Toni Morrison And Junot Díaz - Live from the nypl

I tell my students, I tell everybody this when I begin a creative writing class I say I know you've heard all your life write what you know. Well I'm hear to tell you that you don't know nothing. Ain't that the truth. So do not write what you know. Think of something else. Write about a young Mexican woman working in a restaurant and can speak English. Or write about a famous mistress in Paris who's down on her luck. I give them all these ideas and I have to tell you they really do well. They write way out of the box. Once you open that door, I don't wanna hear what your grandmother, I don't wanna hear about your lover, your forget that. Let's go somewhere else. The act of writing from me is...you really do get to know the characters really well. For me they're sort of like ghosts. I know what they look like although I may not describe them. They talk and if they're not talking to me then I don't have their names right or something's wrong, but I can hear them. Their speech, what they say, what they think... I don't want this to sound too goofy but it's like you really know. Some of them you have to shut up because like other ghosts or all ghosts they don't have any conversation except about themselves. So I remember that was very true with "Pilot" all pilot Mike I just had to shut her up because she was eating up the book. She was really eating it up and it wasn't about her. I mean she was in it, but it was Song of Solomon It's extraordinary you had a view in to black America. To be in that time where there was such a deep reaction to the black civil rights movement and you yourself were actually publishing these people who people were saying these are *** communist. these are traitors. These are people were trying to overthrow and some people kinda said "Yeah, I'm trying to overthrow the country." Now I always felt that the narrative that African-Americans, particularly political ones told, if they were manipulated by, in the hands of the mainstream publishing was going to automatically be restrained. It wasn't gonna be totally up It's sort of like Frederick Douglass and those sleeve stories, you can field withholding because they're writing for abolitionists and they don't want to upset them too much and that gaze and that control, to me is obvious. So I'm looking for projects that come from within, are unapologetic about what they are, what they're saying, and what they intend for other African-Americans or anybody else to know. Even with this which you were saying just now about shifting the narratives center of the telling, I think the reason so many these books are still important, so many these books are embedded in the cannon has to do with that very, very subtle shift at the heart of them. I would argue, that they were facing you. That they were writing you and then in fact in the heart of these books the unspoken premise that there is a black woman as the reader. True. When you get somebody like Gayl, or Toni Cade, or Dumas. You could just indicate that they don't have to... that's not really the audience and it wouldn't be private. It would be like being Tolstoy. You're Russian and you write for Russians. Not for little color girls in Ohio. You know once you take you're own area, in your own soil and dig deep into that, if you're good enough at it, it's available to everybody. You don't have to direct it at a vague audience that you think is perhaps not yours.