Editor’s Notes

Welcome back dinner-guests! Hello to the new guests. We’re coming in hot for the month of July. Things may look different around the site. Click around and share what you like. Now on the topic of sharing: be honest - have you been sharing your art?

The global pandemic reminded us that we all have a story tell. In her new book Back To Venus, playwright and author Tiffany Seven comes to terms with her journey of womanhood and connects us to an inheritance that yields many questions asked before. Listen here.

This is Season 2 of the Trill Kitchen Podcast. Available now on Apple & Spotify Podcasts.

Hear me out: Blackness isn’t a monolith. Womanhood isn’t a monolith. There is so much evidence of diversity around us that would suggest that mankind as a whole is not a monolith. In spite of our similarities, still, many of our stories stand out. “You have to walk out of everything you’ve been through. You have to step forward,” Seven says in our spirited interview. As the Beninese proverb goes, “an old story does not open the ear as a new one does.”

In Back to Venus, a fat Black woman shares her grief over two powerful strongholds. The first stronghold is the cycle of oppression and trauma that her maternal lineage faced in their lifetimes. But there is another stronghold, a maniacal endurance she and her ancestors know how to channel. She has the strength that her great-grandmother’s grandmother had, and she wishes she didn’t. In the 21st century, a century marked with chronic isolation and Orwellan prophecies come to light, the idea of “holding on for better days” lacks appeal.

Both strongholds -- despair and strength, are backbreaking. Living in the duality of the two reveals a chronically tired, unapologetic human being who happens to be Black and a woman. And once she navigates her inner and outer worlds, she discovers that she was and is the blueprint.