Well Said: on writing in community

Poet Nikky Finney on writing in community:

You know, it’s so funny, growing up in a small town, going to a very small college, I have never in my life had a creative writing class as a student.  Never.  They weren’t offered.  That was a luxury.  I had to find my way to words by way of being a bookworm, by way of saying there is something here I want to write and by permission from the community itself.  I remember going to the tiny little Carnegie library in Sumter with my mom, and saying,   “Mom, there are no books by black folks.  Where are the books by black writers.”  And she was like, “Darling, I guess you’re going to have to write them.”  Ding!  Oh, where’s my pen…  We don’t give enough students that kind of permission.  “You have something to say, write it.”  “Books?  Me?”  Books were sacred.  A cover.  A title.  Oh man, I get chills now just talking about books.  A book.  “My name could be on a book?”  “Yes, but for now go wash the peas.”  Put it in the context of everything else in your life.  Don’t say, go in the corner and do that solo work and become this person that is unsociable, that is tragic and not part of the community.  No.  There’s a carpenter, there’s a jailer, there’s a lawyer, there’s a poet.  There were poets in my community who were not called poets because there were no standards.  Nobody was publishing their books but they would stand in the church and they would deliver and their oratory would be so poetic.  They would wear words like necklaces.  I knew English teachers who walked around with dictionaries instead of purses under their arms.  They would stop you in the hall and say,  “What word was that you just used?  Look that up.  What does that mean?”  My standard for a community is that there are good and bad people.  There was the drunk who came in the church doors every Sunday and everybody said,  “Oh God, there’s Thomas Dunbar, again.”  But they sat him down right there until he went to sleep.  What we do now is we try to get all the bad things out of the community.  That’s not a community.  That’s a movie.  A bad movie. 

From an interview in the University of South Carolina’s Yemassee Journal.

14. April 2009 by Mindy
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