Brian Broome: On Letting Other Genres Inspire You
In this article, author Brian Broome explains how a Gwendolyn Brooks poem inspired him to write his memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods.
Author:
May 22, 2021
Brian Broome is an award-winning writer, poet, and screenwriter, and K. Leroy Irvis Fellow and instructor in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is pursuing an MFA. He has been a finalist in The Moth storytelling competition and won the grand prize in Carnegie Mellon University’s Martin Luther King Writing Awards. He lives in Pittsburgh.
Brian Broome
Photo credit Andy Johanson
By Larissa IrankundaMay 18th, 2021, 4:02 pm
Brian Broome’s memoir
Punch Me Up to the Gods is one of the most stunning debuts I’ve had the pleasure of reading.
Broome’s voice captures you instantly, drawing your attention into the beautiful, poignant, and often painful intricacies of Black adolescence most particularly, Broome’s adolescence as a dark-skinned, gay Black boy in the 1980s. With a beautiful introduction by poet Yona Harvey,
Punch Me Up to the Gods is a novel that not only examines Black boyhood but
celebrates it, embodying the heart of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool” in every page.
Phone: (941) 366-1505
Why is Omari such an angry young man? A lesser playwright would offer a buzzword equation. White privilege + systemic racism = Black rage. Morisseau doesn’t. Her play doesn’t even define “pipeline.” You either know it, or you get it.
Morisseau’s characters feel like real people. But they’re larger-than-life and burn far brighter. It’s the difference between a flashlight and a laser beam.
L. Peter Callender’s direction honors the playwright’s hyper-reality. His approach to dialogue and physicalization seem natural, never stagey. But he doesn’t shy away from the white-hot intensity of the play’s brightest and darkest moments. When it’s time to go big, he doesn’t play it small. The actors don’t, either.
Ahmad Almallah
Writing is connected to voting at its very core, in the sense that it is essentially about making a choice. This does not only manifest itself in making the choice to write or to become a poet, as in my case, but it also manifests itself on a micro level, in the very process of choosing what to leave from your experiences with the world in your art and what words to fix on the page. But, most importantly here, for someone born in Palestine, writing was as close as I could get to voting, to having that space that allowed me a choice. It provided me with the awareness of my right to a voice before I was aware of my right to vote. Words and how they are chosen, used and displayed were very dangerous toys in my childhood I have seen people arrested by Israeli soldiers, or even shot at, for trying to write the word “Palestine” on a wall. Living under Israeli occupation before I came to the US meant that I didn’t exist as a “citizen” to have a vote. It’s even
Theories of Falling as well as
Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir and cultural history of food allergies
. She served as the editor for
Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Honors for her work include the 2019 Munster Literature Centre’s John Montague International Poetry Fellowship, a 2015 NEA fellowship, and five DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowships. She lives in Washington, D.C.
INTRODUCTION
I’ve been thinking about beans. Stay with me. My early appetite for them was functional: a can pulled off the shelf, preferably with a pull-tab top, and dumped into a microwaveable vessel. But in the past year, I’ve gotten pretty good at cooking dried beans. Black beans, limas, flageolet. That means making my own stock onions, whole-clove garlic, chopped carrots and celery. Bay leaves make a difference. I bring to a boil, relax to a simmer, add cumin or hot sauce, and wait for that moment wh