How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone: A Memoir

(Dad) whose cooking/cleaning/fixing taught me the deep fulfillment that can come from maintaining the world right around us, and whose labor has always sustained me in more ways than I can know, thank you.

Thank you, Damani Baker, for building a life with me that has space for grief and pleasure, art and children, adventure and peace.

Both of them helped me consider that the response to something broken isn’t a big resolution, it’s in the sweeping, baking, planting, building, and caring for the world we need to live in every day.

A quiltmaking theory of storytelling: Save and collect things, especially those worn beyond repair. Honor the labor that came before. Cut and piece together. Sew. Iron. Stand back. Cut, sew again. Allow for pattern and juxtaposition to provide narrative structure. Allow feeling to inform logic, use a quilter’s math, sometimes intricate, sometimes i

Scientists say suppressing the expression of an emotion can reduce the feeling itself.[23] In a study published in The Journal of Pain, subjects who were told not to frown experienced less pain than those who grimaced when heat was applied to their arm. However: “People who tend to do this regularly might start to see the world in a more negative l

When you are speechless, the last place a story lives is in the body. And the body keeps bringing me back here.

Fred Moten wrote, “What if we could detach repair not only from restoration but also from the very idea of the original—not so that repair comes first but that it comes before. Then making and repair are inseparable, devoted to one another, suspended between and beside themselves.”[7]

James Baldwin quote: “The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”[5]

so I stop and wonder how to be inside an afternoon with no demands, no work, no one else to please.