Diane McKinney-Whetstone brought her beautiful prose, elegant storytelling and tales of her writing experience to the Nile Swim Club in Yeadon, PA, on Sunday, Aug. 28, 2022. The club was one of four sponsors of a Parlor Talk @ The Pool event featuring McKinney-Whetstone and her new novel “Our Gen,” about ageless 60-something people brimming with excitement and secrets.
Even the music accompanying a bingo game after her presentation spoke to the “Our Gen” generation: “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” by the Temptations and Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On.”
The event was co-sponsored by the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance/Paul Robeson House & Museum, the Walnut Hill Community Association and Hakim’s Bookstore. The Nile Swim Club was founded by African Americans in 1958 after two Black families were denied membership in the white Yeadon Swim Club. It was the nation’s first Black-owned swimming pool and has been designated an historical site in Pennsylvania.
McKinney-Whetstone read from her novel and signed copies provided by Hakim’s. It is the oldest Black-owned bookstore in Philadelphia and one of the first on the East Coast, founded in 1959 by Dawud Hakim. The title of the event, “Parlor Talk,” refers to a program at the Robeson House that presents author discussions on a variety of topics.
McKinney-Whetstone was born and raised in West Philadelphia, and the city is as much a character in her books as her real people. “Our Gen” is her seventh book, and it has received rave reviews. Her books tell the story of Black people living complicated lives filled with strife, love, laughter, history and secrets. This book, however, is a bit different from her others.
She was one of seven children in a close-knit family in a middle/working class neighborhood. Her father was in politics, serving two terms in the Pennsylvania state Senate, and her mother was a homemaker and later a school assistant. Both were masterful storytellers who outfitted their stories with so many details that “you could taste it,” McKinney-Whetstone says. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a BA in English. She married her childhood sweetheart Greg and birthed twins, a boy and girl, and now she’s a grandmother.
McKinney-Whetstone didn’t start her career writing poetic novels. She worked for the USDA Forest Service where she turned press releases into dramatic stories. In her late 30s, she became restless as the need to write fiction nagged at her. She joined the Rittenhouse Writers Group, received a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on Aging that allowed her to quit her job, and she didn’t look back.
She wrote her first novel “Tumbling” in 1996. She found an agent and signed a deal with William Morrow publishers. Twenty-five years later, she writes about her generation with the insight of someone who’s living it.
During the question-and-answer part of her presentation, a fan asked about writer’s block. McKinney-Whetstone had a novel answer to how she approaches what is a stumbling block for many writers. She embraces rather than curses it. Writer’s block indicates that she might be headed in the wrong direction in her story, and that she should take some time away from it to regroup. When she returns to the writing, she has a fresh perspective and a new path for the story.
