Oberlin Alum Discusses Early Career and Writing Process Continued from page 10 would do well toiling in an obscure field. You’re an extroverted person. You write really well in layperson language.” I think that they knew that I was going to suck at being an academic, basically. I didn’t listen to them, of course, and I enrolled in a literature master’s program at University College London. I had gone on the Oberlin-in-London program and I chose this master’s program largely because I wanted to move back to London. While I was in the program, I began to realize that I didn’t want to write academic papers. I don’t want to say it wasn’t fun, because writing a novel is not necessarily fun either, but it just wasn’t interesting to me. I was writing short stories and poetry, and I realized that I wanted to write my own work rather than analyze other writers’ work. One thing I don’t talk about in My Salinger Year is that I transferred to a doctoral program in New York. While I was working at that agency, I was taking classes at night. I had a full fellowship and the program was wonderful and the professors were hugely supportive, but I hated it. It just wasn’t right for me. I wanted to be part of the cultural conversation, and in academica there are the few people who are, but most are not. I didn’t want to be in the trenches writing papers that no one was ever going to read. I wanted to write things that were rele-
vant to people’s lives. After two semesters, I dropped out and enrolled in Columbia’s M.F.A. writing program. While I was there, I had two professors who were at The New Yorker and they both independently said to me, “You should write for magazines.” Coincidentally, at the same time, one of my best friends from Oberlin began working at The Atlantic and he also said, “You should write for us.” I thought, “All these people are telling me to do this; I should do it.” So while I was at Columbia, I started writing for magazines. And I loved it. Once you started doing journalism, did it give you that sense of having your finger on the cultural pulse that you lacked in academia? Yes, it really, really did. I did a whole bunch of different things in the journalistic realm. There was a period where I was a stringer for a section of The New York Times, and I wrote about all different things. One time, I wrote about a crime wave in which women were being mugged and how it tied into the popularity of Sex and the City, I wrote about the way women’s lives were effected by September 11, and lots of other subjects. I edited an arts and culture tablet for a while. I wrote hundreds of book reviews for anyone that would let me. I wrote pieces on postpartum depression and suchlike for women’s magazines. I loved doing interviews. I really loved writing profiles. I loved shaping
stories, and figuring out the difference between an idea and a story was really fun for me. I would have an idea and I would think, “What is the story there? How do I make this into an actual story?” All of that really, really helped me when I actually got the courage to write a novel. On the topic of writing your memoir My Salinger Year, in an interview with The Guardian you mention the painful nature of revisiting that time in your life. How long did it take you to access that framework of memory and piece together the narrative? My third book is due very soon. I’m very behind on it because of the pandemic, and because of this film coming out and the constant publicity, this is on my mind, too. It can be very difficult to allow yourself to sink into a work when you know that the subject is going to be kind of painful. My Salinger Year came out of a long essay I published in 2002 about answering Salinger’s fan mail, which got some attention and I began receiving calls from editors and agents asking me to expand it into a book. I said no to all of them, but over the years this idea of turning the essay into a memoir kept popping up: I would meet an editor at a party and he would say, “Oh! I read your Salinger essay. Have you ever thought about turning it into a book?” But I kept saying no. I just didn’t feel like there was enough story there. In 2010, after Sa-
linger died, I wrote another essay for Slate, which the BBC asked me to turn into a radio documentary. When the documentary aired, editors started asking, again, and this time I said yes. Putting together the documentary led me to see that the story was larger than I’d originally thought. But after I signed the contract with my publisher, I became terrified that I’d made a terrible mistake. I then basically spent a year putting off writing it and doing research as a way of procrastinating. Now, I see that I needed that research year to gather the courage to face the past and also to figure out, as I was saying about magazine articles, “What is the actual story here?” When I actually sat down and wrote the book, it came together very quickly. It was a very different experience than writing my novel A Fortunate Age, on which I worked for six years. That novel came out of my thinking about the ways in which nothing had changed in like 50 or 60 years for women, and I wanted to write a novel that addressed that, but not in a pedantic sort of way. So I spent a whole year thinking, “Who are my characters? What are their life situations?” Literally just thinking — I didn’t even write anything down. Then I spent a full year writing the first hundred pages. I’m a person who needs a lot of time to think things through; the internal process takes longer than the writing.
AtGN Begins Four-Day Run at Irene and Alan Wurtzel Theater Continued from page 10 als and staying involved throughout the process. “There’s something really exciting about integrating Black culture into classic texts unapologetically,” Emeka said. “Just imagining a world through a Black cultural experience, that’s what Zora Howard has done by essentially placing her story in a Black church.” At its core, the tragedy of AtGN explores the balance between laws of man and laws of God. Each version emphasizes a unique theme. Howard wanted to tell the tale through the lens of Blackness, modernizing an ancient narrative that may initially seem irrelevant to our time or unrelated to current social issues. Through the adapted story, she highlights Black culture and its legacy. “These old issues don’t go away, and every generation has to confront these ancient struggles in the context of their own society,” Emeka said. The contemporary aspect of an ancient show is something that Emeka values in any classical text. “I think the goal of [classical theater] is to help the audience really connect viscerally and see themselves inside of this ancient story, in these ancient dilemmas,” he said. The Irene and Alan Wurtzel Theater, where AtGN is performed, is conducive to this intention. The audience sits directly on the stage, surrounding performers. Actors make eye-level contact with audience members and physically involve viewers in the show. Many students involved in AtGN had previous experiences with Antigone’s story, but the opportunity to perform in a modern adaptation of the Theban play was a unique experience. College second-year Vera Grace Menafee, who plays Ismene, Antigone’s sister, has acted in a rendition of Antigone before but had a very different cast experience. “My senior year of high school, I was in a production of Antigone, but was the only Black cast member of the show, which is the complete opposite for this show,” they said. Menafee is honored to be a part of this project at Oberlin. “What Zora Howard has created is more than just an adaptation — it is a reimagining of Black stories that have existed and will continue to exist … and we have the honor of sharing [them] in the theater,” they said. While helping current cast members grow into the roles, Emeka kept in mind the broader context of theater at Oberlin. “Oberlin College has a unique legacy and commitment to Black people and Black culture through music, through education, and through theater,” Emeka said. “We at Oberlin College have a very exciting legacy with Black theater that extends well before I got here, so to contribute to that legacy is always exciting.”
The Oberlin Review | December 10, 2021
Zora Howard’s AtGN sets Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy in a Black church with a majority Black cast. Courtesy of Maeve Hogan Unfortunately, the lingering presence of COVID-19 has impacted the production of AtGN. Rehearsals were masked, and so is the majority of the show, with the exception of some tense, emotional moments. Despite this initial challenge and the impact on rehearsals, the cast is thrilled to be back on stage. “COVID has definitely affected theater, but theater is resilient,” College fourth-year and AtGN cast member Cyril Amanfo said. “We are affected, of course, but we are big, we are back, and we will be sticking around.” Emeka has grown to appreciate the masks as he thinks they lend themselves to the show’s modernity. “I’ve been trying to incorporate the masks into the world of the play in a way that I think the audience is familiar with, given that we’re in a world that demands masks,” Emeka said. “And so, making the world of the play an extension or an abstraction of the world that we’re in now [is
important].” Menafee acknowledged Emeka’s conscious effort to dissolve the feeling of a mask barrier. “Justin Emeka has been really intentional about staging us distanced, but he has simultaneously been helping us find ways to bridge the physical distance on stage and maintain closeness and connection with each other,” they said. Emeka has also found that masks enhance the way viewers absorb the script. “You do find that [masks] tend to go away after a little bit, and everybody in the room kind of forgets about them and … starts paying more attention to the language and … listening closer to the language,” he said. Howard’s AtGN is a unique play, and Oberlin students have the privilege of seeing its stage debut. The show is running through Sunday, Dec. 12.
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