PBC 4 Grievers by adrienne marie brown

The second time I met Tawana Petty she introduced Detroit when she introduced herself. She spoke of what the city meant to her, how others saw it, all the things those outsiders' views missed, and all the love and hope and secrets that Detroiters know. Pretty much what I knew of Detroit at the time was exactly what Tawana said: It was shorthand for a place that has been neglected and exploited, extracted from and walled in, welcoming yet impenetrable.

adrienne marie brown - who many of you may know from her work as a social justice facilitator, author, podcaster, scholar, and musician - knows Detroit. The first book, Grievers, in her Grievers Trilogy shows that she loves Detroit. That she is in touch with the place's visible and invisible manifestations - the way it gets its hooks in people, and loves those who love the city.

My sister-in-law died unexpectedly in 2024. There's a tree in my yard that reminds us of her - we call it Boomer's tree. It's a poplar - it's beautiful and big, subdued in its power over the yard. It's noisy - the slightest breeze gets the leaves dancing. As I do when i'm in the yard I patted Boomer's tree. On the anniversary of Boomer's death I was listening to David Naimon interview adrienne about Grievers. As the podcast ended, adrienne tells listeners to talk to a tree to understand grief. It was one of those moments when the (literal) voices in my head aligned with the (quiet, not crazy) voices in my head in a way that sated the hole in my heart.

Grievers is fiction/nonfiction/sci-fi. It draws from the real lives of bad ass Detroiters such as Grace Lee Boggs, fictionalizes a pandemic, draws from the history of activism, reminisces about Allied Media Conferences (the only events I ever attended as a professional that blew me away) and imagines survival while capturing love.

We'll read Grievers for the next meeting of the Philanthropy Book Club. I'll be back with dates and times - last week of July or first week of August. I have the whole trilogy but haven't yet read ahead. I'm hopeful folks will want to read book 2 (Maroons) and book 3 (Ancestors) for a subsequent meeting.

And here's a Bookshop link for the PBC.