In light of the #ownvoices movement, I'd love to hear from you as a white author writing Lovecraft Country about the experience of Black characters. How did you get comfortable with telling this story? What limitations did you become aware of, during and after the process? What are you learning from having the story adapted by Black writers & producers? Anything you would do differently? Any intuitions that paid off?
Matt Ruff I grew up in a multicultural theological debate society. My father was a Lutheran minister, originally from the Midwest. My mother, a missionary’s daughter, was born in southern Brazil and raised in Argentina during the Peron era. Our house in New York City served as Ellis Island for a nonstop parade of immigrating South American relatives. Most of my mother’s people were Lutheran, but a few – like my maternal grandmother, who lived with us for many years – were converts to Mormonism. And they all loved to argue.
The upshot of all this is that I learned at an early age that I’d be spending my time on this planet surrounded by people who didn’t see eye-to-eye with me, or with each other, and that there was value in learning to understand other perspectives. And my writing reflects this: My novels are all over the place in terms of genre and subject matter, but they often involve some sort of culture clash, and most of my protagonists come from different backgrounds and have different beliefs and worldviews than I do.
I realize that the issue of white authors writing from black perspectives is a particularly fraught one right now, but to me, what I was doing in Lovecraft Country is a natural extension of what I’ve always done: use the power of fiction to understand other ways of looking at and living in the world. I wouldn’t say I was “comfortable” doing this – it’s always good to be a little nervous, so I don’t get lazy – but I was reasonably confident that I could do justice to the characters, or that if I couldn’t, I’d figure that out before I embarrassed myself publicly.
The biggest challenge wasn’t the characters, but the history. I’d turn things up in my research that were hard to wrap my head around at first. Like the idea of whites-only ambulances that would literally let black people bleed to death rather than lift a finger to help them – that sounds like something out of dystopian science fiction, but in large parts of 1950s America it was just how things worked. So that was the tricky part, learning the rules of this strange country that my protagonists were trying to make their way in. Once I had that down, figuring out how intelligent, resourceful human beings would respond and adapt was relatively straightforward. And of course I had plenty of real-life examples – anecdotes and stories of how people coped – to draw on.
As for what I would do differently in hindsight, it’s still too soon to say. Ask me again in ten years, and I might have some thoughts, but for now I’m really happy with the way the novel turned out.
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Originally Posted by Kodiak33
