About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

An American Literary History Interview: The Situation of American Writing Today

271 An American Literary History Interview The Situation of American Writing Today 1. No matter how strict your sense of career as an individual endeavor, do you also find that your writing reveals a connection to any group—political, religious, cultural, national, international , racial, class, gender, sexual, or other? Do you see your development as a writer as contiguous with the interests of any such larger group? Do you see this development as linked in any way to the socioeconomic circumstances of your upbringing? 2. What has been the public mandate of American writing in the last twenty years? How has contemporary writing responded to the political and economic contexts of the late twentieth century ? How have you met this invitation or challenge? . How would you characterize your readership today? For whom do you write and why? 4. How would you describe your relation to an American literary past? Do you see yourself as belonging to a specific tradition or generation of American writers? 5. How has your sense of a subject changed in the last twenty years? What pressures have stimulated a change? 6. Has the quality of editing changed during your career? How would you describe the ideal relationship between editors and writers? 7. What value do you place on the way your work has been reviewed? Has the quality of reviewing changed over the course of your career? What has been its effect on the growth of your generation of American writers? On your peers? On yourself? . What value do you place on scholarly assessments of contemporary writing? Do you believe that academic critics have something important to say to you? How would you character- 272 Part฀III:฀Five฀Interviews ize the current state of relations between academic criticism and creative writing? How would you envision profitable exchanges among scholars, critics, and writers? [Questions are by the American฀Literary฀History editors.] samuel฀r.฀delany: This somewhat lengthy overview of your eight questions in general will allow me to answer them later briefly and individually. In their positivity the questions suggest an author—authoritative, intentions wholly present to himself, centered in the current of some mainstream society—who possibly (and comfortably!) could answer them directly: “These are my social, group, and political allegiances. This group and that are for whom I write. Once I wrote about topic X, but (because of this or that historical occurrence—the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, the Stonewall riots of June 1969 in New York City [from which dates the modern leg of the Gay Liberation Movement], AIDS, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reign of Reaganomics, Tiananmen Square, the horrors of Bosnia and its unending continuation, the attacks on abortion clinics, the beating of Rodney King, the reinstatement of the death penalty, Clinton’s failure to effect a health plan, his failure over gays in the military, the homeless situation in America) now I write of topic Y.” Let me risk a certain reductive romanticism: I think of writers as seekers, specifically seekers after questions, questions that are dramatized by what Nabokov once called “sensuous thought,” for him a description of art. Yourquestionssuggest,however,anauthorasfinderofanswers —and answers of a particularly hard-edge nature—which, to the extent they imply a process that has something to do with writing as a social practice as I have known it, I just don’t recognize—the implied writing practice that stands behind your questions, that is. Understand, then, I shall not be able to answer them directly, but will rather slide and slip and fall askew among them. Human beings are constituted of just the political alliances suggested by your categorical, and my more historical, paradigm (in the sense of “list”). The profession of the writer is, however, not. That is to say, no member of any group your list American Literary History:฀American฀Writing฀Today 27 suggests (party member, church member, class member . . . ) nor any individual who survived or was affected by any event on mine is, by belonging to the category, categorically฀excluded from writing. This is not to deny, in any way, that what is required to write is a certain familiarity with one or another “technology of communication ” and that such familiarities are likely to lie more readily among the middle classes than not, or that the various class, religious, and cultural enclaves look at writing very differently...