She’s also the applications director at Write A House, which renovates vacant homes and gives them away to writers. The richest life is one that has room for both.Īnna Clark is a writer who lives in Detroit. It was nominated for twelve Tony awards, and won four: Best Featured Actress (McDonald). I hope I contribute to a more clear-eyed public understanding of what is real in this world.Īs Doctorow showed me, the choice between fiction and fact is a false one. Ragtime is a 1975 historical fiction novel by E. I also write about literary culture and try to help grow it in this city. I write true stories as a journalist, talking to both famous people and people who aren’t given due attention. I wanted to be part of it-all of it.Įight years later, I live in Detroit, a city of unbounded dissonance and creativity. Writing is an act of love for the world, in all of its possibilities, Doctorow seemed to say. And their greatest depth is revealed when they are set alongside each other. But here in my hands was a novel that underscored a belief that both true stories and imagined ones matter. I paged through Ragtime for hours, underlining sentences in pencil, readying the class I was to teach before finishing my graduate degree, leaving my intentional community and going on to-I didn’t know what yet. Five years before Howard Zinn published A People’s History of the United States, Ragtime spotlighted history’s outsiders, especially immigrants and African Americans, destabilizing the stories our nation likes to tell itself about itself. The famous characters shed light on the humble ones, making the story of those in search of a name for themselves especially vivid. Then Mother’s Younger Brother, in search of his life’s purpose, runs into the revolutionary Zapatistas in Mexico, but dies soon after. Father lands a spot on Robert Peary’s legendary 1909 North Pole expedition, but he isn’t on the final leg that actually makes the mark. One of the most touching elements of the book is in the characters’ doomed search for a place in history.
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