Gloria Blizzard’s collection of essays, Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2024) has been on our radar for a while. (You may even recongise it from earlier this year when it was on our Mother’s Day Book Gift List.)
Lorri Neilsen Glenn, author of The Old Man in Her Arms, has praised Gloria for how she “effortlessly weaves elements of her life — its challenges and its gifts — into contemporary conversations about identity, feminism, the diaspora, art, and belonging.”
Ms. Magazine called the book, “as captivating and lovingly written as any of her songs or poems. From identity and belonging to feminism and food, these personal essays present complexities, challenges and reflections that will appeal to a wide range of readers.”
Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Art of Leaving, hailed it has “mesmerizing, lyrical, and cadenced.”
We’re honoured to have Gloria join us today for this Power Q & A. Welcome, Gloria!
Bring home Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2024)
Q: Tell us about the rich and incredibly evocative title of your book! Where it it come from? How does it play out in themes throughout the book?
A: Welcome to my book! Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas is a meeting place. Often important stuff happens at the crossroads of many things. The intersections of art, science, race, culture and spirituality are a valuable, rich liminal space, if we care to pay attention. The subtitle for my book is ‘Essays on music, memory and motion’, as the essays are infused with music, dance and travel.
The title points to and includes all of these ideas. Black cake is a treat familiar to those of us of Caribbean origins, and it made up of ingredients from around the world, none of which are indigenous to the Caribbean. In the essay ‘Black Cake Buddhism’, I look at the intersections of spirituality, where my Catholic Trinidadian mother teaches me, a daughter inexplicably exploring Buddhism in Canada, how to make this traditional cake. Two forms of music compete for the position of the soundscape for this event. Cake can be emotionally and historically loaded!
‘Turtle Soup’ is another layered tale indicative of the collection, and a theme of interconnections between the personal, historical and universal. In this essay, I learn as a child, how death and food are connected, and later as an adult, about a macabre sport played on Ontario roads.
My book also dives into personal and social quandaries that I call dilemmas. ‘The Mathematic of Rage’ looks at negotiating the world in a female, Black body. ‘Trifecta’ explores the connections between academic institutions and the Atlantic slave trade. Woven into it are the healing aspects of Afro-Cuban dance and the making of art in general. Early readers from many worlds, are letting me now how deeply they relate to these intersections. Cultural crossroads can be places of insight and growth, and for many, they are also home.
—Gloria Blizzard
Gloria Blizzard.
About Black Cake, Turtle Soup:
A diasporic collection of essays on music, memory, and motion.
In this powerful and deeply personal collection, Gloria Blizzard uses traditional narrative essays, hybrid structures, and the tools of poetry to negotiate the complexities of culture, geography, and language in an international diasporic quest.
These essays of wayfinding accompany anyone exploring issues of belonging — to a family, a neighbourhood, a group, or a country. Here, the small is profound, the intimate universal; the questions are all relevant and the answers of our times require simultaneous multiple perspectives.
About Gloria Blizzard:
Gloria Blizzard is an award-winning writer and poet, and a Black Canadian woman of multiple heritages. Her work explores spaces where music, dance, spirit, and culture collide. It has won the Malahat Review’s Open Season Creative Nonfiction Prize, and been nominated for both the Queen Mary Wasafiri Life Writing Prize and the Pushcart prize. Gloria holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction from the University of King’s College and lives in Toronto. Her book of essays Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas is published by Dundurn Press.