My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.
— Russell Banks
John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.
For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.
And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.
Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.
The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
Motivations are too tangled and complex.
One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.
So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.
But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.
Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for.
But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.
I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.
And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.
The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.
Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.
I don't want it to be all that self-conscious or artificial, but it really grows out of my having invented myself as a listener so that I could hear her voice.
The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing.
It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.
If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.
What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know - you don't want them to get older as you get older.
A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.
Nobody does anything for one reason.
First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated.
Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
