Lynette Hazelton

I am a writer.

It has taken 17 years to write this simple statement unadorned, without apologies or excuses. It has taken this long to write it with confidence, but I hope not with arrogance.

I am a writer discovering her voice. I want to take the aspects of daily journalism that I love - that sense of being on the front lines of history - combine it with the academic research that I think, if used wisely, strengthens the writing, and use the creative techniques of fiction and storytelling. Once I didn't have aname for this hybrid. Slowly I learned of creative nonfiction. I knew this is where I belonged artistically.

I want to tell the anonymous stories that usually live in silence, using the large issues that dominate the press and the academy as a backdrop. I also want those who are silenced in our culture to have a voice.

I am a writer, but I am also a woman, a Black woman and a life-long resident of a poor community. There is too much silence here.

I want to fill that silence with stories.
 

The Myra I had come to know over the past four years or so was a talker. She held court in Larnella's New Attitude, a small hair salon on Old York Road in the Olney section, as a steady stream of patrons willingly submitted to her artistry. She was a maestro with a pair of scissors. A whirling dervish who could move a head quickly while stylishly undoing the damage of time, dirt, humidity, your own ineptness, and replacing it with something that made strangers ask, "Who did your hair?"

She knew hair. She knew she knew hair, and we all knew she knew hair.

And as she permed, she talked. As she snipped, she talked, As she listened, she talked. Yep, Um-hum. You're right. Yep. She liked to take life's grit, polish it with gossip, pop psychology and Baptist theology, until they were pearls. And then when a troubled sister needed it, with scissors or dryer or comb poised in mid-air, she would stop for a brief minute and gently dispense with a small orb of wisdom.

That Myra, the one with a smooth, round brown sugar face, an easy, rippling laugh, hundreds of you-know-whaat stories and a thing for clothes and dangly earrings ("you just ain't a dress without a pair of earrings, 'chile") had disappeared.

She was part of the Police Academy now.

- from The Police Academy, 1996 (personal essay)