Q: I am proofing WRITER, since you double-spaced “The Great Man of Tomorrow in Art,” added it to ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST: OLD FOLKS AT HOME, and changed the name to WRITER.
A: Yes?
Q: You could call it ANTI-WRITER.
A: In 1985, Anthony Burgess said the future holds “work and television.”
WRITER is a book that asks, “What kind of work? What kind of television?”
The hippies didn’t win. Nixon won.
The neocons won.
Andrew Keen says the Internet is destroying our culture.
I say the neocons have driven writers to the Internet like drought drives a fish upstream.
WRITER details that process. Over four decades.
The writer, for better or worse, c’est moi.
I am what a writer is now.
The false writers are television personalities, professors of writing in a university, celebrities, two of Oprah’s favorite celebrities are Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou.
What is your platform?
My platform is I don’t have a platform. I was excluded. For writing about writing.
You don’t tell tales out of school. You don’t air dirty linen.
I did an anthropology of anthropology in graduate school.
Just about the time of “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders.” When Nixon got in and cut Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society money off.
40 years of writing.
Or 39 years.
Q: In August.
A: That’s right. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.
My book is testimony. A survivor account. I survived belles-lettres turning into the book industry. The book business. Writing is a business.
Creative Writing programs are vocational schools, or professional schools, like medicine, the law, or dentistry. Pet veterinarians. Plastic surgeons.
I need something for the pain, doctor. I need something to sleep.
I need the Beatles songbook. I need the bones of the Elephant Man.
I need Michael Jackson and Jane Fonda, good old Hanoi Jane, keeping abreast of the trends. Getting religion in a colored church.
Thank you, Jesus. She published Souls Grown Deep. African-American Vernacular Art of the South.