Kendra Allen on her first book, "When You Learn the Alphabet," and the challenges and rewards of writing about trauma
The first thing I notice about Kendra Allen through reading her new book, “When You Learn the Alphabet,” and in subsequently interviewing her, is that she is incredibly blunt. Blunt not only in the way her essays divulge deeply personal – often troubling – life experiences, but in her introspection of herself and the way her experiences have shaped her. Her essays don’t always end cleanly with a resolution, something expected in most writing regardless of genre. Her writing doesn’t typically adhere to the standard character or story arc, recognizing that as with life, our experiences don’t end neatly with falling action, that our individual traumatic experiences aren’t packaged up and separated from ourselves as life lessons, free from new consequences. Allen’s essays tie together her individual experiences and thoughts on race, mental illness, sexuality, gender, and familial relations that speak to how our personal traumas are inherited through generations, and how the spreading of that trauma contributes to a social epidemic.
“I haven’t wrote anything I’m proud of in two years,” Allen tells me early on in our conversation. For anyone with persistent writer’s block, hearing this is almost consoling. This revelation comes after Allen tells me about the difficulty of attending grad school at The University of Alabama, and creating work amongst the change in political scenery that came with the switch after her graduation from an, at least ostensibly, incredibly liberal private art school. “The biggest switch was just the apparent hatefulness everywhere. At private college, it’s seemingly liberal, you’re not faced with that, then you go to Alabama and it’s like, ‘No, we’re putting all this in your face at all times.’” She goes on to compare the two evils of hidden and blatant hate, and the reality of her experiences of veiled racism during undergrad. “Actually, I would say I kind of embraced it because I would rather it be in my face like that, so I know how to navigate it, versus it just punching me in the face a year later.”
It’s necessary to mention that Kendra and I shared a creative writing class together at Columbia College Chicago, where we both completed undergrad in 2017. Before receiving her Bachelor’s degree, Allen had already had her work published in literary publications such as Brevity, work which was later published again in “When You Learn the Alphabet.” Despite Allen’s extraordinary feat of publishing her first book before completing grad school, when I mention it, she shrugs it off as partial happenstance. “I got word of this contest. They send out 100 emails every single day with submission opportunities, and I just happened to look one day and it was like, ‘Kiese Laymon is judging the Iowa Prize,’ and I’m obsessed with Kiese Laymon.” Her admiration for Laymon is apparent. She references his ideas in “WYLTA,” and brings him up again later when I ask her about essential writers of color.
“I just looked through all my work that I’d done at Columbia,” she says, “and I was like, ‘You know? This all goes together, I’ve been talking about the same thing for four years.’ I just tried to cultivate a manuscript that way. I put it together, and I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m going to send it out.’ Six months later I got an email and it was like, ‘Hey, you won.’ I forgot I submitted. You take forever to hear back, so I had moved on.”
Allen won the Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, which is open to unknown and established writers, and is an incredible honor. In her acknowledgements, Allen thanks the students in the MFA program at Iowa who took part in selecting the recipients of the prize, and notes that, “This day forward I’m no longer salty about not getting into the nonfiction program,” a prestigious and difficult MFA program to be accepted into. Allen tells me, however, that attending grad school wasn’t necessarily her choice path, but that her decision to continue her education came mostly out of the fear of the unknown that many students face after completing undergrad. “I didn’t really want to go back to school,” she says. “I just made that decision out of fear. I was like, ‘I need something to do, I graduated, and I don’t want to go home.’”
Currently, Allen is teaching English 101 and 102 at the University of Alabama, and when she speaks candidly of her contempt for the staleness of the lower level English courses, she makes sure to mention that it doesn’t have anything to do with her students. “I taught English 101 and 102 as a creative writing class, honestly. I tell them I don’t care about MLA format because I don’t know what that means. Write what you want, you can use ‘I.’ They give you a week of training where you watch PowerPoints, and then they’re like, ‘Okay, go teach 40 students.’”
Her rejection of standard, constricting methods of writing is mentioned in her book, and is apparent in her writing. Her essays don’t stick to one particular structure, some are more traditional, and some are verging on poetic. On how she determines how her essays appear on the page she says, “I start all my essays the same. I’ll write a couple words or a couple sentences and then I just click the space bar because I don’t know what to say. The form kind of formulates itself. It’s like a rhythm. I think of a lot of words in a rhythmic pattern, or a song pattern. You know when something pauses, and then something happens like, ‘Okay, I felt the meaning of that pause’? I’m always thinking, ‘Where is the pause in what I’m saying? How can I amplify it?’”
Allen went into college with the intention of majoring in journalism, but ultimately found the genre too cut and dry. “When I was taking journalism classes, it just wasn’t clicking,” she says. “It’s so many rules, and I can’t do it. It’s who, what, when, where, why?”
With nonfiction and long form journalism’s similarities, I asked Allen if she ever thinks she’ll dabble in writing with a more journalistic bend. “There would have to be some kind of personal narrative to it. I can’t physically write that far away from something, I can’t do it. I would want to learn. I would love to write about music, but it would have to be an intersecting of a lot of other subjects. I love talking about music when I’m talking about feminism in music. I’m talking about bigger issues. I think I always hint on social issues, but I can never just talk about it objectively. It always has to be something personal, so, no.”
Having published her first book, I ask Allen about topics that she is itching to learn more about and explore in her writing. “Right now it’s about virginity,” she says. “I’ve been trying to write and discuss the myth of purity, and what that means for women and young girls. Also the effects of mental health, especially in Black communities, I want to learn more about. The importance of therapy in Black communities. We just think we don’t have to talk to nobody about nothing.”
This topic is laid out in Allen’s final essay in her book, “Bombs on Fire.” The essay revolves around Allen’s experience growing up as a child of two Gulf War veterans, living through their post traumatic stress disorders, and subsequently developing her own depression. “I don’t want to pass along all the stuff that has been passed down to me,” she states in a one-line paragraph in the essay. This notion of rejecting the pattern of inherited trauma, and refusing to accept the standards of society’s regard, or rather disregard, for Black Americans – women in particular – comes up a lot in “When You Learn the Alphabet.”
The essay “Dark Girls” discusses Allen’s experience living with her darker skin tone, and what that means in her family, the Black community, and society as a whole. She tells us of a time where she was prescribed an acne medication that temporarily lightened her complexion, and how that change affected her view and acceptance of her skin tone. “I thought I was experiencing a case of the michael jackson (sic) disease. I got scared. After a couple of weeks of using the medicines, the light eventually eased its way onto my whole face. Wiped me out completely … The world began to look proud of me. I was always looking deep into mirrors trying not to search for a brightness, but a light. I didn’t know I’d find it like this, I didn’t know I’d immediately want to give it back.”
In “How to Workshop N-Words,” we’re placed in a very specific moment of time, a situation all too familiar to Allen. The essay takes place in Allen’s fiction writing class at Columbia, where the professor repeats the “n-word” liberally and enthusiastically to the class while reading a Black student’s work. The essay discusses the weight of the word, and the burden the Black American faces when confronted with it. “I feel like they are expecting me to say something, my classmates. Not to defend myself, but to defend them. Like they want me to say I know they’re not racist. Like they want me to say I’m ok so they can enjoy the story again. I feel like these rooms are always expecting me to say something.”
In the essay, Allen reflects on texts by Black writers that are commonly assigned by professors as a form self-indulgence. “Professors take pride in assigning these texts,” she says. “The ‘classic’ black writers that taught them something about their whiteness – the Baldwins – the Morrisons – the Hugheses – the Ellisons, in hope of including me in the classroom curriculum to some extent. They depend on them … I know they choose these black tales to show they didn’t forget us, forget me.”
In response to this notion in her book, I asked Allen, aside from the “Bluest Eye” and other common Black experience texts, what she considers essential reading in educating ourselves through writers of color. “Definitely ‘Loving in the War Years’ by Cherríe Moraga, she’s a lesbian Latina writer. That should be in everything. It’s kind of a hybrid of essay and poetry, it’s amazing. ‘Bone’ by Yrsa Daley-Ward, it’s another book of poetry that’s amazing. I’ve been really into poetry lately. Anything by Kiese Laymon, read that. Jesmyn Ward, if we’re talking about essays and memoirs, ‘Men We Reaped’ is amazing. ‘Thick’ by Tressie McMillan [Cottom], it just came out. There’s so many, like you said, of course they say James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, all these legendary writers. We know them. Who are their babies? I’m always trying to look for their babies.”
Allen’s exploration and critique of race relations in America is strong, but becomes the most full in the telling of her own experiences relating to the subjects she speaks about. Her father, his relationship with her mother, and how that relationship affected Allen’s life is a reoccurring subject in “When You Learn the Alphabet.”
“About American Marriages” discusses her parents’ separation, and being caught in the middle of two not-quite-ex lovers. In “Father Can You Hear Me,” the fallout of her parents’ separation and her father’s absence is detailed, how that absence shaped Allen, and her struggle to forgive. Contrasting with the flawed relationship Allen shares with her father, her relationship with her mother, although complicated (What mother-child relationship is simple?) connects the two in ways only death can break – and her greatest fear is outliving her mother. To Allen, the most terrifying part of death is not the when, or the separation of mind from body. The most debilitating thought she has when considering death is being without the woman who created her, who she was once one with in body, and remains one with in spirit. “I will plant bombs in the tombs of my soul and there will be no remains left if she leaves me here alone. She is my home.”
“Skin Cracks, Blood Spills” discusses the crack epidemic in the Black community through Allen’s personal experience with her aunt, a victim of drug addiction. The essay goes in and out of the impact her aunt’s addiction has had on her family, and the effects of crack addiction in Black communities as a whole. In a standout section in the essay, Allen reflects on the origins of the epidemic. “I read a news headline that said, ‘Is Crack Back in 2015?’ As if it ever left the front porches of black homes. I’d be hard pressed to find a black family with no crack addicts in it. They asked if crack was back as if the 1980s, the CIA, and Ronald Reagan never happened. They asked if crack was back as if the aftermath of flooding the inner cities of California streets with crack cocaine was just a chapter in America’s history instead of a first step to destruction.” The essay separates the addict from the addiction, focusing not on the atrophy of a family caused by an addict, but how that deterioration stemming from drugs falls on society’s allowance and encouragement of the destruction of a particular group of people.
Sharing these stories with strangers can be challenging, but having your own family read about the pain you’ve experienced, sometimes at their hands, takes a different kind of bravery. I asked Kendra if there was any anxiety or apprehension in making these stories public. She said, “Yes, 100%. Not with my mom, I have a pretty open relationship with my mom, but more so things with my dad. that was my fear the whole time. I was like, ‘Okay, we have a good relationship now, but will me putting this out in the world, although true, but it’s in the past, will that mess it up more?’ Then I put it out, and all those fears came true.” Not exactly an ideal ending, but Allen has found solace in the way her essays have touched girls like her, the people she truly writes for. “When I did a reading at Columbia, I had girl come up to me and she was like, ‘This is my dad, and I wish I could say this,’” Allen retells. “Those affirmations really make me feel like I did just blow this up for a reason, it’s actually helping girls like me.”
I asked Allen if she can pinpoint anything she’s learned about herself or her writing throughout the process of publishing and seeing her book enjoyed by readers. “I learned that my stories don’t belong to me, that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned. My stories don’t make me special or singular, it’s not for me. Of course you have to like it, but when it’s out in the world, it’s not for you anymore. How it’s received and how it’s perceived, it’s not in your control and it never was supposed to be, because it’s bigger than you.” Where she goes from here, she’s not quite sure yet, but her next project might not be typical prose. “I think I’m going to try to write a poetry book … There are so many different types of poems, whereas in essays you’re just writing the truth. It’s just the standard for essays. With poetry, I want to learn about the many forms, and have intention when I write and know what to call it versus just being like, ‘I don’t know what this is, it’s a poem though.’ I want to be able to say, ‘This is a cinquain, or a haiku.’ The virginity project is probably going to be a book of essays, but I’m dreaming in haiku.”
Whatever form Allen’s next writing venture takes, it’s likely to break some rules. “When You Learn the Alphabet” is a stunning first collection that shows modern racism and American race relations through the lens of a woman trying to learn about herself, the world around her, and her family. However many feathers Allen states were ruffled when the book was published, her work has touched many more that have found comfort in her words, which they themselves might not have the ability to say. As she states at the end of her acknowledgements, “I never want to see these essays again. They belong to ya’ll now.”
Click this link to purchase “When You Learn the Alphabet” on Amazon.