INTERVIEW~WITHMICHAEL PARKER Michael Parker is the author ofseveral novels and short story collections) most recently Don't Make Me Stop Now (Algonquin Books) 2007). His short sto– ries have been published in Five Points, Shenandoah, and the Georgia Review. Parker'sfirst novel Hello Down There (Scribne0 1993)) was afinalistfor the PEN/Hemingway prize) and his short fiction has been included in the Pushcart Prize Stories and the 0. Henry Prize Stories. Parker has earnedfiction fellow– shipsfrom the National Endowmentfor the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council and he currently teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. CR: How do you write stories that resonate with an increasingly diverse culture/audience? MP: I think the key to this is perhaps not starting from a point where you are trying to appeal to a diverse culture. I try to write stories about people and the messes they get themselves into, and my job is to make these people contradictory and, I hope, sympathetic in ways that are credible. Ifanything resonates with the reader, it's the sort of there– before-the-grace familiarity that keeps you reading and nodding, that keeps you emotionally involved. Having said that, I've written stories from the points-of-view of an elderly black man and a teenaged boy from Mexico. I don't presume to know what it's like to be black or Hispanic in this country, and I think for any portrait of another culture to be valid and honest, I need to locate the ways in which we're all the same, or share certain psychic 58
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=