A review by kleonard
How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill by Jericho Brown, Darlene Taylor

3.0

This book, made up of both recent and older essays and interviews with Black writers, is ostensibly a craft book. But the idea of craft has recently been undergoing some much-needed challenges, and so the pieces in this collection that resonate the most with me are the ones that push back against craft--especially those by Rita Dove and Nikki Giovanni. Many of the older pieces included here are by authors who, during the majority of their career, were pushed by publishers and editors and others in the industry to "write White;" who were influenced by the lingering ideas of Booker T. Washington, who felt that for Blacks to be taken seriously and accorded rights, they had to be not just equal than but better than their White colleagues--to have better grammar, better vocabularies, better "style." This makes the collection a bit of a museum of ideas about writing and craft. Nonetheless, there is good advice to be found here. For writing instructors, I'd suggest also reading Felicia Rose Chavez's The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop and Matthew Salesses's Craft in the Real World.