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A Conversation with Professor John Edgar Wideman
"It wasn’t until I read Damballah—electric with Wideman’s modernist experimentation and his orchestra of voices—that I began, as Ralph Ellison might have put it, to create the uncreated features of my own face.”
Walton Muyumba on Wideman’s You Made Me Love You
Professor Wideman engages in a conversation with Dr Leila Kamali, Chelsea Jackson and Field Brown on storytelling, freedom and confinement, policing, fatherhood, the inheritance of trauma and ontological stigma, and reflects on his experience as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford in the 1960s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEmv2HnpJwE
Festival News
This year the main festival event was held Saturday, October 30th.
During the Oct. 30th main day of the festival John Edgar Wideman was in Conversation About the Art of Fiction with Walton Muyumba.
A link to the FB Live video of the Main Day events:
Readings in Tribute to John Edgar Wideman
was a free event Co-sponsored with The Writer's Center
Held OCTOBER 29th 2021 @ 7:00 PM EDT - 8:00 PM EDT
A one hour recording of the readings can be viewed at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfGWavsuBJA
See a recording of the Fitzgerald Festival celebrating the Winners and Runners-Up in the 2021 F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Contests .Both Winners and Runners-Up in the 2021 F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Contest read from their stories. A recording is here. An introduction begins about 14 minutes into the recording.
More information on the Short Stories is here and the stories can be downloaded.
Floating in Time with John Edgar Wideman
In a new collection of stories, the author invites readers to sit alongside him, listening and reading in multiple directions simultaneously.
What might "Are all Stories True?" mean?
TRACIE CHURCH GUZZIO in the book All Stories Are True suggests that this invites a meditation on history itself, the nature of storytelling, and the dialogue between cultural discourses.
'The phrase also directly confronts the “master narratives.” If “all stories are true,” then the privileging of discourses and histories (stories) of the Western tradition or in American culture is challenged.'
In The Cattle Killing, Wideman’s narrator, searches for the “correct” version of a mysterious African girl’s life and death, but finally decides:
“I believed each story. My way of reckoning learned from the old African people, who said all stories are true.’
John Edgar Wideman, The Cattle Killing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 53.
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