LITERARY HUB

VIA SINISTER WISDOM I CALL YOUR NAME WHENEVER I CAN: THE LETTERS OF PAT PARKER AND "BEWARE FEELING YOU’RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO DESERVE IT" March 7, 2018 By Literary Hub

Poets and activists Pat Parker and Audre Lorde frst met in 1969 and began exchanging letters fve later, a correspondence which continued until the year before Parker’s death. While their letters highlight, as Mecca Jamilah Sullivan writes in the introduction to Sister Love: Te Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989, “the building of a black feminist literary politics,” they also brim with personal support, generosity, and advice.

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November 13, 1985

Dear Audre,

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I do hope you are sitting so the shock doesn’t boil you over. I received a request from Frances Phillips to read with you in February at the Women’s Building.(1) I am always pleased to read with you and I look forward to seeing you. Tis letter is an informal formal invitation to you to come and stay with me and my family while you are in the area. If you don’t give me too hard a time when you come, I’ll even let you loose on my word processor. I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to see you while I was in New York, but I felt your vibes, honey. Did Frances go with you? I called her several times and never got an answer, so I thought maybe she decided to hit the road with you for a change.

Te tour was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me. I had returned from Europe feeling really down and egoless. I saw a copy of ’s book and discovered I wasn’t a poet. Tat hurt.(2) I still haven’t been able to resolve how I’m going to deal with Judy from this point. I really don’t understand what that was about. It’s so contradictory to everything we’ve talked about and done in the past in regards to competition and divisiveness among women poets. In any case, I was feeling low.

Hitting the road turned that around for me. I was very pleasantly surprised by the response of audiences everywhere I went. I was ready to pack up and move to Boston and Manhattan. (Tat is a joke.) It did make me realize that there are still people out there who believe in me and my work.

So then I got angry. I decided that the way to prevent people from dismissing me and what I’m doing is to do so much more of it that it’s impossible for them to get away with it.

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Obviously I didn’t reach this great insight right away. I took all sorts of other diversions. I started some seriously heavy drinking, hanging out in bars and had an afair. I managed to come out of this with my relationship with Marty still intact, bruised like hell, but intact. Started seeing a therapist with Marty and individually and it’s proved to be quite helpful despite my resistance. It’s hard for us strong Black women types to admit we’re fucking falling apart at the seams as you must well know. Out of all this madness, and I really do believe I was mad, I’ve come to some decisions that are as scary as hell, but at the same time are exciting.

I informed the women at the Health Center that I am leaving efective January 1st. (3) I am going to come home to my machine and do what I’ve always wanted. Write. I’ve talked this over and over with Marty and she is being absolutely wonderful and supportive. She’s helping me compile a mailing list to try and get readings to supplement my income and we’ve worked out a budget and looked at where we can cut back and cut out and of to make it, so that the pressure of earning money isn’t so great that I have to spend all my time hustling gigs and still not get the writing done.

I’m reading everything I can fnd in the library about starting a small business and taxes, and agents and markets. I would be really appreciative if y