At Esquire, sci-fi author Jeff VanderMeer and Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid discuss genre fiction, and how one art form can inspire another. Reid says:
Fiction has always evoked pictures and provoked ideas and sounds in my mind. James Baldwin, who was a powerful writer of fiction and non-fiction was a haunted witness of American dysfunction. In his short play, “The Amen Corner,” there is a sentence spoken by the female protagonist, an anointed prophetess whose carefully constructed facade of a life comes apart when her estranged jazz pianist returns unbidden: “It’s an awful thing, how love never dies”. When I read that sentence, I thought, That’s what this play is about.
