(Jodi Angel, Skip Horack, Christian Kiefer, Bich Minh Nguyen, Luis Urrea) As fiction writers, we often feel pressure to write inside the confines of our own experience, as defined by our ethnic identity, gender, sexual orientation, economic class, and so on. This panel explores the edges and interstices of that pressure. In what contexts is it acceptable to write outside such confines? In what contexts is it not? What does "diversity" mean when creating a fictional world? As writers, who has cultural permission to press past the confines of one's own identity?

Published Date: June 29, 2016

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2016 A W P conference in Los Angeles. The recording features Jody Angel, skip Ric, Christian Kier, Bickman Nen, and Luis Ora. You will now hear Christian Keifer provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:33):

Thanks for coming. The dangerous joy of riding outside your ethnicity, gender, orientation, age, et cetera. I think there's a longer title than that. Thanks for coming. This is the point at a w p where I've been screaming at people at bars all night and my voice is shut and I'm hung over and I have a headache and I don't even drink alcohol, so I have a headache from Diet Coke, which is the worst. My name is Christian Kiefer. I'm a novelist, a straight white, cisgendered male novelist who writes about straight, white, cisgendered male things. I wanted to put together a panel because of a little story I'm going to tell you, and the story is that maybe three years ago I met a young African-American novelist and we sort of hit it off and maybe a year later he emailed me and he said, Hey Christian, I'm involved in this internet startup.

Speaker 2 (01:31):

It's a magazine focused on African-American culture who wondered if you would write us a piece of short fiction and all the characters should be black and it should have something to do with space because my first novel was about an astronaut and I wrote 'em back and I said, Keenan, you remember I'm white, right? And he said, yeah, we don't care about that. We just want good fiction. I said, man, I don't know if I'm willing to do that. I don't really do that. I realized in that moment that I was really sensitive about crossing that line and the presumptuousness of crossing that line. He said, we'll pay you a thousand dollars, and I said, I'll do it.

Speaker 2 (02:16):

But I really struggled with it in my head for a long time and then when I finally sat down to write it, it was a wonderful experience for me and I got a good story out of it and never got paid. So maybe I only thought it was a good story actually, and it just really put me in mind of this issue and this issue, as you know from Twitter and Facebook and Lit Hub and everywhere else, this is a really hot issue right now. Who gets to cross those lines and who is permitted to cross those lines and who gives us permission to cross those lines? Off the top of my head, a list I was thinking about yesterday, Gustav Flo, Madam Boveri, Leo Kazu, Usha Gurus Remains of the Day, Perles Bucks, the Good Earth TC Boyle Tortilla Curtain, Arthur Golding's, memoirs of a Geisha.

Speaker 2 (03:08):

I know how you hate that book. I did. Adam Johnson, orphan Masters son and Bill Chang's Southern Cross, the Dog. These are all writers who cross to various degrees outside of their normal box. This is a really full panel. We kind of freaked out a little bit, so what I thought we would do, I am a big fan of the audience, part of the panels, so I'm going to introduce our panelists. I'm going to ask them to talk briefly about their relationship to their own box, their own ethnic gender orientation, and then we're hopefully going to open it right up to audience questions and we can have a discussion that way. On my far left, skip Hoak is the author of the novel, the other Joseph, and the Story Collection of the Southern Cross. In the context of this panel discussion, I was particularly interested in Skip's second novel, the Eden Hunter, the story of an escaped African pygmy slave.

Speaker 2 (04:05):

And as you can tell, he's no pygmy. He's very tall. Skip's work has appeared in Oxford America. That was a terrible joke. I'm sorry. Skip's work has appeared in Oxford American Epic, the Southern Review Narrative Magazine and elsewhere. He is a former Jones lecturer at Stanford University where he was also a Wallace Stegner fellow native of Louisiana. AK is an assistant professor at Florida State Vic Min Nen, we can call her. Beth is the author of three books all with Viking Penguin. Her novel Short Girls was an American Book award winner in fiction and a library journal Best Book of the Year, stealing Buddhist's Dinner. A memoir received the Pen Jarred award from the Pan-American Center and was the Chicago Tribune Best Book of the year. Best work has also appeared in publications including the New York Times and the Found Magazine anthology. Her most recent novel is Pioneer Girl, the story of a Vietnamese-American academic obsessed with a little house on the prairie books of Laura ELLs Wilder, which is great.

Speaker 2 (05:03):

Both those books really great on my right, Jodi Angels first collection of short stories. History of Vegas was published in 2005 and was named as a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, as well as a Los Angeles Times book review Discovery. Her second, you Only Get Letters from Jail, was published by Tin House in 2013 of that book. The New York Times wrote that according to her bio in the back of the book, Ms. Angel grew up in a family of girls in this accomplished moving collection of stories about boys, she proves the uselessness of the old dictum that you should write what you know. And then down at the end, this miscreant the man n p r called the literary Badass and a master storyteller with a rock and roll heart. How much did you pay them for that stuff right there? Luis Alberto Urea is the author of 16 books of poetry, nonfiction and fiction and has used his dual culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph.

Speaker 2 (06:06):

The 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and a member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame. Louise was born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American mother and is most recognized as a border writer though he says I'm more interested in Bridges, not Borders. He's author of the Water Museum, a current finalist for the 2015 Penn Faulkner Award, devil's Highway into the beautiful North and the Hummingbird's daughter, a novel about the life of his great aunt Terra Cita, a half Indian mystic, spiritual figure and healer. Luis lives with his family in Naperville, Illinois where he's a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois Chicago. That's the panel I made bitches. What's up

Speaker 3 (06:54):

Before

Speaker 2 (07:00):

God damn, feel like I should just drop the mic like Kanye and walk off right now.

Speaker 3 (07:09):

Skip,

Speaker 2 (07:09):

Do you want to lead the charge and let us know a little bit about where you're coming from? I love to follow

Speaker 3 (07:14):

You.

Speaker 4 (07:16):

Thank you all so much for coming. I'm sorry I'm losing my voice as well.

Speaker 4 (07:20):

Like everyone up here, I'm sure, and I suppose most of you writers in the audience, my fiction contains many, many characters who are quite different from me in any number of ways, race, gender, age, on and on. But I think one of the reasons, I guess you admitted it as much, perhaps the main reason they were kind enough to ask me to be here on this panel is because my first novel is written from the point of view of an indigenous pygmy tribesman who's kidnapped from Central Africa in the 18 hundreds, then brought to America as a slave. And I suppose that's a pretty extreme example of this, writing outside the confines of your own experience, discussion, and so a novel written by a white American from the perspective of an African man who lived 200 years ago, why did I think that was a good idea or okay, even?

Speaker 3 (08:10):

Well, I

Speaker 4 (08:10):

Suppose really one of the main points I'd like to make this afternoon is that as fiction writers, pretty much by definition we have to write from the perspective of folks who are not simply fictionalized versions of ourselves, gender, race, age, everything. So just as a practical matter, if writers were never allowed to step outside of themselves so to speak, then I think we would very quickly run out of things to write about.

Speaker 4 (08:36):

But let's put practicalities aside for a moment and just talk about the ethics of the matter because I think that's probably the bigger question. And ethics is definitely not something I can claim to be an expert in, but I try and I will say in my opinion, the desire and the attempt, the struggle to think and perceive as others however different than myself might when done responsibly and empathetically and not cynically or sloppily or exploit, how can that be anything less than an act of respect, right? Something worth celebrating. And to do that effectively requires empathy. And one thing I love about writing and teaching writing for that matter is that it develops empathy and as does reading widely for that matter. So I think one of the things that first drew me to writing fiction even as a little kid was that it gave me the opportunity, the gift really to imagine what other people's lives were like and to put myself in other people's shoes.

Speaker 4 (09:38):

And again, I feel as if that's an act of respect. So to say, I'm really interested in how you experienced the world and I'm going to try and understand how you see life. There's this great quote I came upon from the writer, Rebecca West, and she said that feminism is the radical notion that women are people and to sort of extend that, yes, people are people, and I totally agree with the sentiment that at the end of the day, our similarities are greater than our differences as members of this human family and as a writer, if I allow the fact that someone is distinct from me in certain ways or certain aspects to prevent me from trying to understand what their life is like on the page, I'm sort of rejecting them as a human being in a way. And that of course, I think seems wrong or it should sound wrong.

Speaker 4 (10:27):

So all of that's pretty to say the sort of humanist notion, but that our similarities are greater in our differences, but there are indeed differences that must be represented and appreciated and an act of respect are not the sort of road to exploitation and appropriation is often paved with good intentions and we've seen examples of this, but it's the duty of this writer, I think, to do his or her level best to make sure that those differences are valued and reflected. And when writers fall short of that, then I think readers have every right to call them on it.

Speaker 4 (11:06):

Basically, it's only an act of respect if in creating those fictional characters you give them the respect they deserve. So sure there will be commonalities between you and all of your characters as people. Most of us have the same base level, hopes, fears, and dreams. But the other part of the equation is acknowledging and understanding how that character is different from you as the writer and honoring that on the page as well. And it's that second part that makes it so important for writers, I think to be students of life and of people and not to insulate themselves and from the world and sort of all of its wonderful diversity or their work for them. I'm going to cheat a little bit because Claudia Rankin gave this very thoughtful keynote speech and I thought she said some things that were really sort of on point in this.

Speaker 4 (11:53):

So I guess to sort of bolster my own talk by just using her brilliant words, but also to make sure that maybe they're heard a second time, there was some things I wanted to share. So in the internet this morning, read it if you have in New York magazine, or maybe it was vulture.com or something, had an article about her speech, and there's a passage from that article and from Rankin speech that seems particularly applicable. So the article reads, they're talking about the talk on Thursday night, sort of like a Russian nesting to hold. Rankin went on to offer an example of what some of you white people could do to at least make race acknowledgement part of their worldview. She read a poem by the white poet Jonah Wiener. Weiner cloak about a childhood summer day and then his own lengthy revision inspired by Rankin, which reinstated a black friend he had at the time, as well as the backdrop of school busting in late seventies Trenton, New Jersey, thus turning in a amorphous elegy into a mini layered political critique.

Speaker 4 (12:51):

Then unexpectedly Rankin turned the revisionist impulse on herself, noting I thought about who wasn't represented in my own work, who I had little contact with in my own life. The answer was poor working class white people. So she wrote a poem about it called Sound and Fury, a portrait of the Trump voter as a cast aside worker, which she read to the silent audience in its entirety. Included was a litany of economic woes, foreclosure, banished, pensions, school systems, and disrepair free trade before the poem concludes with this line in twilight, this right to righteous rage doubles down the supremacy of white. In this way, Rankin then ended the talk by revising herself again, changing the last three words. Now they read in our way because racism is everyone's problem. I'll end by saying that I think in many ways writing is a conversation with the world and to conduct that conversation in an environment that lacks diversity, falsifies the conversation, I think. And so I'd say not only should writers be allowed to write outside of themselves, they should be doing it, period. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (14:19):

Thank you all for being here. It's an honor to be on this panel and thank you Christian for putting this together. Also, thank you for putting et cetera in the title because you just couldn't be bothered to finish the thought. So a part of this panel description includes the phrase, the confines of our own experience, and I've been thinking about that phrase a lot. I'm thinking about how those confines begin in childhood, which is a space where we shape the rest of our lives without realizing it. I grew up reading books by and about white people. I think most of us did. I'd be shocked if most of us did not. I read Lauren de Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy, Jane, Austin, will c John Steinbeck list goes on. I spent my childhood days lost in their books, lost in the lives and experiences of people who are nothing like me, me, the child of refugees from Vietnam growing up in the Midwest in the deep 1980s.

Speaker 5 (15:26):

Everywhere I looked, there was whiteness, the characters and books, the actors on tv, the kids at my school, the very landscape of winter. When I started writing secretly in school, my characters were always white. They lived in England and New York, the Great Plains usually in stately homes that in no way resembled my own. It never once occurred to me to write my own family's experience. It's not just that I didn't think it was possible. The idea didn't even enter my mind because every book I saw, every protagonist I knew was white. That's what I read. So that's what I wrote. My first year of college I read The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston for a class. It was the first time I'd ever read a book by an Asian American, an Asian American woman about her own experiences. It's fair to say that this changed my life.

Speaker 5 (16:20):

Then later that year, I took a fiction workshop. The first short story I turned in was about my white boyfriend's mother and how she had left her husband for a man she had met at a horse farm. In other words, there were no Asian people in this story, my professor in her critique told me that the story lacked authenticity. She said, I'm not saying you have to write what you know, but in this case you maybe should write what you know. And at first that confused me because I thought that I was very close to my boyfriend's mother, and I knew all about her romantic escapades, but my professor made it clear that I should be writing about my identity by which she meant writing about being Asian. So in my next story I did, there were lots of Asian people and she loved it, and that's how it went. I had been steeped in a culture of reading that excluded the Asian experience. Yet now the Asian experience was exactly what I was supposed to write about. Whenever I did, I got validation for it. Whenever I didn't, I got questions about authenticity and voice. And so one story about Asian immigrants led to another, which eventually led to books pleading with the publisher not to put dragons and lantern on the cover and conference panels that are almost always about ethnicity and diversity.

Speaker 6 (17:47):

Yay.

Speaker 5 (17:54):

The thing is, I picked the right person.

Speaker 5 (17:58):

The thing is though, I still know white people's experiences and I still read their words and books and see their movies and TV shows far more than I know my own family's history. Yet whenever I don't write about Asians, people still say, why? Meaning, why aren't you staying in your ethnic corner? My third book, pioneer Girl, which is about Lauren goes Wilder, and how she and her daughter Rose Wilder co-wrote those books, was a subject that was near and dear to me. The mother and daughter had a pastor's relationship and that was great material, but there are no Asian people in the little house in the Prairie books. The only way I could move forward with this novel was by using the one real life link between Asianness and the Ingles family, which is that Rose Wilder had traveled to Vietnam as a reporter during the Vietnam War. Even when I'm not in my ethnic corner, I'm in my ethnic corner, whereas white writers have been running by Asian people for years and years. Memoirs of a Geisha,

Speaker 7 (19:03):

Yay,

Speaker 5 (19:07):

Sold more than 4 million copies. I can think of at least three books of fiction about Asians written by white people that have won polled surprises. It is often said in creative writing classrooms that writers should feel free to write ethnic voices or other voices so long as they do their research. I hear this a lot, but what exactly is meant by research? Does reading a few books and traveling for a little while and doing some heavy Googling give us permission to write a voice or perspective outside our own. It seems to me that this anxiety about writing outside ourselves has been framed by and for the white writer's experience. After all, a white person writing the voice or perspective of a person of color is not the same as a person of color. Writing the voice or perspective of a white person, people of color in America know the white experience because that is the foundation of our educational system and media.

Speaker 5 (20:00):

We are surrounded by it. We are immersed in it. White people are rarely obligated to immerse themselves in the experiences of people of color, and they may choose to. And that choice itself is an act of privilege, but they do not have to. Writers of color, I would wager, don't have much of a problem writing white characters because they have spent a lifetime doing their research. The problem is getting those works published and read. I think of a brilliant recent essay by Jenny Zang called They Pretend to Be Us while Pretending We Don't Exist, in which she discusses how white people quote, want to try on my otherness to advance their value in the literary marketplace. But I don't think they want to grow up as an immigrant in the United States. I don't think they want to experience racism and misogyny on a micro and macro level be made to feel perpetually foreign no matter how long they've lived here.

Speaker 5 (20:54):

So I am not saying that we should not write outside our own perspectives and experiences. Of course, we have to take this risk. That's what we do as writers. But I am questioning the reasons and motivations for doing so and how those results are received by publishers and beaters. I'm questioning how often free passes and accolades are given to white writers who do this while writers of color are asked to explore the confines of their ethnic corners. If we want some measure of equity or anything like it, we have to examine these issues of motivation and publishing and how ideas of craft and aesthetics are also caught up in them. Before we could even start with this thing called research, thank you,

Speaker 8 (21:58):

Luis and I have voted that we are speaking outside the box and we're not going to the podium.

Speaker 9 (22:05):

We do what we want.

Speaker 8 (22:06):

This side of the table's different. So my name is Jody Angel, and in 2013 I published a book of short stories called You Only Get Letters From Jail. That was written from the point of view of all teenage boy narrators. And apparently my motivation in doing so was so that I could constantly answer the question, why did you do that?

Speaker 8 (22:33):

And I have given many flippant answers in response to that question. And it's a good question because I cannot articulate the motivating force other than to say that when I was younger, I read Wally Lamb, she's come undone. Is Wally Lamb here? I think he was at the Marriot Bar last night. He didn't have his name tag on, but I thought he was a poet. He did not just write from the female point of view, he embodied that female character. He did not see the world through her eyes. He felt the world through her heart. And I was amazed by the transformation that he made in writing that narrator. And I internalized that for a long, long time. And when I was six years old, I lived in a suburb of a very small town, and if there is a such thing as a suburb of a small town, but the houses were new and the streets were new, they had new names and it was undeveloped and there was a lot of dirt and there were a lot of streets that dead ended.

Speaker 8 (23:48):

And all my friends were boys. There were a lot of boys that lived in the neighborhood. And I would ride my bike with the boys. And so we'd ride bikes around and we'd go on these dirt hills and it was summertime and I'd wear cutoffs and be barefoot just like them. And they rode their bikes with their shirts off. And I took my shirt off too and rode my bike with no shirt on. And I was six years old and my mother said, you can't ride your bike with no shirt on. And I didn't understand why I couldn't ride my bike with no shirt on when all my friends rode their bikes with no shirts on. There was a wonderful feeling of that air on your skin. And I thought, why do they get to do that? And I don't. And so I internalized that feeling too. And what I wanted to do ultimately was not see the world through the boys' eyes, but feel the world through their heart. And so I never forgot that feeling of being six on that bicycle and not understanding why I couldn't have my shirt off too. So I wanted to write a collection where I could take my shirt off. And so that's what I did.

Speaker 10 (25:09):

Take your shirt off, Luis. Okay.

Speaker 10 (25:14):

When I started this Los Angeles Tijuana in the house, I'll tell you what that freaking box feels like a body bag to me. It's stretchy and bendy. Man, it's hard to get out of. When I was born in Tijuana, Spanish was my first language. And the first box I was white. But in Mexico, they thought that was kind of amusing. I'd go to the tortilla and they would get me free tortillas all the time. They'd be like, tortilla. I'd be like, yeah, I was seven. And I was like, yeah, baby, I'll take it to. And then we moved to San Diego, we went to Barrio Logan Juan's Barrio. And all of a sudden that was a different box because I came out of Tijuana talking Tijuana. A lot of my brothers still got the Tijuana accent. So I was talking like that, okay? But I was white like an Irish boy.

Speaker 10 (26:09):

And I like to say that I was the one man wave of social justice because every warring ethnicity saw me coming and said, let's kick his ass. And I would stay home and I would read. But there were no Mexican books really available, Carman comic books if those of Mexico. And I used to say to people, my little apartment was divided, my mother was American, never learned Spanish. So she called me Louis. My father was super Mexicano. He called me Cabron and you'd cross from the US through the border into the living room, which was Mexico. And I liked to read. And my father saw me slipping away. He saw me gringo flying. So he was trying to find something I liked to read, and he was trying to find me something to read in Spanish. And Tijuana, not well known for bookstores, but he found a book in Spanish, which was the Iliad and the Odyssey translated. And my poor dad, I don't know any of you had Mexican dads, you'll recognize this. He always smoked pal Mels. So you had his pal. Melanie came home one day and he had the book. He said, Miko like this. Read it in the original Spanish.

Speaker 10 (27:34):

And then we moved to a white working class suburb, which we were the first mixed family there. And then it had nothing to do with being white. We were all white. But I found out I was a greaser wetback. I was like, I'm a what? Greaser. Wetback. I had never heard that stuff before. And all of a sudden, everybody, I loved, everybody I worshiped, everybody I revered was crap. Tijuana was a filth hole of prostitution. Mexican smoke, horse crap, cigarettes. Did you know that they cooked dogs? I was like, what? It was the most shocking thing that ever happened to me. And now I realize that I suddenly veered over into mom's column. All of a sudden Tijuana started fading away. And then I was like, hello, how are you? Lovely to see you dear boy. It was a survival thing. And you know mean you're Angel knows many of you. I grew up in San Diego in the time when there was nothing Latino available. The only Latino author I ever thought had ever existed was Cervantes. And they told us there was this book called Donkey Hodi, and I thought it was about a donkey named Hodi, a kid's book. And off I go to college. And college was the miracle. When suddenly I get to college and they're talking about this che, I was like, what? Who?

Speaker 10 (29:09):

Ententes? It was this miracle. And at the end of college I discovered Chicanos, what? We actually get to write this because I had notebooks full of stuff I thought nobody would ever see. I didn't think we got to write this stuff. Now during that transit, I just want to throw in there, during my high school years, the miracle of David Bowie happened all of a sudden, right? God bless David Bowie. But all of a sudden my father who was already worried about me, was like, what is the deal with this guy? He's wearing necklaces and he's got hair and his best friend's gay. He didn't know what was happening to me. So I feel like this frigging Vox never stops. No matter where you go, it's not going to stop. You don't have the right body shape. Oh, you don't have the right facial hair.

Speaker 10 (30:06):

Oh, got the wrong haircut. Oh, too bad about your bust size. Oh, your butt's too big. No, it's too small. Oh, you can't wear skinny jeans. I think just shut up. And now we're in the era of the huge huge wall that's coming that Mexicans are going to pay for. Just shut up. And the thing I want to say a little bit about cultural appropriation stuff, which is something that's really important to me. I come from a world where lots of people think it's okay to jet into the border, spend a day or two, and then write a book as experts about those funky little brown people doing weird brown shit. And I hate it. And I call it my day at the zoo writing. I'm very against it. And some people who are real practitioners of border writing have no concept really of the culture and the love and the beauty and my grandma that's there.

Speaker 10 (30:59):

And I found to my great shock that in the re family, we are Apaches, Yaki, Mayos, Chinese, the Wong African-Americans, we have Filipino relatives, gay nephews, transgendered people. My aunt who was Mexico's national women's bowling champion, came out in 1963, lived her whole life with her partner. And my family to this day are like, isn't it sweet that the girls took care of each other until a man came along? No, no. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So when it was time to do hummingbird's daughter, I was really worried. I thought, here's a woman's story. My great aunt known as the saint of Korra, known as the Queen of the Yakes, a medicine woman, mother of the Mexican Revolution. And just to show you how hard this issue is sometimes for us, I think I went to Linda Hogan, you know Linda Hogan. And I sat with her for two hours and I told her the entire story of this woman's life.

Speaker 10 (32:09):

I had already been researching her for 10 years, and she said, this is great. I can't wait till you write this. And I said, well, I was going to ask you something. And she said, what? I said, can you write it? And she said, why should I write it? And I said, well, it's a woman's story. She said, it's your woman, it's your responsibility. And I said, ah, it's indigenous. And she said, well, what's the problem with an indigenous story? And I said, well, Linda, it's my western mind. I don't want to be going in there and doing some new age. And she said this with this gesture, and I pass this on to you. I know you're wrestling with these issues too. She said, honey, the western mind is a fever. It will pass.

Speaker 2 (32:58):

So I have some canned questions, but I'm happy to just get right to your questions right now. Anybody? Is anybody burning? Yeah, go ahead, please.

Speaker 11 (33:14):

Research. You have any suggestions about how to go about that? Obviously not.

Speaker 2 (33:25):

So the question is about research and how to do research authentically in a way that deals with, I think what Skip said about respect and honoring the differences. Anybody want to take that one, Luis?

Speaker 10 (33:40):

I can just speak a little bit from my experience on that book. I mentioned hummingbird's daughter, it took 20 years to research it. So I think the responsibility of research goes beyond research. And my blessing was that once I kind of got Linda's blessing and I was working with Vine Deloria Jr. And Vine kind of gave his blessing that more and more teachers came. And halfway through the book, I moved to the Sonoran Desert to be near the Yaki people. They had been mishandled by Guan and so forth. And lo and behold, small miracles, my cousin that I'd never met was a full medicine woman. And when she started teaching me and kicking me around, they kicked me around for 10 years. So I had to do a lot of things I never thought I would do, still not knowing how to tell that story and thought I was collecting the information for my family.

Speaker 10 (34:34):

We had grown up hearing about her, and that's when it came to life on its own. So to me, it was more a question of living it. Now I'm working on a story about the Red Cross, which is engaged in a lot of research material, but we have a woman who was a World War II hero and the last of this group who's 98 years old, and we sit with her many, many hours. So there's a difference between I think grabbing a story and pinning it to a board like a Beatle and going and trying to look in each other's eyes and cry together and eat together and walk together and try to listen. My cousin when I voiced the same complaint that I gave to Linda Hogan and I said, I just don't think I can get this stuff right about women's medicine. And she said, you goddamn men, if you want to know something about women, why don't you ask? And I thought, oh, really? And then she said, and when we talk, why don't you listen? So that's all I can say about

Speaker 4 (35:36):

It. Can I just jump in? That's great advice. And maybe another bit of practical advice is identifying when you're working on the novel, who is the readers that terrify you the most as far as the ones that are going to know if you're failing in authenticity or things like that? I mean, I guess an example of my last book had a Navy Seal veteran character in it. Believe it or not, I'm not a Navy Seal, but I have a cousin who is, and I wanted to get it as right as I could. So obviously I did what research I could in creating the draft, but no novel is going to emerge fully formed in the first draft. And so when I had it reading well and clean, I gave it to him and I thought I'd nailed everything. And of course you find out very quickly that the seals call helicopters helos and not choppers, et cetera, these types of things.

Speaker 4 (36:28):

But those are great details and things that you kind of, so just always be in the lookout for those people, the early readers. I mean, don't waste their time by giving it to 'em in the very early stages, but after you've done a lot of work on your own, you've sort of earned the right to whatever that means, to earn the right to kind of ask that of them, of their time. I've actually found in all these instances, they've kind of enjoyed the experience, like me being interested in what they do and in their lives again, and sort of collaborating in some ways.

Speaker 5 (36:59):

I would just say that not all research is the same. And to me, if you're researching someone's job or that's important to get all the facts, it's completely different to research someone's ethnicity, family history, that is a totally different thing. And I'll give you sort of a personal example, which is that a couple of years ago, somebody came to my parents and wanted to interview my parents for research purposes because this person was writing a nonfiction book about what happened to Vietnamese refugees. And I asked this person, I was like, why are you writing this book? This was a white person. I said, what is your reason for doing this? And he didn't really have one. He thought it was just an interesting subject. He thought that people would want to hear about it. And the more I talked to him and the more it deceived to me, he just thought it was a sellable subject.

Speaker 5 (37:58):

And I think marketing and commerce, those are not good reasons. Those are not good sources of motivation. So I was like, to my parents, go ahead and talk to them, but I'm going to give that guy the side eye. And the whole time I was like, and my parents talked to him because they'll talk to anybody. But the whole time I'm thinking to myself, that's exactly what I don't want to do. And because I want to examine my motivations for doing something, not because I think it's just a good story, there is a reason we're drawn to things. And if we don't really examine those first and figure out what our personal stake is in it, then we're just going to

Speaker 12 (38:34):

Be writing on the surface.

Speaker 2 (38:38):

Yes, go ahead.

Speaker 12 (38:39):

I have a question for you, skip, when you did write this book from the perspective of African years ago, and obviously you white male or you,

Speaker 2 (38:56):

So the question is about the reception of Skip's novel, particularly in relation to his use of race.

Speaker 4 (39:02):

Yeah, I heard a writer one time say somebody used the word brave in connection with writing, and he said, fighter pilots and coal miners are brave, and we're writing. But no, actually, I mean, I don't know what people said outside of my earshot, but I didn't experience any huge blowback. But it's also true, I did not win the Pulitzer Prize for this book or anything. I don't know that it was on the cultural radar in the way that maybe would've earned that kind of analysis or criticism. So I don't know the answer to that. I don't know what drew me to this story in the first place. I guess it would've been impossible to write about it if I would've been overly concerned about the critic staring on my shoulder. I can't write anything that way. And I just knew it's an answer everybody has to answer for themselves is like, why are you doing this?

Speaker 4 (39:54):

And are you doing it for the right reasons? And I was comfortable with why I was doing it. I was really fascinated by this character, and it was an opportunity as somebody who writes about the south a lot, I liked the idea of, and writes about nature a lot of taking somebody from a culture who lives live in probably a closer contact with the environment than any culture that's ever existed and dropping them into a landscape that was very dear to me, the sort of river bottoms and swamplands of the American south, and just sort of seeing what came from that. I think for any character that I write, even ones that are extremely different from me, I know, and it's usually my secret. There's some point of connection that I have with that character that I can really, really relate to, and I start with that point of connection and just then try and build from there and explore outward. But yeah, that's like a long sort of a weird rambling answer, but nobody's burned me at the stake yet, I guess is the

Speaker 2 (40:50):

We'll do that. We're doing that at two 40 today, actually. That's

Speaker 4 (40:52):

Getting started. I think

Speaker 2 (40:54):

Back in that corner

Speaker 12 (40:58):

Idea of

Speaker 2 (41:03):

Totally motivated by pay all the time.

Speaker 12 (41:09):

I was wondering, when the panelists decides not to do it, what is your tipping book? When is it a bad idea? What is the bad?

Speaker 2 (41:19):

So the question is when, so I was motivated by the cash,

Speaker 2 (41:24):

But when is it a bad idea to cross the line? What is your boundary on that boundary? That's an excellent question. Who wants it? Nobody wants it. I don't know. I mean, I went to Jodi's panel yesterday essentially about writing about poverty, and I kept wondering, it felt like the line there was drawn and granted, it was the panel topic, but the line, there was very much economics. I felt like those writers might move around across various borders there, but not that economic line, right? That was a strong border for there. Would you agree with that? A strong boundary. You're not writing a book about very wealthy stockbrokers right now, are you? No, no, no. Yeah, that one. Yeah. I mean, this is interesting, and I'm also in tangent with that, and maybe further from that, Beth used the words getting a pass a couple times, Skip's book didn't win the Pulitzer Prize, but Adam Johnson's book maybe says that he gets a pass anyway, even if it gets that kind of scrutiny. So I guess what lines are you willing to cross as writers? Are we willing to cross as writers and what lines are we not?

Speaker 4 (42:48):

Yeah, I mean I think it is ultimately this sort of personal, nobody knows what's in your heart, but you and a lot of people are good at faking it, and some people have the best of intentions and are taking to task. I just like to quote other writers, but Carlos Fuentes said, a novels, a pack of lies hounding the truth. And I think if that emotional truth part is honest that you're trying to get to, then you can go to the lies, I think was when you're starting with the other thing. And there is no that maybe that's when you might, the alarms should may be going off. And I am not saying I'm perfect. I've certainly started many things and I've felt 80 pages in a hundred pages in what? There's no heat here for me. You know what I mean? And just put it away.

Speaker 2 (43:36):

This panel is a little self-serving for me, and Beth and I have talked about this, but I want to write a book about American orchardists in Northern California where I live, and it's an important part of the history of that area. And I don't want it to be from the point of view of the white orchardist next door. You know what I mean? Each of you in some ways talked about permission, like having to give yourself permission to even tell the story that you now feel entitled to tell. And for better or worse, I'm a little terrified about feeling like I have the right to tell the story that I have in my head to tell. And I'm really holding myself back hard on that. And I don't know if I just need to give that up and go on to something else. Or as a straight white male writer, I'm particularly sensitive to that. And maybe I shouldn't be, and maybe I damn well should be. There's no question at the end of that. That's just a statement. Yes. And then against the wall next, I

Speaker 12 (44:43):

Have a two part question. One is about this issue of permission and more to the point that Beth raised about what is the work that we all can do to broaden the permissions of what we expect to from different people? The issues that you raised about that?

Speaker 5 (45:05):

I don't know about giving anybody permission, I don't know about. As writers, we have to give ourselves permission very slowly. I doubt it's a conscious process, but everything begins in reading. And for us, everything begins in tons of reading. And every time I hear the word diversity, which I use all the time because I directed M F A program, and we're always talking about diversity and everyone always talks about diversity. It's an add-on word. It's a word that means we're trying to solve some kind of problem without solving the problem. If we just use the word diversity, it means that there's a norm, which is whiteness. And if we use the word diversity, then the norm seems a little bit less pervasive, but the norm is still there. And so I think the ideal would be that we don't have to have this word diversity and part of the solution, I guess to that and to what toward what you're saying is reading.

Speaker 5 (46:04):

With that in mind, I feel like a lot of times I meet people who have read books by diverse writers solely because they were assigned. And this is a subject that I've talked about with a lot of writers about how they assign this books in their classes. And that's the only time people read books by diverse authors is because they have to. When we go into a store, what are we choosing to buy? What books are we reading for fun? Not because it's supposed to be good for us, not because it's supposed to be useful for us, but because we want to. How do we get to that place where we want to read everyone's experiences, not because it's educational or because we feel guilt, but because that is what we want to do. And I guess it does begin with making the effort to look at our bookshelves and to look at our reading lists and to educate ourselves in that way and not put the burden of education on people of color.

Speaker 2 (47:07):

Let me get you over there on the wall there,

Speaker 13 (47:14):

Whitewash. I think as writers, we try to be inclusive of what our society is, and it's not people I is if we want to be inclusive but not speak for the experiences of someone take their mic, we want to amp their voices up and we're going to be writers. I mean, as writers, where do we draw the line between amping the voice of someone's experience and taking their voice away and speaking, being the white explainer, the mansplainer,

Speaker 2 (47:49):

The mansplainer mansplainer, who's man spreading right now in this room? Who's doing it? How do we, or what's the difference between amping a voice and taking the voice and speaking for and mansplaining that voice, Luis?

Speaker 10 (48:10):

Yeah, I think that's a toxic condition that we have going on, and it takes a lot of chutzpah to sort of go out and grab somebody's experience and say, yeah, that's interesting. That's cool. If you watch, for example, a lot of film, there's all this stuff happening that people, there's often a minority, super noble saint figure who with very dewy and moist eyes, looks upon the white hero and then elevates the guy up to a little bit of a godhood. And I think that's as toxic as really foul propaganda is. The question, I think is allowing a full range of humanity, good and bad. And I always tell my writing students, you're not after a career here. If you're going to come work with me, you're trying to learn a pathway, you're trying to earn some kind of a belt, get your black belt, forget being a millionaire.

Speaker 10 (49:20):

And so in that process, for me, this is a central question I think about a lot. I think it's incumbent on us to look at each person we are writing about in as full a measure as we can with failings, with no false nobilities, but also no false unless you're writing about certain political characters running for president, no false attacks on being subhuman. And that is a really important balance. And I've always felt that, for me, one of my kind of unspoken rules is if you're a third person narrator, you're sort of a movie director. If you're a first person narrator, you're a method actor. And I know what roles, I would just be cartoonish if I were trying to foist them upon people. I don't want to be Tootsie. I love to write about someone, but to try to portray that voice would feel false to me.

Speaker 10 (50:25):

So to me, it's that of when the bell is struck, does it ring for you? Does it sustain? And that's something no one can choose for you, but you and I would just say, Alexander Hamilton, look what my boy Lynn Miranda's doing out in New York. It's brilliant. And this may be the time for writers who have been marginalized to step up and boldly say, Hey, you know what, here we go. And maybe that dial is turned a little bit and some other writers will have to back off a little bit. I don't know, but that's what I think's going on.

Speaker 2 (51:04):

Hope so. Let's hope so. Yes,

Speaker 14 (51:07):

You're writing outside your open box. How much do you feel the responsibility to address how that other character is relates to the norm? You're a character that's space. You have to really talk about that. Or the black characters have a gay character.

Speaker 2 (51:32):

Well, I will say if I've got a female character in a novel who's despicable, I hate women. You understand what I'm saying? As a white male writer, if I have a woman in a book, I'm writing about women, I'm not writing about this woman character that I made up. And this is particularly true of those grotesque Amazon reviews that you get. Christian Kiefer hates women. I said, no, but I do hate that woman in that book that I wrote, that one woman, my ex-wife actually, right? Is this being recorded? It is being recorded.

Speaker 5 (52:10):

Oops. Wait. So I love this question because it's can't a person of color just be a person of color? Does that person always have to be reacting against the environment? And I agree. I think that's great. And to me, I have this kind of private theory about this, which now I'm going to make public, which is the hot Asian male theory, which is my theory is this. I was watching Magic Mike and the