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Transcript of Lamentations Episode on WORDTheatre's Saturday Stories
CEDERING FOX
Hello and welcome to WORDTheatre's Saturday Stories! My name is Cedering Fox, I 'm WordTheatre's Founder and Artistic Director. Before we get started, I need to state three things. First of all, this story may offend some people with its use of graphic language and frank references to difficult life experiences. Secondly, WORDTheatre holds the copyright to these recordings and no portion of anything you hear may be reproduced without permission. Thirdly, WORDTheatre and our distributors do not have the right to publish a written transcriptIon of any of the stories you hear on the podcast. The book publishers hold those rights and the production of transcripts violates copyright protection. That being said, most of our authors' works are available for purchase and we encourage you to support your local bookstores, the publishers, the authors and our podcast by visiting our affiliate link at Bookshop/org/shop/wordtheatre/!
Now, in honor of Black History Month, we would like to celebrate John EDGAR Wideman this week, and next, by sharing two of his extraordinary pieces of writing. John Edgar Widman has been publishing his work since 1967, the year Langston Hughes died. Wideman is the first person to win the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice and John was only the second African-American to become a Rhodes Scholar and study in Oxford, England. The first Black Rhodes Scholar was Alain Locke in 1907. There were 56 years in between those two scholarships!
Wideman's chronicling of the Black American Experience has not only made him a MacArthur genius grant recipient, but has also earned him his well-deserved reputation as one of America's most important, living writers. The piece you're about to hear, Lamentations, was the first piece of John's that we performed at WORDTheatre, and we feel honored that he has entrusted us with performing his short stories ever since. This piece is actually excerpted from his novel, entitled Two Cities. To introduce and perform Lamentations, please welcome "Green Leaf" matriarch, Emmy award winning actress for the "Josephine Baker Story," Lynn Whitfield.
LYNN WHITFIELD
"Hello, this is Lynn Whitfield. I will never forget the first time I read this story. John Edgar Wideman writes like nobody else. Meeting him for the first time is etched in my mind's eye. There is something about him that stopped me in my tracks. You can feel his power, his humanity. You can see with all of his warmth and humor that he has suffered. Performing 'Lamentations' was simply an honor. I think I'd like the story to speak for itself, but there is an architecture that the writing is built on that makes inhabiting it just easy.. The story tells you how to read it. I hope you feel that. I hope you feel what I felt and I hope that you get to know the work of John Edgar Wideman, who is without a doubt a master writer, and we are all so lucky to have his work that illuminates the human conditions so so fluidly like Jazz."
THE STORY, Lamentations, is excerpted from John Edgar Wideman's novel, Two Cities. WORDTheatre® DOES NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO PRINT THE WORDS OF THIS STORY and no distributor has the rights to create a transcript of this reading.
CEDERING FOX
Thank you, Lynn Whitfield, for a powerful performance of this remarkable story, Lamentations by John Edgar Wideman. We'll have more great stories by John Edgar Wideman coming your way this month, little gems that have been recorded at various places in New York and Los Angeles and several of them have been performed by Academy Award Nominees for 20024. We hope that you'll tell your friends and that they'll tell their friend and that everyone will will tune into Saturday Stories. It's time for some thank yous: first and foremost, thank you to the remarkable philanthropist & benefactor, Ola Strom, to Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture for their ongoing support, to all our hard working interns led by Executive Assistant Scout Riley, and to our podcast editor, Jason Lee! The music for this week's podcast was composed by Jonathan Sacks. We encourage you to visit WORDTheatre.org where you can learn more and join the WORDTheatre family! Until next week this is Cedering Fox signing off!
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