Novelists From New York City

"Ultimately, it’s the reader’s book. It’s about what they receive and how they interpret it. (2008)"

"(What have you seen change positively and negatively since that time especially in Af Am [African American] children’s literature?) RWG: The biggest change is being able to find African American lit for children and young people in libraries and bookstores. We’re here. We’re out on the shelves with our diverse stories. Characters don’t bear the weight of having to represent all African-Americans, or of meeting publishers’ black quota for the year. We have a presence, yet there’s still a need for even more stories and more writers to explore different genres. If you would have asked me twenty years ago about negativity in African American literature for young people, my lips would still be flapping. I would have begun with them not letting us tell our stories as we know them, and how they let people outside the race and culture write whatever they wanted and call it an African American story. That was one of my main gripes. “Why can’t I tell a story I know to be true, but ‘she’ can write this fake mess?” Ahem. I’ve calmed down over the years. My view has broadened as writing from the other side has gotten better. Truer. More and more I see that we are not a people unto our selves. We make up a good deal of the American experience, culture and expression. I feel both loss and gain. This is the way of forward movement. (2008)"

"writing is an art but it’s work. If you don’t value your work, who will? (2021)"

"I’ve addressed topics like teen pregnancy, abortion, school violence, rape, and abuse. But I think in each and every book, with the exception of No Laughter Here, the real story is the characters’ struggle with themselves. It’s always self-struggle, and no matter how intense the other subject matter, I don’t like to take that away from the character. I believe with every story there’s something within the main character that must be realized, and I like to give them the power to do that. (2015)"

"(Do you consider yourself a pioneer?) RWG: Our pioneers are Kristen Hunter, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Joyce Hansen, Mildred Taylor, Joyce Carol Thomas, Brenda Wilkinson, Virginia Hamilton, [[Julius Lester, and Walter Dean Myers. Manchild in the Promised Land is our Catcher in the Rye. These are our pioneers, while those still with us remain quite a force in young adult literature after thirty and forty years of publishing. (2008)"

"(In a note included with advance editions of the book, referring to slavery and its legacies, you wrote, “At no other time in our nation’s history have readers sought out more this examination and conversation.” Why do you think now is a particularly important moment for this reflection?) RWG: I’ve revised this answer 10 times. I have been watching the trial of the police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd. I have become that boy who asked, “Why do they hate us?” And then I have my answer and I get angry. I’m a person in my 60s who sees the present as a cycle. We fight for rights because we experience inequities and brutalities, we get rights, we move forward, and then we repeat the cycle. What is happening—the murder of and violence against people of color, the suppression of rights, the unequal access to health care—is not new. It’s part of the cycle. We need to talk openly about what is happening to people because of their race, ethnicity and gender, because the cycle continues. We see it happening before our eyes daily. Each and every one of us has to become the conscience of this country by what we say and do. People are being killed or brutalized on the basis of simply existing. We are not too far from our enslaved ancestors. We have to speak up and act up when the unconscionable is normalized. But we have to talk before there can be any reparations. We have to be unafraid to have uncomfortable conversations with an emphasis on listening. (2021)"

"It was a strange, wonderful feeling. To discover eyes upon you when you expected no one to notice you at all. (p214)"

"(What advice do you have for aspiring writers?) Write a little bit every day. I began by writing 500 words a day, but I think 25-100 words a day, every day will help a beginning writer gain confidence and a flow of thoughts and writing. Read widely! Be adventurous with your reading. Nothing helps writing like having the sound of good writing in your mind’s ear. Try new things. New foods. Visit new places. Then write about your experiences. (FAQ)"

"My intention is that the more humanity we see, the better we can judge, acknowledge, understand and even indict. There is the horror, and there is also the hope. I wouldn’t be here if not for the people who endured but also loved. I want to pass that on to the reader. (2021)"

"I enjoyed the sound of our voices following one another. Sounded like a favorite song from the radio they no longer play, so when you hear it, you remember how things were. (p144)"

""Enough people in the world trying to silence us. Girl, you better speak up.” (p238)"

"[asked what readers can expect from her book] Surprises and to challenge our own ideas of humanity. Novels are the home for irony, paradox, contradiction—all the things that make humans interesting to read and write about. (2021)"

"... the pony was not forgetful, yet ever and anon a touch of his owner's whip came to remind him, and the fellow's little body fairly wriggled from side to side in his efforts to get on. "I wish you wouldn't whip him so!" said Daisy, "he's doing as well as he can." "What do girls know about driving!" was the retort from the small piece of masculine science beside her."

"My dear little daughter," said he, "you cannot be so glad to come back as my arms and my heart will be to receive you."

"They stopped next at a bookstore. "Oh, what a delicious smell of new books!" said Ellen, as they entered. "Mamma, if it wasn't for one thing, I should say I never was so happy in my life.""

"In showing how a Jew or a lesbian stood outside the cultural mainstream in America in the early 1940s, Sinclair pioneered comparisons of sexual and ethnic difference."

"Obstacles which have kept him from complete participation have been dissolved. At this year's ceremony, he can recognize without bitterness what is there for him, as well as what can never be there. Recognizing the inadequacies, he knows he need not be hurt by them.... (Chapter Eleven, p334)"

"Sinclair published two lesbian novels that, more than a half-century later, still merit reading. In addition, despite society’s intolerance and her own internal struggles, her 1942 draft is a brief beacon, a point at which a left-wing lesbian writer wrote about the love of two white working-class high school girls, one of them the story’s Jewish protagonist—a butch lesbian who sees connections among sexuality, gender expression, and race. Although she destroyed the 1931 draft that she had written as a teenager, she chose to send the 1942 draft to be archived, along with her other papers—knowing that, as a result, her legacy would include the draft’s teenaged lesbians. As we celebrate The Changelings as an early lesbian, feminist, and anti-racist novel, written by a Jewish lesbian, we can find in the 1942 draft a different voice, one that we have largely lost. And we should honor that voice as well."

"Wasteland, created what gay historian Jonathan Katz has called “probably the most complex, human, and affirmative portrait of a homosexual (female or male) to appear in American fiction” before 1964."

"You remember how that word echoed and echoed inside of you all the way home...All the way home, the word said itself in you like a squeezing fist. (Chapter Nine, p299)"

"Published in 1946 and winner of the prestigious Harper Prize, Jo Sinclair's Wasteland was startling for its psychological precocity and for a boldness of social feeling that linked Jews, blacks, and homosexuals as cultural outsiders in a time when very few were able to make that parallel...Wasteland is a remarkable social document, a state-of-the-art observation of the American-Jewish situation in the early forties, made calmly, clearly, and in an undefended manner. Never again would there be such calm in American-Jewish novels. As the process of assimilation went inexorably forward (and American Jews simultaneously learned the full truth of the Holocaust), a kind of frenzy seized the writers. It was as though they were terrified of what they were doing... or rather, of what they were no longer free not to do... and they became slightly hysterical. Saul Bellow and Philip Roth made the words Jewish and manic synonymous. "What are we doing? What are we doing?" their novels scream at us, from Augie March on. Jo Sinclair reminds us of the quiet before the storm, of that moment of speculation and insight that precedes the turbulence of engagement. Her novel, unquestionably, is part of the record of an absorbing and complicated piece of life."

"The word Depression faded from the American air, but in her it would never fade completely, she knew that. (chapter Five, p177)"

"The big desk was somewhat like a bridge between the doctor and him; at one end the doctor sat, and here at this end he sat, waiting for the moment when he could take a few further awkward steps upon that bridge into understanding, into reasoning. (Chapter Three, p77)"

"His own suffering, preceding the similar experiences of his nephews, makes him unwilling to face the idea of progeny. He is afraid of the continued perpetuation of "wasteland," and yet he now tries courageously to discover the truth of that condition, the source of it, perhaps the cure.... (chapter Five, p194)"

"Even in the secrecy of his own mind, Jake called him "the doctor." He hated the word psychiatrist. He hated it even if Debby did say it was a beautiful word. (first lines, Chapter One)"

"[He] suddenly leaned and pounded the coffee table. "Must the pattern be so set?" he demanded with bitterness. "A generation doesn't have to repeat itself...leave your poor twisted childhood. End it-don't trap another child in it"...when they had gone, her terrified recognition of what he had said was still there. The Ballroom was icy with the truth of every word. (book 5 chapter 5)"

"It was Saturday again. Today he was eager to be here. Already he shared with the walls of this office the intimacy of secrets released, the wonderful freedom of shame and pain eased, even the inch of secret, the first few stumbling steps of ease. (Chapter Three, p77)"

"The walls of Saturday moved in on him with a combined pressure of fear and relief, the walls of a confessional. And yet these walls were different, too, pressing as they did ever closer toward him. (Chapter Six, p195)"

"It was night in her lovely Ballroom, where a dream was completely safe. (book 4 chapter 3)"

"The evening became more and more tender, as if [she] were holding the glass bowl of the Ballroom between her palms and watching it fill slowly with all the nostalgia and sadness, the yearning prolonged embraces, of a farewell. (book 3 chapter 11)"

"He began quietly to tell her the details of Kenny's letter, and as she listened she thought with a kind of tired and comfortable amusement that the ghosts were really catching up with her. Ralph, or her lie to herself, had kept them away for more than a year. But all ghosts had the right, sooner or later, to frighten the people they haunted. (book 5 chapter 2)"

"In the darkness, he found her and it was as if the discovery encompassed him at the same time. She was in a secret forest-place of night, where no pain could enter. His body, his lips and hands, made gleams of light by which she could read at last all the answers to hunger. (book 3 chapter 6)"

"A beautiful thing happened...Her loneliness was gone. Even the night time was less piercing for the happiness of the day preceding it, the day that was so filled with a presence, a little living possession who changed excitingly from week to (book 2 chapter 3)"

"Like touching an old scar, she felt again the crushing sense of responsibility, the sensation of being mysteriously punished... (book 3 chapter 6)"

""Don't I have a right to live?" she said. "Can't a woman live even if she is a mother?" (book 5 chapter 5)"

""...Do you have anything definite on which to pin your dislike? Or is it a cloak for your dislike of someone else? Or perhaps yourself?" (Chapter Five, p159)"

"In the 1940s James Baldwin, Robert Duncan, and Jo Sinclair published pioneering works affirming the homosexual’s humanity."

"They started off the porch, and [she] felt the poems moving with her into the street, like a singing. (p309)"

""Listen to her," [he] said. "A voice like iron. That one will never rent or sell to them. They are more her enemy than ours, even. Remember...even an Italian has his Hitler." (chapter 3, p43)"

"All that summer, as no white people came to rent the empty, upstairs suites of the Valenti house or the Golden house, tension had mounted in the street. Only Negroes came. (first lines)"

"[He] could not move for a while. When at last he went to put the last gate up over the door and to snap shut the locks, a confusion of walls and gates and locks swirled through his head. Don't make a wall in my head, he thought tremblingly. That's all I ask. Please! (chapter 6, p110)"

"Liz picked a stifling evening in late summer to describe love. She yanked the word from a misty, delicately poised niche in Catherine's mind and flung it down newly expressed. The brutish meaning turned real as the smell and touch, the sounds, out of one of the childhood memories always hiding at the back of Catherine's mind. ( first lines)"

"For a second of intense hurt, she remembered all the fires, all the joy of those yesterdays which had merged so quickly. There had never been a calendar to life; excitement and fun had been timeless. Every day had been the present, fast and dangerous, the never-ending moment of leadership. (chapter 8, p127)"

"She saw his dreamer eyes; the dream was love, togetherness, two people together. She saw his whole dreamer self, and she called his name. (p297)"

"The same liquor, the same scar tissue, the same fear-sound of [his] cough flying into the Ballroom: for [her], everything had seemed reiteration out of the ghostly series of yesterdays. Only she was different. Everything seemed blurred and unformed wood, only she chiseled out into actuality, the need of body, the lips shaped to the sound of longing.( p261)"

"It was as if he insisted, time after time, that she could be only a body. Why couldn't he see her shy heart, her eager studying mind? Why couldn't her delicate ways of help flow gently into his way?-not the sickeningly sudden grab, the (book 1 chapter 9)"

"...again, it was the urgent, wholly understanding tones of love she thought she heard, even in the whisper. Her throat felt parched, as if she had sung along with one of her records for a long time. (book 2 chapter 5)"

"How fast the evening had passed, with its newnesses boxed one within the next like constantly opening flashes of excitement. (book 3 chapter 5)"

"...How could anything as delicate as love turn into the harsh accusation of [his] eyes? (book 3 chapter 11)"

"Many of the passengers could not help staring at Anna Teller. It was mid-December of 1956; all the newspapers they had brought onboard were still headlining one story, and here was part of the story in the flesh."