STRATEGIES FOR WRITING YOUR COMMUNITY TO LIFE
Community was not a topic that was explored a lot in my undergraduate writing classes or my MFA
Like many immigrants I lost the community I was born in and started growing up in — Santo Domingo — and had to learn under duress the community I finished growing up in — Parlin, NJ. Community representing my first great loss, and also the most profound adaptive challenge of my life.
Community is the strong force in everyone’s universe, but immigration made it explicitly so. Not something I could ignore, or that hummed around me without notice.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that I became a writer with an abiding focus on community. Nothing special here, either — standard stuff in my immigrant writer and writer of African descent circles — but not a topic that was explored a lot in my undergraduate writing classes or my MFA (perhaps equally no surprise given the hegemonic world we live in).
We talked a lot about the Big Three of Character, Conflict and Context (World), and infrequently about the politics of representation, but if community came up it was only ever in passing, glancing stuff. Never got the isolation / focus it deserved. I learned to write community like many folks do: by studying the artists that I thought did it the best, and of course by trying and failing nonstop. Fortunately for us learners, community has historically been an explicit concern of literature (literature and immigrant writers have that much in common — one might even say that literature, too, is an immigrant of sorts or, at minimum, an exile —not that you would sense this from mainstream creative writing pedagogy).
But what am I talking about when I’m talking about community?
Community — the “social entity”1 that recognizes and can gossip about you and yours fluently. (Please notice I said recognize and not understand).
Community — understood at the page-level as a Character of a distributed dispersed collective variety, sharing many of the characteristics of traditional characters. They have Distinction, they have Troubles, they have Conflicts, they have Silences, they are defined by relationships, they are dynamic, they have telling types of dialogue etc. But where a convincing Protagonist Character must at minimum suggest multitudes, communities are literally multitudes that no matter how expansive must also gesture at the individuality of its multitude.
Because community continues to be an obsession, I’m always on the hunt for techniques and gambits to help me render community more compellingly, more convincingly or, just, at all. Sure, community might be central to all things human and literary but it takes a fuck-load of work to wrestle a passable “social entity” into existence.
One classic approach for dramatizing community is of course