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"I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time."
—James Baldwin, Nothing Personal
Confronting interracial differences with candor and sensitivity
Our conversations attracted the attention of Dr. Aidsand Wright-Riggins, Mayor of Collegeville, PA, who invited us as featured guests on "Collegeville Connects." See About page for video.
We struggled to manage our differences of age (twenty years), career status, personality, and, most strikingly, skin color.
Assigned to an arrangement not of our making, we had no expectations, only apprehension.
We were uncomfortable and doubtful. And yet, there was something compelling about this unique opportunity to confront our differences of age, professional status, and race head on.
Our story was featured in "The Value of Friendships That Don't Come Easy." Read more in The Atlantic.
We were motivated to share more openly. We launched this website and created a "diablog." See blog
Back Story
We were assigned to each other in a mentoring relationship at Grinnell College in 2000. Age, status, and skin color were surface differences but they were significant.
–My first reaction? Who was this person?! I just wanted her to go away.
–How horribly awkward. Her silence and unsmiling glare were glacial.
After years of working together at the same college, we faced the challenge of living a thousand miles and decided to dig deeper into how race had shaped us.
One of us found her voice in poetry; the other felt encouraged to respond in kind. Poems anchored our exchanges, like patchwork pieces in a lattice quilt, we stitched together our ongoing story.
We spoke weekly, wrote, and struggled with topics that kept us awake at night (the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the demise of DEI, etc.). The country's growing racial divide motivated us to put ourselves "out there," maybe not in the streets, but certainly in words.
Quiet and reserved by nature, we understood that visibility and vulnerability were necessary if we were ever to strike a nerve that hadn't been dulled by hidden agendas, how-to advice, self-righteous rage, guilt, or worse, indifference.
We wanted to make our collaboration matter. We wanted our story to jump start meaningful conversations. We wanted to create a space where differences could be shared and confronted.
Advance Praise
“Reflective, inquisitive, and tender, More Than Skin Deep: Conversations At The Color Line shares its voices as it powerfully meditates on friendship, racial difference, the creative process, and what it means to live in America's troubled 21st century.”
Lytton Smith, Author of My Radar Data Knows Its Thing and 2007 winner of the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize for While You Were Approaching the Spectacle but Before You Were Transformed by It.
“This collaboration movingly records and performs the personal and political work of friendship, reminding the reader that the true friend calls us to respond from within, in-between, and beyond our selves.”
Hai-Dang Phan, Author of Reenactments: Poetry and Translations.
“A moving and exquisite meditation on friendship in the best tradition of Aristotle, Cicero, and Montaigne.”
Lawrence Kritzman, Author of The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays, editor of Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and “the Jewish Question” in France, and The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought.
“Jamaica Kincaid says of friendship that ‘underneath one could find worlds.’ The same is true of this marvelous book, a hybrid in so many ways. Whiteness everywhere, like the snow in Iowa, and yet, and yet…a pair, a pairing.”
Ralph James Savarese, Author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption, See It Feelingly, and When This Is Over: Pandemic Poems.
“Truly uplifting, this story illustrates the miracle of dialogue when it occurs with honesty and integrity. It can serve as a model to unite us against the evils of racism so prevalent in our society today.”
Harold Kasimow, Author of Interfaith Activism: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Religious Diversity, editor of Abraham Joshua Heschel Today, and co-editor of Pope Francis and Interreligious Dialogue.
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