In addition to the film photographs Oak shot this past summer, there are many digital photographs as well. Lately, I’ve been thinking of this special trip with the kids. I’ll share words on my newsletter soon enough. And if you haven’t subscribed yet, With Love, L is where I am these days. An official and overdue goodbye to this special long-running space will happen soon enough. In the meantime, here are photos to round us out: The post Paris: Nostalgia, Finally appeared first on LaTonya Yvette ..read more

For his eighth birthday, I gifted Oak a small yellow, point and shoot Kodak film camera. For years, he grabbed my Fuji off of our green television stand and snapped photographs of pretty much everything he saw. He’d snap, take a few moments to review, and continue to snap through the minutes and hours. Over time, I purchased disposable cameras, which delivered a temporary joy. This dance lasted for a few years, until he asked for a “real” camera for his birthday. With a month-long stay in Europe on the horizon, the film camera he received provided an ongoing activity through travel and new spa ..read more

“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.” —James Baldwin The post September’s Words appeared first on LaTonya Yvette ..read more

The kids den was finished with the hands of girlfriends this winter. Cobwebs were removed, paint was touched-up, drawers were lined with contact paper found within the old house. Months later, the swing was hung up, the curtain was finished, and the paint blotches on the floor were cleaned by yours truly. Over the last few months, the room has shifted into a gathering space and more importantly, a meditation room. It is a favorite hiding space, a healing space, a collective space. Here’s a list of things I dreamed up of putting in that now lives there: + contact paper as refreshers for old cab ..read more

For the past few days I have been silently tossing around Serena Williams’ news in my head. For the past few days, a word she so intentionally used, evolution, to describe this transition has been stuck in my heart. It is a word that feels generous in a time when titles and What Happens Next, feel too often stuck in patriarchal binaries. It struck me that I was—like many Black women in their 30s—saying a goodbye of sorts to a childhood hero. Just as she reluctantly, pieced together a goodbye that felt right for her. And like Serena noted in her piece, needing to nearly-immediately evolve her a ..read more

Photo and video via Open Culture of a Never-aired TV profile of James Baldwin. Posting for August’s words a day after his birthday. The post August’s Words appeared first on LaTonya Yvette ..read more

In my family there were nearly a handful of sayings we lived by when it came to our hair. These words were passed down to me by my mother. To her by her own mother. And my grandmother by my great-grandmother, and lived-on through aunts, cousins, and neighbors. When I began to play around with the length and color of my hair when I was 17, I began to push these truths that were so valuable between us. I don’t regret any of it, but now that I have a daughter with evolving hair of her very own, and sit square in my thirties, I se e what they meant when they said that thing they said.  “Don ..read more

birth-day  by Lucille Clifton today we are possible. the morning, green and laundry-sweet, opens itself and we enter blind and mewling. everything waits for us: the snow kingdom sparkling and silent in its glacial cap, the cane fields shining and sweet in the sun-drenched south. as the day arrives with all its clumsy blessings what we will become waits in us like an ache. The post July’s Words appeared first on LaTonya Yvette ..read more

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.  The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.  Remember this: We be many and they be few. They ne ..read more

Oak turned eight years old this past Friday. I’m not sure how it all has gone by so fast. I know everyone says that. I know I say much of the same nearly every year. But this year, feels exceptionally different. Weighted. Complex. Beautiful. This winter and spring when I thought I needed time alone, it was Oak’s insistence that I create a new-found intimacy with my growing children, that lifted me up. The way (at least for now), he says my bed is the most comfortable place on the planet, and my hugs are the warmest from anyone, ever. It is O (and River too) whose birth months, days, and hours ..read more