No. 9

Summer 2005

Location and Revision: Discussing Place with Eddy L. Harris
Missy Raterman and S. Zoe Wexler

As a writer who seeks to smudge the barriers between race, identity, and what it means to be a black man situated in different landscapes of the American experience, Eddy L. Harris has shared with his readers journeys that range from canoeing down the Mississippi River to exploring the birth place of his cultural roots in Africa. He is the author of four published works: Mississippi Solo, Native Stranger, South of Haunted Dreams, and Still Life in Harlem; his forthcoming book will navigate his relationship with his father. Harris, who splits his time between life in Paris and Baltimore, where he serves as an associative professor at Goucher College, visited Pittsburgh as part of the Contemporary Writer’s Series and shared his perspective on his life as a writer and traveler.

Missy Raterman is a previous contributor to Nidus and an editorial intern at Creative Nonfiction.

S. Zoe Wexler is an MFA candidate at University of Pittsburgh's creative nonfiction program. Her writing has been published in Three Rivers Review and Collision, and she is a regular contributor to Pitt Magazine and Pittsburghfashion.com.


How do you get the idea for a project?

It's usually just something that pops into my head and then the longer it stays, the more real I know it is. On some level, I don't consider myself a travel writer at all, and yet I like to travel and when I think of goofy things -- like I've been wanting to get to Southeast Asia overland for years now but have been waiting for places like Afghanistan to settle down -- ideas start to form. Once an idea has been percolating for some time, I know it is a real idea and I begin to think about working through the idea as a book. Because I'm a traveler, as well as a writer, the two will inevitably come together at some point.

Place seems to play heavily into the structure and framework of your writing. To what extent do you begin a project with a preconfigured notion of the metaphor with regard to, for instance, the river in Mississippi Solo, or the city in Still Life in Harlem?

Well, Harlem for sure held some strong associations because that's all Harlem was or is -- when you think of Harlem, you automatically think, blackness and black community. That is why I picked that location, but otherwise not much. The Mississippi River was just the river that was closest to my house when I grew up. The metaphor comes more as I am writing -- you find whatever metaphors you are searching for.

At your reading last night, you described St. Louis as a city of brick buildings. How do you think this sort of characteristic of a town's identity is alive in the people of that place? How does living in Paris affect you differently than when you are living in the US?

I'm a mid-westerner at heart. I'm looking for a house in France, outside Paris right now, and the landscape that I like is the landscape that reminds me of Missouri. Not on purpose, but the landscape I am really in love with -- it's not the mountains, it's not the seas, it's not the beaches -- it's the landscape that I wake up and think, hey, it looks like the hinterlands of Missouri. I haven't yet written about France. Once I'm not here, I'll get a perspective I don't get otherwise; it's like looking at yourself in the mirror every day and not seeing how old you are until one day you wake up and then you are an old man, or woman. If you don't look at your reflection for four days, then you would see the changes, all of a sudden, in your face.

In Harlem, you only expected to stay one year but you ended up staying a year and half longer. Have you found that to be a common experience in your work?

Whether I'm writing or living -- what time is it now?

11:45

Okay . . . if I had something to do at 12:00, which I do, and we weren't finished [with the interview], we wouldn't be finished until we were finished. It drives people crazy because they end up having to wait for me, but I don't mind if they leave. I am in the thing, what I'm doing at the time, while I'm doing it, and then it's over when it's over. The same thing with Harlem or canoeing the river: I was on the river until I was done -- I didn't set a time limit.

You've shown us a lot about what can be gained in writing about a place that you are not familiar with, but what have some of the challenges been?

Not having access to the inner circle of things -- you are always, in a way, a journalist just asking questions. Have you ever tried explaining baseball to someone? If not, you should try it sometime because it doesn't make any sense. You just have to know it. If you live in America, you know it and there seems nothing to explain. But if you explain it to someone else, suddenly there are questions such as, But why are there four bases and why are there only three strikes? As an insider, you don't think about these things. However, as an outsider, you also get to ask. It's important to recognize the value of being an outsider as much as the challenge of it.

Do you ever worry about your authority to describe a place?

That was one of the criticisms of the Harlem book -- how can I write about the place when I am not really an insider there? I'm not writing about Harlem; I'm not writing about Africa or any of these places. I'm writing about my particular slice of this place, which is as authentic as anybody's particular take on a thing or place. I don't worry what anybody else thinks about my aspect or giving voice to this guy -- I'm not giving voice to him. I'm giving voice to me through him. With the book on my father, for instance, we are somehow symbiotic enough that the voice that comes out may be his, may be mine, but I don't worry about having authority to do so.

You made it a point in Still Life in Harlem to remind your readers that you could leave at any point. Why was this an important distinction for you?

I did not have any real conscious sense of this going into the project, but in the beginning of that time there, I spent as much money as I possibly could so that my bank account didn't have Tahiti money. But even with no bank account, I have access to Tahiti because I can loan the money. I have friends who would give me the money and I could find a way to get to Tahiti if I wanted to. So, no matter how poor I tried to make myself, it was nowhere near the same thing as existing in that physical and mental space that the other people living around me dealt with as a reality on a daily basis. You have to be honest with the reader because even if you're not, he or she is going to know anyways.

It seems that many writers need the discipline of a working schedule, but you work in a different manner?

No, I don't work in a different way; I live in a different way. While I do think, especially as a young writer, that kind of discipline is necessary, once you get practiced, you can write on any schedule you want as long as it's working for you. However, I do think you need to write every day. When I was a younger fart, I used to write everyday from 9-3 without fail, so I did believe in that structure at one point. It's a different kind of luxury -- when you are unknown and unpublished you don't have the same commitment to lunches and meetings that you will have once your work is being acknowledged.

How did your work as a journalist help you when you decided to start working on your first book?

Well, I wouldn't actually call myself a journalist -- that's more something I put on a resume. I don't have that journalistic skill. Similarly, a friend of mine is a photographer in Paris -- a fantastic artistic photographer, but he could not go to Haiti and take pictures of people suffering. He doesn't have a detached eye and would feel really uncomfortable exploiting that kind of suffering. Even though I'm interviewing people in an informal way when I am talking to them, it's not the same as walking into a room with a pad and pencil. My technique -- or whatever I'm doing -- is free-flowing so that I'm just having a conversation and then it comes out on a piece of paper later. Plus, I never want to intrude. I'm an unobtrusive kind of person and whatever comes out is because it's organic.

You said you had 55 rejections for Mississippi Solo before finding a publisher and six unpublished books before that -- what kept you writing?

Stupidity! I'm stupid -- like on the Mississippi river. A lot of people would have given up. It was hard work and I didn't know what I was doing, but at some point, especially if people are telling me, I can't do it -- depending on what type of person you are, it makes you want to do it more. I knew I could write; it's a question then of trying to get the right manuscript in front of the right editor on the right day. It comes down a lot to confidence. Also, having really good friends and really good family behind you who will support you no matter how crazy your ideas seem at the time. It's important that you learn not to let other people define you -- you are a writer when you know you are writer, not because of when or how often you are published.

Your books have been classified as autobiography, memoir, travel-writing -- how would you classify them?

I wouldn't -- I'm always astounded by that stuff. Certainly travel, because it has some aspects of travel in it, though it isn't like Paul Theroux's travel books. Essay works best for me because I just like the idea of being an essayist. It is memoirist because it is me and my memories -- but that's a marketing thing. You classify books so you can have a shelf to put them on. I think there should be the good books section and the crummy books section, and I want mine in the good book section. What ends up happening for me is that I often get classified as a black writer, which is the section where my books will end up, and in this case, I get screwed.

What is it that bothers you about being classified as an African-American memoirist or writer?

Partly, I hate it because if I am to be classified as an African-American writer but what I have to say is not particularly appealing to the African-American community -- and it's not -- then the segment I am supposed to be directed toward is rejecting me. I'm doubly screwed. So I'd much rather be classified as a good writer -- assuming that I am -- and leave it at that. Then people who want to discover me, can discover and those who don't, can leave me alone. Once you are marginalized as a writer, your numbers are already going to be small and then you are going to be squeezed farther and farther to the edges and then off the page entirely. Regardless of my philosophy, it certainly hurts my bankroll also.

What do you think it is in your writing that is counter to what a black community may want to hear?

Well, I'm not a separatist for one thing -- I believe in the melting pot-ness of America and that we all share the same culture. You cannot be an American of long duration and not share, in a certain fashion, language, attitude, and outlook. Even when I am listening to country music, which I do now, I hear aspects in certain songs now of rap music.

Like Nelly and Tim McGraw?

(Laughs) Exactly. So all this stuff overlaps and yet, a lot of black people like to think that we have a separate culture or separate outlook or separate something, simply because we've been discriminated against so heavily. You can't deny the discrimination and the lack of opportunity, but you also, in my opinion, can't deny the blanket American culture. There may be separate patches in the quilt but it's the same quilt. I'm also interested in bringing people more together, not further apart. This book I just wrote about my father is what I consider a corrective to what is often considered normal in black families: the idea that the father is gone or doesn't have a job or is an alcoholic or abusive. Though my father was a big boozer, none of that stuff was happening in my house. The reason this book is going to be a non-seller is that nothing bad happens in it! The worse thing that happens is that my father chased my brother and me around the house with a belt, swinging it all over the place -- it looked like he was going to kill us, but looking back I realize, man, he could have caught us anytime he wanted to. He was just trying to put the fear of God, or fear of him, into us. If you write a book that says, my father beat me mercilessly before he left home and we never saw him again, then I became a drug addict but am now rehabilitated because I got a job at the Washington Post after I spent six months in prison -- boy! I'd sell a gazillion copies of that, because it fits into what the mainstream thinks and stereotypes as typical black experience. My black experience is probably as typical as anybody's because it's mine and because it's black -- but it doesn't seem to be what people want to hear about.

Can you tell us more about the book about your father?

It's coming out in France, but not here yet though because I haven't gotten a publisher. The French eat that shit up though, because they haven't been indoctrinated the way we have as to what is supposed to be black culture. They are more prone to see good writing about a guy who happens to be black and his family. They loved the Harlem book -- it did really well there, but it did disastrous here.

You talk about your father a lot in different ways, in different books, however --

(Laughs). I know what you are going to say . . . my mother says the same thing: "How come you never write about me?!" Partly, I think it's because I was closer to my mother than I was to my father -- not that I wasn't close to my father. My mother and I had a special relationship. I didn't feel I had to write about her because she was already in me somehow. But this man, who I didn't know – or, as it turns out, the man I didn't think I knew very well -- I wanted to get closer to. When I look back at it though, I realize, I knew him better than anybody. I knew him better than he knew himself in a lot of ways, but at the time I didn't know that and it's in the writing process that I find out.

Do you always think in terms of book-length projects?

Yeah. I always think in terms of books, unless a magazine comes to me.

About the Matthew Henson project that you are working on now: had you been interested in his life before you were approached to do a book on him?

I mentioned him in an article for Outside magazine a few years back, so I knew about him. Harper Collins was doing a series of biographies and approached me about writing for the series. They wanted the writer to pick a subject that was close to him, and we came up with Henson because he's black and an explorer who did that sort of adventurous travel that Harper thinks I also do.

You said that for your next book, you were considering a topic on how Black Americans are perceived in certain areas now because of the war?

In places like Iraq, for instance. Ten years ago, most people would not have seen a black American before, but now because there are so many soldiers in Iraq, they are all over the place. And the perception of what it means to be a black American would have changed, I imagine anyways, because in the past, black Americans were associated with oppression. Now as an American and part of the huge contingent of American forces there, they may be seen as forces of oppression. A lot of that is what I hope to engage or consider as I'm traveling around.

Would you want to go to Iraq?

Well, not necessarily Iraq because even though I have something of a death wish, it's not so overt of one, but I would like to go through that region -- Turkey, the top or bottom of Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and India.

Can you talk about your revision process? You said last night that you finished the Henson manuscript, but were disappointed?

No, I wasn't disappointed -- I thought it was great! I thought the manuscript was brilliant because it was different, exciting, a little kooky, but the editor didn't like it. She was disappointed. She read it and said, "Clearly you put lots of work into this and did lots of research but man, I can't make heads or tails of it." So, she sent it back, marked up. She started marking on page one, but by page sixty, she stopped! She just didn't want to read anymore and sent it back and saying, this needs to be looked at, fresh! So I looked at it fresh, and, man oh man, that's when I was disappointed in it because I realized that she was right! And not disappointed because she was right, but because now I would have to do a lot more work on the stupid thing. It's always good to [have] fresh eyes.

Do you find the revision process more difficult than the initial writing?

It's more difficult because I thought I was finished. It's more difficult because I have to look at old stuff. It's more difficult because I have to throw so much stuff that I like, away. It is easier though because I have a structure and can then bring something fresh to it. And it's easier because I know it's getting better.

Is revision normally a major process in your writing?

Normally, no. But this one was a departure for me. I'd never written about somebody else completely externally like this. Even when I'd written about my father in the past, it was so close, it was almost like writing about me. But with Henson, it was just this external critter and it was also tough because there wasn't much written about him. One of the reasons it was probably repetitious was that I had to fill up some pages so I was saying the same thing in different ways and it just didn't work; the writing of it was hard for those reasons.

Do you have other advice for young writers?

Besides write -- yeah, write! And then write some more, and then re-write it. That's all there is to it. Again, there is of course that difference between writing and publishing. The writer part of me wants you to just write. Whenever I'm teaching a class, someone asks what the secret is, but there is no secret, except you put your butt in the chair and write. Then, there is the publishing "you" which has nothing to do with the writer "you," except that it's the same person. No matter how good you are, you can still not get it published. A lot of it has to do with luck, discipline, determination, and more luck. If you look at a lot of the stuff being published, a lot of it is not very good at all. A lot of good stuff is sitting in somebody's drawer some place. You need a thick skin and you cannot discount luck in this business.

Copyright 2005, Missy Raterman and S. Zoe Wexler

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.