Make It New (Again)
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I admire what it takes to be a new writer: the nerve, the conviction, and the self-inflicted condition of endless invention. The only consolation for the nervous disposition of the new writer is that all writers need these qualities all the time. In other words the new writer cultivates a persona of a writer that should serve for the growth of the writer over the length of a productive life. Callaloo, under the leadership of the inimitable Charles Rowell and a host of dedicated writers, artists, playwrights, academics, teachers, activists, and quietly devoted staff, wants to reflect this productive life in multiple cultures across several borders over a length of time. The cutting edge for this may well be the new writing across genres that Callaloo features regularly.
Literary nonfiction is no exception in part because it includes strategies from fiction and poetry honed to a factual inquiry. Fiction makes shit up; nonfiction fucks up what’s real. A more decorous way to put it may be to say that all the strengths of invention of fiction are deployed in organizing a memory or assessment of a life or place; that whereas the fiction writer can make up details in a credible narrative or story, the nonfiction writer must obey a loose obedience to some measureable reality easily verifiable by someone not linked or loyal to the nonfiction piece. Even as I write that last sentence I hear a voice in me say no, sir, not always. But it is clear that if I call a novel New Orleans not everyone reading it will think of the city in Louisiana. But if “New Orleans” headlines an essay it is expected to be something (however tangential) about the place.
The writers featured here have shown what it takes to write well, write with surprise, and take risks to keep readers engaged and earn fresh perspectives. They are ill at ease in themselves, questioning, displaced, noncompliant and never complacent. They want us to feel what they see and see what they feel. They do not shy away from failure. If anything, they’ve taken to heart Beckett’s dictum for trying for art in the first place: fail again, fail better next time. We should read them here in Callaloo and applaud their success. [End Page 644]
FRED D’AGUIAR, a native of London who grew up in Guyana, is a novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist. His recent books include The Longest Memory, Dear Future, British Subjects, Bill of Rights, English Sampler: New and Selected Poems, Bethany Bettany, and Continental Shelf (shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2009, and a UK Poetry Book Society Choice). A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, a play, was produced at Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1991. In June 2013, his new collection of poems, The Rose of Toulouse, was published, and his sixth novel, Children of Paradise, inspired by the tragedy of Jonestown, Guyana, was published in 2014 by Granta (UK) and HarperCollins (USA). He has published nonfiction prose in such periodicals as Harper’s Magazine, Wasafiri, Callaloo, and Best American Essays. He teaches courses in creative writing at UCLA, where he is Professor of English.
