Posted by Arianna Miller, GD Co-Poetry Section Head for 6.2
Shara McCallum was this semester’s visiting poet at SUNY Geneseo. I had not only the pleasure of sitting down for lunch with McCallum, both also of reading her diverse collection, Madwoman. Madwoman spans across what it means to be a woman, to have the privilege of being a black woman who appears white, and to accept being the daughter of a schizophrenic, all with the underlying presence of her Jamaican heritage. Continue reading
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Filed under Blog, Interviews, Poetry, Reviews
Posted by Joshua DeJoy, GD Creative Nonfiction Reader for 5.1
Lionel Shriver photo by Daniel Seed for The Guardian
Can fiction authors write outside of their own experiences? To ask the question is to answer it: Of course! It’s fiction, isn’t it?
At least, that’s what American-born novelist Lionel Shriver argued at the Brisbane Writers Festival on September 8 in her keynote address, “Fiction and Identity Politics,” which deals extensively with the concept of cultural appropriation. I think her speech is worth reading in full, but I’ll attempt to summarize it: fiction writers have to use experiences outside of their own in order to write compelling fiction. “This is a disrespectful vocation by its nature—prying, voyeuristic, kleptomaniacal, and presumptuous. And that is fiction writing at its best,” Shriver says. Continue reading
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