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John Edgar Wideman Awes Crowd at Wex
You know you’re a prestigious guest when you have three introductions.
Author of twenty books, John Edgar Wideman read short fiction at the Wexner Center on May 16th, after being introduced by the President of the University, Karen Hollbrook, the Vice Provost, Max Stewart, and the Director of Creative Writing, Lee Martin. The evening, Stewart said, was "an auspicious occasion," marking the seventh event, in the seventh year, in the year 2007, of the President and Provost Diversity Lecture and Cultural Arts Series, which marked the University’s "continued commitment to diversity."
Wideman, as Martin said, is one of the major voices in contemporary American literature. A former Rhodes Scholar and basketball star, Wideman is the author of short story collections, novels, and memoirs, including Sent for You Yesterday and Philadelphia Fire, both of which won the International Pen/Faulkner Award, as well as recent books God’s Gym (2005) and the memoir, Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race, and Love (2001). He is a recipient of an O. Henry Award as well as the very prestigious MacArthur Genius Grant. He currently teaches at Brown University.
Before reading, Wideman praised the students he was working with as part of a creative writing week-long master class, saying he had "beautiful weather and beautiful spirits around him" for his visit to Columbus. Wideman told the crowd that he liked to read work that was "in progress." He would also, he said, be reading short shorts, a form Wideman has just recently begun working in. "When I started writing, I didn’t believe in short stories. I thought they were gimmicky. But I’ve changed. Small things look better and better these days."
What followed was a nearly uninterrupted forty minutes of short shorts that showcased Wideman’s talents for very poetic prose and for absolute mastery and control of movement in narrative. Ida Stewart, MFA student in Poetry, was impressed by the way the pieces effortlessly moved. "We start way over here and somehow he manages to seamlessly move us from there to somewhere else and back again without losing the reader at all. How does he do that?"
Wideman’s work moved from the profoundly sad to the hilarious, from subjects such as Darfur, in his short "Help" ("Already we are weeping inside."), to a longer short entitled "Madonna," a letter to the singer and actress that had the audience laughing. He addressed racism in stories like "A Story about Color" and "Ghetto," and addressed the difficulties of writing in "How You See It." The night affirmed what many fans of his novels and memoirs already knew: Wideman really knows how to tell a story.
