All posts tagged: Tanya Coke

Writers on Writing: Tanya Coke

This interview is the seventh in a new series, Writers on Writing, which focuses on craft and process. The series is part of The Common’s 10th anniversary celebration.

Read Coke’s Issue 19 essay, “Brother Love.”

 

Headshot of Tanya Coke

 

Tanya Coke is a civil rights lawyer and writer. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Root, and USA Today. She is currently working on a graphic novel about race and suburban motherhood.

 

 

 

 

Your essay “Brother Love” reads not only as a heartfelt meditation on how familial ties can be rekindled, but also as an intricate, personal account of your family history over time. How did you navigate weaving the personal with the historical? How did you determine which moments in your life to highlight in your narrative?

That’s a good question. I didn’t write an outline or give much thought to structure. For me, it was a little like reviewing the tape of a home movie and picking the most emotionally laden scenes in a story that traverses 40 years. Or maybe squinting at a landscape to make an impressionist painting and trying to capture the most vivid things in the frame. Like the moment when my father told my sisters and me that we had a nine-month-old brother. The moment when he first handed this scrawny baby to me. The way it made me feel both special and grown up when my father took me to jazz club with him, when I was 14. The look of grief on my brother’s face at 17, when he was a pallbearer at our dad’s funeral. Or the joy on his other dad’s face, when he danced to a brace of Indian drummers on Shawn’s wedding day. Those became the touchstones for the essay.

Writers on Writing: Tanya Coke
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Podcast: Tanya Coke on “Brother Love”

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Tanya Coke is a lawyer, writer, and philanthropy executive at the Ford Foundation. She speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about “Brother Love,” her essay from Issue 19 of The Common magazine. Coke discusses both the beautiful and the difficult parts of writing about her own family, the process of being a writer and an artist, and what it means to helm the Ford Foundation’s Gender, Race & Ethnic Justice division.

Tanya Coke and Issue 19 cover

Podcast: Tanya Coke on “Brother Love”
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Amplifying Black Voices on TC Online

This is the first installment of an online series highlighting work by Black authors published in The Common. To read  The Common’s statement in support of the nationwide protests against anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and police brutality, click here.

Amplifying Black Voices on TC Online
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Brother Love

By TANYA COKE

I.

Scrawny was my first thought. I’d babysat enough by then to place his age at just shy of a year. As my father handed him to me, the baby arched his back in protest, his chicken butt threatening to escape his diaper completely. I could tell that a man had fastened it, because the tape on the sides was all askew.

“Come, say hello to your brother,” Daddy said, smiling. 

Brother Love
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