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47 Walter Mosley Writers Institute Seminar and Evening Reading Donald Faulkner/1996 Transcription from the Visiting Writers Series Archive of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany/SUNY. Copyright © 1996 New York State Writers Institute. Printed by permission. Note: The following interview consists of the transcript from two events held on February 20, 1996. The first part records the interaction between Walter Mosley; Donald Faulkner, the Director of the Writers Institute; and an audience of writing students, faculty, and some members of the general public. The evening session records the question and answer session between Mosley and a general audience after his public reading. Donald Faulkner: I want to say that Walter Mosley is a man of his word. He was willing to come and visit with us last fall, and that afforded us a great opportunity to have an advanced screening of Devil in a Blue Dress. It was the first event in the Writers Institute’s fall 1995 series, and it was also my own inaugural event with the Institute. Today’s event is also special. I first met Walter a few years ago at Yale, where I previously taught. Walter’s visit was one of the most memorable readings and discussions that I had organized there. Walter Mosley is the author of four Easy Rawlins mysteries. I say frequently that genre writing is not what his book is about, and that his writing, like all good fiction, has at its heart the exploration of a mystery: Something is hidden, something is discovered, a secret is revealed. Walter has broken out of the Easy Rawlins voice and has continued to break out of it in yet another collection. He has become a very energetic writer in a very short space of time. Most recently in the fall, in the novel RL’s Dream which centers its action on the old blues musician Robert Johnson. I remember describing its contents to William Kennedy as a couple of people 48 CONVERSATIONS WITH WALTER MOSLEY down on their luck trying to help each other out and trying to explore the dimensions of that. He said to me, “Gosh, that sounds familiar, it sounds kind of like a plot that I pursued at one time.” Needless to say, the work is as different as the two authors are different. Walter is here today with us to answer your questions and to explore, in terms of craft, some of the concerns you have or some of the reactions you might have to his work. Okay, I’ll leave it at that. Please welcome Walter Mosley. [applause] Mosley: Hi. I must seem odd, huh? I feel odd, so I have to seem odd. I was being driven from New York, and I was sleeping in the back of the car. All I can say is I really was sleeping soundly because I woke up thinking about what I was going to talk about tonight and I decided the topic should be death. I woke up thinking that death is really the defining factor right now for the way that I think about anything I’m doing. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about is writing, and the other day I laid out everything that I know I want to write, and I laid it out in relation to when I’m going to die. I’m very psychological, very, on the outside, psychological. My father died when he was seventy-six, but he smoked, so I think, well maybe I’ll make it to seventy-nine. So I’m forty-four and I really think that the reason I was thinking about that was because I was sleeping so soundly; it’s like I was dead. So that’s why I feel odd, but I feel like I’m coming back to life in some kind of way. So coming here, I was really thinking about reading tonight, but are there any questions? Anybody read anything I ever wrote and brought anything that they might want to ask about? Audience: When you wrote Black Betty, it seems Rawlins brings over the preacher and Albert because he knows that Mouse has to kill somebody. Mosley: Well see, he doesn’t have the preacher over to mock. You think he does, but he doesn’t. I got interviewed about this. It was very funny and it made me very sad about writing tricky endings to...

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