The debut of Coin

Yesterday, Copper Nickel launched their e-reader, "Coin," featuring my essay "Race, Authority, Culpability," accompanied by my dialect story "It," which they have nominated for the 2012 Pushcart Prize. In that essay, I discuss the difficulty I've had placing work from my novel "Gone," and finding literary representation. I go on to make an argument about race and publishing and craft:

"Every story fails in representation if it is concerned with being representative. Every narrative reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present. Even writing attempted humbly, with a mastery of craft and an excess of lived experience, cannot be equal to the world. The aestheticizing impulse is fundamental to narrative: to order and make beautiful. Yet what narrative is adequate to human suffering? What are the aesthetics of Vietnam or Hiroshima? What meaning should be made from the Holocaust? Narrative is not exculpatory, nor should it be.

The only way to grapple with the irresolvable is to recognize that we are culpable for what we say and how we say it. That does not mean we shouldn't consider the difficult or contested--unless we seek an art less easy, we will fight the same battles, encounter the same barriers. And so I hope we have the courage to earn authority rather than assert it, to attempt knowing that though we're likely to fail, we have a responsibility to try."

At HTMLgiant, Kyle Minor was kind in response: "The inaugural issue includes poems from Dan Albergotti, Sandy Florian, Ed Pavlic, and Ginny Hoyle, Snezana Zabic’s essay “Meet Satan,” and, most interestingly, a portfolio of work by and about Michael Copperman, whose story “It” is written, as he describes it, in “black Delta dialect, not reproducing African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) so much as depicting a particular boy speaking it,” although the story’s author self-describes as “a Japanese-Hawaiian Russo-Polish Jew” in his essay “Race, Authenticity, Culpability,” which appears alongside the story."

At Big Other, Amber Sparks reacts to my essay, asking:

Amber Sparks at Big Other also weighed in, asking: "Well, so, what if Mike taught for years in these schools and knows these kids better than, say, a wealthy black person living in Park Slope, Brooklyn? Or not? Who bestows authority? Who has it and who doesn’t? What about race and class? What does it say about who we are that we cannot answer these questions but become so uncomfortable, and sometimes so defensive when we try to?"

Good question, is what I find myself saying. Occasionally I have tried to respond to such questions after pieces about these issues by Roxane Gay at HTMLgiant, who I quote in my essay, and I find myself inevitably lecturing some twenty-three-year old mfa who believes it's much better to be a writer of color or a woman, and that America is surely post-racial. My position, as I note, is simultaneously that it's difficult to write about unmainstream experiences, and too, that 'experience' or phenotype alone are not adequate means of conferring authorial authority. This conversation is a difficult one, and a personal one, as for me, the stakes are the success of work I've spent seven years on. I hope the conversation continues, however, as it's both necessary and important.