You can read an excerpt from my forthcoming book…
For a limited time, you can get 25% off with code: Marita. Click here.
Who made me a writer? That is the foundational inquiry that inspired my forthcoming book How to Become a Black Writer Creating and Honoring Black Stories That Matter. No man is an island, and no one becomes a writer in complete solitude or isolation. Solitude is a choice, isolation is imposed, and both can work in tandem with the ever-changing cast of people who enter our lives and wed us to our calling.
Beyond my innate impulse to create stories, and my obsession with the why, the wherefore and the how of real and imagined narratives, who else, I asked myself, made my life as a writer inevitable? Looking back, remembering with fondness and surprise, I claimed a vast and diverse community of the living and the dead-writers, mentors, teachers, family, and other believers in Marita, all of whom laid hands on me and made me a storyteller. Storyteller. One of the world’s oldest, most revered, and necessary designations. Storytellers get summoned and there is no saying no and no turning back.
I never wrote only for myself. Even as I am the first reader and critic, I’ve always craved and needed readers. Over the four decades of my career as a published and publishing writer, readers have become my allies, we’ve joined hands as we uncovered, in story how literature questions, subverts, thrills, affirms and builds bridges from one trembling heart to another.
I didn’t become a writer once. I am renewed as a writer with each sentence. I’ve continued to BE a writer because of hundreds of individuals and many influences. To name just a few:
My father Francis Sherman Golden. He told me bedtime stories of heroes and heroines of Black History, Sojourner Truth, Hannibal, Cleopatra, Frederick Douglass and those compelling narratives, night after night were lessons in drama, and character development and the meanings that stories possess
My mother, Beatrice Lee Reid told me that I was going to write a book one day. She had watched me write poetry, read everything I could get my hands on, ask questions, and insist on answers. Her words were a baptism.
Leo Tolstoy the great Russian writer expanded my notions about what fiction could do, could be and how it could transport a reader. When at seventeen, I read his novel War and Peace, I became a Russian woman giving birth, a Russian solider on the front lines facing Napoleon’s troops.
Audre Lorde called me one evening after reading some of my poems and told me that I was a writer. Her courage and sense of mission were as inspiring to me as her poems. If she said I was a writer I could believe that I was.
Sidney Offit, my first fiction teacher mentored me with joy and pride. I mentor the writers I work with calling on the same generous spirit.
Zora Neale Hurston wrote everything, from novels to plays to journalism to essays to anthropology. I learned from her that I could be a “woman of letters” claiming any genre as my own.
From How To Become A Black Writer…
I am nine years old, lying beneath the blanket in my twin-sized bed. A dull prick of light shimmers in the room’s darkness as I eagerly resist sleep, waiting to be transported. Soon my bedroom will become a stage. My father sits beside me in a straight-back chair. The scent of his cigar-scented skin pulls me close. My father’s skin is dark. Dark like night. Yet I see him inside the shadows that fill the room as he clears his throat, the signal that a story is about to begin.
Tonight, the story is about a woman named Harriet Tubman. A woman who was enslaved. My father often takes me on nocturnal expeditions to meet Black people who made and changed history. People I often have not learned about in school. Men and women who under the spell of my father’s voice and words I imagine and see on the walls and the ceiling of my room, loving their families, running to freedom, standing tall and brave in the soil of this place called history that my father makes real for me on nights like this.
I have met Benjamin Banneker, a free man when most Black people were not, a mathematician and astronomer who helped design Washington, D. C. where my family lives. I have met Phillis Wheatley who was kidnapped, enslaved, and brought from the Gambia in West Africa to America and wrote poems about the life she had been taken from and the life she had to make anew.
One night my father guided my fingers to touch the country of Egypt on a globe and showed me a photograph of the Sphinx, that country’s and one of the world’s most famous statues. My father tells me The Sphinx has my broad full nose. I catch my breath at the thought that people who look like me made such an enormous, grand thing.
But tonight, I meet Harriet Tubman who escaped slavery and returned to the South many times to bring her family and others to freedom. My father is a wonderful storyteller, so I hear dogs barking furiously trying to pick up Tubman’s scent as slave catchers search for her. Her fearful deep breaths pulse in the room as she hides in shallow creeks, traveling by night guided by the North Star. My stomach grumbles in hunger as she desperately searches for food in the marshes of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Famished, afraid, determined, and faith-filled Harriet Tubman walks and runs almost one hundred miles to freedom. Intrepid and bold, she was a spy for the Union army during the Civil War and lead the Combahee River Raid that freed 700 enslaved people. A recognized hero in her own time, Tubman lived to be 93 years old. I fall asleep with Harriet Tubman and freedom on my mind.
These stories were my goodnight, my sleep tight. My father guided me along a historical underground railroad. Did my father know he was creating a writer? Did he know he was teaching me the elements of a good story? Of powerful storytelling and writing? A person is tested. An obstacle is overcome. Did he know he was teaching me how to be a sorcerer of language? On those storytelling nights, the people I met became my kin, the places he took me, my home.
Who made you a writer?
For a limited time, you can get 25% off with code: Marita. Click here.
Marita Golden is the author of over 20 works of fiction and nonfiction. She is Co-founder and President Emerita of the Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Foundation. As a teacher of writing, she has served as a member of the faculties of the MFA Graduate Creative Writing Programs at George Mason University and Virginia Commonwealth University and served as a Distinguished Visiting Writer in the MA Creative Writing Program at John Hopkins University, and at the University of the District of Columbia. She has taught writing workshops nationally and internationally to a variety of constituencies and is a writing coach, workshop presenter, and literary consultant.
