by Justine Hope Blau, English Lecturer, Lehman College – City University of New York (CUNY)
Howard Zinn said, “Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don’t ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it.” That’s the spirit behind My Slipper Floated Away.
Showing Students Their Stories Matter
This summer I published, on the CUNY Academic Commons, an anthology of essays written by my students at Lehman College in the Bronx. I teach memoir writing workshops and most of my students are immigrants, first-generation American, and/or people of color. Here are some takeaways about the process:
My students write about growing up hearing gunshots and police sirens at night, using fire escapes as basketball hoops, and a ritual I’d never heard of: dancing at Thanksgiving. One student wrote about how he and his brother, at ages 11 and 14, had to fend for themselves after their father was deported.
The title of the anthology — My Slipper Floated Away: New American Memoirs — comes from Steven Ngin’s gripping story of fleeing from the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia when he was four years old. He rode on his father’s back as they crossed the Mekong River and watched his slipper float away; the metaphor also works for the other students’ essays because they too are permeated by the theme of people moving forward after sustaining losses.
I’m a born-and-bred New Yorker and I thought I had a cosmopolitan understanding of the world – but I was amazed by my students’ fresh perspectives. At a time when our nation is so polarized, I felt driven to collect these stories and get them distributed, both to people who are afraid of immigrants and POC, and also for those millions of immigrants and POC, who will be heartened to see how stories similar to their own are enriching American literature.
Publishing the Anthology
It took me over two years to publish the anthology. I edited the essays, wrote the introduction, got 25 students to sign author-agreement forms and searched for a cover illustration. (Online I found an impressionistic photo of a Bronx cityscape and photographer Joe Raskin let me use it.) I also arranged for a librarian to explain copyright law to my students; they chose to allow open access for non-commercial use. Finally, I thought that all I had to do was upload a PDF to the CUNY Academic Commons — but it was not that simple.
Several librarians, including Stacy Katz at Lehman, explained that a 168-page pdf is unwieldy and would take too long for readers to load on their laptops or cell phones. They spent a lot of time formatting the document and dividing it into sections so it would load quickly. At Stacy’s suggestion we used the Manifold platform to host the anthology.
The stories in My Slipper Floated Away are available for free, and licensed Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial – No-Derivatives License (CC-BY-NC-ND). We encourage librarians, professors of Ethnic studies, and teachers of advanced ESL to use these stories as reading material. Please share liberally.
Justine Hope Blau presented her work at the Sept 16, 2020, CCCOER webinar, “Decolonizing the Course.”
Praise for My Slipper Floated Away:
“These stories are fresh, vibrant and deeply affecting. The raw human experiences they capture speak universally yet intimately. Using language in sometimes surprising ways, the stories illustrate how American English is constantly remade by the immigrants who embrace it and use it to make sense of their experience.”
Prof. Roosevelt Montas, Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English, Columbia University
“This is an amazing collection of born writers who have managed to convey their individual cultures, along with their adaptation to life in a new country. The result is a melting pot that provides a literary feast.”
Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of the memoir Sleeping Arrangements