Walter Mosley on Black Male Heroes and the Future of Literary Arts

By Yev Gelman

On October 6th, the English Department hosted acclaimed novelist Walter Mosley at the 2022 Mary Higgins Clark Keynote Address, which gathered over two hundred attendees featuring students, faculty, and alumni at the Lincoln Center Campus. 

Walter’s candor was a refreshing contrast to the often impersonal tone that some speakers use when addressing students. Though Walter began with a prepared address, which he wrote especially for the event, he found moments to pepper in unexpected anecdotes and asides. The speech was long, but it flew by. From the front row, Walter’s words felt as free-flowing and extemporaneous as if he was just speaking from the heart. 

As an aspiring novelist, learning more about Walter and his roots helped me realize the importance of staying true to the stories that feel true to me instead of trying to appeal to a faceless audience of publishers and their assistants. In his address, Walter mapped his journey as a writer to the Black men that raised him; he also alluded to a larger community of Black folks whose stories he had picked up outside bars or on the streets of LA, where he grew up. Instead of looking for inspiration in the institutions that have long suppressed his own voice, Walter turned to his community and found poetry in their speech and language. As he described instances of this ‘found poetry,’ I was struck by the sheer simplicity of his process: he listens, then he writes. Suddenly, I felt that I, too, could write, if I just learned to listen.

After the standing ovation that followed his address, I joined Walter for a Q&A. At first, I worried that I’d feel awkward, but Walter’s warmth made me feel confident. His answers to my questions were, tonally, exactly what I’d expect from him: when asked which literary figure he’d most like to take out to dinner, Walter quipped that he wasn’t interested in what other writers had to tell him, and regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, he confessed that his habits hadn’t changed much from his usual homebody self. When I tried to press him for details on the process and inspiration behind his work, Walter shrugged the question off. After he had decided to become a novelist, he told me, he went to the library to “learn what it was that he wanted to be.” To Walter, what made him a writer wasn’t the presence of a certain skill or talent, but the desire to write, and the willingness to go through the motions of storytelling again and again until the story is told. 

Yev Gelman (left) and Walter Mosley (right) during the Q&A portion of the event

While students lined up to get their copies of Walter Mosley’s Devil In a Blue Dress signed, several came up to tell me they thought I did a great job with the questions. I took the compliments, though it was clear to me that whatever levity and grace I possessed during that talk-back was primarily because of Walter, who made me feel as easygoing as he sounded. 

When I got home, the first thing I did was open the Google Doc with the current draft of my own story. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t scared: I was excited to ‘learn what it was that I wanted to be.’