Not everyone agrees with my moderate stance in regard to cultural appropriation, which I blogged about recently. I said that though I have some reservations, I believe it is acceptable for a singer or writer to focus on material from a culture he or she was not born into. Blogger Chris Kent believes artists are more likely to perform well when they are using material garnered from their own cultures instead of borrowed from those of other people. He believes cultural appropriation is "artistically wrong." Appropriation is defined as "to make use of material without authority or right." In this case, I'm discussing an author writing about cultures or even races outside of their own personal experience. It takes a very brave, if not eccentric, author to attempt to produce a work of fiction away from the realm of his/her life's experience. One of the first lessons learned in creative writing is to "write what you know." Creative writing, by nature, is an extension of our own observations about the culture and life we live in. We call upon past events witnessed or experienced, forming a theme through dramatic conflict and hopefully reveal an emotional truth (emphasis on hopefully). One of the examples I used in my second entry about about the topic was Charles de Lint, who is of mainly Dutch descent. I found his probing of Romany culture in his speculative fiction novel Mulengro convincing and well-executed. Kent believes de Lint might have performed better had he written about his own life experiences. . . .In the unique case of Canadian writer Charles de Lint whose work Mulengro deals with a series of murders taking place within the Gypsy culture, he learned about the subject matter through research. De Lint is of Rom descent and did not grow up within the Gypsy culture. Granted, when writing an historical nonfiction novel, authors must rigorously research their material. But to take this route as an author of creative fiction would seem to be the clearest way to stack the odds against the novel's success. There's virture to such curiosity and research, but it could also leave an exhausted writer holding an emotionally bankrupt manuscript in calloused hands. Another writer I might have offered as an example is Richard Powers, whose novel The Time of Our Singing, I reviewed not long ago. Powers, a MacArthur Foundation recognized genius, is a polymath adept in music, physics, writing and no telling what else. I described his latest novel, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Time of Our Singing, Richard Powers ' most recent addition to his oeuvre, is the kind of novel that comes so close to perfection that a reader asks 'How?' How does he know all the things he does? How was he able to incorporate them into the novelistic form? How does he manage to live in a society that hates very bright people like the Joker hates Batman and survive, not to mention achieve all he has?
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
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