The Writer’s Parents

The Writer’s Parents

Posted on September 18th, 2016 by Alex Kudera

“They were like all other parents. My mother liked to feed us. My father liked to take pictures.”

from The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

Recent news of Lionel Shriver donning a sombrero to protest identity politics in the creative-writing world reminded me of Jenny Zhang’s Buzzfeed response to white poet Michael Derrick Hudson’s use of the Chinese pen name Yi-Fen Chou to wiggle his way into a Best of American Poetry collection.

I ignored the controversy over cultural appropriation but “took” from the Zhang essay to compare and contrast her parents’ fear of a child’s future as a writer to my own parents’ feelings about my choices. In “They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist,” Zhang noted: “[My father] sure as hell was not jumping with joy and support when I said I wanted to be a writer. My mother cried for weeks and threatened to tell Stanford I was a convicted criminal so they would revoke my admission if I didn’t promise that I would not try to be a writer. I didn’t promise and my mother never made good on hers. They were scared for me. . .”

Of course, there are no universal parents; rather, we have parents who survive wars, poverty, oppression, penniless immigration, or worse, and parents who buy new cars for children when they graduate college, or even high school. Parents come in all shapes and sizes and from vastly different cultures, countries, and historical moments. We have big, tall, fat, and thin folks, and fathers who ditch because they can, or as Tillie Olsen wrote in “I Stand Here Ironing,” because “he could no longer endure. . . sharing want with us.” So obviously there are no universal parents, yet it can be awfully hard to imagine much beyond the Hemon quotation above.

If you’re interested in reading more about how Zhang’s parents and my own reacted to children who wanted to be writers, follow this link to the original blog.

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Alex Kudera

Alex Kudera's Fight For Your Long Day (Atticus Books) was drafted in a walk-in closet during a summer in Seoul, South Korea and consequently won the 2011 IPPY Gold Medal for Best Fiction from the Mid-Atlantic Region. It is an academic tragicomedy told from the perspective of an adjunct instructor, and reviews and interviews can be found online and in print in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Inside Higher Ed, Academe, and elsewhere. His second novel, Auggie's Revenge (Beating Windward Press), and a Classroom Edition of Fight for Your Long Day (Hard Ball Press) were published in 2016. Kudera's other publications include the e-singles Frade Killed Ellen (Dutch Kills Press), The Betrayal of Times of Peace and Prosperity (Gone Dog Press), and Turquoise Truck (Mendicant Bookworks). When he's not reading or writing, he frets, fails, walks, works, and helps raise a child.