Conversations with John Edgar Wideman

"Fiction/facts are what the artist creates. Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up. But the writing is a way of not allowing those things to destroy you." Orally or on the page, John Edgar Wideman never seems to stray far from firsthand experience. "Writing for me is a way of opening up," he states in one of the interviews in this collection, "a way of sharing, a way of making sense of the world, and writing's very appeal is that it gives me a kind of hands-on way of coping with the very difficult business of living a life." Wideman shares the joy and pain of his life experience. The easy laughter accompanying many of these interviews shows that conversations with him can be intense and fun. This book spans thirty-five years. Wideman discusses a wide variety of topics--from postmodernism to genocide, from fatherhood to women's basketball. One of the pleasures of encountering these conversations is the glimpse they give into the workshop of the writer's mind. He is shown in the interviews to be very open about his artistic aims, techniques, and sources, whether talking about his Aunt May's storytelling or about African spirituality. The earliest piece collected here is an interview-based profile, "The Astonishing John Wideman." It appeared in Look magazine in 1963 and featured him as a ghetto-raised basketball star who had turned Rhodes scholar. Wideman's fulfillment of his early promise is now an established fact: He is an award-winning novelist, a university professor, a social and cultural critic, a political activist, and a MacArthur "Genius" Fellow. To date, he is the author of thirteen critically acclaimed books, including The Homewood Trilogy, Brothers and Keepers, Philadelphia Fire, Fever, Fatheralong, and The Cattle Killing. Bonnie TuSmith is an associate professor of English at Northeastern University.