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Why I Write
The House of Being
An exquisite meditation on the geographies we inherit and the metaphors we inhabit, from Pulitzer Prize winner and nineteenth U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey
In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the crossroads of Highway 49, the legendary highway of the Blues, and Jefferson Street, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. Before the land was a crossroads, however, it was a a farming settlement where, after the Civil War, a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home.
In this intimate and searching meditation, Trethewey revisits the geography of her childhood to trace the origins of her writing life, born of the need to create new metaphors to inhabit “so that my story would not be determined for me.” She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother’s collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be. With the clarity of a prophet and the grace of a poet, Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.
In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the crossroads of Highway 49, the legendary highway of the Blues, and Jefferson Street, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. Before the land was a crossroads, however, it was a a farming settlement where, after the Civil War, a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home.
In this intimate and searching meditation, Trethewey revisits the geography of her childhood to trace the origins of her writing life, born of the need to create new metaphors to inhabit “so that my story would not be determined for me.” She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother’s collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be. With the clarity of a prophet and the grace of a poet, Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.
96 pages, Hardcover
Published April 9, 2024
9 people are currently reading
2427 people want to read
About the author
Natasha Trethewey
41 books782 followersNatasha Trethewey is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.
Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother as "colored", and the race of her father as “Canadian”.
Trethewey's mother, a social worker, was part of the inspiration for Native Guard, which is dedicated to her memory. Trethewey's parents divorced when she was young and Turnbough was murdered in 1985 by her second husband, whom she had recently divorced, when Trethewey was 19 years old. Recalling her reaction to her mother's death, she said, "that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened".
Natasha Trethewey's father is also a poet; he is a professor of English at Hollins University.
Trethewey earned her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995. In May 2010 Trethewey delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University and was awarded an honorary doctorate. She had previously received an honorary degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi.
Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle. Thematically, her work examines "memory and the racial legacy of America". Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), for example, is a collection of poetry in the form of an epistolary novella; it tells the fictional story a mixed-race prostitute who was photographed by E. J. Bellocq in early 20th-century New Orleans.
The American Civil War makes frequent appearances in her work. Born on Confederate Memorial Day—exactly 100 years afterwards—Trethewey explains that she could not have "escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented", and that it had fascinated her since childhood. For example, Native Guard tells the story of the Louisiana Native Guards, an all-black regiment in the Union Army, composed mainly of former slaves who enlisted, that guarded the Confederate prisoners of war.
On June 7, 2012, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate. Billington said, after hearing her poetry at the National Book Festival, that he was "immediately struck by a kind of classic quality with a richness and variety of structures with which she presents her poetry … she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it." Newspapers noted that unlike most poets laureate, Trethewey is in the middle of her career. She was also the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she did so in January 2013. On May 14, 2014, Tretheway delivered her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.
(from Wikipedia)
She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.
Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother as "colored", and the race of her father as “Canadian”.
Trethewey's mother, a social worker, was part of the inspiration for Native Guard, which is dedicated to her memory. Trethewey's parents divorced when she was young and Turnbough was murdered in 1985 by her second husband, whom she had recently divorced, when Trethewey was 19 years old. Recalling her reaction to her mother's death, she said, "that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened".
Natasha Trethewey's father is also a poet; he is a professor of English at Hollins University.
Trethewey earned her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995. In May 2010 Trethewey delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University and was awarded an honorary doctorate. She had previously received an honorary degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi.
Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle. Thematically, her work examines "memory and the racial legacy of America". Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), for example, is a collection of poetry in the form of an epistolary novella; it tells the fictional story a mixed-race prostitute who was photographed by E. J. Bellocq in early 20th-century New Orleans.
The American Civil War makes frequent appearances in her work. Born on Confederate Memorial Day—exactly 100 years afterwards—Trethewey explains that she could not have "escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented", and that it had fascinated her since childhood. For example, Native Guard tells the story of the Louisiana Native Guards, an all-black regiment in the Union Army, composed mainly of former slaves who enlisted, that guarded the Confederate prisoners of war.
On June 7, 2012, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate. Billington said, after hearing her poetry at the National Book Festival, that he was "immediately struck by a kind of classic quality with a richness and variety of structures with which she presents her poetry … she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it." Newspapers noted that unlike most poets laureate, Trethewey is in the middle of her career. She was also the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she did so in January 2013. On May 14, 2014, Tretheway delivered her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
December 28, 2023
How many times, over the years, would my father remind me — quoting Martin Heidegger — that “Language is the house of being”? It would be decades before I’d read those words myself in a book by the German philosopher — who was also a member of the Nazi Party — and feel again that sharp pang of recognition: the difficult knowledge that some of the most enduring ideas had been written by complicated figures, like Thomas Jefferson, who believed in racial hierarchies, inherent superiority and inferiority. More and more I would come to understand that it was not simply ignorance that I’d need to push back against, but also the stores of received knowledge — philosophy, history, science — that I would encounter in the most learned places.
Written by Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Professor of Creative Writing, and two time US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, The House of Being is thoughtful, compelling, and quotable on literally every page. As part of Yale University Press’ “Why I Write” series (former entries include those written by Joy Harjo, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Patti Smith), Trethewey answers the question deeply and provocatively. With a white father and a Black mother (whose marriage wasn’t even legal at the time Trethewey was born) and a grandmother whose house was situated deep in Mississippi at the intersection of two highways — one famous for the Blues and one named for Thomas Jefferson — Trethewey was intimately shaped by the local geography and its competing narratives and prejudices. Combining history, memoir, and a lifetime of meditation on the forces that shaped her, this is a masterwork; thoroughly satisfying and necessary. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
My need to make meaning from the geography of my past is not unlike the ancients looking to the sky at the assortment of stars and drawing connections between them: the constellations they named inscribing a network of stories that gave order and meaning to their lives. That’s one of the reasons I write. I’ve needed to create the narrative of my life — its abiding metaphors — so that my story would not be determined for me.
Trethewey’s father — a poet himself — taught her early to describe the world around her metaphorically. In later life, people would assume that she “learned to write” from her father, but Trethewey insists that she learned as much from her grandmother — particularly the rhythms she picked up from her grandmother’s sewing machine — and from her mother, she learned how to use her voice to speak back to power; as when her mother would sing an inspirational version of John Brown’s Body whenever they drove past a Confederate flag (as on their state flag):
Singing to me as we passed the state flag of Mississippi was a way to counteract the symbolic, psychic violence of it. Through the triumphant, stirring rhythms of the song, my mother was showing me how to signify, how to use received forms to challenge the dominant cultural narrative of our native geography, and to transcend it by imagining a reality in which justice was possible. Her voice was a counterweight.
From her grandmother living at the crossroads of the Blues (according to legend, guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in order to play as well as he did — which obviously discounts his talent, skill, and practise), to the whitewashing of nearby Ship Island (a prison for Confederate soldiers that has a plaque at its entrance, thanks to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, that lists the names of every white soldier held prisoner there but which doesn’t acknowledge anywhere that the guards were all formerly enslaved Black men that had fought for the Union Army), the geography of her childhood had effects that were both intimately particular to Trethewey herself and broadly metaphorical of the American ethos. Wanting to add her voice to those who would confront the dominant narrative perfectly answers why Trethewey writes.
The act of writing is a way to create another world in language, a dwelling place for the psyche wherein the chaos of the external world is transformed, shaped into a made thing, and ordered. It is an act of reclamation. And resistance: the soul sings for justice and the song is poetry.
This is a short read, but weighty and compelling. I loved the whole thing.
March 24, 2024
I got a chance to hear Natasha Trethewey give the Eudora Welty Lecture on March 21, 2024, at the National Press Club where she read from this book in its entirety. In this speech, Trethewey explains how her family, her hometown, Southern culture, and White Supremacy, all shape who she is as a writer and on the topics she writes about. It is a tribute to family (especially her mother and maternal grandmother), home, and memory, especially to people and things we don't want to be erased or forgotten. It's very powerful.
April 11, 2024
In The House of Being, Natasha Trethewey delves deeply into her early life as part of the essential formative material for her life as a poet. She speaks much about her father reciting poems to her while they walked around the countryside or the many rhythms she experienced as her grandmother created clothing in her tailor shop while caring for Natasha while her parents worked, and the general use of language in this small family. Beyond this, her father introduced her to the concept of metaphor, an idea which would become central to her future.
While Memorial Drive, the author’s earlier memoir, deals with the details of Trethewey’s mother’s life and death and much of the author’s early life, this book seems to be a writer’s memoir, a report of the how and why of her youth, love of language, use of language, learning of her place in the world as a mixed race child in 1970s Mississippi, developing passions to write.
I first discovered Trethewey through her Pulitzer Prize winning collection Native Guard which she discusses here in ways that gave me new insights. I highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys poetry, writing about writing, memoirs about writing lives.
Many thanks to Yale University Press and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book. This review is my own.
While Memorial Drive, the author’s earlier memoir, deals with the details of Trethewey’s mother’s life and death and much of the author’s early life, this book seems to be a writer’s memoir, a report of the how and why of her youth, love of language, use of language, learning of her place in the world as a mixed race child in 1970s Mississippi, developing passions to write.
I first discovered Trethewey through her Pulitzer Prize winning collection Native Guard which she discusses here in ways that gave me new insights. I highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys poetry, writing about writing, memoirs about writing lives.
Many thanks to Yale University Press and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book. This review is my own.
January 4, 2024
Because the imagery of dreams is figurative, metaphorical as all languages, it’s easy to apply meaning over the course of one’s life to make sense of not only the past but also the present.
Thank you NetGalley, Yale University Press and the author for allowing me to read the book with advance.
With astonishing writing, Natasha Trethewey navigates introspectively the meaning of her ascendents, presenting her thoughts on grief, resilience, and vulnerability. It’s remarkable how she goes from individual thoughts to collective pain and awareness, always keeping in mind her black heritage. Resolving immaculately how these aspects impact her poetry.
Her recognition as a mixed child didn’t start by comparing her parent’s skin but by the awareness that the world built in her, an accumulation of experience that led her to ask: Who am I? Early on, her father taught her that there is a word in the language for everything: ”and my question ‘What am I?’ demanded a word.”
After her mother’s death, Natasha’s writing goes through a metamorphosis, asking herself how to keep her mother alive and how not to erase her. Not even poetry can pull out Natasha of the pain and grief. But little by little, she finds out her mother could be resurrected for a moment, rising to the surface of the page, brought back into the imagination through ”the sacred language of poetry.”
Natasha Trethewey shows that writing is a way “to create another world in language, a dwelling place for the psyche wherein the chaos of the external world is transformed, shaped into a made thing and ordered. It is an act of reclamation. And resistance: The soul sings for justice, and the song is poetry.
The House of Being by Natasha Tretheway is a collection of thoughts, knowledge, and experiences that form her as a writer. Her grandmother’s house represented a safe place full of love, affection, and attention. There, in Mississippi, she recognized the repercussions of racism and the alterations in America’s history and how individuals are shaped by history and culture.
There, she realized who she was.
An author I will keep my eyes on. Can't wait to read more of her work. I recommend this book to everyone who loves to read and enjoys poetry. You will live an experience of the creation and transformation of it, as well as the emotional path every poet goes through.
Thank you NetGalley, Yale University Press and the author for allowing me to read the book with advance.
With astonishing writing, Natasha Trethewey navigates introspectively the meaning of her ascendents, presenting her thoughts on grief, resilience, and vulnerability. It’s remarkable how she goes from individual thoughts to collective pain and awareness, always keeping in mind her black heritage. Resolving immaculately how these aspects impact her poetry.
Her recognition as a mixed child didn’t start by comparing her parent’s skin but by the awareness that the world built in her, an accumulation of experience that led her to ask: Who am I? Early on, her father taught her that there is a word in the language for everything: ”and my question ‘What am I?’ demanded a word.”
After her mother’s death, Natasha’s writing goes through a metamorphosis, asking herself how to keep her mother alive and how not to erase her. Not even poetry can pull out Natasha of the pain and grief. But little by little, she finds out her mother could be resurrected for a moment, rising to the surface of the page, brought back into the imagination through ”the sacred language of poetry.”
Natasha Trethewey shows that writing is a way “to create another world in language, a dwelling place for the psyche wherein the chaos of the external world is transformed, shaped into a made thing and ordered. It is an act of reclamation. And resistance: The soul sings for justice, and the song is poetry.
The House of Being by Natasha Tretheway is a collection of thoughts, knowledge, and experiences that form her as a writer. Her grandmother’s house represented a safe place full of love, affection, and attention. There, in Mississippi, she recognized the repercussions of racism and the alterations in America’s history and how individuals are shaped by history and culture.
There, she realized who she was.
An author I will keep my eyes on. Can't wait to read more of her work. I recommend this book to everyone who loves to read and enjoys poetry. You will live an experience of the creation and transformation of it, as well as the emotional path every poet goes through.
April 20, 2024
Wow!!! What stunning, beautiful book!!! Trethewey’s writing has such an immediacy that I can’t put it down—except that I did keep putting it down to transcribe lines into my journal to think more about.
July 20, 2025
In this short collection of essays, Natasha Trethewey answers the question “why do I write?” while giving more context to a few of her poems and expanding upon her memoir.
I am partial to Trethewey in that we share an uncommon trauma: both of our mothers were murdered by an abusive ex-husband. When she writes about how she came back to writing, writing her grief and taking up the task of remembering what she had worked to forget, I felt it in my bones.
A little book I will return to for inspiration.
I am partial to Trethewey in that we share an uncommon trauma: both of our mothers were murdered by an abusive ex-husband. When she writes about how she came back to writing, writing her grief and taking up the task of remembering what she had worked to forget, I felt it in my bones.
A little book I will return to for inspiration.
July 1, 2024
This is a wonderful entry into the world of Natasha Trethewey. Her memoir,Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir, was a favorite of mine a few years ago. This short speech (I think!) gives more context and background to simply why she writes. Really lovely.
April 24, 2024
Fascinating and insightful memoir written by Natasha Trethewey gives a glimpse of her youth as a daughter of a white man and a black woman. It is a book about identity, family, terrible trauma and loss, but also about perseverance and the power of words. It forces readers to asks interesting questions. How words of others define us? How to use words to express yourself? How our identity is shaped by the world we live in, trauma, other people and their prejudices? How we can shape or change our own identity? How a person becomes a writer and why? The book is rather short, but powerful.
I received "The House of Being" from the publisher via NetGalley. I would like to thank the author and the publisher for providing me with the advance reader copy of the book.
I received "The House of Being" from the publisher via NetGalley. I would like to thank the author and the publisher for providing me with the advance reader copy of the book.
January 4, 2025
Natasha Trethewey recalls the books that she would create as a child, blank but for her name on the frontispieces, which relays the understood importance of stories, even in the abstract, and of artifacts; those blank books serve as apt metaphors for the unformed child, as well as warnings of what might be left if nothing is retained in the form of memories and stories. She describes part of the mission of her writing to be the capturing of what would otherwise disappear and be lost forever, an extension of a native impulse "to remember, to make a container for the vanished past--the forgotten or erased," which instinct manifested itself in her curation of experiences and stories like artifacts, remaking the world in her preferred image, not making sense of the world but a world that could make sense, like a museum, a representational collection of ideas and images. For her, writing is an act of preservation of details, specific meanings, and her imagination against experience and received wisdom—Orwell’s "emotional attitude from which [s]he will never completely escape"—and an act of self-preservation as well. The world as it is is for Trethewey something to be studied, but that is not enough; the intellect must be cultivated, in lieu of sole reliance on intuition via empiricism, and one's way of seeing the world must be cultivated as well, and learned from studying, in order that one might strain one's experience in advance of refinement. She at one point describes her childhood home as a space "both real and imagined," which captures the conversion of the real world into the created world, wherein writing is what is generated to replace that which would otherwise leave the world altogether, a process of ongoing synthesis and transformation. Not only does her writing process build on itself continually in this way, but so too does her examination of why she writes, as if that knowledge, too, can only be gained once the writing exists in the world, just as she instinctively hung onto traditions from a young age, valuing them as traditions alone before she taught herself through writing why she valued them. Her narrative of her understanding of why she writes builds in a fluid manner that is structurally equivalent to the process of learning from experience and the recursive processing of information, calling back to earlier formulations and figures, and resulting in a book that is anything but empty.
March 9, 2024
If I see Natasha Trethewey’s name it’s an automatic read. After reading her memoir Memorial Drive in 2020 I’ve been anticipating anything I could get my hands on from her…which led me to this immediate NG request THE HOUSE OF BEING.
I dug a little further into the title after noticing it was under 100 pages… a pleasant surprise… this is a part of a series that Yale University Press has put together called “Why I Write” and Trethewey is one brilliant writer of our time contributing.
A glimpse into the crosswords of Highway 49 in Gulfport, Mississippi during Trethewey’s youth. Giving us her reflections on life… family and history in a beautiful poetic voice that shares a great sense of place.
I’m excited to see the rest of this series and of course looking forward to Natasha’s next novel!
Thank you Yale University Press📖
Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Lyon.brit.A...
I dug a little further into the title after noticing it was under 100 pages… a pleasant surprise… this is a part of a series that Yale University Press has put together called “Why I Write” and Trethewey is one brilliant writer of our time contributing.
A glimpse into the crosswords of Highway 49 in Gulfport, Mississippi during Trethewey’s youth. Giving us her reflections on life… family and history in a beautiful poetic voice that shares a great sense of place.
I’m excited to see the rest of this series and of course looking forward to Natasha’s next novel!
Thank you Yale University Press📖
Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Lyon.brit.A...
August 19, 2024
This is Trethewey's Windham-Campbell lecture at Yale on "Why I Write" (or a version of it, I'm not sure how close). You can view the lecture on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW3Yx...
I absolutely loved this reflection on the place--both literal and metaphorical--from which Trethewey's poetry springs, her grandmother's shotgun house at a crossroads in Gulfport, AL. A good reminder for me that I need to read her memoir.
I absolutely loved this reflection on the place--both literal and metaphorical--from which Trethewey's poetry springs, her grandmother's shotgun house at a crossroads in Gulfport, AL. A good reminder for me that I need to read her memoir.
January 28, 2024
The House of Being by Natasha Trethewey is a beautiful, intimate exploration of a writer’s journey. The author expands on the origin of her writing journey and how language shaped her experiences. The short, meditative chapters highlight her childhood in Gulfport, Mississippi at the crossroads of legendary Highway 49 and Jefferson Street. It is here she learned to read and write and developed the need to become the writer of her own story. It is a book that reflects on the geography of childhood, the markers of history, inheritance and culture. Born to a Black mother and white father the author examines her understanding of her own identity in an environment that was shaped by racism and prejudice. The role of imagination was shaped by the author’s grandmother whose textured landscape collages lined the hallway offered a view of another world. The book is a perfect companion piece to the author’s memoir Memorial Drive which is a stunning piece on loss, absence and connection with her mother. The writing in this book is poetic, elegant and engaging for readers who enjoy books that explore how and why writers take up the pen and apply their truths to paper. 4 Stars ✨.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a review copy of this book in exchange for honest feedback.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a review copy of this book in exchange for honest feedback.
October 4, 2025
I love this series. Even the lesser lectures provide something for me. Not that they have to, but that is why I return to the series. For the answer of why I write. Why they write. It is fun to close each book and imagine what my own lecture might be if given the chance and not deathly afraid of public speaking.
August 12, 2024
I found this in the street outside my apartment so picked it up. Quick one readable to and from work. Trethewey writes about growing up mixed race in Mississippi and how that, and the literature she read while growing up, shaped her drive to write.
March 25, 2024
Beautiful writing and heartbreaking. Natasha Tretheway writing weaves in her personal accounts of childhood and family with the history of the South and left me thinking over and re-reading passages. I’m not one to read poetry usually but the book’s break downs of various poems, both from her own and others, have been more inspired to after this.
(ARC received by the Goodreads Giveaway!)
(ARC received by the Goodreads Giveaway!)
April 14, 2024
A true genius and an American treasure.
January 11, 2025
I couldn’t put it down! Read it in one sitting !
April 15, 2024
Real Rating: 4.8* of five
The Publisher Says: An exquisite meditation on the geographies we inherit and the metaphors we inhabit, from Pulitzer Prize winner and nineteenth U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey
In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the crossroads of Highway 49, the legendary highway of the Blues, and Jefferson Street, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. Before the land was a crossroads, however, it was a a farming settlement where, after the Civil War, a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home.
In this intimate and searching meditation, Trethewey revisits the geography of her childhood to trace the origins of her writing life, born of the need to create new metaphors to inhabit “so that my story would not be determined for me.” She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother’s collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be. With the clarity of a prophet and the grace of a poet, Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Her mother sang her John Brown's Body as a means of soothing the Chernobyl-level burn of racism as the mixed-"race" (how I hate that we still use that horrible, divisive pseudoscientific calumny by default!) family drove past confederate battle flags! (Frequently, then, in her home state of Mississippi...it's on their state flag.) Now, how horrifying an image is that, when that damn dirge that starts with the words "John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave" is soothing?! This is the absolute most powerful statement of the horrors the convulsively dying Jim Crow system of the US South inflicted on people of color (another digression: This locution is deeply uncomfortable to white people like me who, in the 1960s, were loudly excoriated for calling African-Americans either "black" or "colored" in the South).
Returning to my scheduled review: Poet Trethewey was unique, then, from birth forward. She was the product of miscegenation (that horrifying term I'm glad I need to define) as her parents were not legally married in her home state until Loving v. Virginia was decided a year after she was born. Her Black matrilineal line was stuffed with women who had embodied what can only be called triumphs of the will, and all the merrier to say that when I know that this application of that phrase will horrify Nazi true believers. The influence of her poet/professor papa is no doubt there somewhere, but Poet Trethewey does not work on one cylinder, she fires on all of 'em.
I can imagine some astute observers wondering what the devil is going on here. Mudge HATES poetry!some are thinking. Some are quite correct. I loathe the experience of reading poetry the same way I loathe the experience of riding the bus. It's crammed with stuff I don't want to know about, it's uncomfortably tight to sit in and in no way offers me enough room or seats designed for my spatial dimensions, it sways and janks and judders over each crack in the road, and the air conditioning almost never works until it suddenly blasts January-on-the-Siberian-steppe gales for a few seconds.
That does not mean I am insensible to its influence on most people. I see it, I get it, I am not of that group but they are quite clearly expressing their approval. And, lest we lose sight of this, the book is Poet Trethewey's *writing about writing*; that is always interesting. As I suspect all good writing must be, the life led by the child-poet became the matter of the adult; in her experiences of racism, white supremacy, and Southern culture, she speaks with a voice that reaches deep into the National Conversation of the US as well as into the emotional cores of many, many, many people.
At under 100pp, this is an afternoon's read for me. It was a pleasure to read...if you've read Memorial Drive, her memoir, you'll know that Poet Trethewey is gifted in prose writing, and if you haven't what is wrong with you?!...and measures her life against her need to write, like a learner sounding out words in a new language. The essay is part of Yale University Press's terrific series of writerly essays. I have only one cavil to report. I felt the origin of the essay as a lecture rather more than I would have liked. I put it down to the poet's innate aurality of expression. I ended up needing to read passages aloud to understand what was being said, and that was also the only way I felt I *got* the Southernness of the Trethewey household. (This also got me very dark glowers from my roommate who is hostile to things literary.)
Hardly a sin, but for this reader a discomfort I could've done without. So can I recommend it to you? Absolutely, and I do. I think anyone interested in writers as entities who transmute life into Art, people intrigued by the shocking dichotomies of Southern culture, and women who batten on reading the success and happiness of their fellows, will all be especially gruntled. I hope men who wonder what hell the fuss about this poetry thing is will give it a read, too, as well as any and all people of color looking to gladden themselves on the success of their own.
The Publisher Says: An exquisite meditation on the geographies we inherit and the metaphors we inhabit, from Pulitzer Prize winner and nineteenth U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey
In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the crossroads of Highway 49, the legendary highway of the Blues, and Jefferson Street, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. Before the land was a crossroads, however, it was a a farming settlement where, after the Civil War, a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home.
In this intimate and searching meditation, Trethewey revisits the geography of her childhood to trace the origins of her writing life, born of the need to create new metaphors to inhabit “so that my story would not be determined for me.” She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother’s collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be. With the clarity of a prophet and the grace of a poet, Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Her mother sang her John Brown's Body as a means of soothing the Chernobyl-level burn of racism as the mixed-"race" (how I hate that we still use that horrible, divisive pseudoscientific calumny by default!) family drove past confederate battle flags! (Frequently, then, in her home state of Mississippi...it's on their state flag.) Now, how horrifying an image is that, when that damn dirge that starts with the words "John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave" is soothing?! This is the absolute most powerful statement of the horrors the convulsively dying Jim Crow system of the US South inflicted on people of color (another digression: This locution is deeply uncomfortable to white people like me who, in the 1960s, were loudly excoriated for calling African-Americans either "black" or "colored" in the South).
Returning to my scheduled review: Poet Trethewey was unique, then, from birth forward. She was the product of miscegenation (that horrifying term I'm glad I need to define) as her parents were not legally married in her home state until Loving v. Virginia was decided a year after she was born. Her Black matrilineal line was stuffed with women who had embodied what can only be called triumphs of the will, and all the merrier to say that when I know that this application of that phrase will horrify Nazi true believers. The influence of her poet/professor papa is no doubt there somewhere, but Poet Trethewey does not work on one cylinder, she fires on all of 'em.
I can imagine some astute observers wondering what the devil is going on here. Mudge HATES poetry!some are thinking. Some are quite correct. I loathe the experience of reading poetry the same way I loathe the experience of riding the bus. It's crammed with stuff I don't want to know about, it's uncomfortably tight to sit in and in no way offers me enough room or seats designed for my spatial dimensions, it sways and janks and judders over each crack in the road, and the air conditioning almost never works until it suddenly blasts January-on-the-Siberian-steppe gales for a few seconds.
That does not mean I am insensible to its influence on most people. I see it, I get it, I am not of that group but they are quite clearly expressing their approval. And, lest we lose sight of this, the book is Poet Trethewey's *writing about writing*; that is always interesting. As I suspect all good writing must be, the life led by the child-poet became the matter of the adult; in her experiences of racism, white supremacy, and Southern culture, she speaks with a voice that reaches deep into the National Conversation of the US as well as into the emotional cores of many, many, many people.
At under 100pp, this is an afternoon's read for me. It was a pleasure to read...if you've read Memorial Drive, her memoir, you'll know that Poet Trethewey is gifted in prose writing, and if you haven't what is wrong with you?!...and measures her life against her need to write, like a learner sounding out words in a new language. The essay is part of Yale University Press's terrific series of writerly essays. I have only one cavil to report. I felt the origin of the essay as a lecture rather more than I would have liked. I put it down to the poet's innate aurality of expression. I ended up needing to read passages aloud to understand what was being said, and that was also the only way I felt I *got* the Southernness of the Trethewey household. (This also got me very dark glowers from my roommate who is hostile to things literary.)
Hardly a sin, but for this reader a discomfort I could've done without. So can I recommend it to you? Absolutely, and I do. I think anyone interested in writers as entities who transmute life into Art, people intrigued by the shocking dichotomies of Southern culture, and women who batten on reading the success and happiness of their fellows, will all be especially gruntled. I hope men who wonder what hell the fuss about this poetry thing is will give it a read, too, as well as any and all people of color looking to gladden themselves on the success of their own.
May 3, 2024
Natasha Trethewey is a former United States poet laureate. As I have mentioned in previous reviews, I struggle to read poetry, but I have a few favorites that keep me afloat. Trethewey is one who has made it onto my poetry raft, most likely because she intersperses history with her poems, providing background information so the reader gets a sense of time and place about these largely personal historical works. I have read most of Trethewey’s collections as well as her memoirs, which do contain some repetition that I overlook because her writing is that good. The House of Being explains why she writes, contains quotes from American master writers as well as some of Trethewey’ most personal poems. Although under one hundred pages, this roadmap so to speak packs a literary punch.
Why does Natasha Trethewey write? So that she does not forget key memories and people in her life. As a product of a then illegal interracial romance, so that her voice is not erased. She states that one of the reasons that she writes is the need “to create the narrative of my life- its abiding metaphors- so that my story would not be determined for me.” Her father would tell her that “language is the house of being.” Natasha needed to write to remember her mother, to remember grandmother’s home that provided her with a safe haven as a child. I knew most of this background from reading her other memoirs but it is still important to reiterate the history of Mississippi race relations here. Trethewey’s parents’ relationship was illegal. Eventually it lead their divorce, the first fracturing moment in her life. For years she could not write about the divorce because it lead to her mother remarrying an abusive man, which eventually lead to her death. The pain persisted but Natasha did not want to forget her mother, which sparked her to get her innermost thoughts on paper, leading her to become a prolific writer.
Anytime I spend with Natasha Trethewey is time well spent, even if the words are primarily repeated from other collections and memoirs. The woman is a member of the upper echelon of American writers. She gives credit to a myriad of other top writers from the last two hundred years, all of whom have influenced her in some capacity. While short, I will always pause for short to read what Natasha Trethewey has to say. I hold out hope that her next endeavor will be on the longer side.
4 stars
Why does Natasha Trethewey write? So that she does not forget key memories and people in her life. As a product of a then illegal interracial romance, so that her voice is not erased. She states that one of the reasons that she writes is the need “to create the narrative of my life- its abiding metaphors- so that my story would not be determined for me.” Her father would tell her that “language is the house of being.” Natasha needed to write to remember her mother, to remember grandmother’s home that provided her with a safe haven as a child. I knew most of this background from reading her other memoirs but it is still important to reiterate the history of Mississippi race relations here. Trethewey’s parents’ relationship was illegal. Eventually it lead their divorce, the first fracturing moment in her life. For years she could not write about the divorce because it lead to her mother remarrying an abusive man, which eventually lead to her death. The pain persisted but Natasha did not want to forget her mother, which sparked her to get her innermost thoughts on paper, leading her to become a prolific writer.
Anytime I spend with Natasha Trethewey is time well spent, even if the words are primarily repeated from other collections and memoirs. The woman is a member of the upper echelon of American writers. She gives credit to a myriad of other top writers from the last two hundred years, all of whom have influenced her in some capacity. While short, I will always pause for short to read what Natasha Trethewey has to say. I hold out hope that her next endeavor will be on the longer side.
4 stars
September 20, 2025
At one level, “The House of Being” concerns the North Gulfport home where Natasha Trethewey arrived as an infant, lived her first few years, and spent her summers when she and her mom moved to Atlanta.
That’s a surface summation of the deeper remembrances and meaning of “home”, her family from the poet and memoirist behind the absorbing “Memorial Drive.”
Her grandmother, a striving clothes-maker, kept the beat in her home with the Singer sewing machine. It used to have a pasture before Hwy 49 expanded through that part of the land and homes of her neighbors. The KKK burned a cross at the edge of her land near a church that had been conducting a voter registration drive. Another reason may have been that grandma was letting her daughter and a white husband live their with her interracial daughter.
As the highway tried to erase a part of her family home, as Whitman erased Black soldiers in a poem on North-South (white) brotherhood, the author thought she sought to erase her remarkable mother, stalked and murdered by her estranged second husband.
The Mississippi homestead remains a constant, and she returns often to the site. The dog-trot, double shotgun home is now gone, but it is intact inside her memory palace.
That’s a surface summation of the deeper remembrances and meaning of “home”, her family from the poet and memoirist behind the absorbing “Memorial Drive.”
Her grandmother, a striving clothes-maker, kept the beat in her home with the Singer sewing machine. It used to have a pasture before Hwy 49 expanded through that part of the land and homes of her neighbors. The KKK burned a cross at the edge of her land near a church that had been conducting a voter registration drive. Another reason may have been that grandma was letting her daughter and a white husband live their with her interracial daughter.
As the highway tried to erase a part of her family home, as Whitman erased Black soldiers in a poem on North-South (white) brotherhood, the author thought she sought to erase her remarkable mother, stalked and murdered by her estranged second husband.
The Mississippi homestead remains a constant, and she returns often to the site. The dog-trot, double shotgun home is now gone, but it is intact inside her memory palace.
February 26, 2024
Heartbreaking. Spectacular. Wonderful. Natasha Trethewey examines how the personal, social and political landscape that shapes her life influence the catalyst of her writing (why) and its direction (how). This is a short memoir that delves into how white supremacy and racism affected the author and how she copes with grief and loss. Trethewey offers us a look into how writing came into being in her and how her background as a biracial child growing up in post-Civil Rights era influenced much of her thoughts and ideas in her writing. Trethewey's writing is eloquent and precise. It is heartbreaking to read about her experience with racial discrimination as a child. The part where even the Word Book - a "prestigious" encyclopedia - validates the idea of racial hierarchy is just disgusting. As a reader, it must've been so conflicting to see the discrimination she faced as a kid being recognized in the world of books. Absolutely gorgeous writing. Natasha Trethewey is a gem of a writer.
Many thanks to Yale University Press and Netgalley for the e-ARC!
Many thanks to Yale University Press and Netgalley for the e-ARC!
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January 1, 2024I have decided to stop giving memoirs and biographies “star reviews” as I feel this takes away from the complexity and depth a book like this offers.
Instead, I want to talk about the gorgeous writing and seamless intertwining Trethewey does of her own life and the history around her. This novel sits on a crossroad between her memories and life experiences and the historical context of Mississippi. She takes the reader on her own self discovery journey, from racial trauma to self identity. This short yet sweet memoir is full of breathtaking writing and poetry and was a joy to read.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for kindly providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. #TheHouseOfBeing #NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Instead, I want to talk about the gorgeous writing and seamless intertwining Trethewey does of her own life and the history around her. This novel sits on a crossroad between her memories and life experiences and the historical context of Mississippi. She takes the reader on her own self discovery journey, from racial trauma to self identity. This short yet sweet memoir is full of breathtaking writing and poetry and was a joy to read.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for kindly providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. #TheHouseOfBeing #NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
September 29, 2025
While perusing the writer section at Barnes and Noble, I came across The House of Being by Natasha Trethewey. Immediately intrigued by the opening paragraph placing Natasha’s young life at the Mississippi Crossroads (a geographic location I am both intrigued by and familiar with) accompanied by her effortless, lyrical writing style made purchasing an easy yes.
Part-memoir, part-literary criticism, akin to Stephen King’s On Writing, The House of Being compels readers to reclaim one’s difficult story through the art of writing. A writer’s writer, Trethewey builds a beautiful testament to the primal desire to survive.. The act of simply “being” for Natasha
is to write. And we, as readers (and writer’s), are the fortunate recipients of her unimaginable place of first permission.
Part-memoir, part-literary criticism, akin to Stephen King’s On Writing, The House of Being compels readers to reclaim one’s difficult story through the art of writing. A writer’s writer, Trethewey builds a beautiful testament to the primal desire to survive.. The act of simply “being” for Natasha
is to write. And we, as readers (and writer’s), are the fortunate recipients of her unimaginable place of first permission.
December 31, 2024
Poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey explains how she discovered her voice and developed as a poet in what seems a process of excavation, returning again and again to uncover the shattering truths of her life, going a layer deeper each time, revisiting the trauma of her mother's murder--and juxtaposed with it, her mother's defiant support of her daughter's intent to be a writer. Gift and loss, braided together; survivor's guilt for flourishing when her mother was erased. And then finally diving into the pain to erase that erasure, to re-inscribe her mother as a living force, through poetry. A remarkable journey, ongoing . . . .
March 23, 2025
I was born the same year as the author and share the dubious distinction of having read the World Book Encyclopedia cover to cover. I remember the articles she describes, as well as others. There’s a story about how I came to have that ambition, but one too long to share here. Suffice it to say that I never expected to hear—much less read—an account from someone who had embarked on the same project as a child. The book is a lovely, poignant, exquisitely crafted account of the author’s desire and need to write.
April 30, 2024
What a stroll this book is! Only 77 pages, you feel like you are walking through rural Mississippi -- with its beauty and haunting. Tretheway uses obsession of personal and historical history as the map of her writing life. Tracing her curiosity and then breakthroughs with the craft through her psychological evolution. There are so many good takeaways for fellow writers -- of how we may view our work and approach the why for ourselves.
June 24, 2024
This is Natasha Trethewey's contribution to the Why I Write series. I loved this book. Not only does it include some of her own poetry, it also includes poems by other poets. She also quotes other writers throughout: Wright, Welty, Faulkner, Auden, Whitman, Baldwin. In my very poorly summarized version, she writes so that she and her family and all the events of her life will not be erased. She writes to set the record straight on race in America. This is one powerful book!
January 17, 2024
This is a series of observations memories and ideas around the author's motivation, drive and inspiration to write. Told in slight tales, this is beautiful, careful and at times achingly sad. It says so much for such a slim work. It is poetic in the way the author strips words down and makes them work so hard to produce such beautiful images. Stunning.
February 12, 2024
Natasha Tretheway crafts every sentence with so much care. Even her writing about painful, difficult subjects reveal her deep love for the places and people from whom she's come. This short book is part of the "Why I write" series. Its depth belies the apparent briefness of the text.
So much thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an e-copy of this gem of a book for review.
So much thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an e-copy of this gem of a book for review.
April 28, 2025
I love when poets write essays (hello, Wendell Berry) because they create the best sentences then string them together to make devastating paragraphs, and by the end of the story the reader has been dragged through a keyhole.
This short book of essays by Natasha Trethewey was just like that and all I wanted was to keep reading.
This short book of essays by Natasha Trethewey was just like that and all I wanted was to keep reading.
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