Bruce Conforth is an expert on iconic blues legend Robert Johnson's life. He spent 40 years of his life researching him, discovering things about him, and writing about him - his co-author even found Johnson's death certificate, which opened up a wealth of information about him. For me, the most interesting aspect of his lecture was when he began comparing and discussing the relationship between writing and music. "They are both performances", he says. When he is writing his best, and when he is playing his best, the words and the music just flows out of him and he forgets what he is doing. "Performance", he says, "is an important concept because you are writing a story and creating a culture".
Although Conforth writes great scholarly text, he originally struggled with the idea of doing so because he questioned whether he had the authority to write with expertise. It wasn't until he read a book called 'Writing and Culture' by Clifford and Marcus that made him realize that academic writing could be literature, too. His academic writing is unconventional.
He felt very strongly that as a writer, you are not doing your job if you do not put yourself in your writing and acknowledge your presence as the author.
His advice to students is to write what they think and what they feel - other people's opinions don't matter. When they write, their goal should be to make him forget that he's even reading, and that he is truly existing in whatever world they've given him. He encourages his students to read and read and read; he has extensive reading lists for his students, and believes that the only way to be a good writer is to be a good reader.
One thing from this lecture that really stuck out to me was when he said: "Ultimately, we're all stories. We can define ourselves in all sorts of ways, but we're all stories". This inspires me to not only write - but to live.
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