On John Hatch

On John Hatch and Self-Published Fiction



Mississippi Swamp .Chicago: 2nd Sight Books, 2001.



Africa, Love.  Berkeley: 2ndsightbooks.com, 2002



Love in Times of Outrage. Berkeley: 2ndsightbooks.com, 2007.



In the realm of African American fiction, self-publishing seems to have become more commonplace  than it was fifty years ago.  Back in the day, many writers who simply had to have a book used vanity presses to put their stories between covers.   Companies were willing to capitalize on misdirected  vanity.  But among those who rushed to be in print, there were probably some gifted  writers whose impatience led to invisibility.  The Project on the History of Black Writing has archived a substantial amount of self-published work, and scholars may discover some forgotten gems in the archives.  One hopes the self-publishers of now will be wiser than their ancestors.

John Hatch is an ancestor, and there is a lesson before publishing self to be learned from the fate of his three novels.  The lesson is a five-letter word: CRAFT.

On April 6, 2002, wrote to Hatch

After the pleasure of conversations with  you about African American history and literature at the Natchez Literary and Cinema  Celebration, I wish to tell you that the Department of English at Tougaloo College was quite pleased with your reading from Mississippi Swamp and sharing  the history of the book's origins with our students in September 2001.  Visits such as yours help students to understand that writers are not reclusive people but rather gifted people who take an uncommon interest in the drama of everyday life and in the history of place.  Educating students about the importance of history, especially as it is incorporated in such a novel as Mississippi Swamp, is very necessary.  The bane of the twenty -first century seems to be a certain cultural amnesia induced by postmodernism.

When Hatch sent me a review copy of Africa, Love , I wrote a longish blurb for his dust jacket:

John Hatch's "New Africa Chronicles" is an ambitious  and necessary enterprise, a project of creative remembering to minimize the damage of cultural amnesia.  Mississippi Swamp, the first volume of the trilogy, sketched the determination and passion of some Africans in Mississippi to found "maroon spaces " and to resist enslaving temptations  during and after Reconstruction.  Africa, Love continues  that story, focusing in finer detail on characters and the dynamics of change in late nineteenth-century Mississippi culture.  Hatch, like Julie Dash  in Daughters  of the Dust immerse readers in the deep structures of African American and Southern histories; he uses the power of oral tradition, of story that trumps genre, to help us rediscover, rescue, and revere the humanity and primal strengths of our ancestors.  Hatch's narratives help us all to remember that we must not forget.

My hyperbole had a purpose. When I detect innate talent in a writer,  I urge the writer to take talent , sensibility, and perspective to a higher level of craft. Often the hyperbolic blurb exists more for the writer's benefit than for that of her or his potential readers.  That is how it should be. Critics who have a sense of literary and cultural histories should want talent to ascend progressively  and not descend into formulas that pander.



 I had hoped that Hatch would have recognized that his fiction was of middling quality at best and would have looked  to Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition,  Arna Bontemps' Black Thunder,  or John Oliver Killens' Sippi in order to yoke fact (as a special form of fiction)  and fiction (as a special form of consciousness)  more smoothly.  In Love in Times of Outrage, I sensed that Hatch had improved overall in  development of characters ; he still had problems with imagery, plot,  telling versus showing, and  writing  nuanced prose.  This is a  typical paragraph:

Discomfort had crept into their friendship, a need for something that Bohemian freedom had not satisfied.  Their brief renaissance dissipated, and details like lease of the apartment took over.  Felipe agreed to pay half the rent even though he would be away for a time.  To signal his displeasure , he departed two ay before Catherine (136)

As he wrote his third novel, Hatch would have profited greatly from being in a workshop or associating  with other writers  and certainly from reading several texts on the art of fiction.  He should not have isolated himself. Hatch was headstrong, confident that force of story was more important  than massaging language.  Did he learn so little from Angela Jackson's being the story consultant for Africa, Love?  Hatch wished, I suppose, to be totally independent, to not count himself as a citizen of literary community, to reject constructive criticism from anywhere  . Thus, Hatch distanced himself from the birthright of tradition.  I guess he became bitter.  Perhaps he stopped writing fiction, stopped broadcasting his vision of Mississippi's past and future. Perhaps the discipline of craft might have saved him from despair. Perhaps the self-publishers of now will get a message.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.     December 8, 2019