This Week, I Wobbled

But the Creative Process Would Not Let Me Fall

First, my profound thanks 🙏🙏🙏 to YOU as a First Subscriber of Tales of Humanity from the Borderlands. I'm so grateful you have elected to join this journey with me! I've promised to give you sneak peeks into the pages of my forthcoming book as well as behind-the-scenes insights into the processes of publishing and podcasting.

So let's get the party started!

This past week, behind the scenes…

I took an unexpected blow. And I’m not gonna lie: I wobbled. And I almost fell.

It happened the day after I launched this newsletter. I named it based on the outcome of months of brainstorming and testing and all that marketing jazz. The decision was to tie both the newsletter and updated podcast to the book through its sub-title. That way, all three projects would be recognizable as one multi-format project by yours truly.

Good thinking, right?

But we weren’t even live for 24 hours when my editor wrote to say she felt we should change the book title. What?!?

Now, I wanted to say — and I did, out loud, but not to her: You accepted my pitch and proposal over a year ago. We had a signed contract before 2021 came to a close. I just launched an eponymous Substack. The similarly named podcast is en route. Why are you telling me this now?!?

I stomped around my house for a while. I grieved. I fumed. I felt the tow of self-doubt threatening to pull me under. Then, I crafted a more professional response, expressing my considered push-back. But my editor, Brooke, held firm. She said that when her editorial and design teams came together to begin working on the book’s cover, they felt The First Solution did not jump understandably off the page. 

So, there’s some cool news: Although still over a year away from our official pub date, November 7, 2023, the publishing house is working on my cover already. WOW!

Now I’m super psyched at the prospect of sharing cover design ideas with you. But first, I had to come up with a new title, urgently… Because you can’t judge a book by a cover with no title, can you?

I’d been living with The First Solution for so long, this was much easier said than done. I thought it was the perfect title, in large part because it was a hat tip to my literary hero, Toni Morrison. But Brooke explained that it meant nothing to the uninitiated without the epigraph. And that most bookstore browsers won't go to the epigraph without being first compelled by the title!

In the end, I had to admit she was right. I reminded myself that she is the expert. That's why I picked her press. I resolved to roll with it. And it turned out, I didn't have to roll far. All I needed was a good night's sleep, several power walks with Gryffindog, and a creative brainstorm with my dear friend Laura. This is what she said,

It’s true, The First Solution held no meaning for me until you explained it. Then I understood and loved it. But I want your new title to tell me that this is a journey inside a journey, inside multiple journeys; that it is about humanity of others, but also about your humanity, too. I want to see that you lacked awareness of something important to you, that you were traveling blind down a faulty path, that you were looking in the wrong direction. But that you found a better way through a new awareness that came from bearing witness, and that now you want to share that awareness with me. It should be an invitation to join your journey so that I might achieve a new awareness with you. Also, I want a hint about what you found along the way, and where you found it.

So, are you ready for the big reveal?
The new title of my forthcoming book (🤞🤞🤞) is...

Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands

And by "America" I do not mean a place, but a state of mind. Now it's up to Brooke and the ace design team at She Writes Press to make that intention pop from the art. Stay tuned for more on cover design to come.

Meanwhile, for today’s sneak peek into Crossing the Line, please find below an excerpt from the introduction in which I evoke the meaning of the original title.

Before you go, I would be very grateful to know: Does this passage still hold up under the new title? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below. 🙏🙏🙏

The Tragic Tale of the Modern Americas
Though I would never get further than an hour’s drive from Brownsville during that first trip to the US-Mexico border, Lizee’s challenge sent me on a metaphorical road trip: A journey of discovery into the deep, dark, life and soul-destroying underbelly of the US for-profit immigration system of deterrence, detention, and deportation that dates back as far back as my birth, if not farther, and which grew up alongside me, hiding in plain sight all around me, just out of my privileged view. Trump merely exposed what has long been a blatant, government-sanctioned flouting of basic human rights committed by politicians on both sides of the aisle — many, heretofore, my political champions — amounting to a slow, unrelenting, uncountable potential “final solution” that has worsened and become harder to hide in the era of demagogues and climate disaster. And that, in the post 9/11 world, has evolved to become one of the US’s most shameful national exports, driving us all toward global apartheid. 

In her 1995 essay, On Racism and Fascism, the late, great Toni Morrison reminds us that “before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third.” As she lays out the ten steps to fascism, she repeats that it is not a jump but a process. She implores us to be among those to get in front of it; to stand in the way of it; to push back against it; to be the one to say “No!” when, borrowing metaphorically from the Holocaust protest poem, they come for the socialists, trade unionists, and Jews.

I had serendipitously loaded Morrison’s collected works onto my Kindle before traveling to Brownsville in January 2020. I knew I’d be writing about my road trip, though I didn’t yet know how. I aimed to soak up craft lessons from my personal literary hero as I traveled. I read her little-known essay, first delivered at Howard University, while in flight. Perhaps that is why, though moved by the tragic tales of those on the run, I was primed by Morrison to tune into the stories, like Susan’s and Lizee’s, of the ordinary people taking extraordinary measures despite the longest of odds to welcome, with dignity, those in search of safe haven and a future free from harm. 

With this book, I hope to humanize the immigration discussion in today’s divided US — and world — by shining a light on the teachers and lawyers, religious leaders and community organizers, medical and psychosocial professionals, celebrities, advocates, and just plain folks, who never stopped flying the tattered flag of US-American values in what history will remember as one of the US’s darkest eras. 

In two years, for example, the RGV humanitarians had gone from bringing tacos, tents, and toilets to a few strangers stranded on a bridge to managing what might have been the best-coordinated private disaster relief project throughout the globe. They are among the many invisible borderlands warriors worldwide tearing down the walls that now divide us. Their collective efforts to take on the machine for the common good strike a universal chord that I hope will resonate in these deeply troubled times. Their combined tales offer us a handbook for a more humane age, one we should all memorize and demand be embraced before the first solution, becomes a second, then a third, evolving into a “final solution” targeting displaced and stateless people now in motion all over the globe — if it hasn’t already.