Educators From The United States

"I tell them that a simple story is the best story, and that time and place is really crucial to good storytelling. Establish your stories in a specific time and place and get your characters set solidly within that framework before you let them start moving from one room to the next..."

"When I was a kid, my mother told me about the time my sister got lost at the circus in New York in Madison Square Garden. ... She said out of the throng of people, suddenly after looking for a long time, she said a cop just appeared and he was holding my sister's hand — she was a little girl. My mother never forgot that picture in her mind. We never see those stories about each other. And I think the writer who wants us to have a better life must take on the responsibility of showing us those kinds of stories."

"Me personally and professionally, I haven't been that outspoken about race and class, partly because it's in my work, but in part because I don't want to get hate mail. I'm sick of trying to talk to people. I don't think you can change people. I think people have to be forced to do the right thing, so I'm not interested in trying to change people's opinion. I can illuminate, and you can see if you like. And if you can't see it, then just go buy the next book. But I'm sorry, I'm no longer interested in trying to be nice about what is right, because that doesn't work."

"I’ve always wanted to be a writer…And I have accepted that my niche is this quiet space. I’ve never been one of those writers who says writing is the hardest job in the world. Look at the jobs my grandparents had. Can I really say a job I’m able to do in my pajamas is the hardest job in the world? This is not a quiet title. And this is not a quiet story. I was a little intimidated by claiming this title for myself. But this novel caused me to challenge myself. I feel really good about it now."

"Writing is the act of failing at something all the time. Do it with a sense of humor, and it ain’t no big deal. Life is just about falling on stage and getting up, and that’s what writing is all about, too."

"I read everything. When I say everything, I read everything: children’s literature, Y.A., science fiction, fantasy, romance — I read it all. Each genre fulfills a different need I have. Each book teaches me something."

"What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?) This is when I became a reading glutton. I loitered in the library and picked books off the shelf by random. I read a lot of British children’s literature by accident — “The Secret Garden”; “A Little Princess”; “Five Children and It”; the Narnia series, etc. — so much so that I confused American spellings and British spellings until I was in high school. I also read a ton of books about witches. If the word “witch” or the name of a witch was in the title, I read it: “The Witch Family”; “Little Witch”; “The Witch of Blackbird Pond”; and “Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth.” And finally, I found myself drawn to books about independent girls: “Harriet the Spy”; “Island of the Blue Dolphins”; “Julie of the Wolves”; “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”; “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry”; the “Pippi Longstocking” books; and the “Anne of Green Gables” series are a few. I still think about those heroines all the time. Reading about them helped me to discover the kind of person I wanted to be."

"(What books or authors have most inspired you? What books did you read while working on Ordinary Girls?) JD: Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, for starters. It felt like she was speaking to me...also, I think of Jesmyn Ward as one of the best thinkers and sentence stylists working right now."

"(What’s the last great book you read?) “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of America Capitalism,” by Edward E. Baptist. It taught me so much about slavery and how slavery enabled America to become America. Every time I left my house after reading it, I saw the world differently. I saw the legacy of human misery underpinning it all...(If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?) “The Half Has Never Been Told.” It’s an essential book for anyone who seeks to understand the America we live in now."

"When I first started writing, I was thinking of it as a book about mass incarceration, and mass incarceration is not a plot. It’s not a story. It’s not a character. I was at Harvard doing research on this subject, and I felt like I had a lot of information, but I had not yet found my story because I had to realize that I am a novelist. I’m not a sociologist. I’m not a documentarian. I’m not an ethnographer. And I found the story, actually, through eavesdropping…"

"(Which writers – novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets – working today do you admire most?) there are so many: Jacqueline Woodson; Colson Whitehead; Celeste Ng; Natalie Bakopoulos; Justin St. Germain; Molly Antopol; J. M. Tyree; Michael McGriff; Quan Barry; Kevin Young; Jericho Brown; Clint Smith; Daniel José Older; and Kima Jones are a few."

"There’s also very little room for diverse expressions of black female identity. There is a place in society for a black man who comes off as uneducated but street-smart. That is respected in a certain kind of way. And there’s also the Obama model of the black man who’s been to the Ivy League. There’s a lot of room. But I feel like with black women, when it comes to credibility, that respectability is crucial."

"She smiled a little bit. “Most of us has a desire to mind other folks’ business,” she said. “That’s the child in you, Butter, not the man.”"

"The reason that I like to use classical myths as models is because African American writers and African American stories are usually understood as occurring in some kind of vacuum — because of slavery."

"Place is important to my writing; I believe that if a reader gets a clear picture of the place where a character is from, then they can understand what motivates the character, what limits him or her…"

"I know that I could, but it feels very unnatural for me to strip my prose like that, in part because place is so important to me. I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and tell stories here in the South, they use a lot of figurative language. The stories that I heard when I was growing up, and the stories that I read, taught me to use the kind of language that I do. It's hard for me to work against that when I am writing."

"But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It’s tiring."

"So I kept pulling my punches. And later I realised that was a mistake. Life doesn’t spare the kind of people who I write about, so I felt like it would be dishonest to spare my characters in that way."

"All of these characters are trying to figure out the extent to which they are allowed to be self-interested in the face of this larger cultural crisis…In many ways, it is a question of modern African-American life. What is the balance between your desires and your responsibilities?..."

"(Any favorite Mississippi or Louisiana authors you’d like to recommend?) There are so many: Ernest Gaines, Natasha Trethewey, Donna Tartt, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker and Robert Olen Butler are just a few I love."

"I think you can’t talk about Puerto Rico without saying the colony of Puerto Rico and the colony of the United States. What is the purpose of having a colony? Historically, you own property or you own a colony because you exploit it. That’s not a benevolent relationship and it has not been a benevolent relationship historically, so that the United States still owning a colony in 2016 is horrific. The exploitation by the United States of Puerto Rico is horrific, and therefore the financial condition that Puerto Rico finds itself in is horrific. It’s a direct result of being a colony of the United States."

"The center has been having cultural exchanges with Cuba since my first trip in 1979. I went when the Russians were still there. (Laughs.) We’ve been having cultural exchanges, bringing musical groups, bringing scholars, writers, exhibitions, so it’s been an ongoing exchange with Cuba, because Cuba has been very influential in the Puerto Rican community, and the Puerto Rican community has been very influential in Cuba."

"Bharati Mukherjee once said that every immigrant must feel powerful because he or she can reinvent one's own past. We see this happen all the time it is a unique opportunity to gain some kind of self-confidence or a better self-image. So in a sense, we are reinventing our own vision and reinventing our past."

"I think without question there’s room for progress. Probably the question you asked was there with Rita Moreno when she did “West Side Story.” I don’t think the question would have been very much different than the questions being asked of Lin-Manuel. The fact that these events happen 40 or 50 years apart and the conversation is a recurring conversation as to being the first, right, in 2016, speaks to the lack of parity, the lack of equity, the lack of access. Every time there is a small breakthrough, it’s seen as, that’s phenomenal, when it should be part of our lives to have equity, to have inclusion, to have diversity in the workplace – and maybe have equal access to resources."

"I think the biggest challenge for people is to understand still that we are result of 500 years of enslavement. And that the process of education has been one to erase us. And it can erase you intellectually and convince you that you don’t exist. So it doesn’t matter the color you are phenotypically, you don’t see yourself. And the challenge is for us to see ourselves as rooted in one experience…"

"my true material is immigration. In other words, transformation not preservation."

"Writers (especially American writers, weaned on the luxury of affluence and freedom) often disavow the notion of a "literary duty" or "political consciousness," citing the all-too-frequent examples of writers ruined by their shrill commitments. Glibness abounds on both sides of the argument, but finally I have to side with my "Third World" compatriots: I do have a duty, beyond telling a good story or drawing a convincing character. My duty is to give voice to continents, but also to redefine the nature of American and what makes an American. In the process, work like mine and dozens like it will open up the canon of American literature."

"My theme is the making of new Americans"

"She has been called the grande dame of diasporic Indian literature, and her relationships with the others in the group are at times complex. Two men in particular engage her attention. She wrote in 1989, "our collective experience is mirrored in the works of two magnificent writers: V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. Either-following Naipaul-we are less than fully human, pathetic trained monkeys, mimic men; or we are miraculous translations, Lamarckian mutations, single lives that have acquired new characteristics and recapitulated the entire cultural history of our genotype." Naipaul was an early model for Mukherjee, but her attitude toward him changed after she and Robert Boyers interviewed him in 1979. She spoke at length to me about the evolution of her relationship with Naipaul and his work. She continues to teach certain of his novels even while rejecting his worldview and politics. Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, is a writer whom she has greatly admired, going so far as to publish an homage to him titled "Prophet and Loss: Salman Rushdie's Migration of Souls" in the Village Voice Literary Supplement in March 1989"

"The most moving form of praise I receive from readers can be summed up in three words: I never knew. Meaning, I see these people (call them Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese) around me all the time and I never knew they had an inner life."

"I have been blessed with an enormity of material. I can be Chekhovian and Tolstoyan-with melancholy and philosophical perspectives on the breaking of hearts as well as the fall of civilizations-and I can be a brash and raucous homesteader, Huck Finn and Woman Warrior, on the unclaimed plains of American literature."

"Literature can help bring about change of hearts and minds and then put pressure for political, legislative change. (2007)"

"I'm amazed at how fast the interest has grown in writing in English by writers of South Asian origin, whether they're living in India, living in South Asia, or they are expatriate writers living here or immigrant American writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and me. The size of the community of such writers and the body of work produced has happened so fast. (2007)"

"I was born into a class that did not live in its native language. I was born into a city that feared its future, and trained me for emigration."

"Novelists aim for fullness of catharsis, not a political pamphlet. (1996)"

"An author focuses on a few individual characters, and hopes that a larger frisson of emotion and revelation comes across to the reader. (1996)"

"I am always amazed when reviewers or some literary critics lump all Asian American writers together as being a homogenous group. Whereas within the subcontinental group of immigrants and naturalized American citizens here, we retain our old world ethnic differences. It's the narcissism of the slightest differences, as Freud might say. (2002)"

"I am an American. I am an American writer, in the American mainstream, trying to extend it. This is a vitally important statement for me-I am not an Indian writer, not an exile, not an expatriate. I am an immigrant; my investment is in the American reality, not the Indian. I look on ghettoization-whether as a Bengali in India or as a hyphenated Indo-American in North America as a temptation to be surmounted. It took me ten painful years, from the early seventies to the early eighties, to overthrow the smothering tyranny of nostalgia. The remaining struggle for me is to make the American readership, meaning the editorial and publishing industries as well, acknowledge the same fact. (As the reception of such films as Gandhi and A Passage to India as well as The Far Pavillions and The Jewel in the Crown shows, nostalgia is a two-way street. Americans can feel nostalgic for a world they never knew.)"

"I believe that if you are literate, all literature that you expose yourself to is your heritage to claim"

"my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America. The agenda is simply stated, but in the long run revolutionary. Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar."

"Where am I going? I don't want to know too far ahead. (1996)"

"I've always been compelled by the notions of context and individuality. This interest has been expressed in different ways across my books, but I think I've been consistently fascinated the question of persons who find themselves in a context that either fits too well or doesn't fit at all, by persons who feel they exist simultaneously inside and outside of a cultural or political space. It’s no surprise that as an immigrant I've always been extra conscious of this interplay."

"I think back to particular librarians when I was in elementary and middle school. My parents were immigrants, and my mother didn’t really speak English. Basically, I was raised in the library. Those librarians and a few teachers in high school and college and even graduate school gave me not just knowledge but also encouragement and, sometimes, a reality check."

"Even though I went to Exeter and Yale, and I enjoyed all the trappings of those places, I think at the same time – and maybe it's because I'm an immigrant kid and not white – there was always this other consciousness; that is, I was conscious of everything that was going on. And I was observing. Some people just ARE, because the temperature of the water is exactly the temperature of their body…But my temperature is always off, a little bit. And I have to note it. And I always did, from a very young age. I don't know if that's my character or upbringing or both."

"It meant that anyone with a brown face in cities like Toronto, Vancouver was fair game for physical harassment as well as verbal harassment on the street. And so, you know, there were incidents every day. And I was a victim of many such incidents of not being served in stores or being roughed up by teenagers in blue jeans overalls in subway - on subway platforms or being, you know, thrown out of lobbies of fancy hotels if my white husband wasn't near me or being given secondary examination in airports or - racial profiling…"

"Almost all of western literature is about talk…There's this great line in Beckett: keep talking, you're winning. And somehow I wanted to subvert that; the need to constantly express and put your verbal and psychological stamp on everything…You don't always have to talk."

"I totally consider myself an American writer, and that has been my big battle: to get to realize that my roots as a writer are no longer, if they ever were, among Indian writers, but that I am writing about the territory about the feelings, of a new kind of pioneer here in America. I’m the first among Asian immigrants to be making this distinction between immigrant writing and expatriate writing. Most Indian writers prior to this, have still thought of themselves as Indians, and their literary inspiration, has come from India. India has been the source, and home. Whereas I’m saying, those are wonderful roots, but now my roots are here and my emotions are here in North America…"

"I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, "Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals." My protagonists are very feisty characters. And, you know, that there is no one unified story about the immigrant experience or the immigrant passage and what I hope I've done in DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS is show how fractured the responses to that whole odyssey of moving, pulling up your roots from your original country and re-rooting yourself in an adopted country is."

"One of the things that's so frustrating about it is that people who are Asian-American and who are non Asian-American assume that sometimes. And I think sometimes the implication is that “Oh, you really didn't have to create that, that was just something that you recounted.” You know, that recounted stories are much more easy and simple to write than stuff that's completely made up. And I think that's one of the things that sometimes, particularly ethnic American writers face because they write about people who look like them and then people automatically assume that it's people who are them or someone in their family…"

"I have been murdered and reborn at least three times; the very correct young woman I was trained to be, and was very happy being, is very different from the politicized, shrill, civil rights activist I was in Canada, and from the urgent writer that I have become in the last few years in the United States. I can't stop. It's a compulsive act for me. It's a kind of salvation, and the only thing that prevents me from being a Joyce Carol Oates, and I'm not talking about quality, but just that need to create, is schedule."