What a thrill this morning – my first US byline in a 20-year journalism career – and it’s about the late great Charles R. Saunders.
Pittsburgh was Charles’s hometown, so I was overjoyed that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wanted to break the news about Charles in the US. I’m planning a second feature for them – this time about how Pittsburgh boxing is at the core of Imaro.
The Halifax Examiner broke the Canadian media freeze-out of Charles this week, but CBC, CTV and every newspaper in the country is still twiddling their thumbs in the past. “But we KNOW about Charles, Jon,” they tell me. No, friends, you don’t.
Any brave Canadian reporters out there ready to take up the story of Charles R. Saunders?
Also, the US podcast Imaginary Worlds devoted an entire episode to the Father of Sword and Soul this week.
Charles R. Saunders loved Tarzan as a kid, but he was also repulsed by the racism in those books since Charles was Black. So, he created a counter narrative about a warrior named Imaro who lived in a fictionalized version of precolonial Africa. Charles had invented a new subgenre of sword and sorcery that he called sword and soul. His books were groundbreaking in the 1980s, but he was also way ahead of his time. I talk with Milton Davis, Sheree Renée Thomas and Troy Wiggins about a movement among Black fantasy writers today to reclaim Charles and his work. I also talk with journalist Jon Tattrie, who wrote a biography about Charles called To Leave a Warrior Behind.
On y va!