{"id":470,"date":"2011-10-16T17:01:15","date_gmt":"2011-10-16T22:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/?p=470"},"modified":"2011-10-17T15:08:46","modified_gmt":"2011-10-17T20:08:46","slug":"saving-the-life-that-is-my-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/?p=470","title":{"rendered":"Saving the life that is my own"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I picked up the Alice Walker collection of essays <em><a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books\/about\/In_search_of_our_mothers_gardens.html?id=PVJXqyuCM2AC\" target=\"_blank\">In Search of Our Mothers&#8217; Gardens<\/a><\/em> and reread the very first essay, &#8220;Saving the life that is your own: The importance of models in the artist&#8217;s life&#8221;. I&#8217;ve read this essay before, many times, in fact, over the years since I first got the book back when my teenager was a little baby. The essay&#8217;s theme, that artists need to have templates to follow in order to live their lives, is one that I have always believed in. The templates are knowledge of the very existence of other artists like them. The timing of my rereading of the essay proved prescient, as this weekend I was fortunate to meet a woman writer whom I have admired for years, <a href=\"http:\/\/nalohopkinson.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Nalo Hopkinson<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_471\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/nalohopkinson.com\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-471\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-471\" title=\"Nalo Hopkinson\" src=\"http:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/nalo-hopkinson-300x298.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"298\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/nalo-hopkinson-300x298.jpg 300w, https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/nalo-hopkinson-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/nalo-hopkinson.jpg 333w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-471\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Nalo Hopkinson. Photo from http:\/\/nalohopkinson.com\/<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>A brilliant writer, Nalo is one of the few Caribbean sci-fi\/fantasy writers who have been internationally published. Her first books <a href=\"http:\/\/nalohopkinson.com\/writing\/fiction\/books\/brown_girl\" target=\"_blank\">Brown Girl in the Ring<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.challengingdestiny.com\/reviews\/midnightrobber.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Midnight Robber<\/a> are bonafide sci-fi classics. She writes brave feminist fiction; it is outstanding not simply because of its themes and Caribbean characters of colour (and the fact that in speculative fiction black writers are few and far between) but also because she&#8217;s a fine writer with a gift for lush, descriptive writing.<\/p>\n<p>I treasured the time I spent listening to her and in the writing workshop she gave at the 30th WI Literature Conference, which took place at UWI, St Augustine, this weekend. Here is a writer who more or less forged her way in the publishing world without compromising her vision or her voice. This is a model I would be happy to emulate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I picked up the Alice Walker collection of essays In Search of Our Mothers&#8217; Gardens and reread the very first essay, &#8220;Saving the life that is your own: The importance of models in the artist&#8217;s life&#8221;. I&#8217;ve read this essay before, many times, in fact, over the years since I first got the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[170,171,165,169,167,166,164,32,172,168,24,173,174,39],"class_list":["post-470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-alice-walker","tag-artists","tag-brown-girl-in-the-ring","tag-caribbean-fantasy","tag-caribbean-sci-fi","tag-midnight-robber","tag-nalo-hopkinson","tag-race","tag-role-models","tag-speculative-fiction","tag-trinidad-tobago","tag-uwi","tag-wi-literature-conference","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=470"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":474,"href":"https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions\/474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisaallen-agostini.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}