When I heard MacArthur Genius, National Book Award nominee John Edgar Wideman was doing a book with self-publisher Lulu, I was more than a little surprised. Then when I learned I could catch him at a Wordtheatre production in Santa Monica, I jumped at the chance. What he told me about writing, microfiction and the business of publishing is in today’s LA Times.
“Stories, in a way, are about time,” Wideman says. Now 68, he holds up his hands to indicate how much of his time has passed — and the smaller span that lies ahead. “What’s that mean?” he asks. “I’ve lost the best of what I have? Or is there something that I can look forward to in another scale, as life crystalizes?”
Following in the footsteps of Richard Wright, who began to write haiku near the end of his life, and taking inspiration from Yasunari Kawabata’s “Palm-of-the-Hand Stories,” Wideman is miniaturizing. He’s taking “the same ambitions” he’s always had and writing them into drastically smaller works.
As much as these stories grow out of Wideman’s current circumstances, they’re also built to connect with busy, distracted readers. “In the pace and rhythm of life we have around us today,” he says, “it’s a struggle to get a private minute. For me, the private minute is what it’s all about. It’s what a powerful culture like ours tends to crush.”
And yet, for all that Wideman wants readers to find focus in his micro-stories, his main concern ultimately is that of a writer trying to take control of his own work. “Most people write,” he notes, “because they want independence. And that independence is threatened when you have to kowtow to the means of production.”
