All These Things: A Conversation

by Sharon Bridgforth, Daniel Alexander Jones

In June 2022, Sharon Bridgforth and Daniel Alexander Jones held an intimate and searching conversation about the pragmatics of making art and engaging the communities--living and ancestral--from which their work emerges. The two longtime friends reflect on Bridgforth’s  bull-jean & dem/dey back , a collection of two performance/novels written twenty-two years apart about the eponymous bull-jean (published in Sept 2022 by 53rd State Press). Bridgforth reveals how motherhood spurred her towards understanding her genders and sexuality, and how the desire to love, heal, and live in truth has compelled her writing and her life choices. Bridgforth details the weave between her early work in social justice (based in Austin, TX, where she and Jones met), her artmaking, and her remarkable commitment to community. Bridgforth's writing starts in the marrow of her own healing. As they discuss Bridgforth's work--as well as the work of such luminaries as Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley, Ntozake Shange, Urban Bush Women, raúlrsalinas, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland--Jones and Bridgforth offer tested strategies for living a grounded artistic life.

100 pages, Paperback

Published July 25, 2023

About the author

Bridgforth is RedBone Press author of" love conjure/blues" and the Lambda Literary Award winning, "the bull-jean stories". She, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and Lisa L. Moore are co-editors of "Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project", University of Texas Press. Anthologies that feature her work include: "solo/black/woman: Scripts, Interviews, and Essays", Eds. E. Patrick Johnson and Ramon Rivera-Servera, Northwestern University Press; "Blacktino Queer Performance", Eds. E. Patrick Johnson and Ramon Rivera-Servera, Duke University Press; ."Windy City Queer: GLBTQ Dispatches from the Third Coast", Ed Kathie Bergquist, University of Wisconsin Press; "First Person Queer: Who We Are (So Far), Eds. Richard Labonte & Lawrence Schim"el, Arsenal Pulp Press; "New Monologues For Women By Women", Eds. Liz Engelman & Tori Haring-Smith, Heinemann; and "Is This Forever, Or What?: Poems & Paintings From Texas", Ed. Naomi Shihab Nye, Greenwillow. Her "River See: Theatrical Jazz Performance Installation" script is featured in Obsidian Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Issue 43.1. Bridgforth's current project, "dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Home" will premiere in 2018. An imagined "dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Home" performance is published in "Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage".

Reviews

[Aaron Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only bad part of this book is that there isn’t more of it. Sitting and reading these two wonderful artists is like listening to your mentors have a conversation just for you. This is an important book, especially for Bridgforth fans, since DAJ asks her to reflect on her journey into art, the teachers who influenced her, the theatre-makers she created with back at the beginning, and the movement toward full-time art-making. This is a short, sweet book you can complete in one sitting, but you’ll be thinking about it for a long time afterward.