Artist Series: Blue Hour
On Writing: Novel excerpt by Tiffany Clarke Harrison
Every month I’m publishing a piece from an artist I admire. This month, I am honored to share an excerpt by Tiffany Clarke Harrison from her debut novel Blue Hour. I read the whole of Blue Hour in bed during a rainy afternoon with rapt attention. I held my hand over my chest and tears wet my cheeks. A smile. A joy made its way through every now and then, but it was the sorrow that kept me glued to the page. The sorrow and the grief and the yearning. God damn, the yearning. I can still feel it in my gut. If I think about it too much I will start crying again.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a sucker for books that tear your heart out and this one did just that. Blue Hour takes us to the intersection of grief and hope and through to a truth that is so open and raw that it changes you. The book, so achingly present, made me feel as if I was the one moving through the loss and the fear and the pain in real-time—one thing right after another like a summer thunderstorm when the rain falls in continuous sheets. If you want to remember what it means to feel, I mean, really feel, and hold yourself with your own hands, read this book.
Tiffany Clarke Harrison is an Author and Author Mentor/Writing Coach. She graduated from Salisbury University with a BA in English with a creative writing concentration, and holds an MFA creative writing (Fiction) from Queens University of Charlotte. Blue Hour is her debut novel.
Before we get into her beautiful book, let’s start with three questions.
What are you reading right now?
I'm reading several things at once because I'm in a research phase for my next book. (When I'm reading for pleasure I stick to one book at a time.) The new manuscript is about the lengths we'll go to for love, and the masks we all wear. The feeling is obsessive, sexual, sometimes eerie. One of the books I'm (re)reading is Netsuke by Rikki Ducornet. I love how she allows the main character to show all of his ugliness and the risks he took for lust. I tend to write about what's considered dark emotions. There's so much truth there, and it gives readers permission to feel the big, scary thing they're ashamed of feeling. So many people are numbing their way through life because they think they aren't "allowed" to really feel. We forget that we're human, and my writing and how I work with other authors on their books reminds people of that.
What do you do when you’re coming up against resistance and you can’t seem to get to the center of the thing—the writing, the living, the task at hand? How do you get to where you want to go?
Resistance is often a cue to look at myself. I'm usually hiding from something, stuck in an unhelpful pattern/habit, believing something about myself or the world around me, or it’s intuition guiding me. Whatever it is (from procrastinating on paying a bill to writing a scene), it always comes back to something within me. Once I catch that I'm resisting, I'll ask myself, "What's going on here?" I usually answer in a journal, or sometimes while I'm out on a walk an answer will present itself. For example, Blue Hour started with a more traditional structure. While I enjoyed writing the first couple drafts, the idea of writing it as a fragmentary novel wouldn't leave me alone. I didn't do it though because I thought something along the lines of, "Who am I to do that?" It seemed like something that only established authors could do, and I was afraid of being perceived as trying to be gimmicky. I changed the structure on draft 3 and it was so incredibly clear that this structure supported the story the best.
Tell me about the book. How do you feel about your first book going out into the world?
Blue Hour is a fragmentary novel whose narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an unraveling America. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class. Unmoored by the grief of a recent devastating miscarriage and Noah’s fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world. Yet her husband Asher—contributing white, Jewish genes alongside her Black-Japanese ones for any potential child—is just as desperate to keep trying. The author, Osa Atoe, said Blue Hour is "a meditation on the boundaries of hope" and, yes, that's it exactly.
My feelings are a mixed bag! Ha! Yesterday (4/4/23) was pub day and the weeks leading up to it I was all over the place. Like, "Yes! It's happening!", and also "Uhhhhh...holy sh*t, it's happening." I've been working toward traditional publication for many years, and as the amazing reviews from places like Kirkus and Publishers Weekly came in, then making several most anticipated lists, my nervous system was freaking out. I've been so used to this day feeling out of reach, my body clung to that story, that identity. So when things changed and we headed into this new, joyous territory it began to feel unsafe. This goes back to what I said earlier about resistance. I realized I was resisting joy because it felt unsafe. Wild, right? I walk a lot and one of the affirmations I'd repeat while listening to music is "I'm safe to feel this joy" while taking deep belly breaths. I'd also do this as I fell asleep. The affirmation alone isn't enough when the physical body is triggered, so that belly breathing was key. Also, making sure I celebrated every little thing that happened with the book to normalize that level of joy in my body. It could be a voice note to friends, hugging my husband or even myself, dancing in the kitchen. Something to show my body, see, we're good. We're really, really good. Yesterday I learned that Vulture named Blue Hour one of the best of 2023 so far—and it was at the top of the list!! I could experience that joy so much better because I faced my resistance with compassion and worked through it.
What is motherhood in the midst of uncertainty, buried trauma, and an unraveling America? What it’s always been—a love song.
Novel excerpt
by Tiffany Clarke Harrison
Blue Hour
“I never thought I wanted children,” I say to the therapist.
“Why is that?”
The sac on the bathroom floor, on those tiny bland-and-white square tiles and under the pipe bending down from the sink. I see it. My insides on the outside, like looking at my muscle. I’d squatted there, gripping that pipe, and when I felt the sac release, kicked it away with my bare foot.
I tap my finger against the leather of the couch. “Did you hear? The guy they shot in the parking lot of a grocery store yesterday, the one getting into his car or something, he died this morning in the hospital.”
Her cheeks are flushed and pinker than I remember in her photo online. Her dark chest is large, and the buttons across it strain with each inhale as she waits.
“I hurt people with my selfishness,” I say.
“How so?”
I laugh. “It’s still pretty early in our relationship, let’s pace ourselves.”
“Ah, silly me.” She smiles, tapping her forehead with her fingertips. “All that ‘the truth shall set you free’ bullshit can’t be rushed.”
I make a Neanderthal sound, somewhere between a grunt and a laugh, grinning. How dare she build rapport with me? Sneaky little therapist.
The truth is, the moment I first saw you dance wild with arms darting, hair flopping in your laughing face, I knew I wanted a clone of that uninhibited joy to grow inside me. I had decided against having children years ago, right after the abortion. This was before I knew you, but then after I knew you, I started to change my mind. Yes. I could be a mother. Yes, I’d changed my mind. Could my malfunctioning body and the reality of this American nightmare change it back?
“My husband loves me, but my blood rejects me.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“They die. Or willingly let me go.”
“You’re referring to your family’s car crash? Your parents and younger sister.”
“And the baby. And my other sister. My own body. It doesn’t want a baby, and nobody can tell me why. Why doesn’t it want to have a baby?”
“Do you want to have a baby?”
“Yes. But I am afraid.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“It’s like after they died and left, everything in me shut down. It didn’t know how to function.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why don’t you know how to function?”
“Isn’t that your job to figure out? How the hell should I know?”
“Because you do know, and it’s my job to get you to see it. So, as early as it is in our relationship, I’ll be up front and let you know that telling me a bunch of facts isn’t going to get you there. Feeling something will. So I’ll ask you again, what are you afraid of?”
I am exhausted and don’t feel like talking anymore. The therapist waits. It is only our third session, but I’ve caught on to her. She will always wait me out.
“I had a dream once,” I say. “After the crash, I dreamed that I opened my mouth so wide that you could see all the way down to everything I’d ever thought but never said and it was horrifying being that human. Like my muscles were on the outside. Have you ever seen a muscle? The raw flesh of it? It’s disgusting.”
————————
You like abandoned things. Hidden things. Tucked away and forgotten things.
In the beginning, we rode the Triumph into the city as you took me on a tour of your favorite hidden places. A garden at the bottom of a gravelly hill on the West Side. You’d once sketched designs for ties there, and started smoking, and wrote songs until you realized you were terrible at writing songs but kept up with the smoking and tie sketching. Dank alleys, all mildew and garbage, were favorite spots to watch the sunset the year you dropped out of school. NYU. You became a line cook instead at some hot shit restaurant in Manhattan. Rich, middle-aged white women who got sad sometimes talked to you there. They wanted to have fun with the young tattooed guy who flipped their salmon on the grill and drizzled it with lemon-garlic butter and capers, who now smoked in the alley. They’d flirt and you’d flirt to make them feel good. You’d let them touch your hair, sandy brown and clumped with sweat, always falling in your eyes.
And there was the warehouse. Peeled paint and textured, cement walls, floor. It was winter when you took me. Wind burst through broken windows. It howled, scraping against jagged edges of glass. “My dad taught me how to play chess here,” you said. “In the winter because he wanted to test my ability to focus.” You pulled a tiny wooden case from inside your jacket and sat on the gray ground. Never mind the dust, debris. You opened the case. Chess pieces toppled on the soft, red velvet. “Would you like to play?”
I sat and you asked about my parents. I told you my father grew up in Haiti and laughed a lot. He was a boxing trainer. My mother was born and raised in New York by my Japanese grandmother and her family. My mother’s grandparents hated her, ostracized her, called her The Dark Devil. A lot of people in their community did. She loved her mother, my father, and my sisters and me more than herself.
I asked about your parents. You said, “In the end, they didn’t like each other much.”
Excerpted from BLUE HOUR by Tiffany Clarke Harrison. Published with permission of Soft Skull. Copyright © 2023 by Tiffany Clarke Harrison.
Where to find Tiffany:
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