Occupation Writer Notable works Wash (2013) Awards American Book Awards | Nationality American Books Wash, Wash - Extrait | |
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Wash by margaret wrinkle interview series i
Margaret Wrinkle is an American writer and documentary film maker. She is known for her 2013 book, Wash, which was a fiction runner-up for the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and for co-creating the 1996 documentary broken/ground.
Contents
Wash by margaret wrinkle interview series v
Life
Wrinkle is a seventh-generation Southerner from Birmingham, Alabama. She described her parents as "Southern intellectuals." A voracious reader, Wrinkle was 5 years old when her parents realized television programs were giving her nightmares. They told her the television was broken, and no one used it for the next 10 years. "As a child, I read constantly, and the characters in books became like people in my life."
Wrinkle's family employed Ida Mae Lawson Washington as a domestic worker. "She had a big influence on my life," Wrinkle says. Indeed, when Washington died, Wrinkle moved back to Birmingham from California, and began working on a documentary about black women in domestic service, work that would eventually become brokenground. Her experiences interviewing Washington's family helped push her into early childhood education. "From 1992 to 1997, I taught in inner city Birmingham schools and used painting, photography, video, and writing to work with children from the poorest income ZIP code in the United States. I taught them to read by asking them to tell their own stories."
Literary work
Wrinkle's fictional book, Wash, focuses on slave breeding in Tennessee during the early 1800s. The main character, named Wash, is hired for breeding by other nearby slaveowners. Richardson’s idea is to “put him with three or four per day. Even if only some take, that will mean ten new negroes, worth two hundred apiece once weaned.”
"This is a story about survival under outrageous circumstances. Men and women suffer squalid conditions, torture and disease. Wrinkle shows the human cost of slavery — for both blacks and whites — in harrowing detail." The book was a runner-up for the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It was published by Atlantic Monthly Press.
Film work
Wrinkle's award-winning documentary brokenground, made with Chris Lawson about the racial divide in her historically conflicted hometown, was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition and was a winner of the Council on Foundations Film Festival. During the filming, Wrinkle says, "I started to get a haunting sense that we are still deeply affected by patterns laid down during slavery and began to see how many of our cultural differences could be traced all the way back to that original clash between Africa and Europe."