Sacred Invitations: Writer Patrice Gopo

in Conversation with Emily Chambers Sharpe

Creativity is an invitation from God to participate in adding beauty to the world.

— Patrice Gopo

Patrice Gopo is the child of Jamaican immigrants and was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. She is an award-winning essayist and the author of All the Colors We Will See (a Fall 2018 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection). As a child, she loved twirling a globe, dreaming about cities and states, countries and continents. As an adult, she loves words and enjoys pondering how places shape the people we become. She lives with her family in North Carolina—a place she considers another home. All the Places We Call Home is Patrice’s first picture book. Please visit www.patricegopo.com to learn more.

The following transcript has been edited. The full conversation is available in the audio interview above.

Emily Chambers Sharpe: I wondered if you could start by just giving us a little bit of your story and introducing us to who you are? 

Patrice Gopo: Absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. It's super fun to be here. I'm just delighted to talk about creativity and things that I'm really passionate about. 

So just a little bit of background about me: I am the Black American child of Jamaican immigrants, and I was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. So I often like to examine issues of racial identity formation, immigration experiences, home, the concept of home, what does home mean, and really, a search for a sense of belonging. So those are themes that often show up in my work. 

And I should say I gave the background about who I am almost to say, then, because of that, I write these things. But that's not necessarily the case. I mean, we don't have to write things just because of our backgrounds. But I do feel like my particular experience navigating growing up in this country, where we're very intent on classifying people and defining experiences based on skin color, that I've just always been very interested in what happens when your story doesn't necessarily fit the typical narrative that might often be offered to a person who looks like me. And so that is a lot of what shows up in my work. 

Historically, I have written essays. I write personal essays unpacking a lot of these themes. My first book was a collection of essays called All the Colors We Will See, and it was really about my journey examining issues of race and racial identity formation. That was my first book, and it came out about four years ago, in 2018.

Most recently, my debut picture book came out in June, and it’s called All the Places We Call Home. It’s the story of a little girl who spins her globe every night, and then she and her mother visit, through memory, these places that are important to her story. And really, that is my way of just emphasizing the fact that we are complicated people, and our children are also complicated people. They can be connected to multiple parts of the world, and many places can be significant to them, more than just the place where they fall asleep at night. That is really at the heart of All the Places We Call Home. 

So that's my writing life. And in my own personal life, I live in North Carolina, I'm married, I have two children, and I just really love writing. I love the ways writing can be an expression of things that we care about in life.

ECS: That's a beautiful introduction. I love that you already talked a little bit about the lenses through which you're seeing the world, especially place and identity. And I love that you have woven in both of your books (which I've had the privilege to read) this opportunity for us to think about the rootedness we have that's in narratives, almost like memories, and also in places. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you started to really weave those themes or explore those kinds of roots? 

PG: That's a great question. Thinking about how I started… Let me just back up a little bit in my writing story, to my story of arriving in this place, of expressing myself creatively through words. 

So when I first got married, I married a man who lived in South Africa. He was born and raised in Zimbabwe, but we met in South Africa, in Cape Town. And when we got married, I moved to Cape Town. I actually didn't have a work permit at this time, so I wasn't able to do the work that I was trained to do. My undergraduate degree was in chemical engineering, and then I went on to get graduate degrees, an MBA and a master's of public policy, because I wanted to work in community development, addressing issues of material poverty in the world. So that was what I thought I was going to do. Now here I am, I'm married, I'm in South Africa, and I actually can't find a job to do this work. It was in this space that I started writing. And I found that there were stories within me that I wanted to tell—stories about my own experiences navigating the world. 

What I was finding is that my stories really didn't have some nice, neat answers to them. They didn’t tie up well.

In the beginning, those stories were very much grounded in, I almost feel like, maybe a more typical Christian devotional kind of way of telling stories, which I think is a perfectly fine way of telling stories. Often, there might be an anecdote I shared, and then I extended it to maybe a larger spiritual truth or something, and then kind of neatly closed out these stories. And, you know, the thing is, Emily, I think there's absolutely a beautiful place for that type of writing in the world. But I think for me, what I was finding is that my stories really didn't have some nice, neat answers to them. They didn’t tie up well. And at some point I thought, you know, I don't know that I'm fully being authentic to these stories that I want to tell, these stories that feel important to me about my own lived experiences, my own interactions with figuring out who you are, finding your sense of place. These kinds of questions that I was asking. 

It was probably about two years into that writing journey that I found the personal essay. Up until that point, I hadn't really thought about the personal essay as a form of writing. Really, my background with essays had been that five-paragraph essay that we often learn about in high school English. And so this idea of a personal essay wasn't something I was quite as familiar with. But I found this form was very reliant on questions and the willingness to ask questions, and the writing being about the journey towards trying to understand the questions that we are asking versus the answers that we find. And that just felt very appealing to me. So I don't know if I so much found a way to write about these ideas of rootedness, versus those were the stories that were bubbling up within me. What I really needed was to find a form in which I could tell those stories. So it feels like a very long answer to your question, but I think that feels more authentic to the journey that I've been on with writing and creating. 

ECS: I think that's a really helpful thing for a lot of us who are interested in this kind of creative and spiritual life, right? That there is probably less of a clear I want to do X, but a lot more of that, you know, a visual artist might say “a blank canvas,” right? And then just slowly ideas forming as we're putting them together. The themes come to us, rather than us necessarily pushing them out. 

PG: I think I would just offer: I think it can be that way; that's how it has been for me. But I know that it's not always like that for everybody. I think one thing that can be really neat for us as creatives is to pause in the midst of our current lives and look back for the patterns that we may see in our past life, like in the years we've lived previously. And look for maybe how things have emerged in those places. Because maybe for some people it really has been an act of I found this, I started doing this, and they can see that. And if that's the case, it would make sense to me that that might be how ideas form for them in their current lives. But if you look back, and you see more of a sense of things bubbling up or emerging or something like that, maybe that's more how it will happen for you now. 

I'm getting a little off topic here, but for us as creatives, I think it can be very true that we can go through seasons of intense creation, lots happening, versus seasons where it feels like things are maybe dormant. And so I think when that first happens, when you're in this season of dormancy, fear can come in because you think maybe I'm done with the ideas, I've exhausted it, there's nothing left, or something like that. In those spaces, it can be helpful to look back in life and see, well, how did ideas originally come to me in the first place? And maybe this is just a pause, but to look for that in the future.

ECS: That’s interesting because it reminds me of something I've read from Anne Lamott in the past, where she has told people, if they want to try writing, to start, like, in kindergarten and just write everything you can remember, and then go to first grade; but write your way through your life. And so I do think mining our own past to help us find something is a pretty strong piece of guidance for all of us. 

It’s interesting, too, thinking about your first book, All The Colors We Will See, and the particular personal essays that you put forward there. You shifted obviously into this beautiful medium in your new book All the Places We Call Home. I would love to hear about what it was like making that shift. I don't know if you were thinking of an audience, or what was the spark?

PG: To start with, All the Places We Call Home is actually inspired by an essay in All The Colors We Will See. There's an essay in All The Colors We Will See called “Before.” In that essay, I am preparing to lay my daughter down for a nap on her great-grandmother's bed in rural Zimbabwe, and I remember a nap I took as a child on my grandmother's bed in rural Jamaica. So that's what the essay “Before” is about. 

I remember it was almost a year after All The Colors We Will See came out, and I was talking to a writing friend, and I think at the time she did have a picture book, a companion picture book that was coming out related to her memoir. And I just remember sitting there listening to her talk, and I had this thought like, I think this essay “Before” could be a picture book. 

I love picture books. I've loved them from even before I had children. I really think there's such beauty in them, and a lot of fun can be had in them. And so I thought, okay, well I need to figure out how to do this. Because one of the challenges is, yes, I'm a writer, but I am an essayist, and I really didn't know much about writing picture books. All I knew is that there is an art to it. But I didn't know anything about the art, so I did attempt a few, I don't even know if I'd call them drafts, but these early things that I'm trying to rework this essay into a picture book. Actually the essay itself is a short essay, so in that way it was working in my favor. It wasn't a long text I was trying to do. 

But it wasn't working. And one of the things I realized is that I really needed to study the craft of writing picture books, much like I have studied the craft of writing essays years before and still continue to study the craft of writing essays. That actually was very exciting for me to recognize, that I can now apply that learning mindset I had applied to studying essays to this new form. That this was something I was, in time, going to be able to figure out, but I needed to take steps to do that. 

So I did. I took an online course. I joined several critique groups. I started reading and studying more about the craft, just things that really helped me learn how to take this story and make it into something that an adult would read with a child. So that's how I shifted. 

But one thing I will say, that's kind of the recent short-term version of the story. The longer term version of the story is, when my family and I moved to our new home last summer, I was cleaning out lots of things, papers, and all that stuff. And I came across this note that I had written just kind of randomly in a notebook years before, back when I lived in South Africa, back after I had just gotten married, and I was pregnant with our first child. I'd written this note that said, “One day I want to write a children's book that explores a child's ties to many parts of the world.” 

ECS: Wow. 

PG: Emily, I didn't keep that note anywhere. You know, sometimes you might write something and put it up so you remember it. That wasn't this. This was just a note in a tiny little notebook that I never really looked at again. But I guess what I say there is that I feel really strongly that ideas take root even before we're in the place to do anything about them. But the ideas are finding us. At least that's my experience. And I think those are beginnings. 

ECS: I think that's very interesting. And that is exactly the sense of meaning, human experience, and spirituality—you're saying, ideas find us. Where do you think they come from? What is that about?

PG: I feel like there's so many ways people could talk about this. What was I reading just the other day, where in times of old, they would talk about the muse showing up for creatives and things like that. And so what I really believe is, creativity is an invitation from God to participate in adding beauty to the world. I feel that really strongly. And so I think this creative pursuit, this engaging with this, is saying, Yeah, I want to partner with God in this work, whatever that might be. 

These are sacred invitations to participate in sacred work. And I think the sheer act of acknowledging the idea is just a sense of me saying, I am open to this. 

When I look back on that moment of writing that little note in my notebook, I think some people could say, Well, you didn't do anything about it right then, almost like a punitive way of looking at it, if that makes sense. But I don't see it like that at all. I think what I did in that moment is I wrote it down. I acknowledged the feeling, and it was like a part of me opened myself up to when the time was right that this would happen. I think that in many of these things, it's almost the posture that we take on: are we letting ourselves be open to what could happen and just creating that space? I don't even know that that means you need to stick it up and remember it, you need to whatever, whatever, whatever. Because I think even as I say that, that idea just feels so rooted in a sense of striving. But actually, like I said, I think these are sacred invitations to participate in sacred work. And I think the sheer act of acknowledging the idea is just a sense of me saying, I am open to this. 

ECS: Oh, I love that. And it's interesting because I think your openness to whatever things might mean comes across even in the work. I looked at All the Places We call Home. This interaction with the girl and the mom—I sense this mom is telling the story, but the girl at the end, she has her own. I think it's right at the tail end of the book, where the girl has her own experience about it. Maybe you can even read it for us if you've got it. 

PG: Yeah, I do. I’ll just read this little part from this page here. 

So that your listeners understand: They have traveled through these memories to these different places. They first traveled to South Africa, where the little girl was born. Then they went to Zimbabwe, where the little girl's father was born. Then they went to Jamaica, where the mother's family is from. So they've gone to these different places that are part of their family's story. And so the mom asks the little girl, okay, so where shall we go now? And the little girl says, “Where we live: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Jamaica. Come with me. South Africa swirls through my thinking. Zimbabwe blooms in my imagination. Jamaica sprouts wings. We traveled back across land, across borders, back to my bedroom.“

I think there is… the sacred invitation that God extends to know our own stories, to value our own story, to recognize our own stories, in whatever way that can look.

Emily, I just love this portion of the story, because I think what is happening here is this little girl is hearing these stories, but then she is taking them and making them part of her own story. And I think that's something that's very powerful for all of us, recognizing the pieces of stories out there that are part of our stories and almost embracing it as such. I think there can just be something very beautiful when that happens. If we go back to that idea of sacred invitations, I think there is also within all that the sacred invitation that God extends to know our own stories, to value our own story, to recognize our own stories, in whatever way that can look. And I again want to be cautious here because I think some people can hear that, and it almost feels like a burden, like, Well, I don't know, and I have to find out. And I just want to release people from that as well. I don't say that in that kind of fashion. I am saying more that there are beautiful aspects of who we all are, and to name those and celebrate those can be a wonderful thing. Whatever piece of that you may know. 

ECS: Thank you for that. I think that gives us a lot to chew on and digest. 

What was it like working with an illustrator, finding someone to collaborate with? How did your work become something that was from both of you? And what is that partnership like?

PG: This is a great question, and I love it because I think people may not know, at least in my experience, how it works. So the first thing I'll say is that I did not find the illustrator. The illustrator, Jenin Mohammed, is amazing and just doing a phenomenal job illustrating books out there in the world. I did not find her. Once I signed the contract for my book, the art director for my publisher, she went out and found the right fit for this story, and she found an amazing illustrator. 

The other idea that quite a few people have when you write a picture book—at least for me and the experience that I know, I would not say that it's a collaborative process in the sense that people think of collaboration. Jeanine and I have never met; we've never talked to each other. She had my manuscript, and she worked with the art director, and occasionally they did ask for some things, ideas that I had, thoughts, things that may have shown up in the manuscript. But by and large, that was what she was doing.

A couple of things that I will point out that she did ask about is if I had any thoughts about the styles of the hair for the mother and daughter. And I gave some broad thoughts, but I didn't name that out specifically. And then she was also asking if I envisioned a particular part of Cape Town when I was writing, so she could have a sense of what that might be. 

And then the last thing I will say, too, with this book is the title. So it's called All the Places We Call Home, which is a beautiful title. One thing, though, on a personal level is I grew up in Alaska, and this book never actually mentions Alaska because it's talking about countries. We're moving from country to country to country. But there was something within me that was like, but it's a book called All the Places We Call Home. And my home actually is Alaska. And so something Jenin did, which I just love, is she put these little nods to Alaska in the illustrations. So the little girl on the cover, she is hugging a seal. And if you look, you'll see a lamp that has a whale at the base. I think the little girl draws a picture of her family, and it’s in the snow. And so those things are very special to me. I just asked if that was possible, and that was what she ended up doing. 

Something that I say about the process is that I feel as though my gift is writing the words, and that is what I offered this project. And Jenin’s gift was applying and creating the illustrations, and she offered that. And we, by and large, offered these separately, but brought together, they made this thing so much more than what it ever would have been on its own. And so I think that's more how I see this: we both contributed something that was a gift, our gift, like we added our gift to this project to create this thing versus, like I said, I wouldn't think of this so much as a collaboration between us. 

ECS: That's a really interesting thing and really helpful, I think, for people who may have the art aspiration or the writing aspiration in the process. 

We have used the word home, and obviously home is a theme in the picture book, but I think home comes up a lot in your collection of essays as well. So, tell me, how would you describe home and what would you say is the importance of home for you as an artist?

PG: Sometimes I feel like my definition of home is ever moving, ever changing as I continue to grow and gain different insights, and all of those things that happen. I think at the end of writing All the Colors We Will See, I really felt as though the home that I found was in the context of my marriage to Nyasha and the life that we had created together. That was my home. And I still think that's very true. And at the same time, even as I say that's true, I feel very much that I have also felt more a sense of embracing the reality that we can have many homes as well. Like I said, Anchorage, Alaska, where I grew up—I think of that place as home. I think of here, where I live in North Carolina, as home. And I think that's something that I love about All the Places We Call Home, because I think it is bringing in that new layer of my own understanding of this idea of home. 

From a spiritual standpoint, for myself, I think there is something within all of us that is searching for our place, our sense of belonging.

Why does the idea of home matter? From a spiritual standpoint, for myself, I think there is something within all of us that is searching for our place, our sense of belonging. And I just wonder if, you know, here on Earth we never fully find that because there's something larger, more supernatural, that we are longing for. But yet, at the same time, I think there is beauty in us parsing this out here. Thinking about that here. Recognizing what does home feel like here? But I think another part of home, perhaps, is the places where we find that we are able to be our most authentic selves, too. So I think that can be a really powerful way of thinking about home. Like I said, I think it is something that shifts with time, with understanding, with the situations we live in and live through. We develop new insights, we look back on the past and maybe reimagine our previous insights, all of that kind of stuff. What do you think? I'm curious of your thoughts.

ECS: I also have a somewhat nomadic existence. And I think that there's something about us that wants a grounded, you know, connected, embodied, rooted kind of presence in the world. And that we are tied to that both through place, and I also think through family, whether that's our chosen family or our families that are by blood. And I think even if we have chosen family, our family by blood and our ancestry does have some kind of influence on us. There's generations of people before us that have come. So I think there is something both innately spiritual and good, I guess, about the fact that we have those longings and that connectedness, that in some ways I think it keeps us from coming into this world and being so isolated or as though we’re set apart, untethered. 

I also love what you've said about the idea that there's something bigger, and that it's sort of the listlessness or the fact that maybe it doesn't feel perfect ever, maybe an indication of the fact that there is also a beyond. And I think somehow probably they're interacting. I think there's an interaction between both, that they're not separated. And I think that's always been a big part of my own creative and spiritual thinking, that whatever is home and embodied here, and what is spiritual, that there's not separate spaces they exist, but that they're interacting somehow. 

PG: Yeah, I love that idea of them interacting. And I agree. You know, one of the things that I think can be beautiful is us actively making space for the fact that they are interacting. And what might that mean? I guess sometimes that means us being just more awake to how we are feeling about place and home here, and what might that say about exactly what you say about what exists beyond this life? Yeah, I love that, Emily.

ECS: Well, I'd love for you to tell folks where they might be able to find you, to interact with you more, or to learn more about the work that you put out into the world. And we've talked about your books, but I know you also have essays and lots of other things, so maybe you can share a bit more with us. You sometimes do some teaching, is that right? Or speaking? 

PG: That's true, I do occasionally do that. So usually if I have something coming up, I will list it on the homepage of my website, and I'll just list what my different upcoming events are. I recently spoke at a writing program in Michigan, and I'm going to be leading a writing workshop in Anchorage, Alaska, later this summer. So those things are coming up as well. And there's a few other things there too. So yeah, if people are interested, please by all means join something that you might see. If you subscribe to my newsletter, I will let people know of things that are coming up in the future.

ECS: Okay. And a last thing I want to ask you is just what is some of the creative work that's inspiring you right now, whether it's writing, music, anything?

PG: I think something that is really inspiring me now is just being in nature, honestly. It was a very intense season of creativity for the last couple of years. And I think in this particular phase right here now, I am finding like my daily walks to just be very enriching and very life-giving and almost a sense of maybe turning outward a little bit. So I think that's something that has been really beautiful. 

I think something else that is fun for me that can always be nice in these kinds of seasons is I really enjoy hand lettering. I mean, I'm not fabulous at it or anything, but I enjoy doing it. And I think it's a really interesting practice, because while it is involving words, which I love, it's a very different way of thinking about words and how we engage with the words. So I think when I engage with it, it creates a more meditative interaction, which I think is good for me, too.

ECS: That sounds wonderful. Well, thank you so much for spending some time with us. And I'm certain that the listeners for Vita Poetica and those who read our journal are going to really enjoy getting to know you. I hope they'll also get to know some of your work that's out in the world, your essays and your books, all the places we call home and all the colors we will see. 

PG: Oh, thank you so much. This has been such an interesting discussion. I just love considering these topics, so thank you.