Return to Compass Features for December 10, 1996
"Writing is like uncorking a bottle of champagne -- you have to let your ideas run over onto the page," says Diane McKinney-Whetstone, CW '75, author of the critically acclaimed novel "Tumbling." And at Writer's House on Nov. 20, she was bubbling with enthusiasm as she discussed the art of writing with three aspiring student authors.
For McKinney-Whetstone, coming to Penn was her way of paying back the university for the help it gave her when she was a 10th grader at West Philadelphia High School who came weekly to campus for a writing workshop on the Harlem Renaissance. Later in the day she credited her youthful experience at Penn with putting her on the path to being a writer.
McKinney-Whetstone told the three aspiring writers that they all had years on her because, aside from some "pretty bad poetry" written in the '70s, she had not really written fiction at all -- until "Tumbling," her debut work. It wasn't until she "was approaching a significant birthday," she laughed, that "I felt that if I didn't start to write fiction now, I never would."
And so, drawing on stories she had been hearing around the neighborhood for years, McKinney-Whetstone began
"Tumbling." It describes the life of an African-American couple in South Philadelphia in the 1940s and 1950s.
The writing was painstaking work at odd hours. She completed the novel in more than two years, during which she got up at the crack of dawn, wrote for two solid hours, and then went off to her day job as a public affairs officer for the U.S. Forest Service. It was during these hours, when the day was still young, that she felt most creative, she told the students.
While writing, the creative process sometimes took over in unexpected ways, she said. Some of the best parts of her novel were unplanned. She had simply put her "trust [in] the characters and let them come flowing out."
Her timing was right. Publishing houses, she said, were "looking for a fresh, new voice." And in McKinney-Whetstone, her publisher, William Morrow, obviously found one. The Philadelphia Daily News review praised "Tumbling" for vividly capturing "a pocket of South Philadelphia" in "wonderful, lyrical" language.
The three Penn students -- senior Audrey Beth Stein, sophomore Rebecca Entel, and freshman Andrew Butler -- all brought works of fiction for McKinney-Whetstone to appraise. After each piece was read aloud by the writer, McKinney-Whetstone gave her insights. For example, she suggested that Entel reconsider the need for one character. And she praised Stein's use of the third person and her images of darkness.
But she didn't dominate the conversation, instead turning it into a group discussion, giving sprinklings of hard-won advice from her own experience. She said it was especially important for each writer to carve out regular, undisturbed writing time, as she had done. Writing, she emphasized, was serious work.
Entel said that the session was "helpful and insightful and getting feedback any way that you can is so important."
During an evening session open to the public at the Institute for Contemporary Art, McKinney-Whetstone expressed gratitude to Penn for the writing course she took here while in 10th grade. Professor of the English Peter Conn had been her teacher back then, and he said that made introducing her at ICA one of his "favorite" experiences.
Return to Compass Features for December 10, 1996