First Sentence Fridays: Samantha Pinto

First Sentence Fridays is a series that celebrates the prose and process of new books.

About Inside the Body of Black Feminism:

Moving from Black feminist theory’s many insights into the representation of the external body, this book goes inside– to the bones, blood, brains, hearts, guts, and wombs that have surprisingly defined and challenged the Black political imagination. 

What’s the first sentence of your book? No cheating!

Two spiky, otherworldly bodies, translucent, nearly split apart, with twinned dense clusters stained chartreuse nested within (fig. I.1).

What’s something  specific you remember about writing this sentence? Where were you? When in the book writing did you write it? Maybe tell us your favorite word in it?

Oh, I love the word “spiky”– I wanted a way to capture the texture of the piece, what it feels like to look at these cells-made-art, and it’s kind of deliciously toddler-esque and simple. 

I am sure I wrote the sentence on my third iteration of the manuscript, after many, many, many edit cycles on a print-out and then again on the screen. I was most definitely at my kitchen table where I inevitably do most of my work despite constantly trying to optimize/set up an office situation in my bedroom upstairs. I knew the book needed an illustrative anecdote, but I still couldn’t quite bring myself to start with this non-sentence description until late in the game when I was thoroughly bored with my writing.

Now that it’s all written and done, what occurs to you about how your first sentence connects to the book as a whole? In the ideas, style, experience?

Now I can see it:  I needed to make the interior of the body speculative and abstract right from the start. I wanted to turn to the body’s material and make it strange, render it something we don’t quite know, something that exists through representation and not just through realism. 

And now that makes it feel so of a piece with my other books, too– so maybe this first sentence thing is like a Rorschach test?

Tell us one or two specific details about how you like to write: home/office/café, soundtrack or silence, favorite mug, favorite hoodie, preferred mode of pencil/pen/notebook/font/software?

Coffee shops or kitchen tables– where there’s din and action all around (sometimes too much at home) and some passive accountability that everyone will see me buying dresses I don’t need instead of writing to keep me honest. 

I have DEEP feelings on mugs, it turns out, in middle age: I don’t want a metal tumbler. I want ceramic in my hands!  Why?!  I have no idea but I feel this as my truth and no longer try to deny myself the pleasure of a mug.  

Do you have a favorite mug? Favorite mug qualities? Tell! (I personally have come to like sort of a swoopy shape?)

I have ridiculously small hands, so I love a smaller mug in a great color, like my Easy Tiger mug in their signature pink.  But I reclaimed mugs through my mom’s gift of a NYT Spelling Bee merch mug that I treasure like the Queen Bee I am, even as it takes two hands to hold.  And my hubs recently got us this romcom  mug from Marshalls for my birthday—it’s missing “fake dating,” but you can’t win ‘em all.  So I am a mug populist!

Re: composing, I use Google Docs now because I can pull it up on any device (of which I have many) and I’m always ruminating on something while out and about.  I also write on a Remarkable sometimes. And the best method: voice-to-text in my notes app!  That way, when I’m stuck and I need a walk, I can just dictate some sentences as I’m working stuff out.   

Tell us one other thing you worked hard on in this book and are proud of!

At this point in my middle-aged life, I know I work hard as a researcher, as a reviser, and as a writer, period.  I love a new subfield, and my hardest work is to release my idea of what I could write and how great my footnotes would be if I were somebody else entirely. 

So I worked hard to let go of my idea of what a truly STS (Science and Technology Studies) person would do with this book. I let myself be who I was as a scholar and thinker and turn this book into, I think, something weirder (in the best way) than it would otherwise be if I tried to mimic the thoroughness, knowledge, and brilliance of STS and History of Science folks. I’m in debt to them and I’m also not pretending to be as good as them at what they do. I also really loved writing about vampire movies even though I am a wuss about horror.  The ones of my late youth are my favorites to write about:  Blade (the OG) and Vampire in Brooklyn:  a little too serious, a lot campy, excellent leather trench coats.

Is there a writing tic you wrestled in this book? How did you manage it? Or, is there a style/voice thing you really tried for?

OMG, yes– I can’t stop with a “this and yet” or “not just but also” structure for my sentences that embarrasses and encapsulates me as a human. If there are 2 words I want to use, I use them both.  If there’s a list to be made, I make it 3 items longer than it should be. If there are 20 too many keywords, I only cut it down to 12 too many. A more is more philosophy, if you will.  I cringe, I cringe.  And yet!  (See!!!!).

I also need to add that I’m seriously and always working to be a better, clearer, more direct writer AND to feel more like myself in my writing style.   

What’s your favorite sentence in the book? What specifically do you like about it? 

So hard for me– I am honestly never a fan of my own writing. My real favorite words are my digs on the “assimilationist vampire bureaucracy” in Blade (p. 70).I wish I was skilled enough to be funnier in my scholarly writing! 

But for a full sentence, I’ll bring us full circle to the conclusion as it points back to the intro image:

“Black feminist thought is, like the HeLa cells this book began with, a gorgeous, living, morphing entity that is both built on a shared history and constantly repeating with a difference– sometimes through authorship, sometimes through interpretation.” (p. 172). 

“Black feminist thought is, like the HeLa cells this book began with, a gorgeous, living, morphing entity that is both built on a shared history and constantly repeating with a difference– sometimes through authorship, sometimes through interpretation.” (p. 172). 

 It’s got my trademark too-muchness, but it gets a lot of hard conceptual things in at once, including a real feminist obsession of mine on moving away from fetishizing authorship in analysis.

Share the love: what’s a first sentence written by someone else (any genre!) that you think is great? 

I mean, is there anything more amazing in my more-is-more and also I-wish-I-was-funnier philosophy than Fran Ross’s opening to 1974’s Oreo? 

May we all be so bold, so iconoclastic, so extra and so much and so smart in our first sentences!  

Order Inside the Body of Black Feminism now from Duke University Press or your favorite bookstore!

Samantha Pinto is a professor and the author of 3 monographs as well as the co-editor of 2 edited collections and 9 special issues of peer-reviewed journals. She attended Rutgers University (undergrad) and UCLA (grad) before becoming a professor of English, Black Studies, and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Georgetown University and then at UT Austin, where she also served as the Director of the Humanities Institute and now runs the Mobile Reproductive Health Lab.