Interview with Dionne Ford

A few weeks ago I mentioned how much I admired Dionne Ford’s stunning debut memoir, Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing, and I’m thrilled Dionne agreed to this interview.

The book shares Dionne’s incredible journey to trace her family’s roots to her enslaved ancestors in order to reclaim power and find healing. It’s deeply personal, diving into experiences of sexual abuse, alcoholism, and post-traumatic stress. Yes, it delves into heavy topics, but please don’t let that stop you from reading about her powerful journey of recovery. Dionne’s prose is poetic and graceful and this book is truly a beautiful achievement. (You can read my review here.)

Also, now that Amy taught me how to embed songs into posts (thanks, Amy!), we’re going to start asking authors to share music recommendations. So fun, so let’s get started!

photo courtesy of the author

Did you ever doubt this book would be published? 

It took me almost 20 years to research and write this book, so even though I felt such a strong need to tell this story, doubt floated in and out like the tide. That need and encouragement from other writers and organizations and that I found an agent when I was finishing my MFA at NYU kept me going. My initial concern was that I wouldn't be able to find the right words to do my ancestors justice, especially the enslaved women in my family.  Once I knew that the story that I needed to tell was about the sexual violence that went hand-in-hand with slavery and my personal experience with sexual abuse, I worried that a publisher wouldn't want to take a chance on such heavy material.  In the end, the story that I needed to tell found the perfect home at Bold Type Books. 

Do you have any tips or tricks for staying motivated?

I get myself into the most trouble in life generally when I go into compare and despair mode, so the best thing I can do to keep myself on task is to understand what that task is and measure my success against my own trajectory. Getting the story down and executing it in a way that feels gratifying keeps me coming back to the page. Writing and publishing are two very different things and I do better when I focus on one at a time and the proper proportions - 99.9 percent on the writing, .1 percent on the publishing. I learned that from other writers, so the other tip I have to share is get yourself a community. 

Any reading recommendations? 

The literary gods have been showering us lately. The list of books I've loved reading recently is long, so I will focus on writers in my community. Cleyvis Natera's sensuous short story "Fog" transfixed me. (I heard it on the Ursa podcast, hosted by Dawnie Walton and Deesha Philyaw). My fellow debut author Diane Marie Brown's Black Candle Women was a delight as was Sara Novic's True Biz and Alice Elliot Dark's elegant Fellowship Point. I also highly recommend Maud Newton's Ancestor Trouble (both the book and the newsletter on Substack of the same name) and Emma Copley Eisenberg's incredible literary reportage in Third Rainbow Girl. And I can't wait to read Rachel Swarns's 272. 

What about music? Was there a song you listened to when writing this book?

I had a playlist that I listened to over and over while I was writing my book with so many tracks that inspired me. It's hard to pick just one! Three songs were on theme with my book: 

Thank you, Dionne!