By Lauren McSherry

Morrison

Toni Morrison composes her novels on yellow tablets with pencil. Her real name is Chloe. And she rises early, so that she is writing by 4:30 a.m.

These are some of the things the Nobel Prize winner shared with the audience at the Celebrity Forum at Flint Center last week.

Morrison’s talk began on a serious note. She spoke of the threats to the relationship between reader and writer, which she called “the dance of an open mind when it engages an equally active one.”

“I am going to talk to you tonight about the world I inhabit most completely, which is the world of writing and reading,” she said before leading into “the peril” that endangers and, in some cases, destroys the dance.

As one example, she cited “a comfortable young American,” “a pampered successful male” who had never learned to sit in a room by himself for four hours and read “without any companionship besides his own mind.”

As a second example, she spoke of a woman writer who made her aware of the persecution writers face in countries where “the practice of modern art is illegal” and where authors can face “death as a consequence of writing.”

In one case, the existence of the reader is threatened; in the other, the existence of the writer. The relationship cannot exist without both.

“Writing has never made me happy, never made me suffer,” she said. “With or without pain, nothing could keep me from doing it.”

She talked of her need to write, to “offer the fruits of intelligence without fear of anything more deadly than disdain,” and the need “to make sure no conglomerate or political wing interferes with inquiry.”

In part two of her talk, Morrison discussed why she left her position as an editor at Random House to become a full-time writer, and read the forewords to “Tar Baby” and “Beloved,” letting the audience in on the thoughts that inspired each novel.

Morrison was candid answering questions from the audience. She explained why, as the single mother of two young boys, she moved to New York City to work as an editor.

When asked “What do you tell people who say your books are too difficult?” Morrison replied, “What I say is, ‘Don’t read them.’ But what I think is, that people read differently.”

She said hard books are like “Finnegan’s Wake,” and returned to her earlier theme of the relationship between writer and reader.

“You want to savor it. You want to surrender to it,” she said. “You want to walk into that world created by a book and stay there.”

She answered all questions openly, except for one. She would not tell who “the one” is on the dedication page of her first novel. She said sometimes authors use that page to thank their loved ones, sometimes they use the page for quotes, and sometimes that’s where authors put secrets.

Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993.