In response to the unexpected death of crucial author and thinker Gloria Naylor due to heart failure, Brilliance Remastered is offering a special series on her work in the month of October. This is a guided opportunity to reread some of Naylor’s work or to learn about her work before engaging it for the first time.
Place: A Homegoing Ritual for Gloria Naylor Thursday Oct. 13th 6pm-8pm Eastern
Best known for creating interconnected ecologies of Black life including the intersectional urban community of Brewster Place, the surburban sacrificial scene of Linden Hills, the time travel enabled landscapes of Mama Day’s sea islands and Bailey’s timeless Cafe, Gloria Naylor has now taken her place among the literary ancestors. This one-night session will draw on Naylor’s enduring works as we (all of us who have benefited and continue to benefit from the black women’s literary renaissance of the 20th century) to lift Naylor’s spirit into an elevated space and to clarify our own relationship to our place in black communities at this time. All are welcome.
Register here.
Revolutionary Class Suicide: Linden Hills Monday Oct 17, 12pm-2pm Eastern
In 1985, just as the beneficiaries of the first Affirmative Action generation were having children (Sista Docta Lex is one of those children) Gloria Naylor had the nerve to write about Black surburbia, and the hard-won homes and gardens of a new Black professional class, as hell, through the structure of Dante’s Inferno. This is a one-day seminar for those of us who have with our own lives, killed the dream of a certain form of Black middle and upper-middle class respectability. I first heard the term “class suicide” from the college-educated daughter of college-educated professionals who chose to use her educational and class privilege in service of a social justice movement that does not provide the relative financial stability she could have potentially accessed. This seminar activates Gloria Naylor’s brave work about the costs of assimilation into the American dream as a resource for those of us who dream and live otherwise. This webinar is healing and transformative space specifically for black folks.
Register here.
The Black Boundlessness Intensive: Monday Oct 24-Tuesday Oct 25 3pm-6pm Eastern
Drawing primarily on Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Bailey’s Cafe, this intensive activates land memory and time travel as crucial resources for contemporary Black life and operationalizes Naylor’s magical realist, speculative historical work as a basis to inquire about how we remember, how we time travel, we we become unwound and how to get unbound. Participants do not have to have already read Mama Day and Bailey’s Cafe (though you will definitely want to once we are done!). Come to this intensive ready to interrogate your own boundaries, remember the storms that precede you and clear out the back alleys of your spirit. This intensive is specifically for black folks.
Registration is limited. Reserve your space with a $50 deposit here:
registration for the whole intensive is sliding scale $150-225. (Installment payments available upon request.) Email brillianceremastered@gmail.com and let me know your goals for the course by October 20th.