Jacket Copy: White Flights is a meditation on whiteness in American fiction and culture from the end of the civil rights movement to the present. White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination The people in these stories are unforgettable, their lives recognizable, their voices, as written by Scott, wholly original.” (Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman) Funny, sad, and always moving, these stories explore what it means to call a place like America home when it treats you with indifference or terror. Last time He was crucified, this time drowned.īlurbworthiness: “In the midst of a renaissance of African American fiction, Rion Amilcar Scott’s stories stand at the forefront of what’s possible in this vanguard. He lived on the banks of the Cross River until one day, He filled His pockets with stones and walked into the water and sank like a crazy poet. Always with a mango, except during Easter time, when He’d pass out jellybeans to get people to stop and listen. But the time I’m talking about, He’d sit with only one or two folks. At one time He had one hundred, maybe two hundred-some say up to five hundred or even a thousand-people listening to Him. Back then there was just mud and weeds, and He’d sit there barefooted, speaking softly, preaching His word. Now there is a nice little sidewalk and flowers and a bike trail that leads into Port Yooga. Used to live on the Southside, down under the bridge, near the water. His chin held a messy salt-and-pepper beard that extended to his Adam’s apple. He was tall, lanky wore dirty brown clothes and walked with a limp he tried to disguise as a bop. Opening Lines: God is from Cross River, everyone knows that. Shattering rigid literary boundaries, Scott is “a necessary voice in American literature” (PEN Award citation), a writer whose storytelling gifts the world very much requires. Culminating with an explosive novella, these haunting stories of the denizens of Cross River serve to explore larger themes of religion, violence, and love―all told with sly humor and a dash of magical realism. Among its residents are David Sherman, a struggling musician who just happens to be God’s last son Tyrone, a ruthless PhD candidate, whose dissertation about a childhood game ignites mayhem in the neighboring, once-segregated town of Port Yooga and Jim, an all-too-obedient robot who serves his Master. Established by the leaders of America’s only successful slave revolt, the town still evokes the fierce rhythms of its founding. Jacket Copy: Deftly spinning genres of his feverish literary invention, Rion Amilcar Scott creates his very own Yoknapatawpha County with fictional Cross River, Maryland. Our panel is first thing on the first day-9 a.m., Thursday, March 28 in Room A106 of the Oregon Convention Center.Ĭan’t make it to AWP, but still want to talk about Writers With Day Jobs? Feel free to leave a comment below! Fox, Daniel Olivas, Yuvi Zalkow, and Teow Lim Goh. To hear more about day jobs and creativity, please come to the AWP panel Don’t Quit Your Day Job – Writers Outside of Academia, where I’ll be joined by these fine, fellow laboring writers: Wendy J. I’m looking forward to this year’s conference in Portland and three days of intense focus on the creative writing arts: not something I normally get back in my windowless, fluorescent-lit office. I embark on the road trip tomorrow, armed with a few good audiobooks. Fox ( If the Ice Had Held) invited me to be on a panel called Don’t Quit Your Day Job at this year’s annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), I immediately knew what I needed to do: put in for leave from my day job. A sampling of my resume: cook, soldier, newspaper editor, manager of a boat-and-RV storage yard, public affairs specialist, school janitor, journalist, video store clerk, tutor in a remedial writing program at a community college, and pizza-delivery driver.Īnd so, when Wendy J. Since graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Oregon, I have worked various jobs-some of them simultaneously-while also making time to write (and publish) a long parade of short stories, poems, essays, and two novels ( Fobbit and Brave Deeds). William Faulkner, after all, wrote As I Lay Dying in between shoveling loads of coal at the University of Mississippi power plant. That’s the beauty of the so-called day job: you can turn a wrench, or flip a burger, or type a mundane report with those hands while your novel’s plot churns and thickens in your head. And so, I constantly felt a disconnect between what I do with my hands and what’s going on in my head. For nearly all my working life, I’ve held jobs that were not, shall we say, dedicated to the study or creation of art.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |