I have both experienced and witnessed a great deal of suffering in my life, and that has informed my art. I'm here today, because I'm a fighter. I didn't survive my life to ask permission to write my books.
C.E. MorganUltimately, I want a peak experience in reading, and that is sometimes difficult to find in contemporary fiction. I'm not interested in books that are just clever and well executed; polish doesn't impress me, and I don't care about a merely capable sentence. Life is short; I want a confrontation with high art. I want soul.
C.E. MorganEvery single aspect of a text requires very careful choices and rigorous evaluation. Style is employed - or deployed - for a reason. It's purposeful. Form and aesthetics are part of meaning-making. Ideally, a writer would have mastery over a wide variety of rhetorical gestures and tonalities, our lexicon and punctuation system, our grammar, and all the riches of a liberal and literary education.
C.E. MorganEvery aspect of the novel is - or should be - an arrow pointed towards its ultimate meaning, or a multiplicity of possible meanings. But I also value the readers' autonomy, their right to both read and misread.
C.E. MorganThe idea that writing about characters of another race requires a passage through a critical gauntlet, which involves apology and self-examination of an almost punitive nature, as though the act of writing race was somehow morally suspect, is a dangerous one. This approach appears culturally sensitive, but often it reveals a failure of nerve. I believe the demand that we ought to reveals a species of fascism within the left - an embrace of political correctness with its required silences, which has left people afraid to offend or take a stand.
C.E. MorganI stared at the Ohio River every day as a child, a thing that for me is almost more symbol than river. The formation of personality is inextricable from place. It strikes me as an interesting example of dependent co-arising; land shapes the organism, which then reshapes - literally and figuratively - the land. This because of this; not that because not that. Nothing is separate, least of all the literary mind.
C.E. Morgan