{"id":16624,"date":"2014-06-03T11:14:07","date_gmt":"2014-06-03T11:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/over-the-course-of-almost-a-year-i-met-with\/"},"modified":"2014-06-03T11:14:07","modified_gmt":"2014-06-03T11:14:07","slug":"over-the-course-of-almost-a-year-i-met-with","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/over-the-course-of-almost-a-year-i-met-with\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>Over the course of almost a year, I met with Delany eight times. We \u00adnever returned to the diner; as we finished that first interview, the waitress informed us they would be closing forever that afternoon. We conducted one of our longest interviews in a caf\u00e9-bar in Philadelphia called Woody\u2019s, where the walls are painted bordello red. Young men milled about in leather vests, and someone kindly picked up our bill. I had been reading Octavia Butler\u2019s essay \u201cPositive Obsession,\u201d in which she mentions that when she started out as a writer of science fiction, Samuel Delany was perhaps the only black author writing in the genre. \u201cWhat good is science fiction to black people?\u201d Butler asks. \u201cWhat good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I pose these questions to Delany, and he responds excitedly: \u201cScience fiction isn\u2019t just thinking about the world out there. It\u2019s also thinking about how that world might be\u2014a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they\u2019re going to change the world we live in, they\u2014and all of us\u2014have to be able to think about a world that works differently.\u201d<br \/>\n\u2014Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/interviews\/6088\/the-art-of-fiction-no-210-samuel-r-delany\">Paris Review &#8211; The Art of Fiction No. 210, Samuel R. Delany<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the course of almost a year, I met with Delany eight times. We \u00adnever returned to the diner; as we finished that first interview, the waitress informed us they would be closing forever that afternoon. We conducted one of our longest interviews in a caf\u00e9-bar in Philadelphia called Woody\u2019s, where the walls are painted [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-4k8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16624\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}