REPAST on NPR

Listening right now to Debbie Elliott's story about REPAST (the oratorio about my grandfather)!  I have been working on this story since I first learning about it in the summer of 2007 and it never ceasing to amaze me how moved people are by my grandfather's words.

It breaks my heart to think of what he went through and that so many people who knew him (white and black) didn't really KNOW him, because they didn't perceive how painful it was for him to be humiliated every single day simply because he was black...

Even worse?  While being humiliated he had to smile.

I have loved learning about his life, sharing it in the documentary Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story, writing about it in my upcoming book, Searching for Booker Wright, but more than anything I love speaking about it.

I've been able to take his story and the ideas that still resonate today to colleges, corporations, and community groups around the nation.

Though he died the year before I was born, my love for Booker Wright continues to nourish me.

Rules for Writers

1. When you're writing at Starbucks and someone says, "You're still working on your book."  Remind them that crafting a provocative, powerful, yet delicately beautiful narrative, that also sticks to the absolute truth of humanity is not as simple as drafting an email.
2. When you meet someone who says, "I'm a doctor now, but I'm going to write books when I retire."  Cock your head to the side and say, "I'm a writer now, but I'm going to perform a few cardiothoracic surgeries when I retire."  
3. When people say, "These days you can write almost anything, it's the editors who put it all together and do all the work."  Hit them on the noggin, turn, and run really fast in the other direction.
4. When someone says, "Yeah, I'm going to write a book one of these days," but then can't name a single book they've ever finished reading, you should do the following.  Tilt your head back and laugh out loud for at least a full minute.  
5. When some random person takes the time to not only read your work, but to tell you how it moved them, remember that moment for the rest of your life. A writer creates a structure made out of words that are reluctantly pulled together, slowly, one at a time.  If you manage to complete your word structure and then find that it has inspired the soul of a complete stranger, then something miraculous has just occurred. The ability to do that is a gift, one that only God can grant.
6. Every day work as if you have the aforementioned gift.  Hope against hope that you are one of the precious few who can bring life to death, set hope alight, and remove the blinders that keep us from seeing our true selves. That's what it is to be a writer.  The only two requirements are that you nurture your own capacity to dream and that you never, ever give up.  Even when it feels as if people have run out of their ability to believe in you, you must never give up.