Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette Pittsburgh native John Edgar Wideman reads from a notebook containing a work-in-progress tentatively titled "Fanon" during 412, the Pittsburgh Creative Nonfiction Literary Festival. Click photo for larger image.

John Edgar Wideman was the leading soloist in the "chorus of the voices" heard last week at 412, the first Pittsburgh Creative Nonfiction Literary Festival.

The Pittsburgh native delivered the keynote reading Saturday after a day of seminars and readings that included a panel with Wideman, his son, Dan, and cousin and fellow writer Albert French.

The festival was held at the Frick Fine Arts Building on the University of Pittsburgh campus. The keynote ceremonies were at David Lawrence Hall auditorium.

"Writing is a community effort," Wideman said in his address. "I am but one voice among many writers in that chorus of voices.

"It's a chorus that gives me a sense of generations connected by writing."

Wideman was introduced by Lee Gutkind, founder of the Pittsburgh-based Creative Nonfiction Journal.

Gutkind, who also started the creative nonfiction master's degree program at the University of Pittsburgh, launched the festival in part to mark the publication's 10th anniversary.

While Gutkind described creative nonfiction as true stories "of substance infused by narrative and style," Wideman offered a "slightly different" take.

"I offer a perspective from the African storytelling tradition," he said. "All stories are true. All stories are not true. Reality is in the eye of the beholder."

He also mentioned the Haitian tradition that honors "the person who tells the best story. It's important that the story be told in the most vivid way."

Wideman's contribution was a work-in-progress, read fresh from his notebook and combining both fiction and nonfiction elements.

The selection was set in Homewood, familiar territory for previous Wideman fiction and nonfiction works. This time, it was seen through his mother, Betty's, perspective.

From her apartment on Frankstown Road, she witnesses the shooting death of a young black man near a nuisance bar, an incident with echoes from Wideman's experience.

A nephew, Omar Massey-Wideman, was gunned down in Hazelwood in 1993..

The piece was also a connection to Wideman's childhood in Homewood, when he recalled how his mother would walk him to grade school, always crossing the street at a spot where a long-vanished dog once jumped at her when she was a young girl.

"My mother was teaching me her fear," Wideman explained.

"These are crazy stories, getting crazier every day," he added, referring to the continuing violence in communities around the country.

The Homewood section is to be included in a new novel focusing on the life of Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and thinker who opposed colonialism.

"The book questions what is biography, what is society and the moral and ethical contradictions of oppression," he said.

An audience of about 200, well-sprinkled with local writers, gave Wideman sustained applause.

He also said that a new edition of "Brothers and Keepers," his award-winning 1986 account of his brother Robby's conviction on felony murder charges, will be published next year.

The festival, which opened Nov. 8, concluded Sunday. Gutkind said nearly 500 registered for the events. "I hope it will spark a coming-together of all writers in the future," he said Saturday.

The local literary journal, The New Yinzer, was co-sponsor of the festival. Its new anthology, "Dirt," debuted at the event.