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  • Dilemmas of the Black Intellectual:A Round Table of the 2009 CALLALOO CONFERENCE
  • Fred D'Aguiar (bio), Koritha Mitchell (bio), James Peterson (bio), Francesca Royster (bio), and Dagmawi Woubshet (bio)
DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:

Dr. Rowell pointed out at the CALLALOO RETREATS-in New Orleans in 2008 and in St. Louis in 2009-that their purpose was to create a forum for creative writers and scholars to engage one another meaningfully, bridge the gap between the creative and critical side of our labors. Perhaps we can begin our conversation by reflecting on our retreat experiences, if indeed the retreat has created a new platform for us.

JAMES PETERSON:

It definitely did for me. You know the St. Louis retreat was my first time being invited and it was actually an absolutely unique experience for me. But I would argue this in two ways: one, both in interacting with and connecting with junior and with senior scholars, as well as interacting with and connecting directly with artists. And I would say that, as someone who attends and presents at a fair amount of conferences year in and year out, no other experience has been as successful or as productive along those lines, and I mean that sincerely, and also in these two ways, both socially and academically. So the ability to see senior scholars' work and junior scholars' work, to hear poets and to hear artists, but also the ability to break bread with them and connect with them was a fairly unique experience for me personally, and it is part of the reason why I'm even more committed to work on the process of making sure that we can continue to do it.

FRANCESCA ROYSTER:

What I discovered was a real commonality in terms of basic needs, in terms of interrogating shared questions and running new strategies of how to do that. In my own writing I try to do some creative approaches and combine them with academic ones and I left the session feeling really energized and excited about them.

KORITHA MITCHELL:

I would say the same thing. Especially in St. Louis, I felt like I had an even closer interaction with creative writers whose work I had known beforehand and so that was a unique experience in terms of keeping my being-a-fan in check. But I also felt that I was able to engage them in decently sophisticated ways because of the conversations that I had had with more junior creative writers in New Orleans. It made me feel a little more equipped to talk to Rita Dove, to talk to Yusef Komunyakaa, because as I had admitted in New Orleans, I typically tend to work with material written at the last turn of the century. I don't engage necessarily with living writers and so that was something that I was challenged to think more aggressively about in New Orleans and so then to have that challenge reiterated immediately in St. Louis pushed me even more because it was combined with the opportunity to speak with those authors. [End Page 333]

FRED D'AGUIAR:

Well, I agree with everyone's words that were so positive! St. Louis was only positive; nothing bad came out of it. Going international of course, that spearhead is something I'd love to see us do and do it well. Even in these economic times, I didn't want to move into reservations here, just to say positively, how much it situates us as being successful and great and how much I felt it was a cross-symbiosis, whatever word it is between improvising a phase, a creative space of telling stories and narratives. I love that correspondence there that seemed to be going on in conversations there. Going international with that would be great; it would be good to land in a place that tours Africa, and journey to America and the Caribbean and make it one global, long process and see how that works, in terms of translation of everything else. Yes, to everybody's initiative and I want to talk of the challenges ahead. Because Addis Ababa sounds like a long way away, and...

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