Please send me your immigrant or refugee stories
Friends, my new novel for children, Pablo and Birdy, will be out in August. Publishers Weekly just gave it a starred review, calling it “a tender tale of the search for ho
me, belonging, and identity (that) smoothly incorporates elements of magical realism and powerful allusions to the refugee experience.”
That reference to the refugee experience is why I’m posting here today. I’d love to hear from you if you have a personal immigrant or refugee story to share with me. I hope to publish one story per day on my blog this August, similar to the tattoo stories and dog stories I did in celebration of Tell Me a Tattoo Story and Percy, Dog of Destiny.
If you’d like to be included in the line-up, please email me your story and a photo (of you or something related to your experience) if you wish.
Email: alison_mcghee@hotmail.com
I greatly look forward to hearing from you. Thanks!
Once, at the end of a book club discussion held in the library of a women’s prison, the women (who are addressed as “offenders” on the prison P.A. system, as in, “Offenders, cell check in fifteen minutes”) took turns asking me personal questions from a list they had prepared. I remember only one of them: “
When we were little my sisters and I used to press leaves and flowers between the tissuey pages of our big dictionary and then forget about them. They could still be in there, for all I know, wherever that big gray dictionary is now. Once in a while, inching along the rows of a used bookstore, I come across my own books on the M shelves. Sometimes I slide one out to read the dedication and the acknowledgments. They are reminders of where I was at that point in life. Most of the people I loved then I still love, although a few have fallen away or crossed over to that other world. Some of those books contain an inscription written at the request of a patient person who waited in line, book in hand, so that it could be personalized for them: To Cornelia on her birthday, with many happy returns, Alison. Once in a while I do recognize a name, or a nickname —To the one and only Booberry, with tons of love. My handwriting looks different in that case, lively and familiar and happy, if handwriting can look happy. Who knows how the book ended up here on this shelf, the hands it must have passed through.
Six saggy old cardboard boxes full of hundreds, maybe thousands, of handwritten or typed letters sit behind closed cupboard doors in my bedroom. These letters date back to high school. They’re from my mother, my grandmothers, my sisters, my brother, boys and men I loved, my best friend, other dear friends, and friends I barely remember but who were important to me at one point in my life. The envelopes, with those wavy lines across the canceled stamps, bear testament to all the places I’ve lived in my life. Unlike almost anything else in my life, I can’t throw them out. Sometimes they have lived in the dark trunk of my car until once again they are hauled into a different cupboard in a new house or apartment, where they rest in darkness next to their neighbors. The other day I opened a box at random and pulled out a letter from my grandmother. She had been to a movie with my parents and what an interesting, if confusing, movie it had been. Afterward they had gone to a Chinese buffet and my parents had treated her, how lovely of them. She was having trouble with that darned knee of hers. And then came this ending line, reminiscing about my grandfather, dead many years at this point: What a beautiful life we had together, but it wasn’t long enough. My grandmother, and that single, uncharacteristic sentence from her, written in the shaky Palmer script of her very old age, is why I love this poem so much.
Alison McGhee 