Book Discussion Group, Saturday August 5, 2017, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy 

Angela Flournoy grew up in Southern California. She attended the University of Southern California and then the Iowa Writer's Workshop. While she was at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she began what would become The Turner House, informed and shaped somewhat by her frequent visits to her father's family (13 children) in Detroit.

She published The Turner House in 2015, and it was a finalist for a National Book Award and also was a New York Times notable book of the year. The Turner House was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and an NAACP Image Award. Angela Flournoy was a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree for 2015.

Angela Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa, The New School, and Columbia University. Her fiction has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.

The Turner House was a "Seattle Reads" selection earlier this year, and the video below is part of a longer interview for the reading program conducted for the Seattle Public Library.

Themes 

The Great Migration: The story of the fictional Turner family in Detroit was set in motion when Francis and Viola left Arkansas for Detroit. Similar stories of migration out of the South form a large part of the larger story of African America. In the video above, Vivian Phillips, the interviewer, mentions the Migration Series, paintings by Jacob Lawrence around the topic of the motivations and experiences of the migration. A collection of these paintings can be viewed at this website.

The Housing Crash: The story of the Turner family is bookended by the subprime mortgage crash in the mid 2000's. In this financial crisis, Black and Hispanic families lost a significantly greater proportion of their wealth than White families, leaving many houses like Viola's with more money owed on them than they could be sold for. In communities like Detroit where jobs left at the same time due to the auto plants' closures, the effect was doubly devastating, leaving many neighborhoods deserted.

Hopeful Notes in a Time of Discord

Back in 2010 when we were reading Farm City, I came across the fact that the original urban farming movement started in Detroit during the Great Depression, and that with this latest financial crisis and great tracts of abandoned land opening up in the city, Detroit has again become an urban farming oasis. Here is a link to an article about 10 Detroit farms, and here is a video of an interview for Overlander TV with a leader of the Detroit urban farming movement.