“I Began With a Question”: A Conversation with LaToya Jordan about TO THE WOMAN IN THE PINK HAT
In the MFA program we both attended, LaToya Jordan was a wise and talented poet a year ahead of me. In Brooklyn where she lives and mothers, LaToya works full time as a writer for a local government agency, while sustaining her creative life. I have long been an eager reader of LaToya’s poetry, short stories, and essays, and when I received her novella, To the Woman in the Pink Hat, I wanted to both savor and devour it.
Across 83 pages of this book, winner of the 2023 Shirley Jackson Award in the Novella category, the reader walks with Jada Morris in her challenging journey at The Center for Future Leaders, where she is required to do “the work” of processing what brought her there. LaToya skillfully, with striking sensory details and an often-unexpected approach, brings us into Jada’s experience as someone who has had their uterus stolen—part of a future government’s racist plan “to stop the browning of America,” which has left a whole group of women of color unable to reproduce.
Jada and other Leaders at The Center have committed crimes because (they are victims of) of gender-based violence—they’ve been sent to The Center because they have promise for serving their communities beyond the program. Jada’s not always sure what to believe, including those who are there to help her “heal,” and the reader must reckon with longing for justice for her throughout the book. The alternative to the Center is jail, so, through verbal entries to a cloud journal, Jada appeases the ultimatum, speaking to the woman who has embodied her uterus, Sarah.
Jada may be in The Center after a violent crime, but I also see her as a woman who is carrying deep reproductive grief. She has lost her uterus, and the woman who has the uterus has a baby, one that Jada won’t have. LaToya uses details like a baby’s cry that trigger Jada, in the body, as someone who has lost a pregnancy. Grounding herself at various points with breathing and trauma-informed practices, like many of us do, Jada gets through it. But is there any coming to terms with the removal of her uterus?
While deliciously written fiction, the book chills with a lingering of the America in which it was conceived, where rates of pregnancy-related complications do in fact impact Black women three times more often than white women. Through its small paperback series, Conversation Pieces, where this book was selected as volume 87, Aqueduct Press hopes to create a “genealogy for feminist speculative fiction.” It’s beyond fitting that they’ve included To the Woman in the Pink Hat. I was honored to chat with LaToya about this book, how she wrote it, and the questions she started with. – Jacqui Morton
Jacqui: Over how long did you write To the Woman in the Pink Hat?
Latoya: There’s a short and long answer to this.
The short answer is I was writing it off and on for five or six years.
The long answer is that the idea for this story hit me in 2016, when two things happened. One being the first uterine transplant in the United States, and the other being I had uterine surgery to remove a fibroid.
I spent a lot of time discussing how they were going to remove the fibroid. I had one child then, delivered via caesarean section and I wanted the option of getting pregnant again but avoiding another c-section. There were so many talks about my fertility and the idea for this story just hit me one day that year.
I started putting words on the page in 2017, but it was just notes and scenes I knew I wanted.
I wrote the first draft in 2019 as a short story. I took a workshop with Mila Jaroniec, who suggested the story needed to be longer. It was about 8k words. When she said she could see it being 20k words I thought that was ridiculous. But it’s about 23k words, so she was right. I really started getting my butt in gear on the novella during the pandemic.
Did you begin with the beginning and end with the end?
I began with a question: What would happen if a young Black woman’s uterus was stolen? Why would someone want to steal them? And that led me to thinking about a racist scheme to stop the births of Black and brown babies and increase the number of white babies being born.
I knew that Jada, my protagonist, had killed someone. I wanted the story to be about what led her to do this and what happened after.
Did you always write fiction?
No! I started writing fiction a year or two after my daughter was born. Even though I had a few short stories published before my book came out, I didn’t feel comfortable or confident calling myself a fiction writer until my novella came out last year. I’ve taken workshops and classes and worked with my writing group, and shared stories with writers in my life who’ve helped me become better as a fiction writer and be able to declare confidently that fiction writing is what I do. Being a poet strengthens my fiction. I have a soft spot for poets turned fiction writers.
Early in the book, a Black Lives Matter sign and references to protesting in the description of your characters’ past immediately helps the reader understand so much. Other details you use are also perfect in this way—such as Jada longing to cook a meal for herself, and the sense of female bond that builds in The Center—they are almost intangible images. It isn’t surprising that you did in fact win the 2023 Shirley Jackson Award in the Novella category! What was that like?
Winning the Shirley Jackson Award for my novella was surreal. Truly, like I won an Oscar.
I hadn’t set a goal of winning. Ever since I started writing fiction I’ve wanted to be nominated for the award so that I could receive a coveted nominee rock.
Shirley Jackson was a phenomenal writer. I remember how blown away I was when I read “The Lottery” in my college intro English class and later reading more of her work. I didn’t prepare a speech even though the SJA folks ask all the nominees to have one just in case!
I keep telling everyone who will listen that they’re going to get sick of reading “Shirley Jackson award-winning writer LaToya Jordan” because that’s who I am and how I want to be introduced now. Just kidding. But really, I was honored. There were great writers and books in my category and across the others. This award was a reminder to myself that I can set higher goals and I can dream of winning.
Ha! I love it. How did you find ways to nourish yourself as a writer and as a mother while working on this book?
Being part of a writing community helps nurture the writer and mother parts of me. I have a writing group, a couple of writing friends from a workshop, and am a member of an online group for mothers who are writers. That community really helped me carve out time to finish and revise the book. It helps to have folks who are also juggling work, children, relationships, and creative writing. Another thing I did, and which I’m due to do again soon, was weekend solo stays at hotels to write. Not often, but it helped. I’d not only write, but read, watch TV, and take glorious naps in king-size beds.
And what are you working on now/next?
I’ve been trying to finish a ghost story about mom guilt for ages. I’m working on revisions for what I hope is a close-to-finished draft. It will end up at novelette or novella length. After that, I have another story to revise based on the trope of dolls that come to life. Originally, I was working on a short story collection, but now I’m feeling called to a possible novelette/novella collection on different aspects of mothering. Quite a few people have asked me for a continuation of To the Woman in the Pink Hat and I’m toying with the idea of seeing what Jada is up to next at The Center.
About the Author
Jacqui Morton’s writing has appeared in places such as the Guardian, The Rumpus, and Salon. A chapbook of her poems, Turning Cozy Dark, was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press as a semi finalist in the New Women’s Voices competition. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, she works as a communications consultant for non-profit organizations. Please visit her at jacquimorton.org.
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