Portland native Renee Watson’s new young-adult novel gets right to its point with its title: “Piecing Me Together.”
Her protagonist, Jade, makes art collages to process her experiences at home in Northeast Portland, as a black student on scholarship at a mostly white private high school, in a mentorship program she reluctantly joined, and in a new friendship with a white girl. “She is piecing all these relationships, all these circumstances and opportunities together to make something of her life,” said Watson.
And Jade does so without the standard love interest. “I wanted her to be in love with herself” and focused on her own future, Watson said. “To give space in a book for that was really important for me.”
Watson, who lives in New York, is back in Portland this month to launch “Piecing Me Together” (Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 272 pages, $17.99). She’ll participate in the African American Read-In at 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 12, at North Portland Library, 512 N. Killingsworth St.; she’ll also do a book reading and signing at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 17, at the branch. She’ll join a poetry slam at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 22, at St. Johns Library, 7510 N. Charleston Ave.
Watson recently talked about her book; her comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: Tell us about your Portland roots.
A: I went to Vernon Elementary School. I went to Binnsmead Middle School (now Harrison Park School) and then I went to Jefferson High School. It was really at Jeff where I found my voice and learned that, oh, I can write and I have something to say, I want to do something with words. I was involved a lot in performing arts there and then the literary program under Linda Christensen, who was my English teacher.
Q: You’re living in New York now, but you set your novels in Portland.
A: Portland has always been kind of a bittersweet place for me. You know, growing up in Portland as a black girl had its challenges. We didn’t talk about race a whole lot when I was a child – not about racism, I should say. And I had a lot of questions. I could feel sometimes a tension there that wasn’t necessarily explicitly discussed.
But then there’s all this beauty. There’s the beauty of the mountain, all the green. My family is there, and of course the community. I grew up in Northeast Portland, just a loving neighborhood and a community that looked out for each other.
It wasn’t until I was much, much older that I realized that Portland has some issues and some things to work through and think about. So I hope to do that in my book, to shed a light on that beauty but also on some of the darker parts that I don’t think people talk about in the Pacific Northwest.
Q: Jade is living in two worlds not just in terms of race but also in terms of class. How did you go about writing that?
A: Before writing full time I worked as a mentor. I also worked as a teaching artist. So I had experience with several young women and had been up close and personal in their world.
I know what it’s like to be the girl who went to Jeff, who had people with good intentions come into our neighborhood and want to fix us, or talked about Jefferson as if it was a horrible place, a bad place, or that we were some exception to the rule, you know, “smart for a black girl.”
I’ve also been the mentor that comes in with all these preconceived notions and ideas about who these students are and what I’m supposed to do for them, not necessarily with them.
Q: Jade’s struggle didn’t seem glossed over, but it also didn’t seem unresolvable.
I want there to be hope. I feel responsible when I’m writing, especially for young people, that I don’t leave them in a place of despair – that you’re showing young people how to cope with what’s going on in your world.
Art in general is powerful in that way, that people can look at it and talk about social issues, talk about what the characters are going through, how the characters handle the situation, and hopefully gain some wisdom from those characters and apply it to their own lives.
I definitely wanted to leave Jade in a place where you feel like she’s going to be OK. It’s not a happy ending, everything’s not neatly tied up, because that’s not realistic. I wanted to give her some agency and make her advocate for herself.
Q: Why do you write for teens and children?
There’s just so much material. When you are an adolescent, you’re feeling emotions so intensely, you are so curious, so open – there’s just so many stories that you can tell and take a character on this journey.
But also, when I was a teenager and younger, I didn’t have a lot of books that reflected my world. I want to put stories out into the world – we talk about this a lot in children’s lit – that are windows and mirrors. I’m really focusing on mirror books, where a kid can see their reflection – literally a dark-skinned black girl, but also their story. And not just a tragic story. Sometimes when our stories get told, it’s just the worst kind of things that happen, and I really want to bring a balance to that narrative and talk about the kids I know that are thriving.
Q: What inspired “Piecing Me Together”?
This idea of how women heal themselves and heal each other. I wanted to explore the relationships women have with each other – friend-friend, mother-daughter, mentor-mentee – and how it changes and ebbs and flows when you have all the intersections of race, class, where a person lives.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from this book?
A: That they walk away feeling like, “I don’t have to be in a traditional family, I don’t have to have what my neighbor has, I don’t have to look a certain way. I can piece together my life and be someone and be proud of who I am, where I come from, and it can look different.”
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
