While blog posts tend to revolve around experiences within texts concerning intertextuality, I would like to discuss a rather terrifying moment in my life where I saw a man’s own take of what it meant to connect two different disciplines into his line of work. A few weeks ago, I chipped my two front teeth, and had to get it bonded by a dentist. I went to a dentist somewhere in Geneseo (won’t say who), and after a few words were exchanged about my insurance and the estimate for how much it would cost to fix my teeth, he took me by the chin and lifted my eyes to meet his, and he said: “Scott, dentistry is the marriage of art and science. I am the artist, and your teeth are my canvas. This drill is my brush, and these drill bits are my pallet. However, the only color I will be using is red, as gums tend to get bloody during this”.
While it was one of the more poetic explanations of how a job encompasses multiple disciplines, the way he described it was rather terrifying to say the least. I decided to write about the experience for one of my other classes, a creative writing class. I wrote about this dentist, and every detail down to what his kids looked like in a picture he had of them on a wall in the back left corner. As I wrote about this dentist, however, it had me thinking of the writing processes of Cane, Everett, and Walker. Did they experience traumatic or interesting experiences that led them to certain character sketches within their fiction? Looking back through Cane’s autobiography, quite a few of the characters he meant in real life were transcribed into his writing in certain ways.
Following this line of thinking, the creative writing class also had me write a piece of literary fiction, and in the piece I wrote, I pretty much gave the main character qualities that I possessed, down to the way he talked, acted, joked around, and even looked. While this may be an extreme example to use, I found it easier to write about myself rather than something completely made up out of thin air. While not every author would go to such lengths, it makes me think about what qualities authors such as Walker, Cane, and Everett give to their characters that they themselves have.
Perhaps even more interesting to try to envision is what qualities that Everett gave to his character, Alice. Did he give Alice qualities of himself, an African American Male writing in the 1990’s, or that of another woman in his life? It could even be said that the Alice in his story was much like Meridian Hill in Alice Walker’s story, perhaps making a homage to Alice Walker, with his character, Alice Achitophel. All of these questions popped up in my mind with ease, and it wouldn’t have been possible without a dentist’s startling depiction of marriage of the disciples. By writing about him and his odd tendencies, it opened a door to new questions to the authors that we have studied that I honestly never thought I would have before.