Issue 19 / 2002
19 / Diversity Dialogues
Unheard voices, untold stories
In this issue, celebrated authors like John Edgar Wideman, Francine Prose, Andrei Codrescu, Terry Tempest Williams, and Richard Rodriguez write essays about diversity that defy easy labels.
The collection includes an essay by Floyd Skloot, who, having suffered from a virus that attacked and damaged his brain 12 years ago, ponders his disabled status.
In “The Green Room,” Eliot Sloan works to assimilate the impact of her father’s gay identity on both their lives. Chavawn Kelley, a white Easterner thrust into the incongruous setting of a Native American classroom, attempts to teach from an outdated lesson plan that uses passages about silverware etiquette to teach writing in “Red, White, and Silver.” In “Confessions of a Black Buddhist Nun,” Faith Adiele, the biracial child of a single white mother, turns her back on a carefully constructed, “politically correct” American upbringing to become a Buddhist nun in Thailand and finds her Buddhism leading to reconciliation with her past.
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Valuing Differences
We’re sorry; we’re currently unable to make this work available online.A Moment of Clarity
This issue of Creative Nonfiction began in New York in the summer of 1995. Chemical Bank and Chase Manhattan Bank had agreed to merge. Walter V. Shipley, then CEO of Chemical Bank, was to be the CEO of the new company.ShipleyWhat’s the Story #19
We are sitting in the Thai Place, a dark, quiet restaurant in the Shadyside section of Pittsburgh, when I clink my water glass with a spoon. None of the other nine people at the table knows why I am clinking my glass.ThreeRed, White and Silver
Three Indian girls sit in the corner of the classroom. Their silver lips burn against their brown skin like the white-hot tips of soldering guns. A boy who dropped out of this school last year has been murdered.The Green Room
Layla and I are 14. Her lipstick is a hard, red line. We sit on rock and watch the waves, and on the other side, New Jersey: lit signs and factories.Aristotle’s Ghost
I am white. I am male. The closest I come to prejudice every day is to suffer the baldness jokes of friends and comedians. I don’t mind. Really. But I wonder—if most people were bald, would there be jokes about hairy scalps?Going Native
Several years ago at an elementary-school Christmas play in upstate New York, I sat behind three fourth-graders from the most remote and poorest section of the rural school district. In all likelihood the boys had never seen an actual African-American person except on television and on rare trips to Kingston, 40 miles away.Looking at Emmett Till
Reckoning with the brutal murder that was “an attempt to slay an entire generation”Snapshots in Black and White
My father died when I was 9 years old, the same year my three sisters and my mother moved with our mother’s parents to America, to Miami. He was mixed: African, Indian, European (from Scotland and England), Jewish and we don’t know what else.Joe Stopped By
When I handed her the phone, Laura looked like I was taking her to the dentist. Her father was in town and threatened to come over. I had met the guy twice.A Measure of Acceptance
The psychiatrist’s office was in a run-down industrial section at the northern edge of Oregon’s capital, Salem.Gone in Translation
The house strains against too many occupants and a hot, hard wind. A white man of 40 with no socks but shoes, next to him a white woman with dark streaks on her apron and flour on her arms.Mixed-Blood Stew
It was an old document. Rough parchment, yellowed and withered. I was all of 10, on the threshold of womanhood, digging in my mother’s closet, trying to find clues about why my mother abandoned me when I was an infant, why she returned to claim me when I was 9.Prayer Dogs
Prairie dogs. Prairie gods. Pleistocene mammals standing on their hind legs in the big wide open.What do they see?What do they smell?What do they hear?What they hear is the sound of a truck coming toward their town, the slamming of doors, the voices, the pressure of feet walking toward them.Leaving Babylon
A Walk Through the Jewish Divorce CeremonyLessons in Killing for the Black Buddhist Nun
When I was 5, my mother came home one Friday from the California junior high school where she taught and announced that she had a surprise.The Brown Study
Or, as a brown man, I think.But do we really think that color colors thought? Sherlock Holmes occasionally retired to a “brown study”—a kind of moribund funk; I used to imagine a room with brown wallpaper.Blindsided
Last week I discovered I was black.You might think that is something you can’t just discover in middle age, but stranger things—even similar things (Madeleine Albright finding out about her Jewish heritage)—have happened.Iguana Don
A pea-green iguana cloaks the neck of a thin man dressed in chains and leather, striding along the train tracks. The iguana’s golden eyes stare over one shoulder; its thick tail twitches over the other.Q&A on Chavawn Kelley
Discussion questions and writing promptsWhy I Love The Dump: Further reading
In our town, we haul our own garbage to the dump. At home, my husband and I put our garbage in paper bags. When one is full, we close it and staple it shut.Interview with Shara McCallum
Writer Shara McCallum dicusses her essay, "Snapshots in Black and White"Discussion questions for “A Measure of Acceptance”
Additional materials to engage with Floyd Skloot's "A Measure of Acceptance"Joe Stopped By: A Brief Interview with author Andrei Codrescu
Andrei Cordescu chats with CNF about his essay, "Joe Stopped By"The Brown Study
Or, as a brown man, I think. But do we really think that color colors thought? Sherlock Holmes occasionally retired to a “brown study”—a kind of moribund funk; I used to imagine a room with brown wallpaper.