Famous writers will tell you of their lives and the lives of those in their orbit. That framing, however, suggests those other lives are not on their own journeys through the universe. In this Big Idea for The Day & Night Books of Mardou Fox, author Nisi Shawl follows a woman who is on her own path, even as it intersects those who would claim her story as part of their own.
NISI SHAWL:
Did you know that Black people existed in the 1950s?
Well of course you did. But you can be forgiven if, like me, you’ve been thinking and acting as though they didn’t. Look, I’m Black, and I was alive and aware during at least part of the 1950s, and even I was surprised to learn that Beat-era author Jack Kerouac had a Black girlfriend. He fictionalized their months-long affair in his 1958 novella The Subterraneans. He called her Mardou Fox. He went on for paragraphs and paragraphs about how sad and mysterious and sexy she was.
In my twenties I hung out with folks who got me interested in Kerouac and his fellow denizens of the proto-hippy Beat scene of the 1950s and 60s: poet Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs of Naked Lunch fame. But not until I attained 60 years of age did I learn that Alene Lee, the inspiration for Mardou Fox, was an author herself. She wasn’t just a sad and sexy piece of tail. Or a love interest or a side quest or a minority demographic-shaped slot to fill. Alene Lee was a writer, and a damn fine one, as you can judge for yourself by the excerpts published here, and here. Ginsberg considered her his peer.
The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox is my attempt to give a voice to a marginalized writer, one unfairly relegated to the gender- and race-restricted roles very much in favor at that time, even among rebels. First, I created entries for a journal my character keeps in 1941, when she’s “nine-and-three-quarters years old.” Magic happens to her, but wary of being labelled crazy, she suppresses and denies it.
The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox: Little Shop of Stories|Sistah Scifi
Source: The Big Idea: Nisi Shawl
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