For over forty years, Clarence Major (b. 1936) has engaged several
artistic and literary pursuits, garnering acclaim for his paintings,
edited anthologies, poetry collections, essays, and novels. His work
within literature ranges from his popular dictionary of slang, Juba to
Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (1994), to such
experimental novels as Emergency Exit (1979), Reflex and Bone Structure
(1975), and My Amputations (1986). He has gained a reputation as one of
America's most visionary and experimental African American writers. In
Conversations with Clarence Major, the author comments thoughtfully on
the diverse nature of his work. Major explores his influences, the
methods he applies to the different types of writing he does, and his
childhood in Atlanta and Chicago's South Side. The same openness and
curiosity that make his work so various and rich allow Major to focus on
and respond to each interviewer's concerns. Journalists, scholars, and
show hosts pose questions about particular works, about the different
ways Major creates, about his teaching of writing, about his views of
nature, and about youth. In interviews from 1969 to 2001, Major
transforms every interview into an encounter that informs him as well as
the interviewer. His interest in the dynamic nature of language and life
emerges in several discussions. "If language didn't change, it would
die," he says in a 1994 interview. "It has to constantly change and
evolve even if we're speaking at a small, secret level. It has to grow.
Words are like organic things--they don't just go on. Some are reborn in
different form." Featuring a previously unpublished interview with the
volume's editor, as well as conversations with such notables as Larry
McCaffery, Conversations with Clarence Major shows how the mind of an
enormously talented and multifaceted artist works while conveying a
sense of the generosity and optimism that keep Clarence Major
experimenting and learning.
