I’m absolutely delighted to have Dolen Perkins-Valdez, the author of the just-released Wench, as this week’s guest author. Randall Kenan, author of A Visitation of Spirits, in a glowing blurb of this “positively riveting book” says of Dolen: “she has the audacity to challenge her readers to re-imagine the ‘Peculiar Institution’ of slavery in ways we Americans are only getting ready to face. There will be obvious comparisons to classics like Beloved and Dessa Rose, obvious but deserved.” And O Magazine agrees: Wench is at the top of their “10 Books to Watch for in February”! Dolen’s fiction and essays have appeared in everyplace you’d like yours to appear (me too!), and she is a 2009 finalist for the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Award. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Puget Sound, and has shared some beautiful words about writing. Enjoy the post, and look for Wench! – Meg
Recently, I was interviewed by my hometown newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee. After speaking with me, the reporter called my mother. When the reporter asked me at what age I started to write, I recalled my time spent in an MFA program in the late 1990s as the beginning of my literary career. Of course, my mother had different ideas!! She told him how I wrote stories while still in elementary school and even decorated the cover of one of my stories with a photograph of my dog. Heavens to Betsy!! Bless my mother’s heart. Of course, she was right. (As always). I did write stories as a child. In fact, I can’t remember a moment in my life when storytelling wasn’t important to me.
Recently, someone came to dinner at my house and after viewing the wall of bookshelves in my living room, asked me: “Have you read ALL of these books?” I was tickled by this question because when I was growing up, my parents lined the wall of my bedroom with bookshelves. And my friends would ask me that very same question. I think I’ve been asked that question my entire life.
I came to writing as a reader, as a lover of the written word. 
Many writers come into storytelling as readers. My story is no different from theirs, I suppose. I believe in the power of narrative to help us make sense of our existence. I believe that narrative is as integral to saving our lives as modern medicine. Whether your writing be poetry or prose, fiction or nonfiction, serious or funny, it is crucial to our understanding of ourselves as human beings. It is this belief that keeps me writing, even without the prospect of publication. My desire has always been to leave behind a record of my existence in written form, even if that were an unpublished manuscript that no one ever read.
When I wrote Wench, I tried my best to write a novel that I would want to read as a reader. Based on the overwhelming number of positive responses I have received so far, there are many readers out there just like me. This, I think, is the most difficult part to remember: even though the act of writing is a very solitary experience, it exists within a vast community of minds, all connected by a love for literature. Whether your manuscript is published or not, you are connected to that energy. So if you keep at it and strongly desire to be published, your dream will eventually come true. Your story is too important for you not to persist in telling it. I wish you much success. – Dolen
