Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Barrack Obama, Comics, entertainment, fiction, president, writing

President Obama On The Future Of Fiction Writing – "We're A Storytelling Species"

For one of his last interviews as a sitting president, Barrack Obama talked with the New York Times about something near and dear to many people… books. Obama is a published author among his other accomplishments and when asked why he became a writer, he said:

I loved reading when I was a kid, partly because I was traveling so much, and there were times where I'd be displaced, I'd be the outsider. When I first moved to Indonesia, I'm this big, dark-skinned kid that kind of stood out. And then when I moved back from Indonesia to Hawaii, I had the manners and habits probably of an Indonesian kid.

And so the idea of having these worlds that were portable, that were yours, that you could enter into, was appealing to me. And then I became a teenager and wasn't reading that much other than what was assigned in school, and playing basketball and chasing girls, and imbibing things that weren't very healthy.

Then I think rediscovered writing and reading and thinking in my first or second year of college and used that as a way to rebuild myself, a process I write about in "Dreams From My Father."

And on how writing helped him find his identity:

Yes, I think so. For me, particularly at that time, writing was the way I sorted through a lot of crosscurrents in my life — race, class, family. And I genuinely believe that it was part of the way in which I was able to integrate all these pieces of myself into something relatively whole.

People now remark on this notion of me being very cool, or composed. And what is true is that I generally have a pretty good sense of place and who I am, and what's important to me. And I trace a lot of that back to that process of writing.

With all the advancements in technology, how does he see the future of fiction writing:

Look, I don't worry about the survival of the novel. We're a storytelling species.

I think that what one of the jobs of political leaders going forward is, is to tell a better story about what binds us together as a people. And America is unique in having to stitch together all these disparate elements — we're not one race, we're not one tribe, folks didn't all arrive here at the same time.

What holds us together is an idea, and it's a story about who we are and what's important to us. And I want to make sure that we continue that.

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