Writing About Lives

Back when I lived in San Diego I developed a routine work-out schedule and pretty well bulked up working with personal trainers. After years of sedentary living – mostly sitting, reading and writing, I foolishly let it go and can I feel the difference. A few friends have had some health crises and a big splashy report came out a few days ago about how dreadful the writing life can be on your health, sort of culminated. I’ve joined New York Sports Club, which I am told has over 90 affiliates in the city. The one I joined in Harlem is spacious, new and very often emptier than you’d expect, so now I have no reason to not go.

My friend Gun took this new pic

I have been astounded at what having a blog for these last eight weeks has meant. People I have not heard from in years have told me they are reading. Journalism allowed me to write and have my work run immediately. In this creative writing bubble there have been fewer opportunities for having a relationship with readers. Blogging has been a nice way of getting my stuff back out into the world.

People have responded so favorably to the piece I wrote about my friendship with Rowena Cruz that I was almost overwhelmed by the kind comments. In fact, someone from Columbia’s School of the Arts linked it to the Our Word website, a group she was in charge of this year. I am always eager to hear what people have to say and I am not afraid to be challenged when people question my point of view, provided they leave their name so I can respond thoughtfully. I can’t respond to anonymous posts because I have no way of contacting the writer.

I am so happy people are enjoying the blog.

I haven’t even had this blog for more than two weeks and only now am I starting to see how useful it can be

Yesterday I got up to find this note from a reporter at the Pine Bluff Commercial.

“Hello — Saw your Web site and thoughts on Grady. Just wanted to let you know that the city will be marking its centennial on April 8 and a centennial celebration and all-time Grady School reunion is planned for April 28 and 29. I’m a reporter at the Pine Bluff Commercial and recently wrote a book on the history of Southeast Arkansas, including Grady. The book, “Bayou Country,” has a lot of photos from Grady, including many of blacks there in the 1920s and 1930s. A white woman by the name Cornelia Kirkley, who married W.F. “Bill” Foster, took assorted pictures of, collected recipes from and interviewed a number of blacks there at the time. Her works were put into a book entitled “Across the Horizon,” published 2006. It may include some photos of or information on some of your ancestors or family friends. The photos and book are now part of a black history display at the Arkansas History Commission in Little Rock. Her grandson-in-law works at the paper here, too. Hope you can make it down for the centennial celebration and reunion. I’ve never been to New York, but I can imagine what a vast difference there must be between Manhattan and Grady. The paper will have a story on the centennial and the book and photos in the April 8 edition. If you make it down this way, you can check out my book, which is on sale at the newspaper office. I appreciate you being devoted to your grandparents. All of mine are deceased now, and I miss them. Best of luck to you . . .”

He had apparently Googled “Grady, Arkansas” and my brief listing appeared. His note confirms for me that the remoteness of that little town is a timeless setting for my work, be they fictional or not. His book, should I get my hands on it, will help me frame my material more solidly.

Well my friends, the treatment that Cupcake Brown and I had been working on based on her best-selling book, “A Piece of Cake,” is dead.

She and I befriended each other after I wrote a story for The San Diego Union-Tribune about her journey from drug and alcoholism abuse, prostitution and the Crips, to finishing in a top spot of the University of San Francisco’s Law School in 2001. The way readers connected with that story convinced me that people love reading about one another’s lives more than the mayhem presented in daily newspapers.

A year later she and I collaborated on a book proposal which got her a reputable agent in Los Angeles and a deal with Random House’s Crown Division. She wrote her own book, I just helped with the proposal and experienced the joys and pains of the editing process with her as an early reader. Now that the book has landed on The New York Times Bestseller list and made it all the way up to #1 on the Times of London, we had hoped we could ride the wave of interest into Hollywood.

It took us months to get a first draft of the treatment done. I’m in New York. She’s three time zones away in the Bay Area. After my Columbia professor who was kind enough weigh in with a fairly harsh critique, Cup felt that his comments were so on point that neither of us had the time to get a rewrite ready in time. We were also competing against two proven sceenwriters who have been made acclaimed films. There was no point in having our names attached to a product that couldn’t compete. I respect that given her potential franchise.

The aggravating thing is if we had had more time, maybe another week, we could have implemented his changes. Her life as an author-lawyer and mine in the last leg of my Columbia University graduate school experience, did not allow us to make the deadline her agent and the producers have for the treatments. I am barely learning the ropes of the publishing business. The script business might as well be on Pluto, no longer even another planet.

Thanks to all of my friends who have been extremely supportive – especially a well-placed movie industry insider and a Columbia professor who was relentless in his critique. After hearing the news that she had decided to not submit the treatment, in an email the professor welcomed me to “the crowd with unproduced treatments and scripts.” A 20-page treatment seals our membership.

In the meantime I will be focusing my energy on getting Grace Bumbry’s book proposal done, which will take me to Europe for three weeks and getting my thesis project polished for the committee. In the next few weeks I will be reading three times in New York, leading a panel discussion of writers and coming to the final arc of my course work. No time for pity.

And just maybe if those two treatments that have been submitted by pros bomb – which could totally happen, Cupcake and I could come back roaring and be in business.

The mood of this photo, taken back when I lived in San Diego, expressing how melancholy I have been feeling lately. I’m calling it the graduate school blahs. Barely keeping up with the assignments. Barely getting out the door on time. Barely, barely, barely. This too shall pass. I need sunshine desperately.

Thanks to all of you who have commented by voice mail, email and verbally to me about my blog. A special thanks to Suzanne and Jennifer for posting comments. Once I figure out how to share them with the world, I will; if that’s possible. It’s going to take some time getting used to posting something regularly and keeping a nice mixture of visual elements in the mix.

For the last two years I have been the only black male enrolled in nonfiction at Columbia University’s creative writing program. The only one. The semester before I arrived there was one more, a fellow refugee from newspapers whom I happen to know.

At first I thought it was just Columbia because of the expensive price tag. But I’ve seen blacks in fiction and poetry my entire time here. Even at the national Associated Writing Programs conventions where thousands of academics gather, there are only a few black people present and virtually none in nonfiction. The truth is there are almost NO blacks producing mass or literary nonfiction. In journalism I found a number of blacks writers at newspapers. And with the huge nonfiction career of James Baldwin, it never occured to me that there would be such a dearth with journalism’s distant cousin.

I have been in email contact with Jewell Parker Rhodes, the author of “An African-American Guide to Writing and Publishing Nonfiction,” and she confirmed it. Her book, while it highlights a lineage of black writers who have focused on history and culture, there has not been much of a market for non-fiction by and for blacks. Rhodes book is a road map for others to follow.

In preparing to write this entry, I was pleased to find this essay by a guy by the name of Harry Dunbar, of which I will quote liberally but credit. (www.queenhyte.com/dobb/dobb_archives/dobb_01/mar_01.htm) This really nails it.

“The black male nonfiction author faces formidable problems. His presumptive audience, other black males, has the reputation of being composed of neither writers nor readers. Blacks in general are not said to constitute much of a literary market. The conventional wisdom is that to hide something from black people one need only put it in a book and label it “nonfiction.” Against these odds, the wonder is not that the black male nonfiction writer does not produce a number of New York Times bestsellers, but that he produces at all.”

“We believe that the black male nonfiction writer must see himself in the way that academic writers see themselves. He must, from the start, see that his audience is small. He must believe, however, that it is a discerning one. If he cannot see himself and his audience in this way, he might as well turn to fiction and the concocting of fantastic stories that defy reality. There is obviously a large audience, black and white, which is looking for an escape mechanism. I am reminded of the experience I had at the Book Market of the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta in 1996. I was signing my book, A Brother Like Me: A Memoir, at a table alongside that of Omar Tyree. During a lull when neither of us had anyone before us, he decided to leaf through my book. When he finished, he asked me if everything in it was true. I told him that to the best of my ability it was. While I cannot remember the exact words of his reply, I recall very distinctly that he seemed amazed at running into an author who wrote nonfiction.”

Hundreds, if not thousands of black writers are choosing to tell their stories under the guise of fiction where, though the story may be true, the names, places and incidents are completely fictionalized leaving people guessing about what really happened. Very often fiction is truly the lie that tells the truth. It is the rare bird who can write dazzling fiction and nonfiction. Good fiction amazes me with the freedom of the prose. I wish I could do it. For now I have chosen non-fiction. Or maybe it has chosen me.

But with books like Cupcake Brown’s “A Piece of Cake,” Chris Gardner’s “Pursuit of Happyness,” and Ron Stodghill’s “Redbone: Money, Malice and Murder in Atlanta,” there are signs that times are a changing. I sure hope so.

sam@writingaboutlives.com