|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Carlos Fuentes
Author, Scholar & Diplomat
Carlos Fuentes: I had two grandmothers, and both were storytellers. One was from Vera Cruz, on the gulf coast; the other one was from Mazatlan in Sinaloa on the Pacific Coast. So I had two oceans at my disposal. I spent my summers with my grannies in Mexico. My father was counselor of the Mexican Embassy in Washington at the time. I think that I became a writer because I heard those stories -- all the stories that I didn't know about Mexico, about my own land. They were the storehouse of these great tales of migrants, revolution, highway robberies, bandits, love affairs, ways of dressing, eating -- they had the whole storehouse of the past in their heads and their hearts. So this was, for me, very fascinating, this relationship with my two grannies -- the two authors of my books really.
View Interview with Carlos Fuentes
View Biography of Carlos Fuentes
View Profile of Carlos Fuentes
View Photo Gallery of Carlos Fuentes
|
|
|
Carlos Fuentes
Author, Scholar & Diplomat
I say, "I'm going to write this book," and now I sit down and I start sorting out chapters and imagining the book and saying, "Tonight, I think that tomorrow I will write such and such." I go to sleep. I wake up in the morning. I go to my table. I take the pen and something totally different comes out, which means that perhaps dreams are dictating part of your writing life in a very mysterious way. You have silly dreams. We all have silly dreams. We are naked on the street. How terrible! We fall off a roof. We're drowning in the sea. Those are the dreams you remember. But what about the dreams you don't remember? I think these are the really important dreams in your life, the underground dreams, the subterranean dreams that come out somehow in your life, and in my case, through literature. Because I can't explain otherwise why I write certain things I have never thought about before. And always on the day after a dreaming night. It's very magical.
View Interview with Carlos Fuentes
View Biography of Carlos Fuentes
View Profile of Carlos Fuentes
View Photo Gallery of Carlos Fuentes
|
|
|
Millard Fuller
Founder, Habitat for Humanity International
Millard Fuller: Linda and I both gained so many new insights. Both of us were professing Christians, but we gained many, many new insights from talking to Clarence Jordan, and one of the insights was the insight about economics. You know, most Americans are religious people, but very few are really serious about trying to discover what the way of Jesus is and following it. It's sort of like we admire Jesus, but he's for church and Sunday school. But in the real world, we do things the way that the culture does it. And what we learned from Clarence Jordan was that if you are going to be serious in your faith, it's an all-the-time, every-day-of-the-week proposition, and that includes how you relate to your poor neighbors. You can't sit in affluence and live in a great big house and be driving around in big cars, and your neighbors are living in abject poverty, and you are going to church every Sunday saying, "I'm a good Christian," and these poor neighbors are of no concern to you. So what we gained from him was that true religion is involved in how you relate to your neighbors. Not just how you relate to the church you belong to, but how you relate to your neighbors. And he did give us the keen insight into how we ought to see our neighbors as people who are equally loved by God. And if they happened to be in a bad economic situation, then if you are able to be of help to them, you have a heaven-ordained mandate to do something.
View Interview with Millard Fuller
View Biography of Millard Fuller
View Profile of Millard Fuller
View Photo Gallery of Millard Fuller
|
|
|
Millard Fuller
Founder, Habitat for Humanity International
Millard Fuller: It was not that we physically walked away. We would do mailings. We would write letters to people in Illinois and Indiana and Pennsylvania. They had been supporting Koinonia during that difficult period when they were under attack by the Ku Klux Klans and the White Citizens Council. So we had a mailing list of people who were sympathetic, and when we told them we had this new program, we were building houses for the poor, they were inclined to be supportive. And that was the beginning of what we did. And as we saw it working, and as Linda said, as we saw the tremendous transformation within these families, we began to think, can we make this work somewhere else? And that's when we actually contacted the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, and asked them to sponsor us, and we moved to what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And we worked over there for three years, building houses, and it was during our time in Africa that we realized that this concept was indeed an idea that would have worldwide implications. And we came back to the United States in 1976 with the dream in our hearts of forming a worldwide work that would build houses for people all over the world and eventually eliminate all substandard housing.
View Interview with Millard Fuller
View Biography of Millard Fuller
View Profile of Millard Fuller
View Photo Gallery of Millard Fuller
|
|
|
Millard Fuller
Founder, Habitat for Humanity International
We really had an emotional reconciliation, standing on a street just off of Fifth Avenue in New York, and holding each other and crying. And so it was really when we got in a taxi and started back to the hotel -- and there was a sensation of light in the taxi, and it was not anything spooky or mystical. It was just a sensation of light is all I can -- the only way I can express it. And at that moment, there was a revelation that came to me, and that was, "You should give everything you got away and start over." And I just turned to Linda and I said I just felt very strongly a presence that -- and "I just feel like we should give everything we got away and seek God in our lives." We both came from Christian homes, but we had gotten so far away from it, and she didn't hesitate a minute. She said, "I think that's what you should do."
View Interview with Millard Fuller
View Biography of Millard Fuller
View Profile of Millard Fuller
View Photo Gallery of Millard Fuller
|
|
|
Ernest Gaines
A Lesson Before Dying
I have about 15 different characters who speak, narrate in A Gathering of Old Men. I think there are 15 of them, and I had to get -- some way I had to distinguish 15 different voices. I had to give each one of those voices different little characteristics, little nuances, each one needed to have, whether it was a small boy, Snookum, who was about -- I suppose Snookum must be about eight years old or nine -- to people who were 80 years old. I had several 80- or 70-year-old men in there. I have two educated white women, Candy as well as Miss Merle. How would I distinguish those two voices, difference in those two voices? I have a sheriff, a big sheriff in there. How'd I get his voice down? Then I have a little skinny deputy, his little deputy, I had to get his voice down. Then I had a minister who used a lot of religious terms, and another older lady who used a lot of religious terms. How do I distinguish those two voices? So I think it's only through having lived in Louisiana and coming from such a place, because there we have so many different -- we have several different dialects in my part of Louisiana. I come from Cajun, Creole, and of course both Creole black (and) Creole white there in Louisiana. I attended a Catholic school there for a little while. I knew the Baptist religion. My folks are Baptist. So you know, I draw from these experiences.
View Interview with Ernest Gaines
View Biography of Ernest Gaines
View Profile of Ernest Gaines
View Photo Gallery of Ernest Gaines
|
|
|
Ernest Gaines
A Lesson Before Dying
Ernest J. Gaines: He asked me who was I writing for, and I said, "Well, Wally" -- he wanted us to call him "Wally," you know, because we were all informal around the place. He didn't want anyone to call him "Mr. Stegner" or anything like that. I said, "Well, Wally, I don't write for anybody in particular." I said, "I've learned from many writers." He said, "Well" -- I said, "I've read all these writers." I said, "I learned a lot from a writer like Ivan Turgenev," but I said, "He was just an aristocrat writing in the 19th -- mid 19th century -- and I know he was not writing for an Ernie Gaines on a Louisiana plantation." And I said, "Still, I learned from him because of the way he wrote that little novel. I learned about a young man coming back to the old place and how he reacted to the old place." I said, "I didn't know anything about that until I read that book," and he said, "Listen, Ernie." He said, "Suppose a gun was put at your head, and that same question was asked. Who do you write for?" I said, "Well, in that case, I'll come up with an answer." And I said, "The answer would be that, first, I'd write for the young black youth of the South, so that I could help him in some ways to find himself, his directions in life. Let him know something about where he's coming from, what he came from, and how to try to help him find his way." And then Wally said, "Well, suppose that gun was still at your head," and I said, "Well, then I'd write for the white youth of the South, to let him know that unless he knows his neighbor for the last 350 years, he knows only half of his own history, that you have to know the people around you. And his neighbor, of course, was the blacks, African Americans." So that was all the discussion on who I write for, but I don't write for any particular group. When I face that wall, when I sit at that desk and face that wall to write, looking at the blank wall, I just try to create those characters as well as I possibly can create them.
View Interview with Ernest Gaines
View Biography of Ernest Gaines
View Profile of Ernest Gaines
View Photo Gallery of Ernest Gaines
|
|
|
Ernest Gaines
A Lesson Before Dying
I said, "Well, I have this idea about this. I want someone that lived from slavery to now. But to make it real, I have to bring in different things about history or whatever," and I said, "Let's start with 12 national things." Of course, they did not experience these things, but they may have heard about these things. So we talked about things like slavery. We talked about the Reconstruction period. We talked about, oh, the Depression era, many things. So after we dealt with 12 things nationally, about 12 things nationally, then I dealt with 12 things statewide. This is what could have happened in the State between 1862, say, until 1962. What could have happened in the State that they could have heard about from someone else, from other sources? They didn't know anything about it, really. They couldn't read. So they did not know anything about it directly. So let's deal with that. So we must have come up with ten, 12 things there. Then we dealt with the parish, need something here. She knows more about -- she has to know something about the parish. So we dealt with the parish. Then we came to the plantation. So the circle becomes smaller and smaller, and there are four books there in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. After I had gotten all this information, then I tried to put it into the voices of these different people who are going to tell the story about this little old lady, but they talked so much about her that I fell in love with her, and it was then that I decided to write the book from her point of view.
View Interview with Ernest Gaines
View Biography of Ernest Gaines
View Profile of Ernest Gaines
View Photo Gallery of Ernest Gaines
|
|
|
Ernest Gaines
A Lesson Before Dying
A common theme in my writing, one of the things in my writing has been about someone teaching someone younger something about life. Miss Jane does the same thing, and in Of Love and Dust I did the same thing, and a short story called "Three Men," we got the same thing. Someone is teaching somebody. Catherine Carmier. It was not always a teacher, but an older person, a much more wise person teaching a younger person about life, and I've always wondered in schools what were -- what did we teach anyone? What did we teach people in school? Surely, when I went to school, I was taught reading and writing and arithmetic. The teacher -- I only had one teacher in this classroom -- and he could not have taught me anything about pride and about my race or history of Africa or whatever. He couldn't teach me anything. He didn't have time to teach anything other than the basic things: reading, writing, arithmetic. So I tried to combine the idea of teaching someone something and a young man who is innocent of a crime. I'd try to bring those two things together. And what does this young man owe the world -- to the world -- when he's going to be executed for a crime he did not commit? What does he owe to the world? What does he owe to himself, when they think that he's a piece of nothing? That's all he's been taught since a small child, growing up on a plantation, such as the one I created for that. He's never been given love, except by his godmother.
View Interview with Ernest Gaines
View Biography of Ernest Gaines
View Profile of Ernest Gaines
View Photo Gallery of Ernest Gaines
|
| |
|
