What's your advice for African-American writers who want to write about their culture and experiences?
|
The Portable Promised Land Book Review Excerpt
|
|
One of the most entertaining short stories is A Hot Time at the Church of Kentucky Fried Souls and the Spectacular Final Sunday Sermon of the Right Revren Daddy Love. This tale of Revren Daddy Love and his church, formerly a Kentucky Fried Chicken, looks at a man of God with human desires such as fame, acceptance and even sex. His
last sermon is just as much of a production as it is a message from above.
Complete Review
|
|
I think in order to be a writer, to have any chance to be a writer means to be a great reader. You must read consistently and ambitiously. Don't read about writing, just read great writing and read slowly, trying to figure out why each piece is the way it is and what the writer's doing. You can really get into it deeply on the second or third read of something.
Nabokov had an interesting idea. He said that instead of trying to read lots of books, writers should choose six books and attempt to know them extremely well. I love that idea.
I'm working now toward discovering what my six are. I think another four or five years of reading and I might have a solid answer. Right now I'm considering Invisible Man, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, Catcher In The Rye, Lolita, Beloved, Old Man and the Sea, 100 Years of Solitude and Midnight's Children.
What's your best advice to new writers?
Try to make every sentence important. And read lots of Joan Didion's early nonfiction. She's a wonderful writing teacher, even for fiction writers.
Give us a sneak peek into your second book, Soul City.
Soul City will give the full view of America's most miraculous metropolis, the all-black utopia where there's speakers in the sidewalks and they play the same song throughout Soul City. Because there's no crime the mayor's sole job is to spin records for the town.
When you first get to town there's a mayoral race goin on between candidates from the Soul Music Party, the Jazz Party, and the Hiphop Nation. There are people who can fly at birth, a group of women who can live for hundreds of years because they can smell death coming and avoid him, a man who can travel to Heaven and talk to God and travel to Hell and speak with the Devil, and a family of women who love too well, that is, so well that when they choose a man, they seduce him, love him more and more, and then when their love reaches a certain degree, he explodes. It's generally considered a curse, but the curse is how the family escaped slavery generations ago.
