Last night I went to see Toni Morrison. It had been decades since I had seen her, she had a new book which I knew I was going to read. She is a woman who fully lives her  life and even if the questions posed, or discussion presented does not fully engage me, I know Morrison will say something that will make me think.  She’s wide and funny and down to earth, always real, always thoughtful, always fully engaging a question and stretching, if need be, till some substance rises from the question.  Interviewer, Michael Krasney asked Toni Morrison some about Mercy, much about The Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved.  He asked  why/how she has written so fully of mother and daughters when after all she had sons, especially during the writing of  The Bluest Eye when she was raising those boys and working and writing the corners of her night. She answered that she has the experience of daughter.  She can as well writer about mothers and daughters as she can about men.  Later on she speaks of someone offering praise to her writing with the crack of the whip saying she was good enough to now write about white folks.  I always enjoy Toni Morrison’s humor and truth.

    Krasney allowed a few questions. A woman asked of character development,  if characters grew from the inside out, or if they stood outside of her- a more sophisticated version of her 1980's questioner I remembered, “Where do you get your characters?,” and Morrison’s quick response, “I make them up,” head already turning across the room toward the next questioner. Toni Morrison tried to talk about what informed the development of character, how one must think about the person in that time in that place, the questions which she looks at.  Krasney, bringing her back to a narrower view of character asked if it was like looking at a movie. No. it is not like looking at a movie. And later, yes they speak from the inside she.
    
     I thought, from where else would they speak.  I mean if I’m hearing non-corporeal voices outside myself, assuming I’m not delusional, the work I’m writing may well be non-fiction, perhaps creative, perhaps not.  But the dictation of voices, ghosts, spirits, aliens, well how would even know if was made-up or not?.  In fiction, fictional characters always spring from inside.  And if they are long dead people who once existed, you cull the history as presented, mediate on the moment, and then based on dregs and wisps still make them up.  And for those who seem to stick to peple close at hand, just like the act of translation creates a new, if related, poem, so they too invent.  For me issue in character building is what one dares to imagine, how far  one is willing to go to discover the truth of a character.  

    I wrote this for a Red Room blog the end of last November. I did not get back to editing the above piece.  Instead I kept working on the book, “Freedom’s Harvest: The Peter Smith Story. I finished the novella and an extended non-fiction essay on the actual history in the book this Spring.  I also finished a chapbook, Black Bleeds in to Green that Word Temple Press and the every gracious and fine poet Katherine Hastings (http://www.wordtemple.com) has published and am waiting to see the printed version of  Amour Verdina/Verdinai Amour which is a Daughters of Yam chapbook.   A flip book, it features poems by Opal Palmer Adisa on one side and myself on the other.  Its release date is October 10.  I am also three - quarters of the way through Classic Black: African-American Voices from19th Century San Francisco.  I’ll be premiering this performance story telling/poetry piece with musicians extrodinaire, Mark Izu and Richard Howell at the end of November.  I’ve been working and writing and working at writing but what I have not done is kept up my online life.  I don’t twitter. I am very occasional with Facebook, and for the past year I have not  kept up with my blog.  I realize I miss that writing, too. I miss that breathless, let me say this one thing  that is on the tip of my tongue at this moment.  I realize I shy away from it because I like a certain amount of polish to my public writing and for me this requires a writing process akin to bread rising.  Mix, bead, cover and place in a warm space, take out, punch down, knead some more, return to the warm space. Repeating this pattern more often for the finer, smoother  piece of bread and less often for the more grainier .  But as someone who bakes a fair amount, I realize that there is a particular pleasure in quick breads too.  So I will be back, soon and often.