Tembi Locke's Blog, page 5
April 30, 2019
The New York Post
By Mackenzie Dawson
The post The New York Post appeared first on Tembi Locke: Official Website.
April 28, 2019
Dear FROM SCRATCH Readers: A Note for You
From Scratch is for anyone who has ever loved, lost and then tried to find their way forward. It is for readers who like a story of self-discovery driven by adversity and for anyone who has ever had life ask more of them than they knew they were capable of.
While it is at once an epic romantic cross-cultural, cross-continental love story, it is also a story of the permanence of the families we create whether through adoption or biology or even through forgiveness. An international story, spanning two continents, two languages and multiple cultures, I hope the books speaks to the prismatic nature of identity and what it means to be an immigrant – a person of two lands. It is about the way travel makes the world intimate and the way life is capable of dishing delicious grace when and where you least expect it.
At the heart of the book are two themes: the island of Sicily in the dazzling Mediterranean and it’s incomparably simple, evocative and straightforward food.
Those themes coalesce to reveal the connective and healing power of food and it codifies memory by connecting us to our past, our present, even our futures. Everyone eats, everyone has a favorite cook in their lives. Everyone wants to keep the essence of someone they loved and lost close to them. From Scratch is a testament to the way the table is a place where love passes through us.
Someone recently described the book as Eat Pray Love meets The Year of Magical Thinking meets Under the Tuscan Sun. WOW! Those books all touched readers who wanted to be inspired and transported away from their own experience and those who wanted to explore the universal human experience of loss. The common thread in each of these books is a woman’s inspiring journey of losing herself in order to find herself and stand in her truth. In FROM SCRATCH, the woman just happens to be me.
In the end, I hope the book will inspire readers to reach for big love, take big risks.
Not just in big ways but in tiny daily gestures. It can be a big risk to quietly say “I’m sorry” or to forgive those closest to us, or to forgive ourselves. And I hope the book will remind us that the world is greater than the confines of any border or geography or culture. That opposites do attract and can conjoin their hearts to what matters most. That the expanse of our shared humanity is full of more wonder and surprise than fear. And, in the end, if FROM SCRATCH can shed light on what it means to grieve openly and in different ways, at different stages of life, perhaps more people will understand not only the grief of others, but their own grief. To quote Leonard Cohen, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
Love,
Tembi
The post Dear FROM SCRATCH Readers: A Note for You appeared first on Tembi Locke: Official Website.
April 24, 2019
Your First Sicily Trip: 5 Must-Visit Destinations
Lucky you! You have your passport ready, tickets in hand. Your first Sicily trip awaits you. So let your culinary, beachside, cobblestoned Mediterranean dream adventure begin! Here are five things I’d recommend that you do. You can thank me later. 
April 18, 2019
Tembi Locke Q and A: 11 Facts About Me
Who in your life has made you a stronger writer and storyteller?
I come from a great line of Southern storytellers. Every time my family gets together, we regale each other with stories of the past, the present, and the never-should-have-been. But undoubtedly it is my sister, Attica, who has made me a stronger writer. I have been lucky enough to read her work in many stages. I have observed how she carves out space for her writing, how she hones her tenacity. On the page, she is able to hold mystery, pathos, politics, and humor in a single sentence. She’s brilliant.
Who makes you laugh the most and why?
If he walked in this room right now, my friend Patrick would have me on the floor laughing in five minutes. He can quickly big picture any situation and then, on a dime, reduce it down to a witty, bare-bones assessment in a matter of seconds. He is unafraid of alliteration or an obscure 90’s pop culture reference.
What piece of art in your home do you treasure most?
A large scale cubist painting from Senegal given to me as a wedding present. It has watched over my life since I was twenty-five years old. It knows more about me than I do.
What is the first movie that made you cry?
Claudine with Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones.
What is your favorite kind of candy?
I probably have M&M’s in the armrest console of my car right now. My road dog.
Do you have any home remedies that you swear by?
Lemon and hot water in the morning. Chamomile tea at night. Bach Flower Remedies, lavender salt baths and laughter any way you can get it.
Are you superstitious about anything?
Black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day. Learning my lines in my character’s shoes.
What is your tried and true, must-have travel item?
At least three sleep masks because, well, I lose them. Espresso because, well, every new place is better after sleep and a good coffee.
What ingredient do you use most in the kitchen?
Extra-virgin olive oil. I’m Italian in the kitchen.
Your favorite “food as a metaphor for life” dish:
I actually have two. Ribolitta which is about taking the crumbs and making something new. Literally re-boiling what was left over into something delicious. AND the caponata, it reminds us that life is always savory and sweet, briny and smooth.
Three words to describe Sicily?
Mythical, bewildering, timeless.
The post Tembi Locke Q and A: 11 Facts About Me appeared first on Tembi Locke: Official Website.
March 28, 2019
Recording From Scratch—The Audiobook
On the seventh day, I finished. There are few words to adequately express the feelings that come with reading your own book – page by page, chapter by chapter, story by story – from beginning to end. I laughed, I cried, I cringed, I reflected, I gave thanks. I spoke three languages and realized how many prepositions I dropped. HA!
But mostly, I thanked the universe for this moment. When I came to the end, I felt deep gratitude. For all of it – the living, the writing, the sharing.
In little over a month, the book will be available to the world. Wow! Still, I’ll never forget the quiet, intimate seven days I got to spend alone in a sound booth telling my story.
You can preorder the From Scratch audiobook now! Check out the links below. I hope you will enjoy.
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Audible
Google Play
Simon & Schuster
The post Recording From Scratch—The Audiobook appeared first on Tembi Locke: Official Website.
March 27, 2019
From Scratch Began in These Sicilian Waters
In my book From Scratch, I write about the improbable moment I found myself traversing these very waters. This photo is shot in the Sicilian archipelago on my way to the island of Stromboli. You can read all about in my book.
If you enjoy stories of love, family, loss, and renewal OR if you’ve ever wanted to travel to the gorgeous island of Sicily, this book is for you. It’s out next month (April 30, 2019!)
You can preorder here. And if you haven’t already, make sure you’re signed up for my monthly newsletter. You’ll get more behind-the-scenes videos, stories, recipes, events and more!
The post From Scratch Began in These Sicilian Waters appeared first on Tembi Locke: Official Website.
February 25, 2019
Our Visual History
With February comes Cupid, chalky candy hearts, bone-chilling nights, red carpet Oscars dresses and, also, a time to reflect on the African American experience in America. Black History Month. As a kid, my parents enthusiastically regarded this time of year as an opportunity to offer a counter-narrative to the lessons my sister and I were being taught in school. Often one of them would say, “But what you don’t know is…” Then they followed that with facts and events, places and people I knew nothing of. The truly fascinating was often juxtaposed against the truly mundane. History, I learned, was rich, subjective and dictated by who got to tell it. As a kid, Black History Month felt like being given a passcode that unlocked a world of information and imagination previously unknown to me.
My Black History Month Instagram Challenge
This February, as I embark on so many firsts, I chose to try something new. With the help of a new calendar and dream planner from the genius folks at INK+VOLT, I decided to give myself a professional creative challenge. I wanted to use each day of Black History Month to honor someone from my family lineage by posting images from the photos handed down to me from both my grandmothers and one great-grandmother. I would bring Black History Month to Instagram my way. And I was curious if I could use 28 consecutive days of posting visual histories to reflect, discover and inspire something new within myself or for my family.
Like so often happens for me, the seed of this idea was actually planted over a lunch. Two people I admire greatly were both gently nudging me in the direction of a new book, one on family and specifically the generation of women who shaped my life. I left the lunch wondering if sharing daily pictures from the family archives just might help me get closer to this creative idea. Maybe, maybe not. I wasn’t sure. However, I knew that if nothing else, the daily challenge would certainly give me interesting dinner conversation topics with my daughter. She never met most of the people pictured in the sepia and black and white pictures. Some predate her by a century. She certainly doesn’t know their stories.
The first thing I noticed by Day 3 of the Instagram posts was the amount of people who sent me messages that they were so glad I was doing this. People who knew me and people who didn’t. One share came from someone who said the posts were as close as our children might ever get to learning about the influence of African American people. She was not African American. She just wanted to know history, shared history, American history.
Now, I felt like I was onto something. But what?
What does it mean to look back at our ancestors? What clues has history left us that might inform our now?
Those became the questions I started asking internally with each new post.
Getting to Know our Ancestors Through our Visual History
Anyone close to me knows I am a huge fan of Dr. Henry Louis Gates’ work on the TV show Finding Your Roots. (I actually met him once in Florence. But that is a story for another time.) I love contemplating the intersections of chance and choice. How the fates and actions of the people before us brought us to our now. How we carry those choices and fates with us, knowingly or unknowingly.
There is a section in my book From Scratch where I mention the achievements of my ancestors. As I was writing that passage, a question lingered at the back of my mind: How had these people been capable of such quiet, unassuming greatness in the face of disenfranchisement? When I posted on Instagram, answers began to emerge.
On Day 9 of my challenge, I posted a picture of an unknown relative. In the image, he is a young man photographed on a snowy day, scarf around his neck, cigarette in his hand. He is handsome, bold. He locks eyes with the camera without hesitation. I kinda love him for that. Behind him is a large brick structure. It looked to be a landmark or large public fountain in perhaps some northern city. I had no idea where he was or what he was doing there. I wrote the caption to accompany the post, “I want to know your whole story.” Then I shared it. And that’s when the universe took over.
Sharing our Stories
An hour later, a relative in Chicago who I haven’t seen since I was child responded telling me the man in the picture was standing on the grounds of his alma mater – St. Emma Military Academy, the only all-black military academy for boys in the US. A few messages back and forth and I learned that a few men in my family attended this prestigious school, especially those who migrated north out of East Texas. A little research and I learned that the school graduated 10,000 young men between 1895 and 1970. People who undoubtedly contributed greatly to their communities. What surprised me was that I never knew this school existed. As I was drinking my espresso on Day 10, suddenly the sense of personal purpose and commitment to civic service that runs through for so many generations in my family came into better focus.
By posting those pictures on Instagram, other new stories were brought forward in ways I had not anticipated. I discovered themes of purpose, determination, intuitive wisdom, connection to land, and a resilience in the face of disenfranchisement.
This 28-day challenge that started as “Let’s see if I can do this,” had by the end given me a rejuvenation and a sense of my own agency. I want to not only give a voice to those who preceded us, but to use their examples as inspiration to meet the challenges of our time in my own way. We are, right now, writing a history. What do we want it to say? Who do we want to tell it?
The post Our Visual History appeared first on Tembi Locke: Official Website.
My Black History Month Instagram Challenge
With February comes Cupid, chalky candy hearts, bone-chilling nights, red carpet Oscars dresses and, also, a time to reflect on the African American experience in America. Black History Month. As a kid, my parents enthusiastically regarded this time of year as an opportunity to offer a counter-narrative to the lessons my sister and I were being taught in school. Often one of them would say, “But what you don’t know is…” Then they followed that with facts and events, places and people I knew nothing of. The truly fascinating was often juxtaposed against the truly mundane. History, I learned, was rich, subjective and dictated by who got to tell it. As a kid, Black History Month felt like being given a passcode that unlocked a world of information and imagination previously unknown to me.
My Black History Month Instagram Challenge
This February, as I embark on so many firsts, I chose to try something new. With the help of a new calendar and dream planner from the genius folks at INK+VOLT, I decided to give myself a professional creative challenge. I wanted to use each day of Black History Month to honor someone from my family lineage by posting images from the photos handed down to me from both my grandmothers and one great-grandmother. I would bring Black History Month to Instagram my way. And I was curious if I could use 28 consecutive days of posting visual histories to reflect, discover and inspire something new within myself or for my family.
Like so often happens for me, the seed of this idea was actually planted over a lunch. Two people I admire greatly were both gently nudging me in the direction of a new book, one on family and specifically the generation of women who shaped my life. I left the lunch wondering if sharing daily pictures from the family archives just might help me get closer to this creative idea. Maybe, maybe not. I wasn’t sure. However, I knew that if nothing else, the daily challenge would certainly give me interesting dinner conversation topics with my daughter. She never met most of the people pictured in the sepia and black and white pictures. Some predate her by a century. She certainly doesn’t know their stories.
The first thing I noticed by Day 3 of the Instagram posts was the amount of people who sent me messages that they were so glad I was doing this. People who knew me and people who didn’t. One share came from someone who said the posts were as close as our children might ever get to learning about the influence of African American people. She was not African American. She just wanted to know history, shared history, American history.
Now, I felt like I was onto something. But what?
What does it mean to look back at our ancestors? What clues has history left us that might inform our now?
Those became the questions I started asking internally with each new post.
Getting to Know our Ancestors
Anyone close to me knows I am a huge fan of Dr. Henry Louis Gates’ work on the TV show Finding Your Roots. (I actually met him once in Florence. But that is a story for another time.) I love contemplating the intersections of chance and choice. How the fates and actions of the people before us brought us to our now. How we carry those choices and fates with us, knowingly or unknowingly.
There is a section in my book From Scratch where I mention the achievements of my ancestors. As I was writing that passage, a question lingered at the back of my mind: How had these people been capable of such quiet, unassuming greatness in the face of disenfranchisement? When I posted on Instagram, answers began to emerge.
On Day 9 of my challenge, I posted a picture of an unknown relative. In the image, he is a young man photographed on a snowy day, scarf around his neck, cigarette in his hand. He is handsome, bold. He locks eyes with the camera without hesitation. I kinda love him for that. Behind him is a large brick structure. It looked to be a landmark or large public fountain in perhaps some northern city. I had no idea where he was or what he was doing there. I wrote the caption to accompany the post, “I want to know your whole story.” Then I shared it. And that’s when the universe took over.
Sharing our Stories
An hour later, a relative in Chicago who I haven’t seen since I was child responded telling me the man in the picture was standing on the grounds of his alma mater – St. Emma Military Academy, the only all-black military academy for boys in the US. A few messages back and forth and I learned that a few men in my family attended this prestigious school, especially those who migrated north out of East Texas. A little research and I learned that the school graduated 10,000 young men between 1895 and 1970. People who undoubtedly contributed greatly to their communities. What surprised me was that I never knew this school existed. As I was drinking my espresso on Day 10, suddenly the sense of personal purpose and commitment to civic service that runs through for so many generations in my family came into better focus.
By posting those pictures on Instagram, other new stories were brought forward in ways I had not anticipated. I discovered themes of purpose, determination, intuitive wisdom, connection to land, and a resilience in the face of disenfranchisement.
This 28-day challenge that started as “Let’s see if I can do this,” had by the end given me a rejuvenation and a sense of my own agency. I want to not only give a voice to those who preceded us, but to use their examples as inspiration to meet the challenges of our time in my own way. We are, right now, writing a history. What do we want it to say? Who do we want to tell it?
The post My Black History Month Instagram Challenge appeared first on Tembi Locke: Official Website.
February 24, 2019
END GAME
Recently, I had the pleasure of hanging out with heart-centered changemakers I deeply admire. Here’s the roll call from left to right: Claire Bidwell Smith, Dr. BJ Miller, Alua Arthur, and Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider. Each of them is instrumental in shifting the cultural paradigm around how we might live more connected and compassionate lives by looking at how we face death. They do incredible grace-filled work. And they are funny, irreverent, and whip-smart. I can’t think of a better group to chat with over a cocktail.
We were all gathered to honor END GAME, this year’s Oscar-nominated short documentary produced by Shoshana Ungerleifer and featuring the work of Zen Hospice and BJ Miller. This beautiful short film offers an unflinching but tender look at what it means to face death, consciously and openly. The film is meant not only to inspire conversation but to inspire a reframing of our ideas about death. It invites us to see life’s gifts by looking at the final moments.
If you haven’t seen the film, please check it out on Netflix. And after you’ve watched it check out BJ Miller’s TED talk. Amazing. And after that, read consider reading Claire’s book, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief. Game changer. It is a great resource for anyone trying to understand the impact of loss and heal in the wake of it.
I have to say, I never imagined my life would take me here. But I so honor the journey and I am so grateful.
The post END GAME appeared first on Tembi Locke: Official Website.
January 21, 2019
The Writing of From Scratch
I am beginning to be asked often, How did you write a book? My answers are not very glamorous or filled with writerly tricks. I am a first-time book writer. The words did not always pour out of me. I spent years thinking about the story and journaling about my life. When I sold From Scratch as a proposal, I spent weeks and months terrified that it wouldn’t all come together, that I had bitten off more than I could chew. However, I was committed to realizing this long-held dream. I had to do it, deep down to my bones or I knew some part of me would always regret never trying. And I had a deadline which, for me, is the sure fire way to get something done.
From Scratch: Beginnings
I had studied creative writing at UCLA Extension for years during my husband’s illness. Writing was the way I used my creativity to make sense of my experiences a young cancer caregiver, wife, mother, and artist. I wanted to stay close to my own inner life in the face of intense caregiving. It was vital to my own well being. Eventually, I completed their certificate program in Creative NonFiction the year after he passed.
UCLA is where I really learned about writing and where the first writings about this story emerged. I had wonderful instructors, engaged classmates and I learned much about craft, varieties of styles and structure. However, I did not yet know that I would write a book. It took six years of taking classes and workshops, before I began to feel like I had the core ingredients and story elements that might make for a book-length memoir. I had written hundreds of thousands of words. Still, I didn’t know where to begin.
Then, in the beginning of 2017, as I approached the fifth anniversary of my husband’s passing I felt ready to take a leap and write a book about what I had learned in our life together and in the wake of his death. I knew my summers in Sicily was a framework. So I started with writing an essay about my first trip to Sicily two years after we were married. It was a story I had been trying to write for years. Somehow I felt it was critical in telling a love story, a family story and a story about Sicily. Writing that essay “unlocked” the promise of the book for me.
From Scratch: The Proposal
When I completed the essay, I shared it with my sister. She in turn shared it with two influential people. I got a break. One of those people became my literary manager, Richard Abate. He told me he felt the essay was really a book. I told him I thought so too and he asked me to write a proposal. So I pulled out the book proposal that I had been tinkering with for years in workshop. Three intense weeks later, with much back and forth, we had a proposal he felt was ready to submit to editors.
It went out on Mother’s Day weekend which I felt was auspicious given the themes of the book. It was surreal when I found out an editor at Simon and Schuster wanted to buy the book on proposal. Even more surreal when I learned I had less than a year to deliver the entire manuscript. Oh my! I immediately cried, laughed, lept with joy and, let’s be honest, I went into sheer creative terror.
From Scratch: Staying on Track
Soon I devised a plan that I thought would work for writing From Scratch. I called on one of my workshop instructors and former UCLA teachers, Shawna Kenney. I asked her to be my writing coach. We agreed to meet weekly for the next year (through manuscript delivery and rewrites). She gave me everything from encouragement, a willing ear, writing prompts when I was stuck and, of course, she gave me discerning feedback along the way. She basically held my hand and said “You can do this. You know your story. …Now give me ten more pages.”
As a first time writer, I felt I needed someone else to “hold” the expanse and depth of the story with me as I puzzled out how the different events of my life all fit together. I needed to feel I wasn’t adrift at sea, lost in a complicated narrative that didn’t go anywhere. Other writers use writing groups or they can do this for themselves. But I knew I needed someone with whom I could hand over twenty pages of journal writing and have them highlight the parts that they felt connected up to the larger narrative. It was intimate and soul-bearing work.
From Scratch: Los Angeles to Sicily
I wrote From Scratch in two places – at home in LA, in my living room, in my bedroom, in my kitchen, in my office, in the backyard, even in the parking lot of Starbucks while my daughter did after-school activities. And I wrote a lot while I was in Sicily during the summer of 2017, especially the parts of the book that take place in Sicily. There was simply no substitute for the sights and sounds and food of Sicily to act as a muse. Sicily always opens my unconscious and my imagination. Once back in LA, I would sift through all the writing and many emails from previous summers in Sicily. Those journal entries, emails to the States and the Sicilian note-taking sessions became the heart of the Sicily passages in the book. And I did a fair amount of research using personal documents I had at home to verify what I remembered.
When I did turn in the manuscript to my editor, it was about 30,000 words over and almost 100 pages longer than what it was supposed to be. HA! But boy, did it feel good to have completed the many, many drafts that led to a complete manuscript. I celebrated with champagne. Every writer should, champagne or otherwise.
From Scratch: The Editing and Completion
Of course, that was just the beginning. When I got my editor’s notes back, they were extensive. The whole manuscript was marked up. And I basically had two months to cut almost 100 pages; restructure the whole book; and write new chapters that filled in unresolved parts of the story. That was a low day. I had spent almost a year writing something that was so far from being done, farther still from being published. I was a little panicked. I cried. A lot. And then, at the advice of many wise and experienced writer friends, I began to take each note one-by-one, each chapter page-by-page and I started over. I chose to not do acting work during that time so that I could stay on schedule. Basically, I just got my daughter to school, wrote, researched, picked her up, made dinner, cleaned and started over again the next day.
Two months later, I had a manuscript that was structurally sound. The story was written. And, serendipitously, I completed the final rewrite while in Sicily. I wanted to complete From Scratch on my birthday (which also happens to be my wedding anniversary with Saro). That was the summer of 2018, one year and two months from when I had sent out the proposal.
I still can’t believe it is written. And I’m still getting used to getting a full night’s sleep. 
