After a summer spent settling my mom’s affairs, I’m getting back to work promoting Miss Experience White. The first review, by Richard Modiano for The Literary Underground, was published on August 28th.
“A surrealist incantation and visual explosion that cracks open whiteness with wit, rage, and unsettling beauty ... What elevates Miss Experience White beyond polemic is its refusal to deliver easy moral certainties ... navigating a fractured landscape where identity, history, and complicity collide ... bold, bizarre, and blisteringly honest ... John Seabury’s illustrations are outstanding.” Read the full review here.
The other big piece of news is that I’m going to Texas this month. I’ll be doing a reading in Fort Worth on Sunday, September 14th, at Second Sundays, a monthly literary event hosted by award-winning poet Tammy Gomez. Actually, I’d planned to be in Houston on September 14th, to visit the grave of the woman I dedicated the book to, Alberta Walker, on her 110th heavenly birthday. Fort Worth is only a few hours away. This surrealistic illustration by John Seabury shows the character Sophia, inspired by Alberta, with young Experience White.
© John Seabury
Thanks to brilliant poet pal Richard Loranger—whose day job as Power Unit 17 is helping other writers market their work— for getting me the Fort Worth reading. I’ll be flying in and out of Austin to go to a couple of open mics and take the book around to bookstores.
After I get home, I’ll be circulating throughout the Bay Area, taking the book around to stores here. I just started this project, and so far Miss Experience White is currently available in San Francisco at The Beat Museum in North Beach and Bound Together on Haight Street. In the East Bay, you can get it at Moe’s Books, and East Bay Booksellers has it on order. It’s also available at Beer’s Books in Sacramento.
Farther into the future, on December 7th I have a double-header. During the day I’ll be selling the book at the Howard Zinn Bookfair in San Francisco. (Zinn was a historian, writer and activist best known for his book, A People’s History of the United States. His work popularized the practice of telling a “history from below” of workers, women, immigrants, racialized people, LGBTQ+ people, dissidents and radicals.) Then I’ll head over to Spec’s 12 Adler Museum Café in North Beach. One of the poems from Miss Experience White appears in Maintenant 19: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art and I’ll be singing it at the San Francisco release party.
One more distant event on the calendar is on February 5th, a reading in Eureka, California. Many thanks to David Holper, a former high school sweetheart, award-winning poet, and poet laureate emeritus of Eureka, California for getting me this gig.
Yikes, I just turned 65 at the end of August. It’s definitely a milestone which I refuse to wear as a millstone because let’s face it, getting old beats the alternative. And I’ve lost enough close friends to that alternative already. But I’m feeling the necessity of slowing down, finding ways to work more efficiently in a lower gear, and appreciating the benefits of a power nap. This Texas trip will be a chance to incorporate all of the above, but no power naps while on cruise control somewhere in Texas, please!
Milo
Miss Experience White is an illustrated, surrealistic political poem cycle about destroying the demon of white supremacy, or “Tyrannosaurus Wonderbread,” and transforming privilege into meaningful action.
Featuring 20 full color illustrations in different styles by Grammy-nominated illustrator John Seabury, this radical work of autofiction, is designed to look like a children’s book but made for adults. (132 pages, hardcover only, $20.00 with publisher’s special 30% discount off list price of $32.95).
Through a series of visions and revelations plus a decisive ancestral inventory, the eponymous narrator arrives at a new understanding of her inner landscape as it meets the changing outer landscape of America.
Johnson began writing obsessively in 2018 when she saw what Donald Trump was bringing out in many White people and the harm it was causing to so many others. Using a variety of accessible poetic forms, Johnson reveals how Whites like herself with deep ancestral roots in America might work through feelings of shame, discomfort, and ambivalence to transform them into positive, constructive actions.
The podcast version of Miss Experience White won several awards including a Signal Gold Award for Best Fiction in a Limited Series and a w3 Silver Award for Cause Awareness in a Miniseries.
Exclusively for the book, Johnson added the appendix, “Your Fire Goes Here: How to Do Your Own Bonfire of the Ancestors,” a set of instructions for a fire purification ritual created for Americans with problematic ancestors.
Is the core of the White American experience a fundamental fear of change? Or perhaps a seed of enlightenment demanding we evolve?
EDITORIAL REVIEWS
"In this brave incantation, Milo Starr Johnson ... has taken the sweep of history and paused the river for us to view, to digest, and heed our historical task."
— Tongo Eisen-Martin, eighth poet laureate of San Francisco emeritus
"At times a story, a song, a rant, a field report of the poetic mind, this piece lays claim to an accounting and cleansing of the American experience for this writer in search of an answer to our own brutality and violence. The landscape is vast, but language frees us."
— Luis Alfaro, playwright, 1997 MacArthur Fellow
"This collection is deeply true, good to read, and visually rich."
— K Shuck, seventh poet laureate of San Francisco emerita
"Milo Starr Johnson . . . throws several translucent blankets of experience over the history of America . . . The words are beautifully illustrated by the incomparable art of John Seabury."
— Ron Turner, founder and publisher, Last Gasp
"With utmost sensitivity, clairvoyance, and transcendent thinking, Milo Starr Johnson has, after years of arduous contemplation, editing, and revision, penned a volume that I think you will truly understand and enjoy."
— V. Vale, publisher, RE/Search Publications
"As a White reader, especially one with ancestry on this continent going back to the pre- Revolution era, I found these passages to be gripping and energized with shame and rage; I was very glad they'd been written, and I suspect that reaction will be shared by readers of many backgrounds and colors."
— Richard Loranger, author of Mammal and Unit of Agency
"Miss Experience White offers a transformative vision of how shame and discomfort can be channeled into meaningful action, inviting readers to reflect on their own roles in the evolving landscape of America."
— Richard Modiano, director emeritus, Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center