LaToya Watkins‘ collection Holler Child released from Tiny Reparations Books in 2023 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. I first read Watkins’ short story “Cutting Horse” and this is where I fell in love with her storytelling. I first heard her read at the 2025 Longleaf Writer’s Conference in Seaside on the…
OPENINGS by Rae Cline
LaToya Watkins‘ collection Holler Child released from Tiny Reparations Books in 2023 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. I first read Watkins’ short story “Cutting Horse” and this is where I fell in love with her storytelling. I first heard her read at the 2025 Longleaf Writer’s Conference in Seaside on the Gulf of Mexico, where I picked up a signed copy of Holler, Child at Sundog Books. “The Mother” is the opening short story in the same collection:
The visits done died down a little bit now. When it first happened, a week ago, all kind of reporters was camped out in my yard. Some still come. The rustlers, like this one sitting in front of me. They still asking bout Hawk. Bout how he come to call hisself the Messiah. Bout who his daddy is, but I ain’t got nothing for them…
The title character, mother, recounts her life, the neglects and abuses and how sex work and drug use lost her her son. She has a keen eye and sensibility, testing the reporters who come to her home and make judgements with their eyes while asking for her to speak about her departed. He was a self-professed messiah, fathered from God, as his mother told him since he was born. He was also a cult leader embroiled in scandal, a scandal that spoke to his mother’s survived abuses.
It isn’t just Watkins’ narrative arc and craft that mesmerizes, it is the richness of language and lyricism that fully immerses. At times, Watkins’ words will smack you on the face with a hard slap. At times, they will guide you with a gentle hand, showing you the things you should have already seen. They will make you sorry for not seeing these things before but they will also remind you how human you are and that everyone is human. It’s just your turn, now, to remember it.
A big fan of bell hooks, I feel the narrator’s oppositional gaze as I read “The Mother.” Watkins wields the gaze deftly, never letting her reader feel comfortable in observation, just as the white reporters should not feel comfortable in their digging for details about the dead and scandalized messiah. They are like the cockroaches crawling up the narrator’s wall, vying for the crumbs she might drop, crumbs from the crumbs from the crumbs allowed her within her intersectionality.
I am eagerly awaiting Watkins’ next book release. As should you. Holler, Child is highly recommended.
About LaToya Watkins
LaToya Watkins’ writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Sun, Kweli Journal, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Kenyon Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. She is a Kimibilo fellow and has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, OMI: Arts, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Camargo Foundation. She is the author of Perish and Holler, Child. Read more at latoyawatkins.com.
About Tiny Reparations Books
Founded in 2020 by comedian, bestselling author, producer, and actress Phoebe Robinson, in partnership with Plume and Penguin Random House, Tiny Reparations Books is a highly curated imprint dedicated to fiction and nonfiction that highlights and amplifies unique and diverse voices. The imprint has published bestselling and award-winning books and is committed to full and honest work that pushes the conversation forward. Read more at Tiny Reparations Books.
About Openings
Openings is a weekly recommendations column by Rae Cline, published at Eckleburg. Openings features literary musings, culture and book recommendations, focusing on beautiful books with memorable openings, where readers meet intriguing characters, settings and moments in which the mind can explore what is, what might be and how this opens the reader’s imagination. Read more on Instagram @raeclineauthor and at the new raecline.substack, where you can submit recent titles of adult literary fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry for consideration.
