In my 52 years I have had 2 short stories published. One was
during my senior year of college. It was called “Postcard From the Past” and it
appeared in the Bucknell Literary Magazine The
Red Wheelbarrow. The other came out
when I was in my early 40s. It was called “Floating” and it appeared in the
online literary journal called Quay
Journal.
The main character in Postcard
From the Past is a 12-year old white suburbanite boy. He is not the
narrator, but it is his point of view we are inhabiting. Floating takes the perspective of this same character twenty years
later. Both are fictionalized versions of me—a middle class white guy raised in
suburbia in the 1970s and 1980s.
I have had an easy life. That’s not to say things haven’t
gone bad sometimes, but my baseline has always been a place of security and
support and belonging. I have never questioned my value in modern American
society. In other words, I was born already on second base and I didn’t even
know it.
When I write, it is most often non-fiction and the voice is
clearly my own. Sometimes, I am inspired to write fiction. Usually the people I
write about are white middle class people very much like me and my family and
friends. But every once in a great while
a different voice will come out of my head and onto the page.
Sometimes it is a woman, telling her story. One time, the story
was from the perspective of a Yemeni villager. Once, it was a dog. I don’t know
where the inspiration comes from when these voices spill out of my head and
onto the page. I just know that they are sometimes there and they are
insistent.
And when I do write from the perspective of a Yemeni man or
a woman who sings at funerals at a small Catholic church in Wilmington, I do
not write with a political agenda. The first draft is always a sputtering
struggle to find the right voice—the real person—who wants to come out. The
story comes first and the character walks around in my head and in the story
until they either seem real or they fade away because I couldn’t quite find out
who they wanted to be.
I read this week about a man whose poem “How-To” appeared in
The Nation. The poet is a white man. Some of the lines in his poem are in Black
Vernacular English (BVE.) Some readers were offended by this white author’s use
of BVE and he and the poetry editors of The Nation apologized for its
publication and any hurt it may have caused.
I have not read the poem. I don’t read much poetry, to be
honest. But the incident has gotten me thinking about the job of a writer. A
writer’s task is to get at the truth somehow. Sometimes that means a haiku.
Sometimes it means a memoir. Sometimes the truth is found in a novel or a short
story. The characters who appear in all of these works have a voice and a point
of view. For me, sometimes the only way for me to know how I really feel about
something is to write it out. Ideas can kick around my head without scrutiny
for a long time.
It’s when I see them on the page in front of me that I know
if they are true or not.
And the truth of the words doesn’t necessarily depend on a
one-to-one correlation between my age/sex/gender and that of my characters.
Some of the value of reading fiction surely comes from the
opportunity to get inside the hearts and minds and lives of people other than
ourselves. We have a magical chance to become intimate with people we would
otherwise never meet. I do not want to be told what books I can read and which
characters I am allowed to get to know and which I am not.
I also don’t want to be told who I can write about and who I
can’t. That is up to me. If I do a terrible job, tell me. Rip up my story. Tell
everyone else how shitty it is and how wrong it gets everything. But don’t tell
me I can’t use a different voice. That is what writers do.
