I’ll be in Austin at the Texas Book Festival later this week, doing an event for a book called I Know About A Thousand Things: The Writing of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas, which I co-edited with my friend, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Naomi will be honored at the festival as 2024 Texas Writer of the Year, and she also just received the Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement from the American Academy of Poets, which comes with a big cash prize. On top of that, she’ll be the lucky recipient of a pair of custom-made turquoise cowboy boots at the book festival event honoring her.
She definitely won’t like it that I started this article this way — she hates “fanfare” — but too bad. I’m a fan and I must fare. In fact, I must quote from the release announcing the Wallace Stevens prize. “In a stunning spectrum of works published in a period beginning nearly fifty years ago, Naomi Shihab Nye has borne witness to the complexities of cultural difference that connect us as human beings, evidencing a firm commitment to the poet as bearer of light and hope. In celebrating her Palestinian heritage with a gentle but unflinching commitment, her body of work is a rare and precious living entity in our time, when the tragic conflict between Gaza and Israel threatens to deepen wounds and resentments everywhere.” Damn right. That’s my girl. Her husband Michael is also a hero — I wrote about him in Rules for the Unruly, if you happen to have a copy lying around.
If you’ve never read Naomi’s poetry, pick up Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems, which contains all her most beloved work, including the viral wonder-works “Kindess” and “Gate A-4,” both of which are online and have been shared millions of times. Her newest collection is Grace Notes, 117 poems that together make a kind of a memoir, revolving around her childhood and her mother. Like many of her books, it is allegedly “for children,” but with poetry, that can be a good thing.
My friendship with this astonishing person goes back to 1980, when we met at a women’s writing conference at the University of Texas in Austin. We were both in a workshop led by the rather dour Adrienne Rich. When Rich took attendance, she questioned Naomi’s name — “Naomi Shihab Nye?” she said. “So you took your husband’s last name?” Flustered, Naomi started to explain why she likes the name Nye, but Rich was having none of it, and Naomi ended up walking out of the seminar room before the class even started. I found out later that she somehow wandered into a recording session Carole King was doing down the street, so all was not lost. Fortunately, she came back to the university that evening for the open mic event, because after my reading, I rushed up to her to comment on the attendance debacle, and in the course of our conversation, she suggested I submit my poems to a contest for which she was one of the judges…. And so it came to be that my first book, nonstop, was published by Cedar Rock Press in 1981. A good beginning to what’s turned out to be a fine long ride.
One of the many trails Naomi and I have wandered down together over the 45 years of this friendship was our correspondence with a Texas woman named Ann Alejandro, originally a friend of Naomi’s. Ann was a great letter writer, and sometime in the early 2000s, Naomi started forwarding the letters on to me so I could see how wonderful she was, forthright, down-to-earth, funny as well as heartbreaking. Since she was 29 years old, Ann dealt with serious chronic illness that kept her from pursuing a traditional writing career, but sometime along the way Naomi had suggested we might help her get a book published. She liked the idea, but then didn’t like Naomi’s first idea for cover art, and tartly proposed that the project might go more smoothly if we waited until after her death.
And we did. Ann died in 2019 at the untimely age of 64, and the book, I Know About A Thousand Things, is the result of our promise to her. We went through thousands of pages, found all the best sentences and paragraphs and wisecracks and arranged them into thematic sections like Land, Motherhood, Loss, Sports. Naomi wrote an opening essay and I wrote an afterword, which is excerpted below. There’s also a photo section. It’s a skinny little book, but there’s a whole person in there, and a whole career. It occurred to me that Ann sort of represents all the talented writers who for one reason or another live and die without recognition. Maybe by lifting her up like this, we somehow acknowledge them all.
I had much fun last month traveling around Central Texas with the Queen of Poetry, promoting the book in San Marcos, San Antonio, Austin, Uvalde and Seguin. We will put on our little show here in Baltimore at Bird in Hand on January 31, with an event at JHU the next day. Closer to that time, Liz Hazen is going to interview us for the Fishbowl’s Baltimore Writers Club section.
From the Afterword of I Know About A Thousand Things:
When Naomi and I started going through Ann’s writing in 2018, and a few years later, as I drafted the first version of our book proposal, I had a certain way to explain the project to people. I would describe the decades of correspondence, the mountains of letters and emails and Facebook posts Ann produced in her life. I would say that I thought of her as an “outsider writer,” sort of like the outsider artists in Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum.
I would explain that though she rarely worked on official manuscripts or sought publication —her illness made submission seem a burden — she loved the idea of us doing the work for her. The book became a treasured idea that came up frequently in our correspondence. But then there was the little dust-up about Naomi’s brainstorm for the cover art that led her to suggest we publish posthumously.
I always concluded with the fact that she was a profoundly Texas-y writer, from a little place in South Texas you never heard of.
That last bit changed on Tuesday, May 24th, 2022 when Uvalde became a place everyone has heard of, the same way they’ve heard of Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Aurora. As the news came in, even before we knew that Ann’s ten-year-old great-niece Layla Salazar was among the lost, it crossed both of our minds that it was a blessing Ann didn’t live to see this. How could she have borne it? On the other hand, she would have had so much to say about it. Interestingly, as we continued sifting through the material in the months after the shooting, it seemed she already had said some of these things.
Her writing about grief and loss, about civility as a response to discord, her struggle with faith in the face of terrible pain all seemed to have a new resonance. At the same time, it was as if the true original nature of Uvalde, the little place in South Texas hardly anybody ever heard of, with its feral pigs and greenjays and mules and families celebrating Christmas, was preserved in amber by her writings about it.
We had always planned for me to come down so we could visit Uvalde together and meet with Ann’s husband, Joe. I wanted to see the places that were important to her, particularly the ranch that was at the center of her life since childhood. I already had a plane ticket to fly down this past summer when the tragedy occurred in May. Should we still go? Of course we should. It was more important than ever, really.
Luckily we arrived in Uvalde after the hordes of media and other doom-related visitors had departed. The town had returned to what I imagined was its normal level of traffic and commotion (i.e., mostly wind and birdsong.) Yet the sorrow was everywhere you looked, from the Welcome to Uvalde sign on the edge of town, to the grounds of the elementary school, to the town square, all marked with crosses, heaped with stuffed animals and withered bouquets, posted with scrawled notes and printed signs of support from police and fire departments and school districts all over Texas and beyond. Downtown, there were stencils of angels in the shop windows alongside the brand-new Children’s Bereavement Center. The old-fashioned ice cream parlor and gaily colored candy store whispered the names of their missing patrons. Even the sign for a flooring distributor called Fresh Start Decoration seemed aware of the discouraging odds.
Around many corners of downtown, in hidden alleys, overlooking empty lots, muralists from all over the state were painting the beautiful shining faces of the 21 victims. Near our Airbnb, a sparkling whitewashed refuge in the oldest building in town, an artist on a scaffold and her assistant worked through the night.
Locals were surprised, and then pleased, that we had actually shown up to talk about something else. Something else!
…And the essay goes on from there, concluding with a description of the Texas sunset as seen from Ann’s ranch. Then I quote from one of Ann’s letters, to give her the last word.
Chess Pie and I go to a world without words; at sunset there is a rounding road on a hill from which we can see not a sign of any human at all, only the bowl of sky equaled to the earth around us. We can see southwest to the clouds forming on the Gulf of Mexico that will bring us the wind in the evening; we look north and we can see the Uvalde water towers, Mount Inge, the hills at Knippa, and the hills of all three rivers which spill into the valleys — the Nueces, the Frio, and the Sabinal.
Every sunset, every flower or field of flowers, every cactus, every river and drought, with 117 degrees going on for days straight, it will be part of me. All the names of all the plants and trees and grasses I will know like my own. On summer evening breezes, I will smell the Gulf surf 200 miles away.
The Texas Book Festival schedule is here, if you happen to be in Austin the weekend of November 16 and 17. Naomi’s coronation and poetry reading are Saturday and our book event is Sunday afternoon. If you’re in Baltimore, and you don’t want to wait til we come to Bird in Hand on January 31, you can order I Know About A Thousand Things here.
