Panel of Writers

Loyola's second Panel of Writers on Friday, March 16, featured various authors in the Baltimore area. These writers discussed what living in the city means to them and why city life is so important to them. They also talked about what influences them as far as their writing is concerned.
Elizabeth Evitts, the editor of The Urbanite, a monthly magazine that explores living in the city of Baltimore as a lifestyle, invited the audience to consider why over forty percent of her readers live in counties outside the city limits. Evitts said that cities are the places where people work and play, and because of this, cities catch people’s interest. The vibrant city streets are sources of inspiration even for people who do not live there. From personal experience, when I would leave my house in the suburbs to go into a city, whether it was Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, or Boston, I would always be amazed by the unique pulse of that particular city.
Chezia Thompson Cager was another writer who spoke during the panel discussion. She read from one of her poems that passionately describes her undeniable need for city life. Despite the double digit murders, the teenage prostitution, the noise, the crime, and the traffic, she needs the city in order to survive. The city moves her and not only inspires her poetry, but her daily life.
Gregory Kane, a columnist for The Baltimore Sun, is inspired by his search for the truth. Surprisingly, he is not a big fan of interviewing public officials because he thinks it is too hard to get the whole story from them. He even said that he will often get more of the truth from prison inmates than from the people who are actually running the system.
The final panelist to speak was Jane Conly, who read parts from her works, Crazy Lady! and While No One Was Watching. She received some of her inspiration for these works by going to a free health clinic and observing the very diverse clientele. She commented that there are two commonly repeated plot lines for novels, and both involve culture clash. She said that this is what makes Baltimore so interesting. I agree with this because diversity and change are things that make life interesting. No one would want to live in or even read about an environment where everyone thinks the same, looks the same, and shares the same customs and traditions.
Like these writers who are inspired by the city lifestyle and the city itself, Ezra Pound and Alice Walker also cite the things that inspired them. Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” presents the reader with an image of the city travelers at a train station which was clearly inspired by the faces in the crowd at a Metro station in Paris. According to the excerpt on Alice Walker before Everyday Use in the Worlds of Fiction book that we use for class, Walker named her own mother as a big influence for the storyline of Everyday Use, which is a celebration of heritage and the true meaning of family traditions.
The writers at the panel discussion as well as the writers whose works we are reading for class all draw their inspiration for writing and life in general from various sources, and many of these sources relate to the city in some way. Living in the city is a way of life for many people, an aspect of their life that they could not survive without, and therefore, for many of these writers, this influence is apparent in their works.