Q: Where do you get a title like Writing the Black Novel After 9-11?

A: Sara Paretsky wrote a book called Writing in an Age of Silence. The last chapter is called "Truth, Lies, and Duct Tape," and it's about the Patriot Act.

But it's also about "The Changing Marketplace," or marketplace censorship.

To me, they go hand in hand.

What can a writer do about it?

Write books.

Books that don't get published. Because you're not Sara Paretsky.

A writer can't do now what she did. Build a career, slowly.

Win a lifetime achievement award for a lifetime of achievement.

You can have a lifetime of achievement and not sell a word to New York.

That's the award, and nobody knows about it but you, and a handful of fringe characters, marginal people, freaks and also-rans, drop-outs and losers.

In Woodstock, a generation called themselves freaks.

That was then, this is now. Now, I don't know what to make of things. Glenn Beck interviewing David Horowitz on television, or Pat Buchanan appearing morning, noon, and night, on television.

Q: Saul Alinsky. Lefty Trotskyites. Van Jones, Green Jobs Czar, forced to quit.

A: Nut-jobs rule.

Q: It's hard to make sense of things in a linear way. You have to see patterns. Clusters. A trend. Cause and effect are had to discern.

A: Sometimes you can do it in a novel. In fiction.

But it will be hard to find a market for it, even if you do. Perhaps especially if you do.

Q: Derek Raymond wrote black novels. Horrible novels, like I Was Dora Sanchez.

He wrote a memoir called The Hidden Files, about what effect writing black novels had on a writer.

He said when you go down into darkness you don't come back unchanged.

A: You might not come back at all.

Q: That's right. You might become unhinged. So changed by the experience that you are unable to communicate it to somebody who hasn't undergone it.

A: I call The Hidden Files a black memoir, and I report that the way I found to deal with it is to combine memoir and novel in the same book, and lapse from one to the other without a clear demarcation line, or include a third, explanatory, narrative nonfiction segment, that also does not set itself aside, you just slip in and out of it.

Q: And poems.

A: Yes, poems.

A poem is the kiss of death.

Q: So writing the black novel after 9-11 is a necessary act.

A: Yes. Politically. But also artistically. Aesthetically.

As Stewart Home says,

I want to combine critique, poetics and popular story telling. I want to combine poetics, critique and popular story telling. I want to combine poetics, popular story telling and critique.

Q: How long did it take you to prepare this lecture?

A: About 15 hours. But I'm drawing on work of the last 25 years.