AMERICAN AUTHORS CHALLENGE--MAY 2023--JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN

"In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality." John Edgar Wideman

As so often happens when researching an author who I previously knew little or nothing about, I have spent a lot of time reading and listening to interviews and discussions about the author and their life...sometimes the lives of their relatives as well. In this case, the prolific writer and acclaimed teacher, John Edgar Wideman, has provided me with a couple hours worth of intense listening, almost none of it referring to his written output. His family life has been fraught with violence and tragedy, with both his brother and his son having been sentenced to life in prison for murder, and a nephew having been murdered execution-style in his own home, in three unrelated incidents. Naturally these events have influenced Wideman’s work, in obvious and more subtle ways. His memoir, Brothers and Keepers focuses on his relationship with his brother. He did not write or speak publicly of his son Jacob’s crime for decades, at Jacob’s request, but more recently has touched briefly on the subject in interviews. A google search for John Edgar Wideman or Jacob Wideman will hit on numerous stories from several sources, from sympathetic to skeptical to sensational . I can recommend those from NPR, and the Wikipedia entry for John is more comprehensive and well-documented than most. What follows here is bare bones biography compared to the information that’s out there.

Wideman was born in 1941 in Washington, D. C. He spent a lot of his childhood in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and like the playwright, August Wilson, set much of his work in that city. He received a B. A. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught for several years, directing an African American Studies program which he helped create. Wideman received a PhD from Oxford University as only the second African American to be granted a Rhodes Scholarship. He received the PEN/Faulkner award twice, and has been honored multiple times with fellowships, grants, awards, and honorary doctorates for his literary output. He also held professorships at the University of Wyoming, the University of Massachusetts, and Brown University. His papers reside in the Houghton Library at Harvard.

Wideman had three children with his first wife, Judith Goldman. His son Daniel and his daughter Jamila are classic overachievers like their father. Wideman and Goldman divorced in 2000, after 35 years of marriage. He is currently married to a French journalist, Catherine Nedonchelle, and spends his summers in France “writing and getting away”. He published his first novel in 1966, and his latest collection of short fiction in 2018. His work has been described as post-modern, complex, experimental -- and compared to Joyce, Eliot and Faulkner, with obvious influence from W. E. B. DuBois and James Baldwin. His stories deal with race, interpersonal relationships, man vs. the state, sometimes merging fiction and non-fiction in a way not all critics have found successful. NPR’s Maureen Corrigan described his “novel” Fanon as a hodgepodge and a literary failure to commit.

Undoubtedly an important voice in American letters, Wideman may be the second most challenging author we have featured in the AAC. I must thank Kathy @kac522 for suggesting we include him. I anticipate arrival of his Homewood stories , Damballah, Hiding Place and Sent For You Yesterday, in my mailbox today. These seem like a good place to start.

I read Brothers and Keepers and Fatheralong, both nonfiction, in the 1990s, but have not read anything by Wideman since then. I'll be reading American Histories (2018), a short story collection, which will be my first try at his fiction.

I have never heard of Wideman, so I am looking forward to reading a "new-to-me" author this month. My local library only has his Philadelphia Fire, so that is what I will be reading!

So long since I read Wideman. I'll aim to read something late in the month.

Ordered his Homewood Trilogy and recently completed the intense and informative essays he wrote to introduce early and classic

African-American writers in My Soul Has Grown Deep. The first writers move pretty slow, while many of the rest are compelling.

I acquired the volume of short stories, Look for Me and I'll be Gone which I'll read through the rest of the month.

" The Stories of John Edgar Wideman reprints two earlier collections—Damballah (1981) and Fever (1989)—and adds ten stories written especially for this volume and collected in it as “All Stories Are True.” The three collections are published here in reverse order, so that the reader begins with Wideman’s most recent stories and moves back through the two earlier collections. Such a journey reveals both the scope of Wideman’s fictional territory and his considerable talents in exploring it."

Honestly, I had not heard of Wideman before he was featured on this month's AAC. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to check out his work and I LOVE short stories. I will start it tomorrow.

I cannot say that I enjoyed Philadelphia Fire all that much, unfortunately.

I'm reading Writing to Save a Life, which is an imaginative fusion of research, memoir and invention rooted in the tragic deaths of Emmett Till, murdered in Mississippi in 1955, and the father he never knew, Louis, who was executed by the U. S. Army in Italy in 1944. This was written when Wideman was in his mid-seventies, and contains a fair amount of reflection on his own life and experiences.

I've also started reading the collection Damballah, which is very good so far.

>9 laytonwoman3rd: I tried the audio verison Writing to Save a Life because that's what was available from my libraries. Sadly, it didn't work for me in that format and I have officially abandoned it. I don't know if it was the narrator, the book's style not lending itself to audio format, or both.

>10 cbl_tn: I can't imagine it working on audio, Carrie. But also, I don't think you should feel bad about abandoning it, because aside from learning a few facts about Emmett Till's father, I didn't get an awful lot out of it. My comments after finishing are on my thread.

>9 laytonwoman3rd: HIDING PLACE expands the characters from DAMBALLAH and gives their story more depth.

I was stumped by this author. I've not heard of him before this challenge. Of the books listed by my library system I chose Briefs : stories for the palm of the mind. It sounds intriguing but it may take a while for this ILL to arrive.
Thanks for choosing a new to me author!

>12 m.belljackson: I'm working through the Damballah stories, and will read the entire Homewood trilogy, unless the novels turn out to be less engaging than the stories are so far.

>13 Carmenere: I'm always glad to introduce a new author (he was new to a lot of us) but it often means the books are not widely available. I hope you get Briefs sooner rather than later. ILL can be unpredictable.

>11 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks for that. I really wanted to like the book, but it was a struggle to get anything out of the audio experience. It's an important topic.

I finished the short story collection American Histories (2018). This is the first fiction I've read by Wideman, but I must say it didn't feel much like fiction. Every story is a first-person narrative that seems in (or very close to) the author's voice and experiences. There were 21 pieces in all, a few just a page and a half; a few were 25+ pages, and the rest in-between.

For me the first ten stories worked the best. My favorite was "JB&FD," a series of imagined conversations with John Brown and Frederick Douglass. The last half of the stories wandered into stream of consciousness/random unconnected thoughts, and these did not keep my interest. A couple stories I mostly skimmed, as my concentration waned. Overall some good writing, but some strange and difficult-to-follow writing as well.

So far, my reading of Wideman's Damballah stories is giving me a very similar vibe to reading Faulkner, or Louise Erdrich. They are so interconnected that dipping in and out is just not going to do it for me. And having read some, and then some more, it's quite likely that revisiting things read earlier will improve and enrich the experience, possibly for years. Understandably, not everyone wants to commit to that kind of long-term relationship with an author, but I love this kind of thing, and will be spending a lot of time with Wideman in the future.

>17 laytonwoman3rd: Sounds good. i set the volume I planned to read aside so I can read in longer bites (not much reading time despite my annual leave), this weekend hopefully.

I too like some of my writers to be those revisited over a lifetime (Baldwin, Wilde, Woolf, Morrison, Fitzgerald to name a few).

Yay! I picked up Stories for the Palm of the Mind (no touchstone)
from the library yesterday. Isn't that a thought provoking title? There are 155 pages and each brief story is no more than two pages. I should get quite a bit done this long weekend.

All Stories Are True: Stories by John E. Wideman

I did not know what to expect from this collection of ten stories, because I was not familiar with this author. It turned out to be a nice surprise, since Wideman is a strong and deeply introspective writer. He reminded me of James Baldwin. That said, he may not be for everyone. He can get pretty dense, in his narrative. The stories, mainly set around his hometown of Pittsburgh, seem to be a reflection on his childhood and ancestry. Recommended.

Thanks to the AAC for giving me the chance to read this author. I am also not at all surprised, that he may get a mixed reaction over here.

>18 Caroline_McElwee: Any impressions to report?

>19 Carmenere: The full title is Brief Stories for the Palm of the Mind. How are they hitting you?

>20 msf59: I'm glad you like the Wideman stories. I'm thrilled to have discovered him.

Once again, thanks to Kathy for suggesting we include him in the challenge.

And now, the June thread is up. Mary Gordon is our author this month.

>21 laytonwoman3rd: You're welcome!

Quite a bit late, but I just started Wideman's short story collection You Made Me Love You. I was going to return it to the library unread, but I received an automatic renewal and thought I'd take a look. So far, terrific.

>21 laytonwoman3rd: Still not got to it but may do this month Linda. It's by my reading chair.