Beth Grosart: Inspiration and Truth

AWP Panel: Teaching the Writer and the Text: Writers of Color in the Creative Writing Workshop

(Panelists: Elmaz Abinader, M. Evelina Galang, Faith Adele, Mat Johnson, David Mura)

As I enter the generic conference room, there is nothing generic about the sea of faces - brown, black, olive, and tan colors of varying tones. Two or three shades of white are intermixed, but fade amongst the color.  I squeeze by an Asian woman with a half buzzed hair cut; the other half of her head is covered in long, straight black strands. She smiles at me and makes room.
Settling into my seat, I study the faces around me. An Asian man sitting at the panel table, smiles at me and I can't help but wonder if it's the kind of smile that says, I recognize you as a member of my tribe. You are one of my people. Or if he's just looking around the room, being friendly. I take it as a little of both and smile back.
I hesitate to look around. I have always felt like an outsider in groups like this, groups full of a diverse crowd of minorities. I sometimes wonder if I feel like the white people interspersed through the room, but then I remember, unlike them, I can fake it. I look like the majority in this room of minorities. What they don't know, by looking at me, is that I'm adopted. I grew up with the other half. Does that make me less of one of them? That's what causes me to sit quietly, take my silent notes and soak in what's being said in front of me:

"We must take our stories outside of this room."
"Why does the what of who we are hold us back for critique and craft?"
"Culture supports story but isn't the reason for story."
Ask yourself, "What reading have you done?" "It's our role to educate ourselves as readers." Read all cannons, "read outside the white cannon."
"No one has the truth themselves...All need to join stories to have the whole story."
"All of our stories come together in a joint narrative. It's not complete without every perspective."

The panel ends and the applause shakes us all forward in our seats, wishing it to continue. After the crowd starts to exit, I walk to the front to speak to the Asian panelist, David Mura. I say thank you. I tell him I appreciate his words. They continue to ring true in my head: Asian Americans, especially, have issues with recognizing and acknowledging their own racial place and diversity.
After telling him I have the added complication (if that's the right word, I sort of think not) of being an Asian American adoptee, he recognizes, just by looking at me, that I'm Korean. He tells me he knows some Korean American adopted writers who, once they recognized their diversity, "out their diversity," they became racially aware as writers. Some, even to a higher degree than people who had always been at that place. This is me, I say. For years, in high school and college, it never occurred to me to write racially diverse characters. My lens was white- painted by my parents, friends, school, and teachers. I was almost 30 years old before I wrote MY truth, before I wrote through a truthful lens.

Leaving the conference room, I remember the moment that (to use a panel term) "outed" my diversity. At the start of my low-res, grad school career, faculty member Evelina Galang (also a panelist) asked me, "What do you write?" I tried to speak. I thought I had a good answer - short, literary fiction about characters with complicated issues that are struggling with identity. She pushed me further, "That's not an answer. What do you write?" I tried again, but again, failed. In just a few minutes, she changed me as a writer. She helped me see that it wasn't my characters struggling with identity; it was me. This small moment inspired a new writer from within to create the writer I am today.

This AWP panel, sitting amongst that group, full of color and truth, helped me remember my revelation and inspired me to never forget it.