More from Writer Friends Who Talk About Why They Write: George Rosen

I have known George Rosen since high school but it is only the last year or two that we have been in any sort of communication again..

You will note that like Goddard Graves, George does not consider himself a writer so much as someone who is inspired to write a story. It may ve something of a subtle difference, but it IS a difference. 

He states: 


This is about not how I was inspired to be a writer, but how I came to write a particular story. But that's how it's always been for me. I never decided I want to be a writer; I decided I wanted to write this. I wanted to write that. Some of those thises and thats have been stories; some have been opinions, some observations. Fiction, nonfiction, explanation, elucidation, inspiration--I've always loved to talk and write, all part of the same enchantment with the miracle of language, which is at once thought and music, imagination and sound. So I've always loved stories, hearing them, reading them, writing them when I can. It's a vast conversation I want to take part in, to listen, to speak, to listen again, to speak again.

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The Immanence of God in the Tropics
Leapfrog Press
George Rosen
A Good White Hunter


“A Good White Hunter” is from George Rosen’s collection, The Immanence of God in the Tropics (Leapfrog Press, 2012).  Rosen’s short fiction has appeared in Yale Review, Harvard Review, Harper’s, and other magazines.  He lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Rosen said this about the origin of his story:  The seed of “A Good White Hunter” was seeing, forty years ago on a side street of a small Kenyan town, a man – an obviously unhappy man, wearing that grim look people wear when they’re doing work they don’t like, for a person they don’t like, for money they need to have. He was loading or unloading something from a Land Rover; you couldn’t tell which because he was in a moment of stasis, just staring at some shapeless sacks.

He was unshaven, dressed in a sleeveless undershirt and khaki pants, stained like all cloth in that part of the country, with the red laterite dust of the roads. The remarkable thing about him, what made him much later (I’m not the world’s fastest fiction writer) turn into a story, was that he was an mzungu, a “European” as they say, with cultural accuracy, in East African English: a white man. I spent two years teaching high school in Kenya as a Peace Corps volunteer, and he was the only European – an Englishman, I guessed, I imagined, not hearing him speak – I ever saw doing menial labor for somebody else, in his case an Indian store-owner next to whose storage godown he was standing.

This certainly was not what the British colonial regime had intended.  Nor was it anything typical of the then newly independent Kenya, where in a few parts of the country – particularly in the richly soiled, fertile areas of the “White Highlands” that had been kept off limits to native Kenyans by the colonial rulers – there were still several thousand British farmers, prosperous men and women you could sometime see walking down a small-town street with a servant staying cautiously a few steps behind.

So I wondered how it had happened, how it had come to pass for this one guy contemplating those sacks of, who knows, those sacks of something. There was, of course, a “real” story, one I didn’t know. If I’d been braver or more obliviously curious, I might have just walked up and asked him. But I didn’t, and it’s inside such fortuitous, sometimes intentional, ignorance that a storyteller’s imagination often starts to work. What I saw then, and it took me twenty years to figure out, was the Atherton of “A Good White Hunter”, a traveler who maybe was, or maybe not, going to make it home.