acknowledged my identity and experience a little more.

But I think there is some value in reading “trash” series as a child, whatever your choice–Goosebumps, Babysitters’ Club, and whatever is out now, like Junie B. Jones or Diary of a Wimpy Kid. That’s because formulaic books are a good primer for life and later study or enjoyment of literature. Also, everyone, even children, needs escapist media for entertainment/winding down/mindless time. Kids can do that with Goosebumps or cartoons, just as adults do that with Dan Brown or “CSI.”

My father is forever bemoaning his freshman English students who “hate” reading and cannot understand how to function in a language arts class, and I keep telling him that high school teachers need to incorporate television series into the curriculum. Nothing teaches you the basic functions of story and plot better than a formulaic television show or horror movie. Nowhere would it be easier to get high school students to learn to point out common tropes, cliches, predictable plot turns, and stock characters than in a couple episodes of “Gossip Girl” or “America’s Next Top Model.” I think starting a year of English class with television or movies and then moving into literature would be a much better way to engage reluctant students and reluctant readers.

I digress. Is it good for me to be reading these updates? Or is it a waste of time? Sure, I could read Life With Archie in probably about ten minutes, and I could count it as my mindless entertainment quota. Epilogues are always fun. That’s why everyone keeps adding old friends to their Facebook so they can check up on them, that’s why we’re intrigued by “adult” conclusions to teen series, that’s why authors’ FAQ pages annoyingly include the “who married so-and-so” or “will you ever write another one?” questions. But I can’t decide if it’s healthy, when these books perpetuate both my parents’ idea of trash (low quality writing, formulaic plots) and mine (continues the same hegemonic ideas or presents the same cis-everything). Is this just an adult take on childhood? Or is it the extension of immaturity? I’m inclined to think the latter, because I think even adults should allow their trashy, throwaway media evolve with time just as their quality media does (i.e. my idea of silly music to listen to is still “better” than the music I thought of as awesome when I was younger; as I now pick up lit theory for pleasure, even current, literary, intelligent novels are more of a chill-out-and-relax reading choice). Then again, it makes me a better person (at least in my own eyes) if I say that it’s just a way of bringing back some of the fun of childhood, and chalk the rest of it up to capitalism and author comebacks.

the belzhar

february reading in review

what else i’m up to, and where

the walls around us

i accidentally secretly watched the entire twilight saga

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