Category / Publishing

by Michael

Interview With Marita Golden

I recently read The Word: Black Writers Talk About the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing and contacted Ms. Marita Golden for an interview.  She graciously accepted and I’m pleased to bring you her answers to my questions.  There are other interviews, to the right, in the Writing and Reading “neighborhoods”.  This book is worth reading, soaking up, and holding onto.  Ms. Golden has several other published works that the same can be said about.  Now, the interview.

MW: Your book presents author interviews and one of your common questions is about childhood influences and early beginnings for those writers as readers.  Talk about your early beginnings as a reader and writer. 

MG: I grew up in a home in which my love of reading and writing was
nurtured and encouraged. My father and mother both influenced my
writing life in different ways. My father was a great storyteller and
his stories to me often told at bedtime, were about famous heroines
from Black history such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth so I
learned early on what a hero was and what a hero or heroine did. My
mother told me early on that one day I would write a book and that was
crucial in terms of my development of a creative identity.

MW: The Word exposes us to writers today who are telling great stories.  Who are some writers from before, perhaps writers too quickly forgotten, who readers need to find, remember, and keep reading?

 MG: Anne Petry is one of my favorite writers from the 40’s and 50’s she
is most known her novel THE STREET but I am a huge fan of her second
novel THE NARROWS which is rich and deep and very satisfying to read
as well as her short stories.

MW: Your latest book reminds me of the continuous gift of Gumbo, an earlier anthology you edited with E. Lynn Harris.  In that great book, along with this current one, you’ve brought together astounding artists.  Tell us about your process of editing them.  I imagine those works were full of gifts for you.

MG: In the Word I wanted to shape the interviews so that the
conversations became a commentary not only on the writing and reading
life of the writer, but also an invitation into that kind of life for
the reader. It was important to also get them talking about the issues
of literacy facing the Black Community.

MW: Speaking of gifts, how did you establish the Hurston/Wright Foundation?  How did that vital work come about?

MG: I established the Hurston/Wright Foundation 20 years ago with Clyde
McElvene as a way to support what I saw as a fantastic flowering of
creativity among Black writers. I wanted to create an institution that
would give Black writers the kind of support I wished I had had as a
younger writer-workshops, awards, recognition, community. The
foundation has opened doors and created possibilities for a whole
generation of writers and I am just glad that I was chosen to do that
work.

MW: You’ve shared this answer in pieces throughout interviews in The Word, but tell us why reading is important to you.

MG: Reading is important to me because it is a passport into the lives of others and the unique wisdom, intelligence and creativity that they possess. Reading also gives me experiences that I have not and may not ever had and increases my empathy for and connection to others.

MW: What are you reading these days?  

MG: I am reading a wonderful memoir called THE MEMORY PALACE and a
collection of short stories by Nadine Gordimer.

MW: Can you recommend particular writers who are must reads for children?

MG: Eloise Greenfield is a must!

MW: You have communicated in multiple forms and continue to do so.  How do your roles–as writer, teacher, speaker, and editor–intersect?  What enables you to do all you do?

MG: I find that writing teaching and speaking are all interrelated in
that that enable me to connect with others which is one of my favorite
things to do.

MW: How can readers of my blog learn more about you and your work?  

MG: They can go to www.maritagolden.com.

Questions for you, blog readers: What are you reading?  What have you just finished or are looking forward to reading?  I just closed Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and am taking in long amounts of the elegant and massive The Warmth of Other Suns.  I am also reading Souls in Transition.

by Michael

Would You Suit If I Wrote A Book About You?

One of last year’s bookish blockbusters is subject to a suit.  I haven’t read The Help by Kathyrn Stockett.  I know folks who have.  I’m waiting to get and read it for reasons I’ll bring up after I read it. 

But I read this article from a NYT blog.  An inviting quote into the piece’s scope is:

There are few topics in the South more complicated and fraught than the one between white families and black women who raise their children and keep their houses clean. The South, and high society in particular, is governed in large part by what is left unsaid, and this is particularly true on the topics of race and family.

This article has me thinking about the dangerous relationship between a writer’s resources for writing, on the one hand, and the responses of the people and situations which are those resources on the other.  I suppose I’m also spinning the words of this NYT post with Tuesday’s episode of The Good Wife (my current favorite show), along with having recently been forced by my wife to watch The Social Network.

That preface offered, fiction is fiction.  Made up.  Created.  From the imagination.  Or from some combination of the imagined and the real.  But it’s fiction, and that means that the literary display between the covers is accountable first to the author’s imagination.  The inimitable Richard Wright said that the writer should only bow to the monitor of his own imagination.  It’s difficult enough for a writer to be responsive to that vision.  When that vision–the result of sustained imagining–is tutored and decorated by real people and events, it’s get trickier.

Fiction is not only accountable to an author’s imagination.  It’s accountable, in ways that I suppose an audience has to detail, to the reader, to the people mentioned, even when those people are consumed inside the residence of a “work of fiction.”  Novels like The Help portray real people and real events, and writers are responsible to those folks and happenings.  In some way. 

Writers should take care in handling people, particularly writers of historical fiction.  And care is best evaluated by the people whose voices we use to tell our stories.  It’s evaluated by the people who are the subjects of our stories because those same folks are often subject to them.

So, my question, Would you suit if someone wrote a book about you, a novel about you?  If the writing wasn’t true or if the artistic expression crowded the way you perceived yourself before having paged through the published copy.  If the language was offensive or if the implicit ideas driving the story were disagreeable to some part of you.  What would you do?  How would you think?  Just a question.

by Michael

Chocolates, Valentines, and Child Slaves

I read an article the other day summarizing how many people in advance of February 14–a holiday I’ve boycotted for other reasons–are encouraging people to write and email executives of chocolate candy companies to tell them that there shouldn’t be child labor or forced labor in their chocolate.  Have you thought about where your chocolate or your candy comes from? 

I love chocolate.  I love children.  But this article talks about how children are being trafficked for chocolate.  Children living in towns all over West Africa, girls and boys I’ll never meet.  I learned that 2/3 of the world’s chocolate comes from the cocoa trade on the Ivory Coast.  The question comes.  How much do I like chocolate?

To be honest, I don’t like chocolate candy.  I prefer chocolate desserts, baked goods, stuff that comes out of an oven.  But I can’t grant myself an indulgence on the matter too easily. 

Thanks to some good people at my church, I’ve been learning about the modern ways people are being enslaved, particularly children being forced into sex work across the world and in my own city.  Incidentally, Patricia Engel has a searching, well-written short story with a character who deals with this in her collection, Vida.  I seem to remember the incomparable ZZ Packer having a relevant story in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. 

Kids are being sold, sometimes by their families, sometimes by other pimps, so that their bodies are being given to someone else.  “Given” is the wrong word.  They are being offered.  They are pushed.  Exploited.  They are molested in the act of such flagrant offerings, pushes, and exploitations.  They are being forced to clean houses, to raise other children, and to perform sexual acts on the men and women who “bought” them.

Sex trafficking is one the newest ways of enslaving, though it’s not so new.  Unfortunately people aren’t connecting the purposeful enslavement of small children with holidays like Valentine’s Day or with their favorite candies.  Perhaps it’s not altogether appropriate to suggest a connection.  But the truth is that there are boys and girls and unnamed women and men working themselves haggard so that the shiny bar and that glitzy wrapping with the dark chocolate you love can sit on the shelf at the store.  When you buy that bar, when you munch into that candy, when you talk about love, or when you ask that special person to be your valentine, remember that children who can’t remember what love is, quite literally, had a hand in that chocolate.

by Michael

How Many Times Can I Call You By a Bad Name?

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is being reprinted and one of the main questions surrounding the upcoming unveiling by one scholar came across my ears on the radio.  Should Mark Twain’s use of the N-word be sanitized to fit audiences and readers of today and beyond?  There are a lot of posts and articles about this, and here’s one I’ll suggest, though you can find a dozen easily.

High school and college students, of whatever color and skin tone, are reading the 200+ references to Black folks and first-nation peoples in the novel, constantly employing the word that’s frowned upon by Black folks, Native people, and other folks.  Point a pin here: it is true that the N-word is used within the Black community with a frequency that is both constant and contested.  I’m not going there in this post.  This post is about writing and publishing.

I think the language in Mark Twain’s novel should stay the way he printed it.  Here’s why.

  1. That’s the way Twain wrote the novel.  As a to-be-published novelist I take this matter seriously.  Writing is hard.  Writing is work.  After all that fighting and researching and soul-wrenching and editing and emailing and reading tracked changes and questioning whether I should do this or something else and crossing of my eyes, I don’t want somebody else changing the words which finally get to the printed page.  Of course someone will edit my work.  I told Dawn the other day that my freelance editor is working.  My agent, when I get one, will have a revision letter.  My in-house editor will have her or his own multiple-page vision which will require another (re)writing.  So, it’s not that changing words is a problem.  The problem is that the writer goes through those steps to agree with himself of what he wishes to be printed.  I’d despise having someone change 200+ words in my novel–whatever the word or words.
  2. Language is instructive and contextual.  Twain’s language anchors the reader and student in his world or at least in his vision of a world as created for that novel.  The language sprung from his time and it teaches us, in our time, about the society around the author who was married to a Black woman, or, more appropriately, around his characters.  I read a quote from a teacher saying that that teacher would love to teach the novel but that “In the new classroom, it’s really not acceptable.”  Of course I asked the teacher in my head, what’s the new classroom and when has it ever really been acceptable in “contemporary” times?  That said, Twain’s words do teach.  The uncomfortability that lifts in that teacher’s students and in their throats is instructive.  Those things are symbolic of a problem with the souls of a reading and language-using public that so spoke of Black folk and Native people.  Last, remember that Twain’s use of his words were counter-cultural, and that goes back to my first point.  Why change them?

What do you think?

by Michael

Click These Links

  • Read how Tayari Jones talks about prettiness and publishing as she thinks about the upcoming release of Silver Girl.
  • This post is a great reminder from a father for a father and for a mother too about what not to do.
  • My friend and coworker, David Swanson wrote a thoughtful short piece on church segregation and has a piercing question at the end of this post.
  • Zadie Smith tells a lovely, funny story when explaining in an unexpected way how friends are generous.
  • Mario Vargas Llosa’s writing is discussed at the Guardian in ways that put forward some interesting intersections between writing and politics.
by Michael

The Winner Is…

Thanks for all your book recommendations.  I am planning my next run to Azizi Books and then to the 57th Street Bookstore with great gratitude.  I hope a few of you can pick up your own copy of Ms. McFadden’s latest.  For one of you that will be as easy as going to the mailbox. 

The winner and soon recipient of Glorious is Vanessa.  I will email you this morning to get a mailing address.

It looks like my next author interview will be with Mr. Ravi Howard, author of Like Trees, Walking.  After that, I hope to have Ms. Donna Freitas, author of This Gorgeous Game, and Ms. Maaza Mengiste, author of Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, on the blog.  Perhaps you should pick those novels up or visit your local library for them. 

If you know of authors, particularly debut authors–more fiction than nonfiction if you will–let me know about their work.  I’ll consider adding the works to my leaning pile on the shelf and contacting them about an interview.

by Michael

Discussing Work in Progress

When you seek publication, one of the first steps to finding a publisher is convincing an agent to represent you.  In order to do that, you have to pitch your work to the agents.  They choose you from your pitch which comes in a one-page letter called a query or from your sample pages which usually includes a synopsis and up to 50 pages of the completed manuscript.  Jessica Faust has a great dictionary of publishing terms, if you’re interested, by the way.

Whether we’re talking about a query or a full proposal with pages, I pitch projects too soon.  I’m not the most patient person.  I blame it on the fact that I was born premature.  I blame it on whatever movie my mother was watching when I announced my early coming.

But I decided recently to restrict myself from submissions for a while.  It’s an exercise in building patience, in reading the work-in-progress better, in critiquing myself harder, and in gathering useful information to enhance my voice.  I’ve made some version of this decision several times since I started writing fiction a few years ago, making the early switch from nonfiction about all things spiritual.  But I tend to release the unrealistic goal of waiting, and I submit submit submit. 

I don’t have an agent currently.  I used to, when I was pitching a particular nonfiction manuscript that we “just couldn’t sell” at the time.  But right now, I’m agentless.  So, even though I don’t have an agent, I have a manuscript, well two of them.  But we’re talking about one of them.  One I was told to get professionally edited–by an agent who read the full (the abbreviated way of saying the full manuscript). 

Somewhere between ending one year with its records and papers and making room for the new tenant who pays no rent, I filed the rejection letter along with its advice.  I had already started working on another project when I got that feedback.  Since then, I’ve finished that historical–which I’m told I can’t expect to break into publishing with since it’s historical–and started work on something else.  Writing, for me, is non-linear as you can tell. 

I’m at the point now where I am decided to have the work edited.  It’s been read by a few members of my team.  I’ve read and revised it six times since the first draft.  I started by being in love with the story.  I’ve gone the route of hating it, cutting it, changing it, breaking it and returning to the love I once had.  And it’s time to send it off to some professional person who will give me feedback, who will check my plot, characterization, and execution, who will tell me that I am, in fact, out of my mind for thinking I could write good fiction for publication or that I am on the right path and how to strengthen the work.

I’m told that many published authors have editors review and critique their work.  Since I didn’t study writing in college, I’m looking forward to this level of feedback.  I’m choosing that editor carefully over the next weeks.

So, I wanted to share a few scattered ramblings about editing this WIP.  Things that have occurred to me as I prepare to send it to someone else.

1) Giving my work away hasn’t gotten easier.  I’ve had helpful readers give me great feedback.  Each time I’ve sent my file, it’s been difficult.  The patience I’ve exercised in the waiting period from “send” to “receive” has been nothing less than divine because it took God and all God’s angels to keep me from pestering my readers with daily reminders to read and email me.  Patience comes slowly when I’m waiting for a response.  But so does my ability to send something I’ve written.  It feels a bit like taking an unflattering picture of myself–and most of them from one angle or another are unflattering–and sending it to my the guy whose girl left him for me in second grade and asking for a compliment on the photo.  Second-graders don’t forgive. Continue reading →