![]() ![]() I’ve published with three different houses and not once did I have an editor tell me what I should or should not write. I reached out to three prominent black writers to share their thoughts.īernice McFadden: ‘Never has an editor told me what to write’ Is success defined only by whether black writers write about race? Or, is there room for a diversity of stories that don’t necessarily align with race issues? This implies a direct link between the authenticity of the literature and the sociological and political perspectives of African Americans.Īfter all, the recent evidence of police brutality and racial injustice against black people, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement, is likely one of the many reasons why Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me sits comfortably on the New York Times bestseller list. In fact, it’s commonly believed that “good” writing by black authors is birthed from oppression, and marginalization is viewed as a key marker for black literature. As black writers, are we bound to the race narrative? Many prominent thinkers in black literary criticism think so. ![]() ![]() Yet despite feeling empowered by these books, I often wonder if literature written by black authors, in order to be considered successful or even “good”, must address the social ills of the day. ![]()
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![]() ![]() is a camera company.” or Dropbox’s S-1 mission statement: “ Unleash the world’s creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working.” These statements ignore what these businesses fundamentally do - advertising and storage. ![]() Think about Snap’s famous declaration, “ Snap Inc. ![]() In today’s day of fake technology marketing, it’s easy for messaging to slowly take over a company if left unchecked. There is something so human about wanting to believe there are no limits to technology. It was just a 19-year-old talking who’d taken one course in microfluidics, and she thought she was gonna make something of it.” It was debunked by almost every scientist as wild fantasy even prior to its commercial use and subsequent fall from grace. Stanford professor Phyllis Gardener even told Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos’ founder/CEO) early-on that an early patch-like design of the product would never work: “ just kind of blinked and nodded and left. But they didn’t work and never had a shot to work. Theranos’ Edison and miniLab blood analyzers were supposed to tell you everything you could ever want to know about your blood. Sometimes technology sounds too good to be true. ![]() ![]() In Vietnamese, we don’t have past participles, so everything is spoken in the present, and whether it’s past or present depends on the last word. The funny thing is, the biggest trouble I have with my writing is tense. Is writing a way to orient events among one another on that spiral? You present, in some of your poems, that the future has already happened, and the past is happening still. Everyone’s a poet, as long as they remember. I thought, “Well if the Greek root for ‘poet’ is ‘creator,’ then to remember is to create, and, therefore, to remember is to be a poet.” I thought it was so neat. Every time we remember, we create new neurons, which is why memory is so unreliable. I’ve been thinking about trauma-how it’s repetitive, and how we recreate it, and how memory is fashioned by creation. ![]() ![]() ![]() He believes that’s why we repeat ourselves, including our tragedies, and that if we are more faithful to this movement, we can move away from the epicenter through distance and time, but we have to confront it every time. The Italian philosopher Vico had this theory that time moves more in a spiral than it does in a line. It becomes fuel, and it brings me out of myself and into the world, even if I’ve just been sitting at my desk and thinking about spirals, which is what I’ve been thinking about this morning. ![]() I don’t know if curiosity is a balm, because it often gets me in trouble, but it gives me control. ![]() |