David Chura
Oyster River Pages: How is your art or writing informed by current social and/or political issues?
David Chura: As a gay man, I am fine-tuned to enforced silence. The voices of so many have been denied. As a writer, I want to tell the stories that don’t get told, especially those of disenfranchised young people who don’t have access to the tools—art, writing, music—to express themselves. Instead, their voices can only be heard through the harm they do to themselves, or, in desperation, to others.
ORP: We often think of ourselves as writing or making art, but the process often changes or makes us as well. How do you feel like your writing or art makes you?
DC: No matter where I start in my writing, I always end up with the same question: Are things—people, relationships, values, myself—really the way I thought they were? Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I will begin with a firm sense of who I am or where I stand on a particular issue; or I will have a firm grasp of who a character is. More times than not, by the end of a piece, the ground has rumbled, my step is shaky, and I’m left in a world of more questions than answers: It’s the only true place to be.
ORP: What do you hope readers or viewers of your piece take from it?
DC: I wrote “Pampers” knowing that most people have little understanding of what prison life is like, and what young people of color entangled in the criminal justice system experience. Too often these young people are defined—and at times, demonized—by the media. What I’d like the reader to take away from the story is that Rolando, the 19 year old narrator, is a complex person, shaped by his community, his family, and the culture. Sounds disappointingly simple, doesn’t it? But it’s actually challenging—not to excuse, ignore, condemn, or condescend to, but to meet him on his own terms, and see how you feel after listening to him. Then at least, he’ll be “Rolando,” and not a static or some thug on the local news.
ORP: Do you believe that hope is a luxury, a responsibility, a danger, or something else? Why?
DC: Hope is a gift. It’s not a commodity, but rather a force or a spirit that can be passed from one person to another by what one says, writes, or how one acts. I’ve been given hope, shown hope, by some of the most unlikely people—people, young and old, who have nothing, who live in dire circumstances, yet have hope which they readily share. In the face of a culture filled with despair and cynicism, how can hope not become a responsibility to share?
ORP: If you could choose one writer or artist, living or dead, as a best friend or mentor, who would it be? Why?
DC: From the great tribe of writers who have nourished me over the years, I’d have to choose an ancestor: Herman Melville. For his courage to write, in lush and sensuous language, about issues that in his time were hidden or ignored—slavery and race relations; the hypocrisy of religion, and of sexual mores; the force of passion in male friendships. A man who was not afraid to write—a love letter, really—to his friend Hawthorne, “Your heart beats in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s… The divine magnet is in you, and my magnet responds.” I want that same courage and passion in my life, and in my writing.
