What is the Contemporary?



TONI MORRISON













I chose the above two pictures of the great Toni Morrison because to me they display the awesome power of time, and things possible. I am fascinated with people who have lived several decades and the knowledge they are able to offer about life. What to hold dear? What will not matter at the end of our journey? Toni Morrison has written ten novels over the span of her career. Her ability recapture places in the time and its people, to tell a compelling story has earned her several writing honors, including the Nobel Prize.

Morrison says: "After I finished The Bluest Eye, [her first novel] which took me five years to write, I went into a long period of...not deep depression but a kind of melancholy. Then I had another idea for a book, Sula, where I was trying to write about real friendship between women—and the whole world came alive again. Everything I saw or did was potentially data, a word or a sound or something for the book, and then I really realized that for me writing meant having something coherent in the world. And that feels like...not exactly what I was born for, it's more the thing that holds me in the world in healthy relationship, with language, with people, bits of everything filter down, and I can stay here. Everything I see or do, the weather and the water, buildings...everything actual is an advantage when I am writing. It is like a menu, or a giant tool box, and I can pick and choose what I want. When I am not writing, or more important, when I have nothing on my mind for a book, then I see chaos, confusion, disorder.”

Though I cannot ever imagine creating the body of work she has, I relate to Morrison’s take on the world and writing. Writing keeps me engaged with the world. It is how I relate to and make sense of all things. When I am not working on a writing project, I feel a palpable disconnect with the world. I know now without doubt that I am a writer. But, I wish I was a lot more patient and appreciative of process it took to discover this.

Some years ago I felt compelled to start a novel. I would write a bit, leave it and return to it at a later date. I wrote without knowing the source of the words, which formed a language of a people and a place. Everything around me was a source of inspiration, a character, or a detail that moved the story forward. Then one summer, I put everything aside and I just wrote. I just went along with the story. At the same time my writer friends and I questioned the purpose behind the work we were doing and when would all end because it felt like we were writing these books forever. Then one afternoon, nearing the end of that summer, a woman I had never met, told me a piece of her life story, and also revealed the true title of the novel I was working on. But this was a dream. Just a dream that I woke up angry from because I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. My writer friends thought I was lucky to have such a dream. I thought different. A few months later, I put the novel aside. A year later, I just happen to be having a conversation with my uncle, who tells me a few details about his mother, my grandmother, who died before I was born. Those details matched the ones the woman in the dream told me and wanted me to write down. But I had already segued into screenwriting…