Literary Activist E. Ethelbert Miller on the Innovative E-Channel and
His Web-Based Conversations with Dr. Johnson—A Groundbreaking Feat of Cultural
History
By Robin Lindley
Renowned
literary activist and poet E. Ethelbert Miller is recognized for his creative
approaches to bringing art and literature to new audiences, for preserving
intellectual and literary history that might otherwise be lost, and for
mentoring and encouraging committed artists and writers, especially promising
black creators.
In
a unique effort that employs new technology to enlarge the literary landscape,
Mr. Miller has assembled a groundbreaking new work of cultural and intellectual
history with The Words and Wisdom of
Charles Johnson (Dzanc Books). This magisterial book collects a year-long
exchange of emails between Mr. Miller and literary icon Dr. Charles Johnson on
topics as varied as philosophy, African American literature, history, Seattle,
education, Buddhism, the craft of writing, politics, Dr. Martin Luther King,
fatherhood, martial arts, cartooning, dogs, and much more.
Mr.
Miller called his electronic media project the E-Channel, a platform for
thoughtful and inventive exchange of ideas and exploration. He launched the project
with the multifaceted and celebrated Dr. Johnson, a fellow “black, male, boomer
writer,” to bring his “cavernous and selfless intellect” to the world.
Dr.
Charles Johnson is perhaps best known as the author of four novels including Dreamer and the National Book
Award-winning Middle Passage, as well
as numerous essays, short stories, and screenplays. He is also recipient of a
MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and is recognized as a public intellectual,
philosopher, and even an accomplished cartoonist. Dr. Johnson earned a
doctorate in philosophy (emphasizing phenomenology and literary aesthetics). He
then worked for more than 30 years as a professor of English at the University
of Washington in Seattle where he taught literature and creative writing, directed
the creative writing program, and held an endowed chair, the S. Wilson and
Grace M. Pollack Professorship for Excellence in English. He is now a professor
emeritus and has just published a second volume of his children’s book series Emery Jones, Boy Science Wonder with
co-author, his daughter Elisheba, and a book of essays on Buddhism, race, and
culture, Taming the Ox.
Over
the course of a year, Mr. Miller emailed Dr. Johnson more than 400 questions
and Dr. Johnson answered 218 on a wide range of topics.
In
a recent interview with Peter Kelley, Dr. Johnson stressed the immediacy of his
writing in for E-Channel and recognized Mr. Miller’s work: “For
me, it was a real brain dump. There's no book like this anywhere in world
literature — a very candid, detailed look into a writer's mind and heart and
journey through this life. It was a fascinating challenge for both of us.
Ethelbert had to read all my novels, stories, essays, book prefaces and
introductions, and because he is an arts advocate and chairs a liberal think
tank in Washington, D.C., the Institute for Policy Studies, many of his
questions have a political flavor. Really, the 672-page "Words and
Wisdom" is as much his book as it is mine.”
Writers, teachers, and professors
have praised the Miller-Johnson project, and many of Dr. Johnson’s responses
have been shared widely. Mr. Miller’s project serves as a model for future
explorations of renowned thinkers and creative minds.
A poet, writer and literary advocate, Mr. Miller has
served as director of the African American Studies Resource Center at Howard
University since 1974. He also chairs the board of the Institute for Policy
Studies, a progressive multi-issue think tank, and is a board member of The Writer's Center and
editor of Poet Lore magazine. Mr. Miller has taught at UNLV, American University, George Mason
University, and Emory and Henry College. He is the former
chair of the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C., a former core faculty
member of the Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College, Further, he often contributes to National Public Radio.
Mr.
Miller is also an acclaimed poet whose collections of poetry include Andromeda
(1974), The Land of Smiles and the Land of No Smiles (1974), Season
of Hunger / Cry of Rain (1982), Where Are the Love Poems for Dictators? (1986),
Whispers, Secrets and Promises (1998), and How We Sleep on the Nights
We Don’t Make Love (2004). He is the editor of the anthologies Women
Surviving Massacres and Men (1977); In Search of Color Everywhere (1994),
which won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was a Book of the Month
Club selection; and Beyond the Frontier (2002). He also wrote two
memoirs Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer and The 5th Inning.
Mr. Miller recently talked about his
work and his unique web-based exchanges with Dr. Johnson that led to the
impressive new volume The Words and Wisdom of Charles Johnson.
Robin
Lindley: Congratulations on your
wide-ranging and innovative new book The
Words and Wisdom of Charles Johnson.
E. Ethelbert Miller:
It was a major project, and he deserves a lot of credit for taking the time to
do it.
Robin
Lindley: And you too. It’s a book that’s
impossible to skim—each entry is so compelling.
E. Ethelbert Miller:
I think you could take, for example, just the entries on the craft of writing
and use them to teach a number of creative writing workshops.
Robin
Lindley: What inspired the E-Channel and
then your year of interviews with Dr. Johnson?
E. Ethelbert Miller:
It may not have happened if I didn’t live in Washington and Charles (didn’t
live) in Seattle. We both stay up late and, over the years, we sent a lot of
emails back and forth late in the evening. So we were in contact that way.
And
he had to be retired to undertake this project so he’d have time to do it.
The
E-Channel is really an outgrowth of social media.
The
idea came when I was reading the newspaper and saw that Oprah [Winfrey] decided
to develop her new Oprah Channel, the O-Channel. And I thought if Oprah can do
it, I can create my own channel, the E-Channel.
Then I thought who could I focus on that would be interesting—and then
Charles was the obvious choice because I was in touch him all of the time. It
was just a question of creating an outlet for his voice.
I
should note that the beginning entries are short, but after a couple months
went by, Charles really got into it. There are a lot of questions he didn’t
want to answer, which I thought was funny. I had to sometimes send him clusters
of questions like five or six questions before he would take one. We developed
a relationship so that some questions he didn’t answer in January or February
he might answer later.
Charles
is a very private person, but after a while I could get him to write about his
daughter. I knew he liked dogs, so I put in things like that. And I
tried to mix up the questions. I didn’t want him to get in a comfortable
position where say he knew I was asking about Middle Passage. I always wanted to have surprising questions.
Robin
Lindley: You’re a masterful interviewer
and the questions brought out many different aspects of Dr. Johnson.
E. Ethelbert Miller:
Near the end of the year, I stumbled on something that I thought might make the
collection really important. Near the end of the book, I pulled out quotes from
African American history and literature and had Charles respond to those
quotes. I think that anyone teaching African American studies would have come
by these quotes from Du Bois, from Fanon, and here is somebody who has taken
the time to explain what this means.
It
was also a way to get Charles to comment on poetry. I’d ask what he thought
about a famous poem by Dunbar.
Robin
Lindley: The book is organized
chronologically rather than by topic.
E. Ethelbert Miller:
Right. As a casual reader, you can go through it at your leisure. If it was
more structured, it could be used differently.
Robin
Lindley: How did you get to know Dr.
Johnson?
E. Ethelbert Miller:
I got to know him through his work. His first novel, Faith and the Good Thing, became one of my favorite books. I read
it and shared it with people.
Then
Charles came to DC for the 1987 PEN/Faulkner Award. I remember going to the
Folger Shakespeare Library and meeting Charles and Richard Wiley who won the
award. That’s when our relationship started.
Robin
Lindley: This project is such an
innovative use of the Internet. As the book makes clear, you and Dr. Johnson
are both open to new technology.
E. Ethelbert Miller:
Yes. My project now, which is not as big as the Johnson project, is called “The
Aldon Nielsen Project 2015.” He’s one of the important critics in African
American literature. I’m going to explore and get in the mind of a critic and
chart how a critic develops. We really
don’t know how a critic develops, and I think it will be interesting to see
this project alongside the E-Channel.
Robin
Lindley: You have a great interest in
history, and your book on Charles Johnson is an impressive book of cultural
history.
E. Ethelbert Miller:
Yes, I think so. If someone asked about my dream for the book, my dream would
be that this book would put Charles on a shortlist for a Nobel Prize by showing
the length and breadth of his work. As others talk about Joyce Carol Oates or
Philip Roth, we can talk about Charles Johnson.
Robin
Lindley: And readers can go to this
comprehensive work and pick out sections that relate to so many fascinating and
timeless topics.
E. Ethelbert Miller:
Yes, especially at this particular time. It’s so key in looking at Martin
Luther King with the fiftieth anniversary of Selma. Some of the best stuff on
King is in the book.
Robin
Lindley: Dr. King’s last year is largely
forgotten but it’s critical time when had turned his attention to militarism,
poverty and economic injustice.
E. Ethelbert Miller:
That goes back to Vincent Harding who died last year. He had a significant
influence on King in the last years. He helped King write the Riverside Church
speech [April 4, 1967] where King came out against the Vietnam War.
Robin Lindley: Dr. Johnson spoke of a Buddhist trend in
Dr. King’s actions. Do you remember how he expressed that?
E. Ethelbert Miller:
There was considerable eastern thought that came to King through people like
Howard Thurman who made trips to India and influenced practically every black
minister in the United States.
Looking
at eastern religious connections to Christianity is no different than what
Thomas Merton did later by going from being a Trappist monk to embracing the
east. Charles looks at those paths.
We
need to consider what people are reading and doing, and look at the possible
influence of Langston Hughes on Martin Luther King and the dream motif in his
speeches. King, like many people, looked to the poetry of Langston Hughes.
People need to go back and look at Hughes’ influence on King. The same way, you
can go back to the March on Washington and look at Mahalia Jackson who some say
got Martin Luther King to speak [about the Dream] when she said in the middle
of the speech: “Tell us about the dream Martin. Tell us about the dream.” And
all of a sudden the cadence of King’s speech changed and it was like two
different speeches. That was an interesting connection that needs to be pursued
like a moment of microhistory to fill in the gaps.
Robin
Lindley: Were there a couple of moments
in the course of your interviews with Dr. Johnson when you were surprised by
what he said?
E. Ethelbert Miller:
When you look at the E-Channel as a blog and at blogs in general, and blogs are
sloppy and are not journalism. But the key thing that came out is that Charles
is a perfectionist. Nothing is posted with misspellings, with punctuation
mistakes. Many bloggers get by with that because they want to post quickly.
Nothing upset Charles more than a spelling error or whatever. After a while,
that affected me in my own work. If I put anything out there and work with
someone like Charles Johnson, I proofread tighter. I’m not going to let something go out with a
typo.
That
gives you a sense of Charles and the craft of doing revision and getting it
right.
And
when he got the book, it knocked him out. He was overwhelmed by the size of it.
It gives you a sense of why the book is so powerful. We can have things on
line, but when you can hold something in your hand and see how big it is, I
think that makes a difference. This was a lot of work.
Robin
Lindley: You both did a great job. Dr.
Johnson has an expansive view of his role as a writer and he’s seen as a
transitional writer. He sees that African American writers may deal with the
history of slavery and injustice, but he wants to get beyond the boundaries of
race and class and culture.
E. Ethelbert Miller: I
don’t know if it’s getting beyond. I think what it comes back to is that
Charles is a philosopher. If we’re undergraduates, we’re going to take some
philosophy classes. And if those classes are taught well and do their job well,
they are going take you and me and make sure we confront the big questions. Who
we are. Why we’re here. Those big questions.
Robin
Lindley: When Dr. Johnson talks about
creative writing he encourages all writers to get beyond their own experiences
and to imagine the lives of other people.
E. Ethelbert Miller:
Yes. No selfies. With social media we don’t take the time. Look what happens
now. Everybody has a story to tell but nobody listens.
Robin
Lindley: Marc Conner, a professor of
English, wrote an introduction for the book on Dr. Johnson’s influence.
E. Ethelbert Miller:
Marc Conner deserves a lot of credit. He began to see as a critic how important
this project was. This book could change even how we teach literature.
Now
we can teach Charles Johnson to a new generation of writers, and they’re going
to write differently. They’re going to write philosophical novels. That’s a
completely different breed.
Robin
Lindley: And Charles Johnson is open to
new projects. He has a new book for kids that he illustrated and wrote with his
daughter Elisheba, Emery Jones, Boy
Science Wonder. He’s still exploring so many areas.
E. Ethelbert Miller:
You could see that coming. In reading the E-Channel, you see his first love was
cartooning. And other things come in. All of a sudden you learn about his
daughter, about his cartoons, about becoming a grandfather. I think the
personal questions opened the door for him to collaborate more. He was looking
backward and looking forward.
Robin
Lindley: Thanks for mentioning that archive.
Would you like to write a biography of Dr. Johnson?
E. Ethelbert Miller:
[Laughter] I’m a literary activist. I work behind the scenes. If you go to the Gelman
Library at The George Washington University, you’ll see the scope of my
personal archive.
Robin
Lindley: You make a good point that
students will benefit from learning more about Charles Johnson. He rejects a
narrow or limited form of thinking.
E. Ethelbert Miller:
You can’t get into Charles unless you come at him from a particular angle. You
have a number of people who will love him because they’ll be introduced to
Buddhism because of a hunger they have. He has a growing audience for that. But
in conferences or in graduate schools people to do more work on Charles
Johnson.
I
was looking at every single angle in viewing Charles. I looked back at texts. I
looked at every single interview with Charles Johnson and what they didn’t
touch on.
Robin
Lindley: Charles Johnson has certainly
influenced hundreds of students, writers, artists, and he’s touched people in
so many ways with everything from fiction and philosophy to cartooning.
E. Ethelbert Miller:
More people are discovering his books. That has a lot to do with our society.
Many individuals are being promoted who don’t even come close to Charles
Johnson.
Because
he’s in Seattle and not in New York City and he’s not marketing himself like
cornflakes, we won’t see him with his wife at the Academy Awards or some
celebrity event. Unless he does an album with Lady Gaga, some people won’t know
about him. And that’s our loss as a society. And it’s our loss if Charles is
not acknowledged by a new generation.
Robin
Lindley: Thank you so much for sharing
your insights. It’s been a pleasure.
Robin Lindley is a
Seattle-based writer and attorney, and the features editor of the History News
Network (hnn.us). His articles also have appeared in Crosscut, Real Change,
Documentary, Writer’s Chronicle, and others. His email: robinlindley@gmail.com.
For the first three weeks in July 2015, the Standard, East Village will provide a room free of charge to a writer who has a book under contract and needs three weeks of solitude in downtown New York City. Applications will be judged by the editors of The Paris Review and Standard Culture. 
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