I had the pleasure of interviewing writer Brian Broome over two sessions conducted on Zoom in December, 2021. A majority of the interview can be found in the March-April 2022 edition of The G&LR. I couldn’t include everything that was interesting, however. Since his way of telling his stories was so engaging, I thought readers might enjoy seeing and hearing him recount how he developed his memoir, Punch Me Up to the Gods, from a series of short sketches to an internally cohesive book, and which I reviewed in The G&LR‘s Jan-Feb 2022 issue.
You can also enjoy his recollection of his trip to southern France. There he, like James Baldwin before him, found a freedom from negative racial stereotyping very different from what he had grown up with in the industrial Midwest.
Richard M. Berrong, professor of French literature at Kent State, is the author of Pierre Loti (Critical Lives, 2018)
