Each year we ask festival authors to participate on our blog. Ana Maria Spagna is the first of many for 2010! In April, you will hear her read from her latest nonfiction book about a personal exploration of the civil rights movement and can also participate in a writing workshop about the power of telling two stories at once. Check on our website for more information as we are adding details all the time.
Washington author, Ana Maria Spagna, shares her journey to discover her father’s role in the bus boycott in Tallahassee, which, she said, changed her life. "Meeting John Lewis, and so many other 'foot soldiers' of the movement, at the 50th anniversary of the Tallahassee bus boycott was one of the proudest, and most humbling, moments of my life," said Ana Maria. "John Lewis is the quiet hero of the Civil Rights Movement, former Freedom Rider, and last surviving speaker from the March on Washington in 1963. He remains one of the most powerful voices for civil rights, gay rights, human rights in the nation."
When I started work on my new book, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, there was one word I wanted to avoid at all costs: “I.” For years, I’d been writing personal essays—some heavy on the personal—my first book had just come out, and I was feeling exposed and exhausted, weary of self-indulgence.
By happenstance I’d stumbled upon evidence of my late father’s involvement in the early civil rights movement in Florida, and I thought: “This is it! Not my story, but his story!” Research was a relief; it was exhilarating. Slowly, over months and years, books, microfilm, bold cold emails, motel telephone interviews, distant rural church services and poorly-attended peace marches all led me closer to the buried truth about six courageous young men on an empty city bus.
Then it was time to write. Problems arose. For one thing, the two central living witnesses—one black and one white—told radically different versions of the story. Whose was true? Another inevitable problem was I began to feel like an encroacher. Civil rights history belongs to African Americans, I thought. Florida history should belong to Floridians. There was real danger of appropriation, of being a modern day outside agitator.
The answer lay in one word: “I.” The only way, ethically, to make the story mine was to go whole hog. I had to tell the story with all of my pre-conceived notions, all my fears and suspicions, my family guilt and family grief, all front and center. That’s not to say I abandoned the research. Far from it. But over time, I found that melding memoir with history offered unexpected benefits. Like the early New Journalism of Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe or even Hunter S. Thompson, my own perspective offered a unique slant, a lens through which to watch events unfold. [Little know fact: when Ana Maria drinks gin, she's convinced that she is Joan Didion, whose essays she admires more than anyone else's.] And as in the best novels, telling two stories at once—what happened back then and what I discover now—increased the tension and gave the book its shape. In the end, including more of me makes Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus more authentic and more poignant. Because, well, it includes more of the truth.
Lately I’ve been thinking again about finding a me-less story to write. But I’ve also been wondering this: is there really any such thing?
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this...me-less or no me-less, that is the question. Comment below or be the first to start a discussion on our message board!
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