What makes Lillian Smith’s work endure? What makes any writer’s work endure? The relationship between an author and their text, and a text and its audience, is a cooperative experience — they hold hands, speaking to one another in a circle. This “collaboration of the dream,” as Smith refers to it in “Trembling Earth,” encourages artist and audience to collaborate in the construction of … Read More Lillian Smith’s Enduring Legacy
Every semester I tell my students how Ernest Gaines would respond when someone asked him how to become a better writer. Gaines would look at the questioner and say, “There are six words to make you a better writer. Read. Read. Read. Write. Write. Write.” During my own educational journey I had teachers tell me that in order to be a better writer I … Read More Six Words to Be a Better Writer
Next semester, I’m teaching Alice Walker’s The Color Purple alongside a couple of her essays, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Ernest Gaines’ Of Love and Dust, and other works. Preparing for the class, I recently read Walker’s 1976 essay “Saving the Life That is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life.” Walker wrote the essay in the mid-1970s, at a moment … Read More Writing Saves Lives
Two of my favorite short stories are Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” and Ernest Gaines’ “The Sky is Gray.” Each of these stories, in different ways, interrogates the deployment of language and how language serves as a foundation to the social construction of race the subversion of that false construction. Morrison states that “‘Recitatif’ was an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a … Read More Writing Process for “Paper”
+ archive, archives, fiction, short story, writing
A few months ago, Jadyn DeWald asked me to participate in a reading on campus. I debated reading something about Frank Yerby or Lillian Smith; however, I chose, instead, to write a short story. Below is the story that I wrote. It is entitled “Paper.”
Interminable Rambling 