Hypertext Magazine asked Sharyn Skeeter, author of Dancing with Langston, “Why did you choose to have poet and author Langston Hughes as a character in Dancing with Langston?”
By Sharyn Skeeter
I had heard of distant Langston family connections—via my father’s mother—to Langston Hughes. This was around the same time when I was a teen and began to write poetry. Though some relatives in Harlem said they were in contact with him, I never got to meet him. Meanwhile, family connections aside, I became fascinated by Langston as such an important and prolific poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, translator, memoirist, and librettist, while my father, who worked in the post office, had never seriously tried to develop his talents as a visual artist.
So, with this novel, I use elements of bio fiction. When I created this Langston Hughes character, I imagined what it might have been like if he and my father had met in the salon of a former Paris café dancer. With fictional events from both men’s lives, I ask the question: How does an artist live his or her dream to pursue that talent and manage to pay rent to live?
Thanks to the incredible richness of both black men’s lives and the contemporary setting —a Harlem apartment condemned to be gentrified—the novel also deals with black American arts, aging, wartime PTSD, gender issues, multiculturalism, and love relationships.
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