Robert Fleming

Interested in psychology and sociology, I came to writing as a fluke in the early 1970s when a friend, Willard Jenkins, allowed me to sub for him as a music writer at a local magazine in Cleveland. Reading had always been a favorite pastime for me, but writing was something I never imagined myself doing. While studying full-time for a degree in psychology at night at a local college, I worked fulltime during the day as a welfare case worker, squeezing time in doing interviews with people like Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Minnie Riperton, Ray Charles, Bob Marley, and a host of other jazz and pop greats. Like many writers, my first love was poetry and I published two books of poems, Melons (1974) and Stars (1975).

It wasn’t until I came to New York as a young writer that a whole realm of possibilities opened for me in that area. I landed my first real writing job at Encore Magazine, a pioneering black newsmagazine in 1977, working as an associate editor. Despite hassles with pay, the experience at the publication was extremely beneficial, giving me a chance to work with such talents as Nikki Giovanni, Ivan Webster, Paula Giddins, and Henry Jackson. I worked on hard news stories, such as the involuntary sterilization of young black women in several southern states, political corruption on a national level, the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, medical experiments conducted on black patients at several East Coast medical sites, and the spate of police brutality cases nationwide. In 1979, I did one story which would change my life: a car tour of the Deep South, where I interviewed poor black families in rural Alabama and Mississippi, spoke with plantation owners in Georgia and Louisiana about their abuse of their black tenant farmers, and conducted a late night talk with a group of hooded Klansmen outside of Anniston, Alabama. This series got me some notice and earned me a scholarship to Columbia University’s noted School of Journalism.

After my tour of duty at the “J School,” I worked for a time with former CBS News president, Fred Friendly, former boss of the legendary Edward R. Morrow, as a staff writer for the PBS TV show, Media and Society. A chance meeting at one of the show’s taping got me a job as a reporter at The New York Daily News, where I worked throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. While there, I learned the world of hard New York news from the street up, earning a New York Press Club, award, a Revson Fellowship, and several other honors. I retired at the end of 1991 to write and teach. Since that time, I’ve published work in Essence, Black Enterprise, The Source, U.S. News and World Report, Omni, Black Issues Book Review, Bookpage, Quarterly Black Review, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly.

If you have skills in a discipline, pass that along to those who want to acquire that talent. I taught writing and media studies at Marist College, and The College of New Rochelle for a time. Also, I taught courses in “Media And The Black Experience,” “Hard And Soft News Journalism for A New World,” and “African-American Film History before The Cold War” at the New School in 1999-2002. Recently, I instructed local college teachers in literacy educational strategies at CUNY.

In the early 1990s, I wrote two young adult books: Rescuing A Neighborhood: The Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps and The Success of Caroline Jones, Inc.: The Story Of An Advertising Agency. Two other books followed: The Wisdom of the Elders (1996) and The African American Writer’s Handbook (2000), both of which were selected by The Black Expressions Book Club.

Other books by Fleming included: After Hours (2002), Intimacy (2004), Havoc After Dark (2004), Fever In The Blood (2006), Gift Of Faith (2012), Gift Of Truth (2014), Gift of Revelation (2015), Free Jazz (2016), and Rasta, Babylon, Jamming (2017).

My poetry, essays and short stories have appeared in such books as UpSouth, Brotherman: The Odyssey of the Black Man in America, Sacred Fire, In Search of Color Everywhere, Dark Matter, Brown Sugar, Gumbo, and Proverbs For The People. In the works are a memoir, a book on prison reform, and a collection of short fiction, Evil Never Sleeps.

Recently, I came upon a quote from the Senegalese writer Aminata Sow Fall that sums up my goals as a writer:

The African writer cannot and must not take pen in hand merely to offer pretty expressions and phrases. As the product of a society that has its problems, he must create work so that each person becomes completely aware of them, so that people think of them, and look for their solutions, for that is what it means to be a committed writer, then that is what I am. Our literature must raise issues that summon me to devise solutions to problems that are specifically ours, problems which, although existing in other places, take on a special dimension in our country.”

This is what I’ve tried from the moment I first started submitting my work to publishers and will continue to do until I no longer write, which I hope is never.

Fleming explains his penchant for spirituality and how he overcame a series of challenges to produce the popular line of religious fiction.