Newspapers / The Front Page (Raleigh, … / Feb. 10, 1995, edition 1 / Page 15
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Living with AIDS should not be a financial challenge... Coping with a personal crisis should at least be on your own terms. Selling your life insurance policy can help reduce financial stress and allow you to regain control of your personal affairs. We can hellx Normally, we offer 60 to 80% of the face value of the policy. In some instances, we pay more than 80%. No fees or processing costs are ever deducted from your money. How would you get paid? Upon accepting our offery your money will be placed in an escrow account* specifically created for you. The full amount will be sent to you, no later than 48 hours after receiving proof of the requested changes to your policy. At Individual Benefits, Inc., we care how you feel about us. For more information, please call (anytime): 1 (800) 800-3264 ItufividiiaC (Benefits Inc. or visit us at 616 Guilford College Road, Suite A, Greensboro, N.C. 27409 * as recommended by the National Viatical Association The Wide World of Raadal Kenan Continued from page Finding Signs. “It was a very odd experience,” he says. “I’d be called up by my editor at Grove and he’d put me through*certain paces, then I’d hang up and call Sharlene and put her through the exact same tiling.” A Visitation of Spirits was published by Grove in 1989. Although it didn’t receive much attention initially, it was impressive enough to allow Kenan to leave the hectic pace of the publishing world and take on the relatively leisurely task of teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia university. “It certainly changed my work habits,” he says. “I work much less than I did before!” It was Kenan’s next book, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, published in 1992 by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, that brought him to the forefront of American letters. Not only was the book nominated for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award, it won a Lambda Book Award for best gay fiction. The stories in Let the Dead Bury Their Dead are told through a multitude of characters and narratives that reveal the imaginary history of Tims Creek—its legendary origins as a runaway slave camp in the swamps and its growth into a thriving agricultural town. Kenan’s characters cover the entire spectrum of the community: There’s the upstanding, the outsiders, the pillars of church and business, male and female, black and white, gay and straight Kenan’s literary forebears may have much to do with his ability to encompass so many points of view: He lists Marquez, Toni Morrison, Flanneiy O’Connor, Yukio Mishima, and even Steven King among them. “I never really saw the necessity of getting into one bed,” Kenan says of his literary influences. “I guess I’m promiscuous. I’m attracted to so many different things.” But the first and largest literary influence on Kenan was that of the Bible. “1 grew up with this strict Calvinist world view, and anything antithetical or contraiy to that was suspect,” he says. “So, when I came to school and about halfway through rebelled against that upbringing, .. it took a lot of knitting and sewing and suturing to put some view of the world back together. So I think the writing is a way of reconciling that veiy strong hegemony of thought with this new view of toe world, which is that it is essentially existential, absurd and chaotic.” Part of that process includes keeping Tims Creek alive in his woric. Kenan has already begun work on another novel with ties to his fictional North Carolina town. But first, he is finishing up an even more ambitious project “Right now I am working on a travel book, for lack of a better term, about Black America,” he explains. The book, which is under contract with Knopf is tentatively titled Walking on Water: A Journey into African America. Kenan easily becomes engrossed in describing the project “1 just sort of took off in the summer of ‘91 and traveled all over the continent,” he says. The resulting book “asks questions about what it means tq be African American,” he says, “So it’s a big book! “It’s an exploration of and a dipping into the diversity within various black communities. There’s this idea that we’re becoming more and more alike and that we’re all becoming bland and mailed out But I think this is opposite from the truth.” During his travels and research, interviewing hundreds of African Americans all across the country, Kenan became convinced that there is no monolithic “black community.” “I think that people are becoming more tenaciously local,” he says, “and that locality becomes one way that people keep a grip. No matter how much the malls may look alike, what people are motivated by and interested in are very radically different, and geography has a lot to do with it” As in his fiction, Kenan seems determined to transcend divisive categories. Though it began as a study of black America, he intends Walking on Water to go beyond blackness. “1 subversively hope,” he says, “that this book will really be as much about all Americans as any one group of Americans.”
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Feb. 10, 1995, edition 1
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