Muse & the Marketplace 2018

This session will focus on the question of identity: How writing is an exploration of who one is and one's place in the world; how such exploration entails challenges both to familial, cultural, social, or political norms, and to one's own psychic defenses and blind spots. Thus, in any genre, a writer's journey often requires investigating one's past and present selves in order to create a truer and more complex articulation of the self. In interrogating identity, race provides an essential lens to interpreting and evaluating the work of writers of color. But beyond this, the failure to question the ways whiteness has traditionally been defined and practiced both in our literature and society can lead to failures in craft. Thus, a consideration of race in writing and reading literature is an invaluable pursuit for all writers—not just writers of color but white writers, too.