“It’s my aim to get down on the ground with the folks,” said the English Department’s most recent speaker. He couldn’t have said a more fitting sentence to sum up his personable character.
And this is saying a lot. When I heard the Department was hosting a senior editor from The Atlantic, I didn’t expect he’d want to get down on the ground with us. In fact, I expected the opposite. When I heard a big time writer was coming to speak to us, I thought man, this guy’s made it. How could I ever face him without familiar surges of intimidation flooding over me? I knew when he walked on stage in his big time writer clothes and opened his big time writer mouth to drop us his big time writer words, the nagging pessimist in the back of my mind would say to me, you’ll just never make it that big. And let me tell you: as an undergraduate trying to make it big in the creative fields, this little pessimist can get to me.
But when senior editor of The Atlantic and author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle Ta-Nehisi Coates stepped center circle in the Adamson Wing this Wednesday, that little pessimist I described stayed far away from my thoughts. Ta-Nehisi is just so down-to-earth he scared away my inner pessimist and made me think, Hey. This guy could actually be my friend.
A dropout of Howard University, the first thing Ta-Nehisi said to us from the carpeted Adamson Wing stage in his familiar vernacular was, “I’m not going to give any advice today.” By saying this he stripped away the typical superiority a speaker has over his listeners in talks and lectures. So there I was, listening to a man who can write about whatever he wants (a writer’s dream)for TheAtlantic.com, who’s been ranked #37 in TheRoot.com’s list of 100 influencers and iconoclasts, who’s written for The Village Voice, the Washington City Paper and Time, and I felt like he was one of us, the normal people.
Ta-Nehisi spoke conversationally, his hands flat on the desk in front of him, as he described to us his writer’s journey and the process behind creating the voices in his historical fiction work-in-progress about the Civil War era. Trying to recreate dialects from this time period has become a favorite hobby of Te-Nehisi’s. “I always felt like language is organic,” he said, meaning individuals speak and write words to fit their personal needs first, then over time these uses evolve into the official, universally accepted grammar.
“I love voices,” he said, and we knew it was true. Ta-Nehisi spoke like a voice, a friendly one we’ve heard all our lives, rather than like a book, an academic voice we’ve grown accustomed to in college. It is apparent in both Ta-Nehisi’s speaking and his writing that he prefers to use plain but eloquent words in the same way the common person uses words today. Hearing Ta-Nehisi speak was a refreshing, encouraging experience. He showed me that not all big time writers fall into professional speak, and that we can still get down on the ground with the folks.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at CMU chapter.