Poet and Accomplished Journalist Tess Taylor Comes to San Ramon

SAN RAMON LIBRARY RELEASE

Poet, renowned journalist and El Cerrito native Tess Taylor will appear at the San Ramon Library on Thursday, Nov. 22 at 6:30 p.m.

Taylor, whose had work appear in The New Yorker and The Atlantic released “The Forage House," which was called one of the four best books of poetry this year by Publisher’s Weekly.

In her lyric debut, Taylor explores a complex familial and personal history that traces her ancestry back to Founding Father Thomas Jefferson.

“I began to know that I would need to write a version of this book in the late ‘90s, when DNA tests confirmed that chromosomal patterns on the descendants of Sally Hemings matched the patterns on the chromosomes of descendants of Thomas Jefferson," Taylor said in an interview with Publisher’s Weekly. 

“It was a fierce wake-up call, because I am a white descendant of Thomas Jefferson. I hadn’t engaged with this history as a kid or sensed how it connected to me. I had blocked out considering my own connection to slavery. I felt the enormity of my ignorance. I needed to process this is some way, to articulate the grief and haunting and re-discovery I felt."

“The Forage House,” which was partly written in residence at Monticello, is as much about the imperfect material of family stories as it is about the imperfect and politically charged material of history. 

“Omission is deliberate and accidental. Omission is deliberate,” said Taylor. 

Working alongside the field’s top historians and archaeologists, visiting family attics and rarely seen relics, Taylor has crafted a lyric history, using shards, buttons, and the accidental unearthings of a busy state building a new freeway.

Former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky said of Taylor's work: "Ezra Pound's definition of the epic--"A poem containing history" demands courage and intellectual range, as well as lyrical gifts. Tess Taylor meets that challenge in "The Forage House." A figure of epic scale, Taylor's Thomas Jefferson is tragic as well: "ambitious foundering father." The poise, candor and reach of this book-- with a vision that embraces the enigmas of contemporary El Cerrito along with those of the slave-owner Jefferson--are deeply impressive."

Recently, Taylor was contacted by Gayle Jessup White of Virginia, who had been engaged in a 40-year pursuit of the elusive connection between her family and Jefferson’s. White’s link to this heritage was the stuff of oral history and family lore.

“I’ve been working on establishing a Jefferson family connection for 40 years,” she said. Different types of evidence strongly point to her probable descent from one of Thomas Jefferson’s great-grandsons. Google led her to Taylor’s poetry.

Taylor and White – the white woman and black woman — in all likelihood, cousins — met for the first time a few weeks ago. They hiked a path to the Monticello Graveyard, examining an ancestral legacy from opposite perspectives. They formed an immediate bond. 

“It’s possible not even to like people in your own family,” Taylor said, “and the thing that was delightful was the probability that we’re related and we do get along. That made me happy. We have a shared history, and we’re both interested in history,” Taylor said.

They also share a journalism background — Taylor has a master’s in journalism from New York University, White from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Taylor, also an accomplished journalist, has written for “The New York Times,” “The Atlantic,” “The New Yorker” and other venues.  She had hoped at one point to write about her family in prose. But as she began her work she found that many sites of family memory were cloaked in evasion, silence, or absence.

In “The Forage House,” Taylor uses poetry to dramatize a dance between what is and is not known, what will and will not be said. Moving between past and present, east and west, these poems reveal an uneasy genealogist struggling with ambiguous legacy. This book is about the legacy of slavery; the violence of not recording lives; the aftermath and echo and ghosts of that violence. It is also a book about family and memory, about love, inheritance, and loss.

Addressing Jefferson directly in the haunting "A Letter to Jefferson From Monticello," Taylor writes, "Here's your garden:/ marrow peas asparagus/ & nubbed beginnings/ of the scarlet runner bean./ I still hear schoolchildren asking/ why you needed slaves to grow them./ O great rhetorician, tell me: What should I say?"

The program is free and open to the public. For further information or reservations, contact 925-973-2850 orwww.ccclib.org/locations/sanramon.html. San Ramon Library is located at 100 Montgomery Street at Market Place and Bollinger Canyon Road.