Digging in the Crates

Lupus and chronic disease writing from 2013

I’ve been digging around in my email inbox for a class lecture on James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” (to no avail, it’s on my desktop in another city.) At any rate, I found a disjointed essay from 2013 that I imagined as the beginnings of a book about my journey with Lupus. My audiobook, A Dangerously High Threshold for Pain is the most extensive published writing I’ve offered on living with chronic diseases (plural.) Some of the content of that work is here. But what is more interesting (for me) is how many threads of the other books I’ve written over the past 11 years are also here. There are parts that would become part of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, and even the forthcoming Black in Blues.