Writing About Place: My Influence Map
Wk5 - Wk8 Assignments: My Influence Map
One of the final assignments for this class was to construct a map of my writing influences. I was prompted to make one map of “work that I’ll never read or that I’ve read and remember nothing of,” and another map of the writers I’ve identified as my (parasocial) mentors. X marks my spot.
I’ll start with my no read list. The Odyssey is at the top of this tower because I distinctly remember trying to read it in accordance with my 9th grade English class. It’s hard to pinpoint when or where in the story I lost interest but I did, and ended up using Sparknotes to do the homework. Next on this list is The Great Gatsby. Like The Odyssey, this story was a reading requirement for a highschool English class that I lost interest in. Sparknotes was once again my saving grace. These two stories made it to my no read list because they were both public-school-certified classics that I felt very uninspired by. For some reason, the school curriculum, or my highschool English teachers, or a combination of the two set these stories up like they were going to change my life. Like they were about to be the most impactful, epic tales of humanity that any child has ever read. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I think I was quite disappointed to find familiar tropes being executed with familiar characters. I guess that’s how the classics work – they serve as a reference point for a lot of stories in popular media – but surely these stories couldn’t have been the first stories of their kind. I should have put these books side by side on my map, but rearranging all of the pictures was a hassle.
The other two books on my no read list are Jane Eyre and Gone With the Wind. I’ve actually read these books. In fact, I spent a chunk of my teens obsessing over and re-reading these books. They served as gateway books to a romance novel addiction that I (arguably) still have. Nonetheless, these books made it to my no read list because, like The Odyssey and The Great Gatsby, they were familiar tropes executed with familiar characters. I enjoyed the romance! The pining, swooning, gothic longing of it all was very appealing to my teenage heart. But I did notice that very few of these stories made mention of characters that looked like me. For the stories that did, they reduced those characters to racist caricatures.
Like most young readers, I had bad taste in books for myself. Key word being myself. Almost nothing I read made mention of characters I could relate to. I’m not sure why it took me so long to start reading romance, and then sci-fi and then fantasy and then any and all fiction, by authors that look like me. Maybe, it was something about institutionalized systems of oppression – I’m over those. All that matters is that I did (start reading books by authors that look like me) and it’s been great! Grounding myself in stories by Black authors with Black characters and Black perspectives prompts me to read more works by authors with culturally diverse backgrounds. Reading Black authors also enables me to bridge the gap between my love-hate relationship with the books on my no read list and my own writing.
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Which brings me to my masters list. These authors are currently the most influential in my writing practice. In the top left corner of this list, you’ll find Octavia Butler. In our wk4 reading and discussion of Butler’s “Bloodchild” short story, I mentioned my love for her and her approach to writing. In the afterword of “Bloodchild,” Butler mentioned that she sorts out her problems by writing about them. The desire to write a serious story about a pregnant man, overcome a fear of Peruvian botflies, and build an extrasolar world that wasn’t the British Empire in space. These are the problems Butler was solving as she wrote “Bloodchild.” Each time I read Butler, I make a mentor out of her work.
In an interview, she said she loved sci-fi but never saw herself in those stories, so she wrote herself in. I think her advice to all writers was to write ourselves in. So I’m writing myself into all of those stories I put on my no read list. Maybe not literally — I’m not particularly interested in a rewrite of The Odyssey or Gone With the Wind with Black protagonists, although I’d be open to reading those if anyone does want to write them — but they’ll sit on the palimpsest of my writing practice. I’m trying to build worlds in my writing to build bridges for myself. If that makes sense.
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Next in the line up on my masters list is Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. This book was published in 1958 and it’s a book I think should have been on that list of classics for my highschool English class. It would have been a good read for my world history class as well. It’s notably one of the first books published in English, by an African author, about African characters, in reference to pre-colonial African (Igbo) culture. In my search for Black authors, my first step was graduating from highschool, getting out of the suburbs of northern Virginia and going to Spelman College. Spelman is a historical Black College (HBCU), and its curriculum equipped me with tools for developing my own critical consciousness. Accordingly, after Spelman, I had a thirst for knowledge about myself through which I hoped to figure out how to build those bridges I mentioned earlier.
If I wanted to build a bridge between my past and my present – which would eventually lead to my future – I thought learning about myself should start with learning about the family I was born into. So I talk to my parents, my aunts and uncles, and my grandparents. Our conversations have been bridging some gaps in African American history with family history. I mentioned Spelman – going there filled in a lot of gaps in my understanding of the African Diaspora. For me, I think bridging the past (my family history in the African Diaspora) and the present looks like writing my ancestors into the classics. Classics as they were defined by my highschool English teachers and classics as I define them now.
I found my way to Zimbabwean author and historian Pathisa Nyathi, by way of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, while doing research for one of those ancestral stories I mentioned. Not because I am Zimbabwean, but because Nyathi is a historian of sub-Saharan African culture and philosophy as well as an author. The story I’m currently working on is turning out to be my attempt at an epic, 8th century fantasy with a West African prophetess as its protagonist. Nyathi’s work offers insight into the precolonial sub-Saharan African cultural ethos. I feel like this perspective is essential to writing the type of character I want to write.
Outside of research for my writing, reading about African culture from an African writer prompts me to make connections between Black culture, as I know it in my part of the diaspora, and African culture. This process reminds me of the theme of “portable worlds” discussed on the NPR podcast episode about writing in exile. Through memory and literature, I’m able to retrieve stories and characters and worlds I’ve lost to someone else’s classics.
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The last three authors on my masters list are N. K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor and P. Djeli Clark. Again, adding and rearranging the pictures in my map was too much of a hassle, but I’d like to add a show on HBO Max called Random Acts of Flyness (particularly season 2) to the last group of authors on my masters map. These three authors and TV show fall into the category of Black speculative fiction that I’d like to explore in my own writing. As I write, finish, and revise stories, I’ll reference Jemisin, Okorafor and Clark’s careers when looking for writing journals, competitions, agents and publishers to submit my work to.
