Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. My name is Robbie Howard. I'm a novelist written to novels like Trees Walking and Driving the King. I also teach creative writing at Florida State University. In elementary school, I think I really started to know that I wanted to do something related to writing. Those are always the projects that I think spoke to me. I think in the Black imagination or any imagination that has an honest reckoning of culture or recognizes, the origins of these historical or cultural voices. So for me, it's really important to see how we are creating the voices of those who weren't near a microphone. Their bursts and deaths were not registered. So I think in a lot of ways, the idea of what fiction is doing, it is recreating that archive that may not have been officially recorded at this moment. Sometimes it's hard to know what day of the week it is. So it feels like time has no sense of structure for us. I think it's helpful to return to the structure of poetry, fiction writing, plays, films, television, and think about how we are reformatting time for the sake of the story we want to tell. For me, it becomes grounding or a planned escape, but escape that at the same time gets you really connected to ideas that are meaningful. Sometimes difficult ideas, but you can take some comfort in how those questions are being asked or refined or in some cases answered. This is an imperfect time for those who want to create art and those who want to consume it. I guess the hope always is that the work will endure. My name is Ravi Howard, a novelist, and I teach creative writing at Florida State University. You're listening to voices that inspire.