An Interview with Marita Golden
Q: You have written books in both fiction and nonfiction. What is the appeal of each genre?
A: Fiction allows me quite frankly, to become a magician. The process of creating a story that is fictional, but inevitably shaped by reality, my own experience, my dreams, my values and my imagination is conjuring, plain and simple. The creating of characters and dramas that reach out from the page to touch the reader is an awesome process. It's fun and terribly hard and very rewarding to know that words on paper about people who do not exist can convince the reader that they do and that the reader is inextricably bound to them. In nonfiction I am often attempting to dialogue with readers about a social issue, or even my own life in autobiography and to shape it into an object that the reader can use as a springboard for new ideas about what they thought they knew about sex, or Africa, or single motherhood, or whatever topic I am delving into.
Q: Who were your earliest writing influences?
A: My parents gave me tremendous encouragement to write and so I always begin my list of influences with them. They recognized my talent early and gave me the confidence I needed to believe in myself and then to believe that I had stories to tell worth listening to. They both lived their lives as though they were heroes in a grand novel and they believed in their ability to shape their own lives against the odds. Writers create stories against the odds every day.
Q: Have any particular writers influenced your writing style or its content?
A: I read voraciously as a child, and in my teens discovered Jane Austen, Thackery, Tolstoy, Flaubert, all the great European writers whose work I loved for its ambition and sweep and how it spoke across the ages to my own life. In college during the sixties I began seriously reading Black American writers, African writers, women writers from all over the world. All the writers I love have taught me a lot about the role of courage in the writers life. The writer is supposed to be brave and daring and to ask the questions others fear asking and to say if need be that the emperor has no clothes.
Q: What are the dominant themes in your work?
A: Family and identity, especially how one achieves, attains and holds onto family and identity against the backdrop of the legacy of racism and the cultural changes of the last several decades. I write a lot about families in crisis, I think because both my parents died when I was on the brink of adulthood, my mother when I was 21 and my father when I was 22, often I feel that with every line I write I am searching for them, talking to them. And so the impact of death weighs very heavily on my work.
Q: How do you judge the current state of Black writing?
A: I think there is much to be quite satisfied about. There have never been more Black writers getting published and Black writers have reshaped the meaning and parameters of contemporary American and world fiction. I also feel that there is a wonderful community of fresh new young Black writers who are writing serious, literary fiction and nonfiction that is very exciting. I wish there were more viable Black publishing companies, and I wish that the Black community supported serious fiction more. But I see what is missing as an opportunity to do more cultural work.