Hello Beautiful People,
Ten months ago, I set out to feature one author per month for the entire 2012-2013 school year. And we succeeded. And I could not think of a more beautiful, more intelligent, more wonderful author to conclude this series. The admiration, appreciation, and love that I have for this woman is limitless. She’s absolutely phenomenal, and I’m proud and blessed to be able to call her a friend and colleague. Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond is a style & culture writer that has been featured on MSNBC, published in EBONY Magazine, NBC’s thegrio.com, among others. She has been photographed and/or featured in a range of magazines, newspapers and blogs including the New York Times style section, Glamour Magazine, Paper Magazine, and the highly popular fashion street style blog The Sartorialist. Her poetry has been published by Nike and in the Growing Up Girl and This Woman’s Work anthologies. Also a novelist, Brew-Hammond’s first book Powder Necklace(Washington Square Press 2010) is a YA tome loosely inspired by her experience attending a girls’ boarding school in the Central Region of Ghana, West Africa. Publishers Weekly called the book “a winning debut” while Library Journal recommended it “for readers who enjoyed Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus“. In July 2010, Powder Necklace pierced Amazon’s Top 100. In 2012, she was one of nine writers selected to receive a 2012 BID International Fellowship to write and exchange with Brazilian writers in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. Most recently, she founded the writers blog People Who Write. Keep up with her on twitter @nanaekua.
Ladies & Gents, meet Nana…
TWT: First things first, did you always know that you wanted to be a writer?
NEBH: I’ve known I was a writer since I was ten years old. When everyone else was being social, I was writing or wanting to; but I didn’t connect that I could be a professional writer until my 18th birthday when my sister gave me one of those journals that look like a book with a cover image and title. It was called “Book Woman”. It seems a standard gift, but for me it was the permission I needed to become a book woman myself.
TWT: What was the process like when writing Powder Necklace, a story that’s rooted in your personal experience?
NEBH: Technically, my writing process was insane. I woke up at around 5 every morning, wrote for two hours till I had to leave the house for work. I continued to write on the train till I got to work. Then I repeated this in reverse on the commute home, staying up till about 2am writing. I did this for two years straight.
Spiritually, writing Powder Necklace was incredibly cathartic. It brought to the surface a lot of the anger and resentment toward my parents I had suppressed or forgotten; and it helped me to understand the situation from their perspective more objectively.
When I was 12, my parents tricked my sister and me into a one-way trip to Ghana that would last two years for my sister, and three for me. I believe that decision completely changed the course of my life—I know I would be a different person today if I hadn’t gone to Ghana.
When they allowed me to leave Ghana and return to the States after three years at a girls’ boarding school that was an experience akin to Mean Girls without water in the mountains of Ghana’s Central Region, I was so focused on reclaiming my American identity that I packed my time and reason for being in Ghana to the basement of my mind.
Instead, I spun a myth of myself as a worldly girl from a Ghanaian boarding school and proceeded to dive head first into the “college experience” getting wasted and wearing belly tops with low-rise jeans. And left it at that.
But Ghana had irreversibly changed me. My view of the world was completely different and I had developed a strong faith in God while I was there. I knew I had to deal with what that change meant at some point. Powder Necklace was the beginning.
TWT: When was the last time you were in Ghana?
NEBH: I was in Ghana this past April! It was amazing to reconnect with family from far and wide; plus, every time I go, I learn some new nugget about the culture.
TWT: What words of wisdom would you offer to reluctant readers of today?
NEBH: I don’t know if I have any words of wisdom for people who don’t like to read. I think the onus is on storytellers to create narratives that are so compelling people HAVE to read them! You know?
TWT: What words of wisdom would you offer to the writers of today?
NEBH: I think writers need to:
- Focus on telling the truest story they are capable of.
- Take an active role in cultivating an audience of readers.
- Stay abreast of all that’s happening in the rapidly changing world of letters from publishing to booksellers to copyright laws to industry hirings and firings.
- Be more active in writer advocacy groups/get more vocal about our right to be compensated fairly for our work.
I think writers underestimate our value to the culture. We’re so used to receiving rejection letters and panting after the approval of industry elites, that we forget how much society needs us to document and interpret the world in words and stories.
TWT: If you were stranded on a desert island, what movies would you want to have with you?
NEBH: Annie, The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz, About Last Night, Notes on a Scandal, Grease 2, Life of Pi—don’t judge me!
TWT: What books are permanently on your bookshelf?
NEBH: Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Janet Fitch’s White Oleander, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers, and Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton.
TWT: Just for fun, what is your favorite word?
NEBH: Anything with a “cious” suffix. “Luscious”, “sagacious”, “rapacious”… those are good words.
TWT: Just for fun, what is your least favorite word?
NEBH: “Friend” —I always feel like I’m mispronouncing it; that it should be “fry-nd”.
TWT: In today’s economy, arts programs in schools are being cut. What reasons would you give a politician for preserving the arts?
NEBH: I’d like to tell a politician and any other decision maker to stop thinking of “the arts” as some separate space colony that breeds art freaks and anti-establishment rock stars while bleeding resources and distracting from more worthy pursuits like science. But I doubt that would change any minds, so I’d point out a few facts:
- Strong reading and literacy skills are fundamental to all academic success.
- Students with four years of high school arts education average about 100 points higher on their SATs than students with only one-half year or less.
- Students that do well in The Arts, tend to do better in all their other subjects. For example, music education has been linked to stronger performance on standardized math tests.
- Most Americans believe Arts education is vital to a well-rounded education.
Then, I’d make it personal. I’d ask them how their favorite song/movie/book/etc educated, affirmed or otherwise impacted them, and ask how they can deny a new generation from either acquiring the education and tools they need to one day create that feeling with their own art, or benefiting from the works of a new crop of artists for their time.
TWT: Who is/was your favorite teacher?
NEBH:My fifth grade teacher Sister Barbara Baranowski is my favorite. She was “mean”, that is to say she did not take any shorts from us as kids, but she was the first to recognize and encourage my talent as a writer.
Thank you, Nana!
Live, Love, Learn,
Megan &