Deep inside The National Library of Wales, in one of those rooms with suspect acoustics and uncomfortable chairs, I sat alongside Alex Wharton and Jade E. Bradford and we talked about writing for well over an hour.
We spoke about what it costs to write when you work full time and have a life. About first drafts that are supposed to be terrible, and what reading has to do with writing, and whether the two are separable at all.
Jade wants, she said, the permission to be radically boring. The right to write about ordinary life without that life being read as a statement of identity.
I’ve been doing this long enough to know why that permission is difficult to obtain. The mainstream expectation of the Black experience has a shape. We explain. We translate and tone down. We make the particular legible to a reader who arrives from outside our experience. That shape is commercially proven and culturally rewarded but irrelevant to the readers the book is actually about.
The full panel discussion is available above and is entirely worth your time.
Gareth James | M2M Books