This term's Montgomery Fellow August Wilson spoke about his play which will be performed at the College this weekend, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," and his beginnings as a writer to about 20 students yesterday in the Mid-Fayerweather residence hall basement.
He explained the history of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," which begins tonight in the Hopkins Center. He said the idea for the play began at a bar in Minnesota, where he knew the bartenders well.
He said one night, a woman approached him saying she was also a writer, and asking whether he would be interested in writing a story with her. He agreed, and started writing, inspired by the painting, "The Millhand's Lunchpail." He said he decided to adopt the persona of an art critic to gain a perspective on the story.
"In the middle of the painting there was a man sitting in a posture of abject defeat," Wilson said.
Intrigued by this figure in a coat and hat, he said he wondered who this man could be and why he was sitting alone.
"I began to wonder what his past might have been," Wilson said. "What was it about this guy that would make him sit there like that?" He said he imagined people pursuing their lives around the man, leaving him alone when what he in fact needed most was human contact.
Wilson said after writing nine pages of the story, he returned to the bar, met the woman who had given him the idea and told her that he could not let her work on it.
"I just had to do this myself," he explained.
He proceeded to write more of the story, and decided to write it in the form of a play. He said he wrote the entire first scene in one sitting. He spent the next few months working on the play.
Listening to a song called "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," he chose the song's name as the title for his play. Joe Turner was the brother of the governor of Tennessee, and Wilson said upon hearing the name he had an idea about the history of his main character.
He said that the transformation of the main character in the play corresponds to the African Americans' search for self-determination, self-defense and self-identity.
Wilson compared the process of writing both to going into battle and to starting a journey "into the interior landscape of myself."
"The artifact is the record of that journey," he said. His ideas, he explained, originate in himself, and after he writes he passes a judgment on them.
"It's been 32 years of struggle and craft," he said about his career as a writer.
Asked about his inspiration to write, he smiled and spoke of a girl he had admired and written poems for in seventh grade. Later, his sister at Fordham University had asked him to write a paper on two poets for her -- he chose Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg -- and paid him $20 for it.
He spent this money on a typewriter and submitted poems to the Harvard Magazine, which rejected them, to his great surprise.
"I thought that instantly, overnight, I would become this famous poet," he said.
As he wrote more poems, he realized that "the game of writing poetry was not a game." Four years later, his first poem was accepted.
"It took me from 1965 to 1973 before I found my own voice as a poet," he said, explaining that it was at this point he felt he could write most freely.
He said he started out writing poems with obscure meanings, and finally wrote one on a morning bus ride through town.
"That was a seminal moment for me," he said. He realized he could communicate without trying to sound important or too poetic.
After a student asked him if he thought his writing would be different had he graduated from high school, Wilson replied that he found school restrictive and was thrilled by the resources the library offered.
"When I dropped out of school and went to the library, I thought 'this is it.' There are no requirements, if you can read, you can access the information," he said. He read about everything from anthropology to boat-making to theology and said he enjoyed the freedom of being able to place his own values on the reading.
