In the Background

What is a love story anyway? Love has more than one face. The artist's story explores the deepness of love from its underside as he waits for the wound to heal. Sensitive to both his conditions and his conditioning, he wrestles with himself. He attempts to make sense of a world he has decided to leave, isolate himself away from, and never return to. Why has he made this decision? There are absolutely too many reasons, or maybe there is only one. Slowly, the reader is invited into his mind, to see as he sees, through his art and through his memories of the reality he has all but completely turned away from. In The Background begins at the story's chronological end. The narrative then returns to where his development began, maturing its way back to the end as in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. It is a layered journey, scattered with many thoughts reflecting his confusion early on, but in his understanding all of the scatter settles in its proper place to do as the artist has had to many times in his own works, "make it all make sense." And it all has something to do with love.

About the Author :
As an author Devin Wright is not "typically" urban. He does not write narratives to satisfy the gaze of those on the outside, with characters making an appeal in their exodus of the sensationalized violence and desperation of the inner city - these characters are always different, better than what their environment has to offer, special, cut from a different cloth, more human even, to tap into the sensibilities of the audience; they are the "good ones" in the pit of hell, of all of Sodom and Gomorra, they are Lot and his kin. Devin refuses to retell this story, as so many novels, movies, and songs have, because to humanize one or two characters in this manner, means the dehumanizing of many, and he's never saw the inner city environment that has nurtured him, deserving of such treatment. He is indeed urban though, but not the urban his audience expects when they listen to him or read his works, but just as important to the fabric of the city as the others highlighting the thug, the hoe, the drug dealer, the gangster, the hustler, and the baller, if not more important, because their stories are only partial representations of urban life, and in his opinion, irresponsible and incomplete. Many times these urban standards have only made the case that his type does not exist, outside of a protagonist trying escape the evils of the hood - which is not really his type at all, because one doesn't escape what one embraces. Devin Wright has taken his urban experience to be a redeemer of sorts, inviting the rest of the characters, telling the rest of the story, and completing the mural of inner city life for the voiceless many who do not fit within the offered mold.