I worked on Remember the Bridge: Poems of a People for twenty years. Kids often ask me how long it takes to write a book and the shortest amount of time was two weeks, off and on and the longest amount of time was the two decades that I spent working on Remember the Bridge.
That project started as a graduate school photo essay project and one of my teachers, as he was looking at my portfolio at the end of that semester, said this should be a book. I began expanding it and submitting the manuscript. At the time, I was thinking that it would be an adult publication. Got a little interest from one publisher and that just egged me on, but didn’t find a publisher at that time.
I resurrected the project after I started writing for children and began shopping it as a children’s book manuscript and did find a publisher. But the process, what I did during those twenty years, besides raising my kids and working in public relations, was to write more poems for Remember the Bridge that focused on African American heritage and culture and also to do picture research — to find images to pair with those poems.
I went to places like the Library of Congress, Moylan-Spingarn Research Center, state archives, in search of photographs. The more photographs I found, the more poems I ended up writing because I not only found photographs to pair with existing poems, but I found photographs that kind of cried out for words. I found myself acquiring all these photographs and then writing poems to go with the photographs that had really spoken to my heart.
