danyel smith [writer]
naked cartwheels & journal scraps & contentious cursive
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Posts I like
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politicaljones: LOOK!
You can definitely see which family member Barack resembles.
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You know what!? I’ll buy myself this Royal typewriter and start writing a book because a macbook has no soul. This does.
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photo credit: Shella Pimental Photography
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One of the cutest children’s books I’ve ever read. Oh, man.
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Drake stay using people’s quotes. My dumbass thought drake was the one who first said this.
food for thought, 99% of today’s...
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192 posts tagged danyel smith
![elliottwilson:
danyelliott 2. #YN40
[when we were dating. at a wedding in 2004]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_leym4tkUAo1qcx5rwo1_500.jpg)
I almost never choose to *not* go someplace.
From when I was able to go outside without my mother or great-grandparents, freedom was given to me as a task, as matter of necessity, and as a treat. I walked whenever possible on the sunny side of the street. I like freedom. The choices that must be made; the fears overcome and given into. The sacrifices eased into consciously, and sometimes, as if in a dream. The more freedom, the more one regrets. But the regrets are mine. They’re arranged sharpest to the front, like knives in a drawer.
—one of many drafts of memoir; Danyel Smith/2010
My beginnings are too far away to even think of beginning.
But the middle makes no sense and ceases to matter without harebrained efforts to recall those first truly conscious moments—naked in the bathtub with my sister, at a department store called White Front for a portrait, bedtime terror of the Zodiac Killer—the moments that make you know you are alive apart from the people who are there to guide and to teach and ostensibly, to protect.
—from one of many memoir drafts; Danyel Smith/2010
I’m not playing hard-to-get as much as actually being hard-to-get-at.
I like the present—it moves. I like digital time as opposed to the clock of real life. I like better who I am than who I was. I like to think I am all me as opposed to all the people and events who have poured and bored themselves in. I like nows more than thens. Beginnings remembered are far worse than endings, which like tar muck up then melt but harden into something that can be walked over, and away from. Beginnings have hope in them. I don’t care much for hope. I believe in a plan.
—from one of many memoir drafts; Danyel Smith/2010
It’s the ones with the most to talk about that least want to tell their stories.
Over drinks yes, that is fine. Chat-talk-sip-gulp-chew-the-cherry-chat. On Twitter: LOL. Sharp, in-the-moment blog entries—or, as they used to be called, columns—that’s easy-breezy. But to wrap it up burrito-style? There is resistance. Or at least, there is mine.
—from one of many memoir drafts; Danyel Smith/2010
At the shoot in NYC’s West Village; Jay-Z is on the stereo
Mos is chic in a black trench. Smaller and mosquito thinner than you would imagine. More chocolate brown handsome than you would imagine. More gracious and friendly than you would imagine.
Someone hollering about does anyone want some coffee. Tea? Cappuccino?
Mos says cappuccino. Wants to hear a song called, “Rainbows.”
It’s the black coat and the inky blue denim.
“Louder,” is what he says. He wants to hear “Rainbows,” louder.
Shots with eyes open. Eyes close. Eyes wide shut.
Jeans totally sagging down, barely clinging to the black boxer briefs. Rocking the picture-T with four shots of Richard Pryor, live on stage.
—Danyel Smith; notes for a Mos Def piece that was published in Elle, maybe 2004 or 2005. “Rainbows,” I think, is Madvillain
okay. i’m doing a tumblr challenge.
Day 1. Photo of you along with ten facts
the photo is from about 10 months ago.
and so: the facts-
1. California girl.
2. have written two novels: More Like Wrestling, and Bliss.
3. can cook really well.
4. love artichoke hearts.
5. hate take-out
6. take more baths than showers.
7. could be in a commercial for Amtrak #loveit
8. love Whitney Houston best, even taking my faves Mary J. and Mariah into consideration
9. i’m one that cries easily.
10. #teamObama
“… Keep writing … Keep reading, and…to quote Master P: Don’t talk about it—be about it. This is what I try to keep in mind: Just when things are going horribly, that’s when you really have to keep going. It’s always darkest before the dawn. And don’t let just anybody read your work while it’s in progress. Only people you trust with your innermost. Even if the book isn’t “personal,” writing is personal, and people sometimes react strangely to you when you are committed to your project. Because when you’re committed to your project, you are committed to yourself. And if you’re not like that usually—super-committed to your dreams—you have to give people a chance to get used to your creative, committed side.”
Danyel Smith, interview, 2005
Paige got a job that next month, at the covered swimming pool in Diamond Park.
…She wore a red swimsuit and baggy red shorts. Mom would go up to the pool and swim and swim, up and down the lane she held her breath until gills appeared behind her ears, until her eyes were magnified and blurry under thick clear mucus, until her strokes were teak blades, until the slap of her feet on the water was lonesome applause, until chlorine washed over and through her, rinsing beyond purity. Mom would rise shivering, sheets of wetness falling, water dark on her lashes. She sliced thorugh the blue-green toward something Paige couldn’t see.
—Danyel Smith, “More Like Wrestling”
![[book in my house; that i sometimes go to] Andrew Delahunty, “From Bonbon to Cha-Cha: Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lax7z8broD1qau4q6o1_400.jpg)
[book in my house; that i sometimes go to] Andrew Delahunty, “From Bonbon to Cha-Cha: Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases”
from “Black Sheep: Stranger than ‘Non-Fiction’”
…Back at home, she blasted the music loud—”Similak Child,” “The Choice is Yours,” all that—danced to it as she accentuated her lips a coral pink and sprayed perfume on her shoulders and on the back of her neck under her hair. She reveled in Dres and Mr. Lawge’s funny flair for charming whimsy. The rhymes that took her on an escapade. The lyrics and music all giggly and fuck you.
“There’s too many groups lost in the identity of someone else,” Dres had said at the studio. “Everybody and their mother has a gun now. That’s not how you get respect. Rap is starting to make no sense again.” She liked when he said that. Positive for the community. See, Black Sheep say “ho” so nicely. Black Sheep must like her, be intrigued by her, find her compelling, she heard her self saying, out loud, kind of fervently, even crazily. They think about her, write about her, rap her.
Ready she was to hear some Non-Fiction.
—Danyel Smith, Vibe, March 1994
