November 27, 2015 - 15:10
John Edgar Wideman Embraces the Future, Publishers Weekly (May 3, 2010):
A noted literary author chooses digital publishing for his new collection of stories, Briefs
Self-publishing for me is no Nat Turner rebellion against fat books or traditional publishing….Though not a fugitive slave, I still relish shaking things up. Hoping it might be more affordable for people like those I’d grown up with in Homewood, the novel Sent for You Yesterday was published in 1983 as a paperback original…
I grew up in a poor community where good, rich talk abounded. Attempting to represent that powerful orality in my fiction, I’m often reminded of the inadequacies of the written word. In human history, the electricity of one person speaking to another came long before we taught ourselves to write and read. Perhaps a digital age will restore to writing some of the energy of speech lost when the written word became Western culture’s dominant mode of embodying, conveying, and retaining knowledge. Given online publishing’s ability to instantly edit and revise, provide interactive conversation and commentary, mix words with sounds and pictures, link text to text, will books be reimagined, not solely as finished products or done deals but as virtual works-in-progress? Can books regain more of the jazzlike spontaneity and improvisation vital to speech, that ancient fire of live, face-to-face exchange?