We celebrated the official release of Miss Experience White last month on May 10th. Thanks to guest readers Kim Shuck, Kimi Sugioka, and Deborah C. Segal, and to Richard Loranger for planning and hosting the event. Thanks to the Clarion Performing Arts Center for having us. Thanks to everyone who chose to spend a beautiful spring afternoon celebrating the end of this seven-year creative project, sipping wine and nibbling on cookies.
I should’ve posted here a few weeks ago, but with my mother passing away in late April and her memorial the day after the book launch, I’ve been totally preoccupied dealing with everything that happens when a parent departs.
Thanks to my mother’s younger sister, Eddy Ancinas, for taking so many great videos at the book launch. I’ve shared a few on Facebook as well as here. My aunt has been primarily a travel writer for decades. I recommend her travel memoir, Tracing Inca Trails: An Adventure in the Andes, for summer reading. She too has won awards and written about our ancestors, although very differently than I have. And actually, I wrote about my Aunt Eddy and her husband, my Uncle Osvaldo, in Miss Experience White. This passage near the end of Part III, The Other Feast, was inspired by them:
Cut back to Feast, another guest
Osvaldo Lucero
Olympic skier born and raised
Down Argentina Way
He marries an American
and takes his bride back home
but they decide the States are best
for work and family
As cultural ambassador
this uncle changes things
and cousins play, the brown with white
They run, they laugh, they climb
And when he’s called a Mexican
Osvaldo tells them off
He says, “I taught the fools about
some countries they forgot”
Thanks to John Seabury for bringing some prints of the illustrations to sell, and for taking part in the Q & A, which was a terrific idea of Richard Loranger’s. I hope we can do more interviews in the future. Overall, John and I had a mutually satisfying creative collaboration. We understood each other very well most of the time.
But we did have a few disagreements. In one case I’d asked him to do an illustration of a vision an indigenous shaman might’ve had looking out over the Atlantic at night. It would show kind, hopeful faces in the waves to suggest a radical, alternative unfolding of American history and appear near the end of the book. The illustration (on the wall in dark blue between us) never felt positive enough to me, but successful collaborations require flexibility, and the solution turned out better than the original idea.
The seven-year phase of writing and book creation has ended: The courtship and wedding are over and the marriage begins! It’s time to sell books. Miss Experience White is available to purchase here on my site. And, thanks to my distribution company, you can ask any bookstore anywhere (except maybe Australia) to order it.
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
In these challenging times—which often shock but don’t completely surprise me—I’ve found getting out and about to be a crucial part of self-care. So next month’s blogpost will be a guide to Bay Area bookstores interested in carrying Miss Experience White along with recommendations for nearby cafes, bars, and eateries. Until then, to borrow from Walt Whitman as I did in the Prologue, remember that each of us really does contain multitudes. And if that’s not enough, there’s always that line from The Handmaid’s Tale which has gotten me through many a hard time: “Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down.”
Milo