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Through essays and stunning photography, the beloved multimedia storyteller and author of Growing up in New York in the 1990s, LaTonya Yvette experienced many versions of home. She witnessed her loved ones transform their often-imperfect environments into sites of possibility: her mother, waxing old wood floors on hands and knees until they looked new again; her grandmother, decorating her home with thrift store finds and discarded objects plucked from the street--“treasures possessed of their own mysterious stories.” The lesson was handed down to her like an heirloom: Any place could be made beautiful simply by inhabiting it. Home could be self- and community care--a meaningful and creative task taken up each day. In Both visual feast and emotional salve,
Info autore
LaTonya Yvette is a multimedia storyteller who writes the newsletter "With Love, L." Yvette's first book, Woman of Color, was included in an installation of Jay-Z's personal bookshelf for Brooklyn Public Library's Book of HOV exhibit. She also co-authored the illustrated children's book The Hair Book with Amanda Jane Jones. Yvette is the owner and steward of The Mae House, an upstate New York rental property and the home of Rest as Residency, which offers BIPOC families a no-cost place for rest and focus.
Riassunto
Through essays with stunning photography, the beloved multimedia storyteller and author of Woman of Color shares the powerful lessons she’s learned about creating a home that honors the past and celebrates the future.
“[A] hybrid memoir, featuring beautiful images . . . [Yvette] talks about things like dressing the table, and what hour you gather people around it to eat. It reminded me of the rituals of my grandmother, who maintained them in the face of Jim Crow. We still need those kinds of rituals.”—Imani Perry, The New Yorker
“Home is a reflection of what we inherit.”
Grappling with the state of the world over the last few years—the global pandemic, climate change, threats to women’s rights, constant racial violence—LaTonya Yvette began to contemplate the concept of home. What does it mean to cultivate safety when it is constantly under threat? How can we nurture joy and peace within the spaces where we spend most of our precious time? Who can we turn to for guidance along the way?
In Stand in My Window: Meditations on Home and How We Make It, Yvette explores these kinds of questions as she takes readers through the journey of her own rediscovery of home. In eleven meditative essays, accompanied by 25 beautiful photographs taken over the course of writing the book, Yvette illustrates how the act of homemaking can be revolutionary, liberating—and one of the most powerful expressions we have of self- and community care.
Woven throughout the book is the story of the nearly 200-year-old house in upstate New York that Yvette bought and painstakingly renovated, with the aim of creating a safe space for BIPOC communities. The house—Yvette’s ultimate expression of home—provides her greatest lessons. Both visual feast and emotional salve, Stand in My Window demonstrates that home truly is what you make of it—in mind, body, soul, and in the thoughtfully curated spaces we can build for ourselves anywhere.
