Walter Mosley was able to sit down after his lecture and answer a few questions as he signed a stack of books.
The interview:
University News: The central character in most of your novels, Socrates Fortlow, was named after a philosopher, and you described him tonight as a philosopher. You also had numerous thoughts on life and spirit and what is right and wrong. Do you see yourself as something of a philosopher, or has anyone else commented on you as such?
Walter Mosley: I don’t see myself as a philosopher, I see myself as being political. I’m political but not necessarily a philosopher.
UN: Since you see yourself as a political person, what kind of issues are you advocating? What awareness are you trying to raise in people?
WM: I try to raise understanding, not only in the black community but also outside. To raise understanding that people think and care and are concerned. And that people have lives worth redeeming, no matter how bad one thinks they are.
UN: You mentioned in the lecture tonight that you are often referred to as a mystery writer, and you don’t care to be referred to as a mystery writer. You even made light of this stereotyping at the end of the lecture. Why is that?
WM: Because I don’t think it’s just. I think writing mysteries is just as important as anything else. But the problem is that people try to minimize it, ‘Oh, I don’t read that kind of stuff’. And I find that problematic because I say, well listen, I read good fiction, I write good fiction. I want to be thought of as a writer of good fiction. So I had my problem with Norton, when I wrote Blue Light [a science fiction novel]. They just said, ‘[We] won’t publish it’. They had just published an anthology of science fiction. It’s not like they don’t publish it; they just didn’t want me to do it. And that, I think, is very problematic.
UN: So you see that as very limiting?
WM: I think it’s limiting to everybody. Certainly with black writers, the shackles of black writers, they are best to comment on their own chains. And when you try to move out into other things it becomes problematic. And I think that has to do with all writers. People put them in these genres, and they want to keep them there. I think that you can’t do that. Writers can write whatever we want to write, whenever we want to write it. It’s not a question of the money, it’s a question of the art, and expanding the boundaries.”
UN: Is that one of the reasons why you went to an independent publisher?
WM: No, I went to Paul Close because that was a business thing. Because black people need to support the businesses in their own community. That’s the reason for doing the book signing with [Afrocentric Books & Cafe], for instance. Now, when I travel around the country, I try. Very simply, the idea is that you can’t really isolate yourself and say, ‘Well, I’m only going to deal with black people in the black community, yadda, yadda, yadda’. Because it doesn’t make sense. What you have to do is to make inroads into other places. But if there is one of them around I will go to the little independent [store], go to a black bookstore, go to a mystery bookstore.
UN: Is there anything you would like to say to students and young, budding writers?
WM: Writing is simple, just write every day. I write about three hours a day. Just write everyday and that’s it. That’s all you have to worry about.
