Nin Andrews: Dare to Be Unconventional

A Dare to Be Unconventional: Nin Andrews and Dante Di Stefano Discuss Miss August (CavanKerry Press, 2017)

I simply felt that I wanted to talk about my formative years. But to write about my past, even in a fictional way, composing stories and prose poems based loosely on my childhood, was to write about race and gender and class. After all, I was raised by a black nanny who hated other African Americans, by a father who helped to start an all-white private school, by a father who was also a gay man and who was kicked out of the Navy for having an affair with an officer, by a mother was from Boston and not a typical woman and not a bit like Southern women, by farmhands who were illiterate and who were my playmates, by friends’ parents who called the Civil War –The War of Northern Aggression.

But my goal as a writer is not to explain, pontificate, or change what is or was, but simply to describe, to bear witness. I know that my particular vision and filter is tainted, colored not only by my class, race and gender, but also by my inevitable prejudices, fears, eccentricities, opinions, and blind spots. Nevertheless, it is liberating to write. Silence, for me, is suffocating.