Letter #14: To Richard Wright from Jason McBride
"Your haiku show how potent a storyteller you are."
Welcome to the 14th installment of Letters to Dead Authors & Artists! Today’s letter is from Jason McBride to Richard Wright. Wright is best known for his 1940s books Native Son and Black Boy, but I was fascinated to learn that he also wrote over 4000 haiku in the last years of his life. Jason McBride is the creator of popular Substack, Weirdo Poetry, where he combines haiku and comics in profound ways. In a moving post about work, poetry, fatherhood, and Richard Wright, Jason wrote: “Even though separated by skill, race, and generations, I feel a kind of kinship with Richard Wright that was not possible for me with my father. Wright and I share a love of poetry and a haiku writing practice”.
Read along with Jason McBride
About Richard Wright
Richard Wright (September 4, 1908-November 28, 1960) was an American literary luminary writing primarily about the Black American experience. He’s best known for his works, Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and Black Boy. Wright’s membership in the American Communist Party in the 1930s led to his exile in France. In France, Wright wrote more than 4,000 haiku. Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon, was published posthumously in 1998, containing 809 of his poems.
About Jason McBride
Jason McBride is a poet-cartoonist obsessed with using haiku as a way to live a slower, more deeply human life. He’s published six books, including his most recent, Haiku Comics from the Anthropocene, and writes the Weirdo Poetry newsletter.
Video Conversation: Haiku, Comics, & Richard Wright
Please join us for a video conversation with Jason McBride & Kelcey Ervick on Substack Live. We will talk about Haiku, Comics, & Richard Wright. More info coming soon.
Note from Kelcey
When I read Jason’s line referring to Wright’s “haiku notebook holding sheets of poems you have cut-and-pasted together,” I thought: I want to see that! And sure enough, in his post about Wright and his own father, Jason shared images of Wright’s haiku that were published in a tweet from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, which holds 50 years worth of Richard Wright’s papers.
Feast your eyes:
Hello, dear Reader! Thank you for reading Letters to Dead Authors & Artists, a weekly newsletter curated by me, Kelcey Ervick. I’m the author of four award-winning books, an artist, creative writing professor, and a lover of letters. I publish my own handwritten, illustrated letters on Substack at The Habit of Art. This is a new venture where I’m thrilled to publish letters from the community. I’m open to pitches!
-Kelcey
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