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And It Begins Like This
Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. "This collection of essays reveals an impressive new voice, both poignant and observant. McQueen suggests loneliness is also the accomplishment of understanding how far away you can move from other people's expectations. Her clarity rings brightly throughout these works of self-discovery and cultural re-connection."--Wendy Walters
"LaTanya McQueen writes with fierce eloquence about the legacies of family and America's racial history. Balancing intimate investigation with intricate research, she traces the ways the past is bloodline to the present. Gripping, urgent, at times even shocking, this is a deeply important book, one I will be thinking about for a long time. McQueen is a writer--and a mind--to watch."--Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
"LaTanya McQueen's essays offer a bold examination of the weight history, both personal and societal, places on our present moment. AND IT BEGINS LIKE THIS is a book brave enough to challenge our accepted notions of the past to put black women in their rightful place, in the forefront of the ongoing struggle for dignity and equality. It's a book that is both moving and absolutely necessary."--Rion Scott
"LaTanya McQueen writes with fierce eloquence about the legacies of family and America's racial history. Balancing intimate investigation with intricate research, she traces the ways the past is bloodline to the present. Gripping, urgent, at times even shocking, this is a deeply important book, one I will be thinking about for a long time. McQueen is a writer--and a mind--to watch."--Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
"LaTanya McQueen's essays offer a bold examination of the weight history, both personal and societal, places on our present moment. AND IT BEGINS LIKE THIS is a book brave enough to challenge our accepted notions of the past to put black women in their rightful place, in the forefront of the ongoing struggle for dignity and equality. It's a book that is both moving and absolutely necessary."--Rion Scott
175 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2018
6 people are currently reading
850 people want to read
About the author
LaTanya McQueen
5 books287 followersLaTanya McQueen is the author of When the Reckoning Comes, a novel with Harper Perennial, and And It Begins Like This, an essay collection with Black Lawrence Press. Her work has been published in TriQuarterly, New Ohio Review, West Branch, Florida Review, Bennington Review, New Orleans Review, Fourteen Hills, The North American Review, Indiana Review, Passages North, Ninth Letter, Black Warrior Review, and several other journals. She received her MFA from Emerson College, her PhD from the University of Missouri, was the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer Fellow at Cornell College, and is now an Assistant Professor at Coe College where she teaches English and Creative Writing.
She edits creative nonfiction for the literary journal Gigantic Sequins. Her website is www.latanyamcqueen.com.
She edits creative nonfiction for the literary journal Gigantic Sequins. Her website is www.latanyamcqueen.com.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
August 31, 2020
the 2020 Kalamazoo College common read
notes:
p. 52: when telling a friend about being yelled at, calling out slurs, the author asks why she should report this...her friend responds: "Because people should know this shit keeps happening...and because people still believe it doesn't."
p. 68: (the Whitney Museum?)...upon leaving the museum, and seeing the shop, the author contrasts the items available for purchase with the kitschy things for sale at a previous museum...here, no "jars of moonshine", penny machine, bottles of pecan whisky, memorabilia...but rather books: "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, "Kindred" by Octavia Butler, "The Known World" by Edward P. Jones. Personally, I noticed the same upon leaving the Anne Frank Haus in Amsterdam...no little "souvenirs" for sale in the shop, but many, many books. I remember commenting on it at the time.
p. 74-75: the hymn "Amazing Grace", sooooo famous and well-known...sung at so many funerals...written by John Newton, a slave trader, written after his ship survived a storm at sea...(he renounced slavery 5 years before publication of the hymn...the author writes here of "I once was lost, but now am found" and "blind but now I see")...also on these pages, Obama singing this hymn at a funeral and later being criticized for using a song to ask forgiveness for a slave trader...(but it seems the author also sees it as coming together and healing..?)
p. 77: the effects of trauma being hereditary
p. 93: the author, in class asks her students: "When you are writing, when you are reading, if no race is mentioned, what are you picturing? Is it always a white person?" also on this page, Toni Morrison's "Recitatif" sounds interesting... "a story about race that removes all racial codes."
p. 94: "Marley Dias who took it upon herself to solve the lack of representation in the books at her school"
p. 115: the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History in D.C....I have visited and found her description, observations, reactions she relates on the next pages to be so like so much of what I felt during my visit...all so well done...such an emotional experience
p. 119: Eugene Williams and the Michigan beach
notes:
p. 52: when telling a friend about being yelled at, calling out slurs, the author asks why she should report this...her friend responds: "Because people should know this shit keeps happening...and because people still believe it doesn't."
p. 68: (the Whitney Museum?)...upon leaving the museum, and seeing the shop, the author contrasts the items available for purchase with the kitschy things for sale at a previous museum...here, no "jars of moonshine", penny machine, bottles of pecan whisky, memorabilia...but rather books: "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, "Kindred" by Octavia Butler, "The Known World" by Edward P. Jones. Personally, I noticed the same upon leaving the Anne Frank Haus in Amsterdam...no little "souvenirs" for sale in the shop, but many, many books. I remember commenting on it at the time.
p. 74-75: the hymn "Amazing Grace", sooooo famous and well-known...sung at so many funerals...written by John Newton, a slave trader, written after his ship survived a storm at sea...(he renounced slavery 5 years before publication of the hymn...the author writes here of "I once was lost, but now am found" and "blind but now I see")...also on these pages, Obama singing this hymn at a funeral and later being criticized for using a song to ask forgiveness for a slave trader...(but it seems the author also sees it as coming together and healing..?)
p. 77: the effects of trauma being hereditary
p. 93: the author, in class asks her students: "When you are writing, when you are reading, if no race is mentioned, what are you picturing? Is it always a white person?" also on this page, Toni Morrison's "Recitatif" sounds interesting... "a story about race that removes all racial codes."
p. 94: "Marley Dias who took it upon herself to solve the lack of representation in the books at her school"
p. 115: the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History in D.C....I have visited and found her description, observations, reactions she relates on the next pages to be so like so much of what I felt during my visit...all so well done...such an emotional experience
p. 119: Eugene Williams and the Michigan beach
March 4, 2019
The way McQueen weaves in corporate history, family history, and personal experience to share her story of being a black woman is bold, fierce, and genius. The prose is both sharp and measured and lyrical as well. This book will certainly fulfill any longing for a well-written collection. These essays are words that we need in our society right now as we continue to live with the reality of our racial history.
October 27, 2018
Two summers ago, my family and I took a guided tour of the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro, NC. It’s located in the original Woolworths where the lunch counter sit-ins began. At one point our group, which included several small Black children, stopped at a display showing historic racist depictions of African-Americans: the minstrel characters, the Aunt Jemimas, the golliwogs and the pickaninnies, caricatures with bulging eyes, large lips, crinkly hair, many of them depictions from children’s books. I’m a school librarian; I watched the children staring. I felt horrified; I knew I could only begin to imagine the horror they felt. Yet the woman leading the tour defused the moment. She just leaned down to those children and smiled. "Do you see what they did? That's how powerful we are, that they had to show these ugly images over and over everywhere to try and keep us down, but we didn't let them."
The children nodded their heads and smiled. They laughed to think of how some white people had had to make these ugly images.
I’ve thought of that incident often since I read LaTanya McQueen’s And It Begins Like This. Her collection of linked essays reminds me of taking that guided tour. In her book, McQueen explores racist stereotypes of African-Americans, particularly Black women. She examines the impact of centuries of psychological trauma upon the Black community. McQueen seeks to discover the story of Leanna, her great-great grandmother, an enslaved woman who demanded that her children bore the name of their white father after she was set free. McQueen visits the land her ancestor, Leanna, owned in an effort to discover her story. She also visits the Whitney Plantation, the only plantation museum to focus on slavery. With And It Begins Like This, McQueen explores the legacy of America’s racist past in hopes of making sense of the future.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough-one of my favorite books this year. LaTanya and I discussed it here: https://electricliterature.com/and-it...
April 30, 2021
Weaving together rigorous research and moving personal stories, the author reveals the impossibility of making sense of - let alone coming to terms with - America's racial history.
January 28, 2019
‘A friend of mine can taste the differences in bottled water’
Iowa author LaTanya McQueen earned her MFA from Emerson College, her PhD from the University of Missouri, and was the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer Fellow at Cornell College. She currently teaches at Coe College where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor. Her works have been widely published in significant journals.
The time is right for this extraordinary book of essays on racism, but then every day or month or year is the right time for the illuminating insights and shared memories that LaTanya brings to this collection. Her writing is powerful, as powerful as the ideas she expresses. She manages to offer a different view of racism – the isolation or alienation racism creates and influences the lives of so many.
But this book is far more than a rage against the continuing presence of racism. This is a book of essays that share LaTanya’s history and indeed the history of our society’s coping with the loneliness hatred can create. A fresh approach to a long existing problem, LaTanya’s voice is clear and strong and among other gifts she holds the standard for black women’s role in the fight for dignity and equality.
‘We are here, I think. We have survived because survival has been etched deep within our bones, and after everything that’s been done to us we are still here. ‘
This is a book that should become required reading for our students – and for their parents, for us all. History is revisited here so that we will remain aware of the progress in equality that must be achieved. Highly recommended.
Iowa author LaTanya McQueen earned her MFA from Emerson College, her PhD from the University of Missouri, and was the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer Fellow at Cornell College. She currently teaches at Coe College where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor. Her works have been widely published in significant journals.
The time is right for this extraordinary book of essays on racism, but then every day or month or year is the right time for the illuminating insights and shared memories that LaTanya brings to this collection. Her writing is powerful, as powerful as the ideas she expresses. She manages to offer a different view of racism – the isolation or alienation racism creates and influences the lives of so many.
But this book is far more than a rage against the continuing presence of racism. This is a book of essays that share LaTanya’s history and indeed the history of our society’s coping with the loneliness hatred can create. A fresh approach to a long existing problem, LaTanya’s voice is clear and strong and among other gifts she holds the standard for black women’s role in the fight for dignity and equality.
‘We are here, I think. We have survived because survival has been etched deep within our bones, and after everything that’s been done to us we are still here. ‘
This is a book that should become required reading for our students – and for their parents, for us all. History is revisited here so that we will remain aware of the progress in equality that must be achieved. Highly recommended.
July 7, 2020
This is one of the most moving and brilliant books I have ever read. McQueen brilliantly weaves in her personal and modern experience as a Black woman with Black history. However, McQueen takes this a step further by also integrating her family's history as she works to understand her place in the world. Her ability to capture the impact of microaggressions is particularly brilliant. A must read.
August 17, 2021
"There is no penny machine here. No pecan liquors or jars of moonshine for sale. No kitschy souvenirs or memorabilia."
January 25, 2020
"But I'm told that another way of looking at this is to understand that in order to finally get to some sort of end there must be an examination of the beginning. We must understand the past if there will be any attempt to move forward."
I've just finished reading this piece of non-fiction for my seminar class and I am absolutely floored. There isn't a singular book, in a long time (including the ones that I've read for other classes), that has made me truly question our society and its obsession with oppression and concealment. McQueen's mixture of past and present, slavery and modern oppression, and language creates a piece that is so effective in telling readers of the struggle that white people don't have to think about. Where is African American history? We all have the ability to track our genealogy to understand where we come from, but what about those of us that don't come from countries that have their history written into the basic curriculum? How would you feel if you knew absolutely nothing about your past? How would you know where to go in the future? There were so many questions that came to mind while reading this and my book is so marked up it's not even funny.
I, at times, was so irritated by her mixture of tenses and lack of transition between past and present, personal and global stories, but the further I got into these essays I was able to find an appreciation as everything came together. Her style seems to be unlike anything I've ever read, which is why I think I was so irritated, but there's beauty in that. You cannot tell your story in a way that everyone else would because then what do you have? A formulaic account of things that have already been said. Using a new format, something that might make people uncomfortable is so important in advancing the way that we write, understand writing, and understand the way that our society works for the oppression of people of color.
I wish there was more I could say that was concrete but I really just think that everyone should read this for themselves.
I've just finished reading this piece of non-fiction for my seminar class and I am absolutely floored. There isn't a singular book, in a long time (including the ones that I've read for other classes), that has made me truly question our society and its obsession with oppression and concealment. McQueen's mixture of past and present, slavery and modern oppression, and language creates a piece that is so effective in telling readers of the struggle that white people don't have to think about. Where is African American history? We all have the ability to track our genealogy to understand where we come from, but what about those of us that don't come from countries that have their history written into the basic curriculum? How would you feel if you knew absolutely nothing about your past? How would you know where to go in the future? There were so many questions that came to mind while reading this and my book is so marked up it's not even funny.
I, at times, was so irritated by her mixture of tenses and lack of transition between past and present, personal and global stories, but the further I got into these essays I was able to find an appreciation as everything came together. Her style seems to be unlike anything I've ever read, which is why I think I was so irritated, but there's beauty in that. You cannot tell your story in a way that everyone else would because then what do you have? A formulaic account of things that have already been said. Using a new format, something that might make people uncomfortable is so important in advancing the way that we write, understand writing, and understand the way that our society works for the oppression of people of color.
I wish there was more I could say that was concrete but I really just think that everyone should read this for themselves.
August 3, 2024
Thoughtful and beautifully written essays about trying to answer historical and family questions that are in some ways impossible to truly answer, a curiosity about one’s own origins that matters deeply and yet cannot be satisfied. This author’s particular and personal questions tie closely with the history of the nation - of slavery, emancipation, reconstruction and the subsequent backlash. The personal lens is such a necessary one through which to view these events, and the generational impact is clear. Among the questions explored are questions of what survival looks like, what is love and what is violence. I really appreciated the book and how it was structured and will look for more of this author’s work in the future.
July 28, 2020
Beautiful collection of essays that weaves family stories with history. Loved this writer's voice and the themes she weaves here: racism, family, history, knowledge, the body, home, trauma. McQueen's meditations on racism, progress and backlash are as relevant in 2020 as in 2018 when the book was published, and they now take on different resonances. Highly recommend.
"This is not my history, my story, and yet it is. It is my story and it is yours because we are all stained with this past....All of the actions of our ancestors are entangled in the shaping of this country, in who we are and what we've come to believe and understand about ourselves."
"This is not my history, my story, and yet it is. It is my story and it is yours because we are all stained with this past....All of the actions of our ancestors are entangled in the shaping of this country, in who we are and what we've come to believe and understand about ourselves."
June 21, 2025
[4.5 stars]
McQueen blends history and memoir well in these essays, detailing her family's past -- both what is known and what has been lost to time. "[H]ow does one begin to find the truth in the past?" McQueen writes. "Who do you turn to when most of the people who could have known are gone?"
I picked up this collection because I have read (and loved) McQueen's novel When the Reckoning Comes, so it was particularly interesting to me to see how these two works inform each other.
McQueen blends history and memoir well in these essays, detailing her family's past -- both what is known and what has been lost to time. "[H]ow does one begin to find the truth in the past?" McQueen writes. "Who do you turn to when most of the people who could have known are gone?"
I picked up this collection because I have read (and loved) McQueen's novel When the Reckoning Comes, so it was particularly interesting to me to see how these two works inform each other.
August 9, 2022
More like a 3.5. I really liked the title and the way that McQueen keeps returning to the beginning of her known family history and exploring the known/unknown of it. I was less interested in her personal explorations of race, partly because I thought it was a little basic (not to negate her personal experience, but I personally didn’t get much from it). I wish there had been more made of the idea of not knowing.
March 15, 2020
I highly appreciated this author's perspective, on everything. I enjoyed her weaving the past and present in this short narrative. Tying in family history, modern day battles over Confederate monuments, interpersonal interactions that are racially tinged, white privilege, being a child of divorce. Looking forward to anything else the author writes.
April 5, 2022
Man, someone give this collection of essays a Pulitzer. Such a deep and illuminating probe into the personal and collective buried history of race in this country. I loved every essay. I was fully absorbed every time I opened this put. I loved her broad scope of her ability to view history and the present.
January 14, 2020
Beautifully written and thought-provoking memoir. I'm really looking forward to discussing this with Dr. McQueen and with our first-year students in September through our summer common reading program.
October 8, 2020
I had mixed feelings about this book. Incorporating research into a story narrative is nice to see and I'm glad as I got to learn some things from it. Race is an issue in our country and it was evident to see in this book.
April 25, 2019
A brilliant and varied essay collection on McQueen's heritage, experience at Mizzou, and reflections on being black in America. Short, pwerful, and innovative, I couldn't put it down.
October 13, 2019
Thoughtful, vulnerable essays woven with personal pain, intensive research, and backlit by the glare of current events. Brilliantly crafted, structured.
July 22, 2020
A good book that made me check my privilege on many things. The parts about swimming were important to me
December 21, 2022
a very important book that should be read by everyone.
March 18, 2025
“There is just this moment as I stand here with my arm outstretched, my heart full of foolish hope, waiting to see what you will do.”
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews