Tiphanie Yanique’s Home Tour: Reid Writers of Color Event 2021
By Shannie Rao
Screengrab from Home Tour with Tiphanie Yanique
As Tiphanie Yanique leads a virtual tour around her home near Atlanta, Georgia, every highlight, every piece of decor seems to lead back to the idea of community. She’s interested in debunking the conception of authors as solitary and isolated for the audience of nearly 200 members of the Fordham community in attendance:
I think most writers have community, as all artists do. In particular, I think that writers of color really have to have community. I think that’s true for women writers too. And I have a really strong community of women writers, fellow writers of color, but also artists of all kinds. There’s no version of my life in which I’m solitary, alone, doing this work by myself. It’s always a community effort.
Screengrab from Home Tour with Tiphanie Yanique
She shows off her colorful walls and photographs that connect her back to her family and her history in the Virgin Islands, the setting for her novel Land of Love and Drowning. The book, she explains, is loosely based around the stories of her grandparents, but the actual events and people are fiction. Addressing some of the heavier content surrounding a characters’ experience with sexual abuse, she explains that while it wasn’t something she took from her family history, she found it an essential parallel to how the Virgin Islands were exploited by the United States.
Screengrab from Home Tour with Tiphanie Yanique
Leading us up the stairs, Yanique pauses at her bedside table to highlight some of her current books. They range from the Bible to environmental literature to picture books that she reads to her children. It’s a strangely personal look into the life of a writer: a reminder that successful writers are people too.
She concludes the house tour by leading us into her office. “It’s also a guest room,” she adds, “because every room in my house can be converted into a guest room.” Sitting down at her desk, she laughs as she explains she’s written all her books at this desk and feels no need for an upgrade.
As she explains her research process, Yanique highlights her need to be surrounded by books of all genres. “I don’t really write unless I have poetry close by,” she tells the audience as she prepares to take questions, “It helps me remember that I’m a prose writer.”
Yanique is one of the first writers from the Virgin Islands who is writing the stories of her own people, and she doesn’t shy away from acknowledging it. And yet she’s sure to never take the credit in isolation. Behind her, her tech team that helped her lead the tour clap in support as she lists the names of other writers from the Virgin Islands whom she admires.
Screengrab from Home Tour with Tiphanie Yanique
Fielding questions from the audience, Yanique shares her thoughts and advice on craft and once again highlights her community. As a final question, an audience member asked about certain mythologies within Land of Love and Drowning, particularly a myth of silver pubic hair that appears throughout the book. Did Yanique draw on stories from the Virgin Islands?
In part, her answer is yes. But addressing the specific myth highlighted here, she acknowledges that she created it herself. “It’s a great responsibility we take on when we say we’re going to be a writer,” she says, explaining that the same motif has gone on to appear in other Virgin Islanders’ writing now. It’s a beautiful ending to a zany and memorable event. Yanique offers to the audience the power of writing: I made the legend. That is the legend. This is the legend.
You can watch the recording of the event here: https://fordham.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=57d0ea3e-a426-41d7-b89e-ad11016ee9a6#