Linda Villarosa reported on the launch of ringShout: A Place for Black Books on TheDailyVoice.com. In “Books in da Hood,” Villarosa explores the proliferation of street lit and asks what constitutes literary work.
Bridgett Davis wrote “Break the Street Lit Habit” on TheRoot.com. Davis calls out the L-word: Literary. She also offers suggestions for the Black Books community.
And Ron Kavanaugh calls all this essay-writing “almost pathological” on his blog, MosaicBooks.com What do you think?
To learn more about ringShout: A Place for Black Literature, visit the blogspot and join the positive, upbeat conversation taking place there.
Finally, you can more regularly check out Christopher Chambers’ blog for ongoing posts on Urban Fiction, Literary Fiction, and what we communicate about who we are to the world through our writing.
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Thanks always, Eisa, for making it easier to follow the debate on this important topic.
As you well know, sister, I am one of those writers whose work lies in the middle. As an activist, I made a conscientious decision to write popular fiction as a way to raise socio-political issues among an audience of readers that might not otherwise engage them (and yet has the most to lose by their lack of engagement.) Indeed, one can employ the urban vernacular and still write deeply about the human condition. However, it is this ambition to grapple with substantive themes and a respect for craft that makes me identify with those who squarely place themselves in the literary camp. Quite frankly, I am adamant about distinguishing myself from street lit, yet I don’t know if – based on what I write alone – if the literary crowd would embrace me. I don’t know if solely based on my titles, covers, storylines and pen name, they would even read a word and discover that I’m not trafficking in the stereotypes and gratuitous sex and violence.
If there is such a sharp line between the commercial and literary, where do writers like me belong? Does such a line serve any of us -writers and readers alike in general, and specifically communities that have been long underrepresented or misrepresented?
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Thank you for your comment, Sofia. I also really appreciate your post on your own blog today. This discourse will certainly move us to a more powerful place as readers and writers.
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Thanks Eisa for letting us know about ringshout! I’ll check it out.
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Please join our ringShout circle, where we celebrate ambitious Black books, Carleen. 🙂
Joy!
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Yes, to paraphrase the Academy Award Winning Song from 2005, “it’s hard out here for a writer!” Not that it isn’t always–but the overwhelming preponderance of street, urban and erotic lit on the AA shelves and displays in bookstores, makes us very aware that if the industry climate in 1996 had been as it is today, Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made would very likely not have been published. We already were up against what we called the Toni/Terry dynamic. We weren’t deemed either “Morrison literary” or “McMillan commercial” and since there was no pre-determined African American category for us… despite the fact that what we wrote, as far as we were concerned, was contemporary women’s fiction–we had difficulty finding a publisher. So yes, it is hugely important to keep the circle wide, for there are many who live and write somewhere in between. And as we’ve been out on book tour these past few weeks, we’ve been telling readers how important it is to support the writers whose work they’ve come to care about–or they won’t find them on the shelves any longer.
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Eisa, I linked to ringshout and posted about it on my blog yesterday. Anything else I can do to participate and support, let me know!
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I spied Kavanaugh’s and left a prickly post. He deserved it. I have immense respect for him, but please–it gave the flavor of one of these statements from older black leaders who are “captive” or owing to the Clintons, over Obama. Another strain (other than not wanting to upset sponsoring or advertising white publishers who feed out appetite for this brain candy and swill) might be a genuine, post-Black Arts activist tradition that tells us that art should be populist and for and by everyone. Well, we’ve seen how that and corporate economics has destroyed professional journalism–why not literature, too?
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My thought relates to Eisa’s fine article in Crisis and her observations on book covers. (Paperback editions of literary novels being ’sexed up’ with Urban Lit style covers.) I have heard white women writers express a similar frustration. There, the supposedly more saleable paperback cover image comes from the Chick Lit mindset–often showing the miniskirted or bathing suited body of a thin, young white woman (even if the protagonist isn’t young) truncated in some way by the edge of the book cover. My observation (not exhaustive) is that when publishers change the covers for paperback editions of the books written by black women writers, the images tend to be more overtly sexual. Cleavage, steamy looks, all of that. It’s as if what is being “suggested” on the Chick Lit influenced covers is about to be “acted out” on the Urban Lit influenced covers.
This is all market-driven, and writers know what the publishers seem not to–these cynical tactics don’t increase book sales.
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Thanks for connecting the experiences of Black women writers to our sister-writers across race lines, Helen. We have much more in common as women than the superficial divisions, like race, that would keep us apart. It’s nice to know there’s a spirit of activism growing among all women writers. Maybe we can direct these energies into one powerful force and form stronger coalitions that benefit us all – readers and writers.