Books — A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

 A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing

David Mura, The University of Georgia Press (2018)

Find the book here. Check out Mura’s website here.

One of the thorniest issues in teaching creative writing, particularly from my position relative to the issue, is exploring how best to create and write about characters of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds than the author.

This is particularly difficult for young white writers who are likely just coming to terms—if they have found those terms at all—with the way their racial designation acts as a pass-through rather than definitional label. This positioning of whiteness as the baseline for cultural expectations often creates assumptions about others’ race and identity that are prone to flattening and stereotyping. And that’s if they acknowledge those other groups at all.  

This is why David Mura’s A Stranger’s Journey is such a powerful resource. It explores these issues in direct but applicable ways, identifying issues that cause such assumptive thinking, the barriers to identifying them in ourselves, practicable ways writers can improve, and all while holding writers accountable for engaging this work as diligently as they study elements of craft and voice.

“...[A]s long as white writers unconsciously assume whiteness and the whiteness of their characters as the universal default, both as a literary technique and as an approach to the world, they will almost always fail when they attempt to portray people of color, whether in fiction or in nonfiction” (34).

To delve into this unconscious assumption, Mura cites a raft of writers and thinkers on the subject, compares in parallel the efforts of various writers to convey issues of race and identity, and describes his own process in examinations of writing he has done. And in the process, the work he does with the sources he connects offer a fantastic set of resources readers can mine as they continue exploring perspectives that de-center whiteness.

The effect of the whole—which rests on the author’s ability to move between the registers of writer, educator, and theorist—is truly impressive and allows Mura to dispense hard truths without shutting down the potential for writers to commit to doing the work and growing more competent with their representations of people from other backgrounds and life experiences.

“I am not saying authors can’t cross racial boundaries and write about characters not of their own race. But one can do this in a way that falsifies, simplifies, and fails to portray the complexities of a character of another race—or one can do this in a way that does justice to the reality of that character, that acknowledges the character is complexity and the full nature of his or her reality and experience” (33).

In all, A Stranger’s Journey offers a needed and immanently accessible guide for writers to starting the process of deconstructing our racial assumptions and blind spots for the sake of rebuilding ourselves as better storytellers and people in general.