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Writing From One Culture to All Cultures
By david167 on Mar 2, 2009 | In Welcome
When I studied for my bachelor’s degree in Education, I took a course in African American literature. I read the course description and decided that I knew next to nothing about it. The writer in me was open to exploring new thoughts and ideas. What I discovered was eye opening in ways the professor never intended—or at least not overtly.
I learned that in writing we tend to aim for the culture we live in. This is as obvious as the fact we need oxygen to breathe, but there is something wrong with this paradigm. Does that mean because I grew up in one culture that I cannot reach for the others? As I read the words of Charles W. Chestnut and other authors of the Harlem Renaissance, I felt them reaching out beyond their culture to even people like me, opening a window on a world I thought I saw, but never did.
Writers cannot write from within their ivory towers about the world they think they know without stepping in to that world and experiencing it. We may be raised in one culture, but no culture exists in its own isolated universe. All cultures move and intertwine, separated by imaginary lines or ways of thinking that can be alien to another. As a writer I want to be like a mountain range or a river, not seeing the borders—instead writing to reach everyone I can with the stories I weave.
Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates on the blogs, short stories, and novels I write.
