ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 6, 1996 TAG: 9602060035
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALMENA HUGHES STAFF WRITER
Gloria Naylor has watched the publication of black writers grow from trickle to torrent.
"Remember when we were excited to get a new Toni Morrison novel?", she asked in a recent telephone interview from her work retreat in South Carolina. "It's wonderful that today it is impossible to read everything by black writers... that there is no such animal as black literature."
An award-winning author herself, Naylor recently finished assembling and editing "Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present" (Little, Brown and Co., $24.95).
"There has been an incredible outpouring, including experimenting with form," Naylor said, referring both to the current crop of African-American writers and to her findings while compiling the anthology.
"Our children are going on to define themselves rather than being defined by the outside world. They are saying 'I am and I write it,'" she said.
The new anthology came out this month. It is is an update of Langston Hughes' 1969 classic, "The Best Short Stories By Black Writers," which covered the years 1897 to 1967 and also was issued by Little, Brown.
Naylor will speak Wednesday on "The Importance of Black Women In Afro-American History." The lecture is set for 7:30 p.m. in Hollins College's Little Theatre.
Naylor, who has a bachelor's degree in English from Brooklyn College and a master's degree in Afro-American studies from Yale University, said she was an undergraduate when she discovered Morrison, Pauley Marshall, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange and other women writers whom she considers important because they are the foundations on whom today's writers build.
Her plan was to get a Ph.D and teach while writing on the side in the hope of becoming a successful author. But she found that academia didn't make her happy; she wanted to write full time. In 1983, she reset her priorities, applied for several grants and "dived into the water."
The result, so far, is four novels that have been published in 12 languages and - in two cases - transferred to the screen.
"The Women of Brewster Place" won the American Book Award and was made into an Emmy-nominated TV miniseries starring Oprah Winfrey. "Bailey's Cafe" was adapted for theater and praised at its Lincoln Center premiere. "Linden Hills" won critical acclaim. "Mama Day" was adapted to a feature-length film by Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, where Naylor was a Sundance Fellow. Her own independent entertainment company, One Way Productions, intends to eventually release it.
Naylor has no favorites among the successful quartet.
"Each has given me something and required something special," she said.
One reviewer described the ragtag assortment in "Bailey's Cafe" as "black characters who are mysterious and clear, ephemeral yet solid, rather like the person you see first out of the corner of your eye but is somehow totally different when seen straight on."
"Naylor creates characters who have rich and complex inner lives," the reviewer wrote. "Even when they cannot change the way they react to life, they never whine about their failings. The author loves and respects her creations."
"I've never consciously modeled a character after anyone," Naylor said, although she supposed that her personal acquaintances and experiences do influence them.
"My characters change from project to project," she explained. "I see a vision and snatches of scenes. If the vision lingers, I go in search of the story. I'm a very spiritual person, but I'm not saying that the visions come uninvited. I have to work at it."
She said that many people - not all of them creative - have influenced her as a writer. Among them she listed "the strivers, struggling to keep their heads above water," who were prominent in her middle-class upbringing in New York; her parents, who grew up together in a small town in Mississippi; and especially her mother, who among other things imparted to Naylor a love of reading.
"You must love to read before you can write," Naylor said. Her own non-research-related favorites include Stephen King, John Irving, Josephine Humphreys and Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of "Women Who Run With the Wolves."
Naylor declined to place herself among Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Jamaica Kincaid, Andrea Lee, Terry McMillan, Toni Cade Bambara, Sherley Anne Williams and other influential writers whom she included in "Children of the Night," which also has selections by male black authors.
"That will be a job for the critics and time," Naylor said. For the present, she said, she prefers to tour, lecture, return periodically to her New York home base, tend her South Carolina garden of vegetables, fruit and pecan trees and work on upcoming projects in the relative solitude she so much enjoys.
Currently, she is concentrating on writing her next novel, "Sapphira Wade," which she would only say is a prequel to "Mama Day."
"I don't talk too much about a work in progress," Naylor said. "I take the advice of Ann Petry, who said that if you talk too much about a work in progress, it's already written."
Lecture by Gloria Naylor: "The Importance of Black Women In Afro-American History," Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. in Hollins College's Little Theatre.
LENGTH: Long : 101 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. "The Women of Brewster Place" won an American Bookby CNBAward for Gloria Naylor (right), (B&W) 2. and then was made into an
Emmy-nominated miniseries (above) that starred Oprah Winfrey.
color.