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Black History Month Author Roundtable
1.
AOTW: How have your experiences as an African-American shaped your writing?
Nikki Giovanni: I believe all writers are influenced by their experiences whether by something they learned or by something that they wished. All learning comes down to why and why not? We are what we know but we should be more than that. We all, I believe, strive to be better than what we know.
Stanice Anderson: Because I understand my history as an African-American, I do not take reading or writing for granted. My voice is sprinkled with the nuances, dialects, rhythms, and sayings handed down from generation-to-generation through great sacrifice and the Grace of God. I exercise my voice ---whether writing or speaking-believing that God will breathe life into my words.
Another way that my voice has been shaped by my personal African-American experiences is I have no desire to be isolated or segregated. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I had enough of that. Jim Crow is dead and I do not want to see him resurrected in any shape or form --- including self-inflicted segregation. I believe God granted me a voice for people not a certain group of people.
My desire is to be a great writer who happens to be an African-American. My skin is café-mocha brown but my writing is more colorful than a rainbow after a storm.
Ray Shannon: Since all of my published works to this point have dealt at least in part with African-American protagonists, my life experiences as an African-American have been vital to my writing. Somewhere in everything I write is a commentary on the world from an African-American's (that's singular, not plural) perspective, and making this perspective known to readers of crime fiction, who might otherwise have no access to it, is a key bullet-point of my writing agenda.
Stephanie Perry Moore: As an African-American female, my life as been very interesting. From having strong, educated black parents, to going to an all black high school, then attending a predominately white institution, to pledging a black sorority, to marrying a black man are just some of the highlights of things I pull from for my writing. Because I love so many elements of my life, and would also like to see a lot of things differently, I will never be out of things to write about.
Harriette Cole: My heritage is part of my self-definition, so inherent in who I am is how I write. I grew up in a predominantly Black affluent neighborhood in Baltimore. My education was primarily in Black schools, at least majority Black all the way through college. I worked for 11 years at Essence magazine. Most of my clients in my business have been Black. I have traveled the world, largely to places where people of African descent live. So, naturally being in the company of African-American people has influenced my writing.
More, though, being me and growing into the woman I have become has informed my writing. Having a solid anchor in my heritage, I have also traveled many roads with people of many ethnic backgrounds. I consider myself a person of the world, in that I have no fear to venture into different environments, and I learn from each experience.
My writing is informed by my experience-and that experience has been vast.
Y. Blak Moore: I would definitely have to say that my experiences as a Black, urban writer have shaped my writing. If they hadn't I don't know what the heck I would be writing about.
Jenoyne Adams: I think it would impossible to expect that being African-American in this country wouldn't shape my writing. I say this because it wasn't until I was a teenager studying at the University of Malaga in Malaga, Spain that I actually realized that I was African-"American" and not just a black person living in America. My experiences as an African-American have shaped my writing tremendously because in most circumstances, I process the world/information firstly as a person of African of American decent, then secondly as a woman. Because of this, my writing centers strongly around African-American, female issues.
Diane McKinney-Whetstone: Of course my experiences as an African-American woman writer influence every aspect of my writing. Since all of the writing begins at the point of perception, that is the way I see things, my fictional worlds are all created from the unique vantage point of one who has seen and felt discrimination based on race and gender. It doesn't end there though. Since I have also seen, felt certain triumphs, my stories have a sense of hope, a bluesy quality that hums. In fact, when the writing is going particularly well I can actually hear my grandmother humming.
Benilde Little: Of course, but so has being female, the youngest, the only girl child. Everything in one's life shapes one's writing.
Victor LaValle: It has given me a great sense of humor. Sometimes the world can be so absurd that you have to laugh instead of crying. That sounds melodramatic, and it is, but somehow it's still true.
Marcus Major: I believe we all are shaped by our experiences regardless of ethnicity. I write from an African-American perspective because that's what I am. It's hard for me to quantify how exactly it's shaped my writing, but I do feel a greater responsibility to put out a product that doesn't just present African-Americans in the worst light.
Olympia Vernon: I've never looked at it this way. When I write, my characters shape who they want to be. They don't care what race I am. They say and do what they feel comfortable doing. I'd much rather say that they are shapeless. They walk through air. They float. They fly.
Nalo Hopkinson: Well, first, a point of information; I am not American. I am Afro-Caribbean, with Taino (that is, Arawak/Carib), South Asian, Jewish and Scottish ancestry mixed in there as well. And perhaps a few others. But I think of myself primarily as a black person; my features and the culture in which I grew up are for the most part African. I was born in Jamaica, and I now live in Canada. Have lived here for 26 years, since I was 16 years old. I can't really speak of American experience; haven't had much of it. But of course, being black has shaped my writing. Every bit of one's experience shapes one's writing. An example; I have found it difficult to find apartments to rent where I live, in the city of Toronto. When I phone to inquire, it often happens that homeowners hear the way I speak, ask where I was born, and when I say Jamaica, they decide that their vacant apartment has just remarkably become rented by someone else. It's easier for me to find apartments in apartment buildings, where commerce can sometimes outweigh prejudice. A few years ago, I scraped together every bit of money I could borrow from banks and family, and bought a tiny condo apartment. I wanted something that it would be difficult to bar me from for the crime of Breathing While Black. Housing's a biggie in my life. Travel is less so. I can usually catch a cab 90% of the time when I hail one down, UNLESS I'm travelling with a black man. Then the odds drop to about 40%. It's higher if he's wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase; maybe about 70-80%. So, when I create characters, I find myself thinking about how their identities affect their lives, their abilities to find housing, jobs, community, lovers. Even if I create a character who's a rich, white, North American, straight man, I find myself thinking about how what he is affects the choices he has. Everybody faces limitations in life. His choices are going to be constrained in some ways that are different from the constraints I experience, and some that are the same, but there will be constraints. The tension caused by those constraints are part of what makes fiction exciting. It's no fun if your characters have no problems.
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