An Interview with John Edgar Wideman

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN John Edgar Wideman John Edgar Wideman was the winner of the 1984 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, currently lives in Laramie, Wyoming, and is the author of several books including The Homewood Trilogy: Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday. This interview was conducted by Kay Bonetti, Director of the American Audio Prose Library Series. The Prose Library offers tapes of American authors reading and discussing their work. For information, contact AAPL, PO Box 842, Columbia, MO 65205. An Interview with John Edgar Wideman / Kay Bonetti Interviewer: Mr. Wideman, we know a lot about your biography from both the Homewood trilogy and Brothers and Keepers, in which you try to come to terms with your brother Robby's imprisonment for firstdegree murder. But I wonder about your life as a writer. Can you tell us at what point you began to know that's what you wanted to do? Wideman: I liked to get up and tell stories in grade school and I was pretty good at it. Most of my stories were bits and pieces of the reading I'd been doing, which would vary from the kids' fiction in the Carnegie Library to comic books. I loved comic books. I guess I began to identify myself as a writer even that early. Not as a writer with a capital W; I just liked to write and I had a lot of encouragement all the way through high school. But I don't think it was until probably senior year in college that I actually began to make life decisions based on the idea that maybe I wanted to write. Interviewer: Were your parents supportive in that? Wideman: My parents have always been enormously supportive. Anything I've wanted to do was okay. I was told do it well and work hard and make sure it's something you really like. That kind of support. But for my parents and really for the whole extended family I was a test case. Nobody else had gone all the way through school. Almost everybody in my parents' generation had a high school education, but nobody had gone on to college, so I was the flagship; I was out there doing things that no one else had done. My parents were smart not to try to monitor that, except by being supportive. The reasons that I went to college were basically mine. I thought I wanted to play pro basketball, and I knew in order to play pro basketball you had to play college basketball and to play college basketball you had to get a scholarship, so things sort of dovetailed and it was a lockstep kind of future that I had figured out for myself. The Missouri Review · 77 Interviewer: You were on an athletic scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania? Wideman: Well not exactly, because the Ivy League schools claim that they don't give athletic scholarships. That means that I had to qualify for an academic scholarship. In reality, if you were a good athlete they gave you a certain number of points so that if I were competing against some kid from Illinois who had the same grades and the same sort of test scores as I did, I would get the scholarship. Interviewer: You went on to become a Rhodes Scholar. Were you the first black Rhodes Scholar? Wideman: There had been one black Rhodes Scholar, Alaine Locke, in 1905, I believe it was. And then the same year I was elected, 1963, another man, Stan Sanders, from the West coast was elected. So we were the first three. And Stan and I were the first two in about sixty years. Interviewer: Do you have a political attitude toward the Rhodes Scholarship program? Do the origins of the money bother you? Wideman: I'm not trying to hedge, but there's very little clean money. Whose money do you take these days if you look at it very hard? To tell the truth, when I won a Rhodes Scholarship, I didn't know a thing about South Africa, or Rhodes. I just knew...