Washington Square on air is the audio town square for the Washington Square Review. Lansing Community College's literary journal. Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of. The world, gather here and chat about all things writing.

Hey there. This is Melissa Ford Lockin, editor for the Washington Square Review. I'm here today with Lyzette Wanzer. We're going to talk about her book, Trauma, Tresses and Truth. Hey there.

Hello. Thank you for having me today.

Yeah, thanks for reaching out and coming on. Tell us a little bit about your book. How did it come to be?

So trauma justice and untangling our hair through personal narratives actually began at the annual AWP conference.

Oh, okay.

Which one? This was the one. It was the last one before the pandemic. It was the one in San Antonio in 2020 March. Okay. And I had done a panel there called Trauma justice and Truth and recruited four other authors from across the country to do that panel with me. And we had standing room only in our session. And after our talk was over and we all had given readings from our essays, six audience members came up to me and said, well, where is your book? Because it's not down in the book fair. Are you selling them up here? And I was like, ha, ha. There is no book. And I didn't think that idea had any legs either. So I forgot about that. Got home just before San Francisco locked down. And then a couple months went by, and then George Floyd and Breonna Taylor happened and kicking off that whole what I call the summer of racial reckoning. And I was filled on a daily basis with so much rage, I was having a tough time metabolizing it, was not eating, wasn't sleeping well, had tough time working. And I thought, I need to find a healthier way to digest this. And I thought back to that panel at AWP and those audience members. I said, you know what? Maybe they were up to something. Maybe they had a good idea. So I started writing a book proposal based on that panel. And I wrote it during the month of July, 2020, finished it literally the last day of July, and then said, okay, well, I am feeling a little bit better. I also began teaching some creative writing workshops specifically for writers of color during that summer. And then I said, you finished the proposal? And even though it doesn't have any legs, just go ahead and sen it out because it's done. So I did that. And then by mid September, it was really fast. I had four publishing offers and one agent meeting.

That super fast. For anyone who doesn't know, that's lightning fast.

That's very fast and it probably would not have happened any other year. It was the zeitgeist of what was happening that summer. Because, you know, our hair is another form of persecuting the black body. So I framed it as an anthology, sold it, and then had to write the rest of the book because I hadn't written very much of it. I reached out, of course, to all of my panelists at awp. Of course they were all interested in participating. And this collection is a collection of Afro, Latina and African American women speaking about their experiences. So they're all true stories. Wearing natural hairstyles in school, in the workplace, in academia, et cetera. When I say natural, I'm talking about Afro dreadlocks, braids, Bantu knots, anything that's untreated. So no relaxer, you know, no perm and no straightening.

Let me back up a little bit and ask. You said that you didn't think it had the concept. When they first asked you about the book, you didn't think it had a possibility. Why do you? Obviously it was an important issue to you because you were doing a panel on it. What was it that made you think that it didn't have book possibility?

I didn't see an audience for it. And I already knew that Hair Story, you know, had come out. The kind of groundbreaking book by Laura Lori Tharps and I'm forgetting her co author right now, back in the 80s. But I didn't see this as a book idea. And I was working on another book at that time also, and I was really focused on that instead. And I did not see the collection at that time as being a form of persecution or speaking to that until, you know, Brianna and George happened. And I said, you know, that's also about the perception and the policing and the politics of the black body as well.

So those events gave it a new layer of meaning.

It did. Along with the fact that there were six audience members that came up and said, where is the book? You know, people at AWP are smart people and if they expected a book, I thought maybe there should be one.

Yes. How did it feel when you wrote the proposal that quickly?

It was somewhat cathartic. So it did help me, you know, be able to start eating again and sleeping a little better. It also gave me something else to focus on besides just watching wall to wall coverage of, you know, all of the demos. And I was going to demonst of marches as well. So it was very therapeutic process for me, which is really why, why I was doing it. But Then when it was done, I said, well, it's finished. You may as well send it out. I wasn't expecting anything, but, you know, it's tough writing a book proposal, so. And it takes time. So I just decided to send it out and if it boomerangs, that's fine, you know.

So emotionally, how were you attached to it when you hit send? Were you like, nah, whatever, or were you kind of conflicted?

Oh, no, since I. My expectations were very low for it, I was like, whatever. Yeah,.

But that's pretty great.

I was really preoccupied with the politics that were going on here in Northern. Yeah, that's great.

That writing the proposal did give you some closure and momentum to move forward in a different way. So tell us a little bit about the other authors that are included in the book.

So I chose not to do an open call for this book. I decided to invite people that I already knew or who came to me through referrals of people I already knew, including people at ewp. So I did a whole lot of reading of articles and peer reviewed journal pieces where women were discussing various aspects of this topic. And I would reach out to some of them directly. I tracked them down and I'll find their emails and then tell them my concept for the book and ask if they wanted to participate. And so there's about 20 of us in the book. Everybody's got one piece. And I've included four of my own pieces in here. And so that's how I found it. I was tweeting about this when it was still Twitter. I was tweeting about this as I was going through the process and I heard from so many other people that I hadn't expected. I was reaching out to African American and Afro Latina women. But I heard from East Indian women who said, you know, we have this problem too, and it goes hand in hand with colorism in our society. In India, I heard from quite a few Native American males, men who said, you know, we have this problem. Our tribe requires that we grow our hair long. And when I go for a job interview, even if I have it braided neatly down my back, it's not all over the place. I'm told things like, you know, everything about you is great for the job. We love your resume. We just need you to do one thing. And they can't, they can't do that. And they said, it's still going on. Oh, and then I heard from, I had never heard of this before from white women who said, you know, I'm the only One in my family who has Jewish hair. And I had to look that up. And I asked some of my contributors, and they said, oh, you. You haven't heard of the Jew Frozen? They said, no, I've never heard of that. And they said, that's what they're talking about. They're talking about that frizzy hair. And sometimes only one member of the family out of siblings will have it. So that was really interesting.

So you said that you did some reading into scholarly work. What kind of things did you find that made you think, I want to get in touch with this person?

I wanted the book to be accessible for general readers, but I also knew that I was going to include a study guide in the back and a reader's guide, which I did do. And that was galvanized by what was going on during that summer of 2020. But also a colleague of mine who had read some of the work said, if you put a study guide in the back of this book, it can get you into universities and you'll have a broader audience and your publisher will be able to market you on more than just one front. And so I thought that was a good idea. And also I wanted to make sure that if it did get into universities, people would understand how complex a problem this is and that it's not new. It's a very long standing problem. I kept hearing from people, you know, oh, this is relatively new. And I'm like, no, it's not. It goes back to slave days. So I did that and wanted essays that were not completely academic, but they're completely general, so they had to kind of walk that line. And then some of them are just personal essays.

What kind of things are included in the study guide?

Essay questions. It's meant for college age and above, like college and graduate school. I do have one high school in LA that's interested in it. I don't know if this would really be appropriate for them, perhaps, but. The reader discussion guide is a list of essay questions in four different sections. One is called Reflecting on Personal Experiences. Another is Reflecting on Readings, where I include some of the readings from the research I did, reflecting on attending school or work while black, and then reflecting on dialectic topics.

Okay.

And There are about 10 essay questions in each section.

All right, so something perhaps a book club could also use.

True.

What kind of conversations has the book sparked for you? Because I imagine there are some people, like you said, that are saying things like, oh, this is a really new problem, or people that are more familiar with it, that it's long standing. What kind of things do you guys talk about? What do people ask you?

I think what's been most gratifying to me, especially doing book tour, when I was doing readings at bookstores and literary festivals and all this stuff, is hearing black women come up to me and say, because of your book I'm now growing at my relaxer. Or because of your book I'm no longer wearing a wig. Or because of your book I'm taking my extensions out. Things like that. That was the most gratifying. And then also continuing to hear from people in other cultures saying I have this problem as well. And then the whole conversation around colorism, especially the Latina authors, have a whole other layer on top of the hair, which is the colorism that kind of goes hand in hand with hair texture issues. So very often a Latina might be the only one in her family that has hair that is not straight or that's a little frizzier or curlier, but she might also be a shade darker than her siblings and that sort of thing, which causes a whole nother, a raft of problems in their families. So I've heard about that.

Can you give an example?

So there's one contributor in the book where she is the darkest in her family. She's got curly hair, very thick texture, and everybody else in her family has straighter hair. And she would be watching TV with her father, they'd be watching Spanish language TV and anytime a fair skinned woman would come on, his father would be like, you know, now that's what I'm talking about, blah, blah, blah. And so she learned that that was what was desirable and that she didn't quite match that and she internalized that which kids will do. And so that's, that's just one example. There's another example where an author went to visit relatives in might have been Puerto Rico. No, no, the Dr. Dominican Republic. And she had very frizzy, curly hair, somewhat nappy. She went with her cousins to a hair salon and she just wanted a regular hair treatment. But the salon stylist there kept trying to convince her to have a Brazilian blowout. So just things like that. Yeah.

Do people talk about the way that it affects their family relationships aside, you know, do they end up comparing themselves to their siblings or.

They do. Especially if parents or aunts or uncles are showing clear favoritism towards one sibling or another. But also some of these contributors are parents. And so they've already had to go to battle for their children attending schools. There's one Woman who. Her daughter was something like 2 years old, going to preschool, and one day her husband picked her daughter up and her hair had been completely changed. The teachers changed it and put a bow in it and put it up in a bud and all of this stuff. And the mother was just outraged, which she should be. You know, no one else's hair had been changed, just her daughter's hair. And there, of course, the news is just flooded with these instances happening to kids being sent home because they come to school one day with dreadlocks or with braids, both girls and boys. This is happening, too. There have been lawsuits. And then it was a young man, his name is escaping me in Texas, who was suspended from school because he wouldn't take his dreadlocks out. And they were very neat. And yes, he has long hair, but he had it up. They were very neat. Every picture you saw him in, they were neat. And they said, as soon as he takes those out, he can come back to school. And his mother said no. And Texas had just passed the Crown Act. They had just passed the Crown Act. And I was shocked. I was like, texas passed the Crown Act. I'm surprised they passed that legislation. And then, of course, when she went to file suit under that act, they said, well, it doesn't apply in this case. Well, if it doesn't apply in that case, then when does it apply? So then I knew Texas passed it to be performative and to jump on the bandwagon of other states that were passing the Crown Act. California was the first, New York was the second. So Crown stands for Create a respectful and Open Workplace or World for Natural Hair. California passed it in 2019. And the bill was signed in 2019. Governor Gavin Newsom. And then the first. It went into effect in 2020.

What are people being told that their hair is distracting or disruptive or what? What's the reason?

Is the number one.

Yeah.

Distracting, unprofessional is a big one. Too big. Doesn't fit the dress code, especially for kids in school, despite the fact that there may be white kids there, including boys with longer hair, but nothing is said to them.

Yeah. Or people who have, you know, crazy colored hair or whatever. Yeah.

Yep.

Yes, it sounds like. So there's some kind of assumption that the person is trying to say something with their hair, you know, that they've got some, like, agenda or meaning.

It's either that or they just. They really want us to change our hair to look as Caucasian as possible. So if you straighten it, it's fine, you know, I tell the story of a woman who was working at a hotel in Boston back in the 80s, and she always had had relaxer, but she came in one day with it braided. Now, everybody checking in, the guest loved it. But her management told her she had to return to her perm because she was working at the front desk. And when she refused, they fired her. Yes.

Yeah. There are no words for that. Yeah. Yep. When you first, very first, started working on putting the panel together, what motivated you to put the panel together?

Like, I just wanted to get a panel accepted at awp. I've been trying it for five years. I know how competitive it is, but I just wanted to get a panel accepted at AWP. And the year before, in 2019, when it was in Portland, they had a session called how to create a Competitive Panel. They probably do it every year. And I attended at that time. And then when I got home, I literally was reading through the catalog, just reading the descriptions of the panel and noticed a few things about the way those descriptions were written and noticed that they liked alliteration in the titles.

AWP Secret.

I know. And I had already written an essay called Twisted about my experiences working in New York. I'm a native New Yorker down in Wall street wearing my hair in braids. And I had published that essay, so I decided to just build the panel around that piece. Okay. And I thought trauma, tresses, and truth. You know, I had trauma, and I had truth, and I couldn't come up with a third T. And I went to Raje's, and he gave me tresses, so I had it. And I said, they've got to take this one. And they did, and they did it twice.

All right, nice. Good job. Yeah. But I've sat through those how to do a panel workshops at AWP a couple times, and it's intense.

Yeah. Yes. Yes.

So alliteration, there's the key. I think it's also a really good topic, so that was probably part of it. I have friends in my life who have stuff with their hair when they were kids. And what I'm thinking about is how, as you move through life, there are natural spaces to work out some of these childhood things. But I have never been in anywhere, if it exists, a place to work out this hair stuff. So I think that's one of the great things about your book, is that it finally gives people something to read and a place to connect and be like, oh, my God. Other people had a similar issue because you could probably feel like you're completely alone. In this without any resources for help.

Right, right. I mean, I can say that very few African American women have gotten out of girlhood past the age of 5th or 6th grade without having something humiliating or derogatory said to them because of their hair.

And there's no place for them in, like, mainstream society to open up and talk about this.

Right, right. I did produce a conference called Trauma Trust Isn't Truth as well. It was a virtual conference, and I did that for three years in the summers and recruited about 30 to 35 speakers. And so they did panels over three days. So that was. That was kind of nice.

Will there be a book, too? Where is it going next?

There might be. There might be. I'm now working on the book that I was working on before this whole thing started. So I'm working on that book now, which is building a career as a literary artist of color.

Okay.

But I do want to do a second. Trauma Trust is, in truth, where I am including Native American men in it and then also other cultures, because I heard from so many of them. And so it's. It's clearly not just us. And then I went to a writer's residency where there was a Native American man there, and he was telling me all kinds of stories. So. Yeah.

Things that he Himself, that he'd experienced, that he'd experienced.

And even his mother, he said, you know, her hair is very dark and long, and people would come up in the grocery store and just stick their hand in it. And I was like, they do that to us, too. I said, they do that to us also. And he's like, yeah, they treat her like a pet. And I'm like, same. Same here.

Yeah. And there's, like. I would think that some of these moments just seem. They probably just come up out of nowhere. And you. You know, you don't. How do you deal with that in the moment? So having a. Having a book to read and having a conversation started gives you a place to, you know, kind of build from, so you're not just completely caught off guard.

Yes.

Right. Talk a little bit about your other writing that you do. I saw on your resume that you do freelance. That sounds profitable.

So I teach creative writing workshops through. I used to just primarily teach through the Writer's Grotto, which is a collective here in San Francisco. But during the pandemic, I had to pivot like everyone else and start teaching online. So now I do still teach online through a number of different literary standalone organizations like the Loft in Minneapolis and Grub street in Boston. Gemini Inc. In San Antonio, Hugo House I'll be teaching at this spring and still teaching through the Writer's Grotto as well and a number of other places.

Are those doing that online, those different teaching positions, or are some of them.

Yeah, those are all online. The Writers Grotto I can do online or in person, of course.

What do you like about teaching online?

I mean, I'm always going to prefer in person. Right. Always. I mean, because when it was in person before the pandemic, you know, we would sit around the table. I would sit at the table with them seminar style.

Yeah.

I would bring in snacks and we would have tea and all of that. And we would stretch before class, do a jog around the table. So it's not, you know, it's obviously not as interactive and people get on and say, we miss your stretches. And I'm like, I know, but I can't really do it on Zoom. But, you know, the silver lining is that I now have students from across the country and sometimes the world that can join. So it's okay. It's okay. But I'm always going to prefer in person.

Right, that's understandable.

Yeah.

But it is nice that you can meet people from other places that you wouldn't ordinarily. And that's true. You know, perhaps in that way, if there's a group working together, they get different voices from around the country or around other countries, so they might get some different perspectives. So I know we're just working hard for that silver lining. Because when I first started to ask you, I was like, do you like teaching online? And I'm like, no, don't ask it that way. What do you like teaching about online? Because, yeah, the pandemic did definitely changed a lot of creative spaces and things slowly, slowly are getting back to more in person. But it's surprising to me how long it takes.

It is. I think people got accustomed to not having to leave home, so it's a little tough getting them back into spaces. I've noticed. Yep. Or, you know, I used to just offer classes in person when we came back. And then I would get emails from people in other states saying, oh, is this going to be hybrid? And after enough people asked that, I would just switch it to online.

Yeah. Yeah. If people would like to follow you online, speaking of online, and perhaps watch for that second book, where is a good place for them to find you?

So they can find me at my website, which is lisettewanzermfa.com and I'm also on LinkedIn I'm actually on LinkedIn every day.

Oh, okay.

Awesome.

We'll be sure to include both of those in the show notes. Sweet. Well, thanks a lot for coming on and talking to me today.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for stopping by the audio town square of the Washington Square Review. Until next time, this has been the Washington Square On-Air from Lansing Community College. To find out more about our writers, community and literary journal, visit lcc.edu/wsl. Writing is messy, but do it anyway.