In the key of Tougaloo


FICTION IN THE KEY OF TOUGALOO

After reading



Johnson, Charles. The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling. New York: Scribner, 2016.



I came to a tentative conclusion:  MFA programs are sexy and  dandy, but they waste money and talent that is  going nowhere.  Imagine  what would happen if a person of modest talent that could go somewhere  did give  time, while working a salary-bearing  job, to sustained study of



David Lodge, The Art of Fiction

Lance Jeffers, "The Death of the Defensive Posture"

Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel

Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction and On Moral Fiction

Richard Wright's "Blueprint for Negro Writing"

Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing

Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer

Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?

Henry James, The Art of the Novel



Said person has an equal chance of making it as a writer in the real world as much as  those who come to the door with expensive  MFA in hand.  Both have an equal chance of writing books for everyday use.  This is not the conclusion Charles Johnson, an excellent teacher,  might approve.  This is the conclusion I choose to make on the basis of my education in literary theory and criticism.



My motive is an open secret, or eventually  will become one.  I want to say a few things about "popular" writing or fiction, the flawed and under-crafted works which make space for resistance, justified anger, and James Brown payback in our tradition of black writing in the United States of America. Candice Love Jackson described that domain in Chapter 25 "From writer to reader:  black popular fiction," The Cambridge History of African American Literature, pp. 655-679. What the academic world says is dreadful and dismisses with panache is consumed by real readers in the actual world with gusto.  The thrown-away has a purpose.



In a forthcoming review essay on novels by two of my former Tougaloo students,  I'll write with cayenne pepper.  I have to protect my reputation as a Tougaloo terrorist. My former students would be disappointed if I failed to ink their fictions as I inked their undergrad papers, reminding them of their sorority with Margaret Walker and Toni Morrison in one case and with W. E. B. DuBois and Albert Murray in the other case.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            November 9, 2019




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