There was a moment while reading the E- Channel, an exchange between award-winning authors E. Ethelbert Miller and Charles Johnson, when I forgot I was on the Internet. Their words had an intimacy and a spirituality I hadn’t experienced before online. “I wanted to change the literary landscape using technology,” Miller, author of 11 books of poetry and non-fiction and director of Howard University’s African-American Resource Center, explained during breakfast at Busboys and Poets on 14 St. NW.
“As I look back it is something unique in literary culture,” Johnson, a 1998 MacArthur fellow who has published extensively — four novels, three short story collections, screenplays and numerous essays — told me during a telephone interview from his home in Washington state.
Miller and Johnson have earned my annual Civic Salute for creating literary art for electronic consumption that expertly replicates the power and intimacy of print. While print has been translated to technology — e-books, for example — those works often haven’t retained their intensity and authority.
E-Channel (ethelbert-miller.blogspot.com/) was inspired, somewhat, by Oprah Winfrey, who, Miller said, often provided online space to guests after their television appearances. But his project featured only Johnson in a year-long interview.
Miller’s questions — about Buddhism, fatherhood, black public intellectualism, the disappearance of the protest novel, the craft of writing, the importance of silence and education etc. — were exquisite. Johnson’s answers were equally superb.
His rumination about the Talented Tenth, for example, has forced me to reconsider what African-American civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois actually meant and whether that concept was unintentionally misdirected.
Johnson never knew the questions Miller would ask. “It was as close to releasing first draft material that I ever get,” he told me, noting with busy schedules they were mostly “catching this on the run.”
I laughed, trying to imagine producing such rich, nearly poetic prose on the fly.
“I wanted to keep the writing tight concise and brief, more than diaristic and more than memoir with a strong kernel of intellectual content,” Johnson said.
The exchange has caught the attention of academia: University professors, students, librarians and others have excerpted some of the essays. Miller seemed happy E-Channel has gained attention. In fact, Johnson said his editor at Scribner publishing has been reviewing the work.
“The dialogue is much more sustainable than what you might see with Tavis [Smiley’s show]. It’s richer intellectually; it is not like Cornel West showing up at some Occupy event,” said Miller.
There is an epistolary feeling: writers talking thoughtfully and passionately with each other about their work and other things of importance to them. That, said Johnson, is because he and Miller “share the same historical and cultural moment. We were talking as two baby boomer black male writers.”
One of the 403 questions Miller asked that Johnson didn’t answer was “Is print dead?”
For me, it isn’t. But for those who have already buried it, Miller and Johnson have provided a more than satisfying alternative.
Jonetta Rose Barras’s column appears on Monday and Wednesday. She can be reached at [email protected].
