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Episode 364: Mitchell S. Jackson
1.1k Plays2 years ago
Mitchell S. Jackson is the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of "Twelve Minutes and a Life" for his piece on Ahmaud Arbery for Runners World. He's also the author of Survival Math: Notes from an All-American Family and the novel The Residue Years.
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Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Shout-Out
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, here's my requisite shout out to Athletic Brewing, my favorite non-alcoholic beer out there. Not a paid plug, but I am a brand ambassador and I want to celebrate this amazing product. So if you head to athleticbrewing.com, use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout. Get a nice little discount on your first order. Give it a shot. My favorite these days is Athletic Light and Free Wave.
00:00:23
Speaker
I don't know. Give it a shot. Can't hurt. I mean, I just see it as the work. Like, how can you push yourself forward? You know, don't try to rest on what you've done. I don't want to be a one book guy or a two book guy or a three essay guy. Like, I want to do this for a very long time at a high level if it's possible.
Introducing Mitchell S. Jackson
00:00:57
Speaker
This pod has been a couple years in the making. We've got Pulitzer Prize winner Mitchell S. Jackson on the show today for episode 364.
00:01:11
Speaker
He won the big prize for his feature on the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, 12 Minutes in a Life for Runner's World magazine. His first novel, The Residue Years, won a Whiting Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence, and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction, Flaherty-Dunin, first novel prize, and many others. He's a regular contributor to Esquire magazine, the New York Times magazine,
00:01:37
Speaker
and his work of nonfiction, survival math, Notes on an All-American Family was named the best book of the year in 2019 by 15 different publications, including NPR, The Paris Review, and Buzzfeed. He's also a professor at Arizona State University. Something that has always struck me about Mitchell's work is his uncompromising voice, a cadence, an incredible delivery
00:02:08
Speaker
where you know you're in the hands of a true, like, author. In fact, he's the kind of writer where I'd read whatever he's writing just for him. Like, there are some voices out there where you would pay to hear them read the phone book, and similarly, I would
00:02:27
Speaker
I would pay for Mitchell to write the phone book. He's at Mitch S. Jackson on Twitter and Instagram, and you can learn more about him and his work at MitchellSJackson.com. He's a special dude. Awesome that we got to speak to him.
00:02:42
Speaker
We? We're dropping the royal we now on the show. Make sure you're headed over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. It's now on Substack. Just click the lightning bolt on my website or visit RageAgainstTheAlgorithm.Substack.com.
00:03:00
Speaker
Still first of the month, no spam. Still can't beat it. And if you dig the show, consider sharing it with your networks so we can grow the pie and get this CNFing thing into the brains of other CNFers who need the juice. You can also leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts so the wayward CNFer might just say, well, shit, I'll give that a shot. I mean, he's got Mitchell S. Jackson on the show. That's something. That says something.
00:03:25
Speaker
Also, show is free, but as sure as hell ain't cheap, so maybe consider heading to patreon.com slash cnfpod and consider dropping a few bucks in the hat if you glean some value from what we churn and burn here at CNF Pod HQ.
00:03:41
Speaker
All right, you're going to love this one as we delve into his writing for Esquire's profile I did on Chris Rock on developing a voice, forging a voice, and leaving a legacy. So here we go. Let's get after it.
Jackson's Pulitzer Prize and Its Significance
00:04:07
Speaker
I gotta say, where do you keep your Pulitzer Prize, man? Well, now I just got a new bookshelf, so it's sitting right here on the bookshelf. The physical, I don't know, it looks like a little diamond.
00:04:26
Speaker
and then the plaque is hanging on a wall in the hallway. That's amazing. Yeah, congrats on that. That's incredible. And when you look at it, what is the predominant feeling that you feel when you see it in passing, or even if you allow yourself a moment of introspection when you're looking at it?
00:04:46
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I don't really look at it anymore. But in the hallway, it's up with the
00:04:57
Speaker
some other awards on the wall and my degrees and so it feels like it's telling a story about my career in a way that it that is not just sitting here on the shelf but i'm obviously proud of it i mean i think you know it's one of those things that marks you for the rest of your life that and i don't there are there are a few things that do that so i'm i'm thankful for that
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. It's almost like a, but it's also, it's like an ongoing thing too. Like I'm sure like, you know, even at, you know, someone in your 40s, so you're not satisfied, but you're leaving a trail and a body of work behind you that's like very, I imagine that's very validating as you push yourself forward into your newer and future ambitions.
00:05:47
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. That's exactly how I see it. I mean, there's a measure of satisfaction, but, you know, I mean, I've written so many things since 12 Minutes in the Life, nonfiction pieces at that. So it is, I mean, I just see it as the work. Like, how can you push yourself forward?
00:06:10
Speaker
you know, don't try to rest on what you've done. I don't want to be a one book guy or a two book guy or a three essay guy. Like I want to do this for a very long time at a high level if it's possible.
Craft and Connection in Writing
00:06:23
Speaker
When I was listening to your interview with Evan Ratliff on Long Form and even recently reading your profile on Chris Rock, listening to that interview and then reading that profile and then even just hearing what you just said now, I really got a sense that as you were profiling Chris Rock,
00:06:43
Speaker
I get the sense that in terms of putting out putting out the work and not being satisfied and sitting on your laurels, that you probably saw a lot of yourself in Chris Rock. Am I right in reading into that? I would like to say I see a lot of I don't know about a lot of it, but I respect his
00:07:05
Speaker
attention to craft. Yeah. And something he said, there were two things he said, I remember one of them in the interview, he said, this, he said, comedian, performers, he said, you do this thing, and it naturally puts you on a stage, which puts you above everyone else. But he said, the better the comedian, the lower the stage gets. And I thought that was a really keen way to think about yourself and fame and
00:07:35
Speaker
critical acclaim and just the craft of what you do like bringing yourself down to a human level right like seeing yourself inside of humanity not above it, or beyond it. And then the fact that he kept the reading list, and you know he was
00:07:51
Speaker
He had a lot of expertise in different areas. Just let me know that this guy is just, he's really intellectually curious and he does the work. So I appreciated that because that's, I feel like that's how you keep going. But I'll say though, I felt the most connected to Kendrick.
00:08:11
Speaker
And I don't know if you looked at that, but for me, because Kendrick and I came out of the same kind of world and had this sense of artistic integrity and making something of the world that we came from, I really, really felt a Kendrick spirit to him and his partner Dave.
00:08:29
Speaker
Yeah, the rock quote about the stage, I had plucked that out. The better the performance, the lower the stage gets. And I love that in essence because the principle behind that, it doesn't matter if you're a comedian on stage, a musical performer on stage, or a writer writing books, the best things resonate when, yeah, the stage gets lower and you're more among your audience and relating to them in universal and very concrete ways.
00:08:59
Speaker
So it strikes me as something that as like kind of a North Star for you I imagine as you're processing your essays in your books.
00:09:07
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, the reason why that coach resonated with me so much is because when I was studying with Gordon Lish, one of his edicts was, never put yourself above the other on the page. And he said, you know, if you can find fault in another person on the page and you have to also be able to find fault in yourself, or if it was fiction, which we were talking about then, in the protagonist. And so I really lived
00:09:35
Speaker
by that. Like, even if you read 12 Minutes in a Life, there's a moment which, I mean, I was really trying to defend Ahmad and his mistakes that he had made, or quote, mistakes, because they were talking about him being arrested. And so that's, there's a moment in the piece where I say, you know, Ahmad got arrested and had a gun and got probation and I got arrested and
00:09:59
Speaker
had a gun and drugs and went to prison. And I'm here writing in Amada's Dead. And so that was me. It's not lowering myself, but like seeing how our lives are on par with each other.
00:10:13
Speaker
Yeah, that takes a real delicate hand to do that and to do that effectively, where you're not inserting yourself into the story as a means to, even though you're trying to relate and say you're not above them, it's also doing it in a way that I think is more respectful of the source at hand. There's a purpose behind it, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah, definitely, definitely.
00:10:39
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you can't do that with everyone. But I think the beauty of...
00:10:44
Speaker
being in this space. I mean, one thing about the Pulitzer is I don't have to write about anybody I don't want to now. And so I'm choosing people to write about who I actually have a genuine interest in. It's like, I'm not just, oh, you got a cover story on celebrity A and I want to write it. It's like, no, do I really have a connection? And can I push myself artistically and writing about this person? And do I respect what they've done and their work?
00:11:12
Speaker
So if I don't if I don't see that, then I don't want to do it. And so I felt the connection. I felt that connection to my when I was doing that. And I think you can't fake me. I guess you can try to fake being genuine, but hopefully readers will ascertain that that's not the case.
00:11:31
Speaker
Now, I understand the reporting of that piece was done, I think, entirely remote, just based on the pandemic. And you're someone who is trained in fiction and writing and not like a pure journalist, per se.
00:11:48
Speaker
So, how did you approach it, you know, just the delicate nature of it, the sensitive nature of the story, speaking to, you know, his close family members who desperately miss him and the injustice of it all? So how did you handle that, you know, in your reporting? I mean, I think I had the benefit of having written survival math and talking about very similar delicate subjects with
00:12:14
Speaker
people who had similar experiences to Maude's family. So that was a benefit. Also, I really tried to...
00:12:24
Speaker
Every reporter, I imagine most reporters are trying to connect with the people that they're interviewing in some way. When I was talking to Maude's ex-girlfriend and his sister, it felt like I was talking to my younger cousins. I remember, I guess the best example of that is that the last person that I interviewed for that story was Buck, which is Maude's older brother.
00:12:47
Speaker
And he was very skeptical of me going into the interview. His first words were like, what do you want to do with my brother? Are you trying to make some money or something? And I had to not really defend it, but explain myself to him. And I remember
00:13:02
Speaker
We must talk for maybe 30, 45 minutes. And then when I got off the phone, we were laughing so hard, like telling each other jokes. And when I got off my partner, she was like, who was that that you were interviewing? And I was like, oh, that was that was Buck, that's my older brother. She was like, I thought that was one of your homeboys.
00:13:21
Speaker
So for me, that was the greatest compliment. She had no idea who it was. And for us to have that kind of rapport, I think that was how I was able to get the McChicken sandwich with cheese. So for me, again, it's like choosing subjects where you have that connection. But I also worry sometimes that maybe I'm not pushing myself out of this world enough.
00:13:51
Speaker
One attempt at that was doing the Scarlett Johansson story. Like, early on, they're like, well, we don't want to just keep pitching you the Black stories, Mitch. Like, do you want to do Scarlett Johansson? I'm like, well, I like Marvel. And it turned out that she was cool, and she ended up reading survival math.
00:14:10
Speaker
But I just wouldn't have normally gravitated to that as a subject, but I'm glad I did. So I do like having a familiarity with the world of the people that I'm interviewing, at least feeling somewhat that that's somewhat the case. But also I do want to make sure that as an artist, I'm not limiting myself on who I can cover and what I'm interested in as well.
00:14:38
Speaker
I think that experience with Ahmad's brother really underscores the ability to get face-to-face with people. And I know you weren't physically face-to-face, but it's like, and I've spoken about this with some people on the show of late, especially in a digital age where a lot of things are very detached and impersonal and faceless, be it through DMs or email, even a phone call, cold call,
00:15:06
Speaker
It's like it's very easy to reject, especially when you're trying to talk about delicate subjects. It's very easy to just say, no, like, you know, I feel like you're kind of like a mother's brother was saying, like, what do you want? Like, are you trying to get like money from telling a capitalized off of a story? And but.
00:15:24
Speaker
the fact that you were able to disarm him by being face to face and the fact that towards the end it was like you guys had known each other for years. That's so integral to doing this kind of storytelling. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, I was interviewing black people too. I don't think that that's insignificant. And
00:15:48
Speaker
I don't think it's insignificant that my daughter grew up in Atlanta and I probably mentioned that to them that I had spent a lot of time in Georgia. So there were, I think one thing in general that I find myself doing is always trying to find what it is that connects me to someone. I think I was just, I don't know where, I was just somewhere in this, oh, I was in Portland and then I was at a bar and the guy came over
00:16:15
Speaker
brought his drinks and I was like, where are you from? He was like, oh, I'm from Brooklyn. And I was like, oh, man, I used to live in Brooklyn. I was like, well, what part of, you know, so once you say Brooklyn, like it's so big, but when you actually live in Brooklyn, you can be like, well, were you in Fort Greene or were you in Flatbush? And I was like, man, I was on Atlantic. And he was like, oh, I was right down the street. And so then I made his subway stop.
00:16:35
Speaker
And so for me, that's basically what I do in an interview as well. It's like, what is it? What is it that is connecting us? What part of my life do I feel that is attending to this other person's life? It's totally lowering the stage, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah, definitely. But but in this case, like there's no real stakes in it either. It's just something I guess maybe I want to feel connected to people. And so I'm always trying to
00:17:04
Speaker
to find that and to see what their response is. And reading your work over the years, what I'm so taken by it is just a real uncompromising voice on the page. And sometimes I liken it to in movies, maybe some auteurs, they'll kowtow to the big studio to then maybe subsidize the art project. And then their real voice comes through.
00:17:34
Speaker
Um, but I feel with you like there that there isn't just an uncompromising nature to to your voice in your writing And I wonder if like you've you've done that kind of math yourself, you know Like i'm not gonna i'm not gonna write a certain way so then maybe I can afford to do it my way later Like i'm just gonna do it my way now. Yeah I mean that is absolutely and and I really have to go back to um gordon lish who really he was the first person to um
Influence of Gordon Lish on Jackson's Voice
00:18:02
Speaker
I mean, his comment was, Mitchell, you got an ear. And so he was the first person that turned me towards trying to cultivate a voice. And I've studied a lot. I teach a lecture on voice. I've been teaching it for four or five years. It keeps growing and growing. And I learned new terms or terms for things that I've been doing but didn't know what it meant.
00:18:24
Speaker
But really it's like cultivating the skill of listening and what sounds go together and then also it's a political
00:18:36
Speaker
position to me because I'm also trying to mix what other people would classify as high and low diction or, you know, diction from the world of my first life and diction from the world of my second life. And so I think if you put both of those things together, that's really where I try to stay on the page. But also I remember very distinctly I did my first New York Times book review.
00:19:02
Speaker
And that was actually my very first review ever. And I sent it in and then the editor came back and he wanted to change something. I can't remember the edits, the exact edit, but I pushed back against the editor and I was like, no, I said, if you change this, you've taken out my voice and anybody could have wrote this review. And he was like, okay, Mitch, if you feel that strongly, I'll keep it in.
00:19:27
Speaker
And he kept it in. And then that review ended up being the cover of the Times. I've done several since. I've never made the cover again, but that very first one was on the cover. And I remember having that discussion with the editor and just putting my foot down, like, no, I'm not publishing something that doesn't sound like me.
00:19:48
Speaker
Maybe it was winning that battle, but certainly thereafter, I was like, I'm never going to let an editor push me off of my square in terms of voice. No, that's not to say I won't listen to you with structure and we can move some stuff around, but like voice, nah, not doing it.
00:20:06
Speaker
And the good thing is once you do it a couple of times, like no one's coming to you. They all know what, what, what is going to sound like to a certain degree. Right. So I think if you wanted somebody to write strictly in the house style, you just wouldn't, you wouldn't query me. I'm not your guy. Go get another guy. And there's nothing, no, no disrespect. But if you come to me now, you got to know at least a little bit of what you're getting.
00:20:31
Speaker
And you brought up Gordon Lisch a couple times and you wrote a wonderful essay about rejection for tin houses. It goes way back to 2015. Yeah. And you spoke about it on long form with Evan Ratliff a couple of years ago too.
00:20:48
Speaker
It was what maybe before we talk about sort of the you know spoiler alert kind of like the the harsh breakup of it all The callousness of that but maybe you can just speak to you already said like he he told you you had an ear which I imagine put a lot of Some fuel in your tank so like how did he help you start to cultivate? You know who you ultimately would become as a writer and
00:21:12
Speaker
Three things I would say. One of them is once he said I had an ear, then it was me paying attention to the acoustics of the senses, but also not just paying attention to them, but letting them guide me in how I was constructing them. So it's one thing to hear a thing. It's another thing to say that, oh, what I'm hearing is actually the logic for how I should compose this. So that was one thing.
00:21:39
Speaker
The other thing was being really meticulous in what he saw. So he would literally sit down with us, or me at least, and go through something, a whole story sentence by sentence. Some people will read it and they'll give you some feedback, but to go through a story sentence by sentence and say, why is this here? Why is it this way? Why didn't you choose this? Can you think of another way to say this? For me, that was really, really
00:22:08
Speaker
and influential and it also made me grateful for someone who was willing to spend that kind of time with me. And then the second or the third thing, which you can never undervalue is just encouragement. Like him calling me at night and leaving me voice messages telling me I could be great. Like I still have some of those voice messages. And so I had never had anyone before that tell me that they thought I could be great at something.
00:22:35
Speaker
Not in my whole life, like good. Yeah. I think you'd be a good basketball player. I think you're a good student. Gordon Lynch was the first person that said, I think you can be great. Now. He also said, you got to stick with me in order to get there, but whatever. That was beside the point. He told me I can be great. And that was, I don't think you can, you can discount that, uh, type of, um, yeah, encouragement.
00:23:00
Speaker
Yeah, I watched this micro documentary done by some sort of a grad student about Gordon Lish and his relationship or lack thereof in the end with Raymond Carver and how he edited with a butcher knife and just totally reduced so much of Carter's prose down to the bare bones, so much so where it was like,
00:23:26
Speaker
was it really Carver or was it Lish as like a ventriloquist and it was very interesting and I wonder like for you like before you started working with him like how well where were you of you know just of his relationship to writers by the time you guys intersected
00:23:43
Speaker
Oh, I was supremely aware of it. I'm from Portland, and one of Lish's very first students is a guy named Tom Spambauer, who basically was teaching a Lish-like class for 30 years or 40 years in Portland. And probably his most prominent student is Chuck Pollinuk.
00:24:03
Speaker
So he wrote Fight Club in that workshop, but then also Lydia Jukovich is there, Margaret Malone, there's a lot of, basically any writer out of Portland at some point came through Tom Spambard's class. And so I was familiar with some of the philosophies of Lish before I ever met him. So I went to New York kind of knowing who he was, but he had retired and he probably had been retired for like a decade.
00:24:28
Speaker
while I was in New York. When he came back and I saw that the Center for Fiction was going to have a summer class with him, I started kind of revisiting, well, who were the writers that he worked with? And one particular thing that struck me was I couldn't find a writer of color that Lish had worked with really explicitly. And so I thought, man, like, what if I can take what he's given all of these other white writers, essentially, and they weren't all
00:24:57
Speaker
white, white, but what if I can take what he'd given them and I could filter it through this experience and this kind of, I had like a burgeoning sense of the kind of voice I wanted, but I didn't really have it. And so for me, that was, that was the goal going in. Like I'm going to take everything that he gave these other people, but I'm going to filter it through something that has never been filtered through before. And that's this kind of experience.
00:25:24
Speaker
And that burgeoning sense of voice, you know, a lot of times that can come, that can take just years and years and years to forge. And for you, where did that assuredness come from that you felt like you really locked into something wholly unique and wholly you?
00:25:39
Speaker
Turning Point, my first year at New York University in the MFA program, probably my first semester, I had a woman named Paul Marshall, a great writer, one of the Black Arts, I don't know if she's Black Arts Movement, she might be before Black Arts Movement.
00:25:58
Speaker
wrote a groundbreaking or several groundbreaking books. And she taught a short fiction class and she assigned John Edgar Weidman's short story, Weight. And the story starts, my mother's a weightlifter, you know what I mean. And then it goes on from there and it is
00:26:20
Speaker
It reads as if it were spoken and it read as if one of my uncles were telling the story. And when I read the story and then I went and I looked up a white man and I saw that he was a MacArthur fellow. I actually didn't know what a MacArthur was at the time, but by reading about him, I found out what that was. He had won the Penn Faulkner twice and he was teaching, I think, maybe at University of Pennsylvania at the time. Like he was the, he was like,
00:26:47
Speaker
okay, this is the dream for me as a graduate student in my second program. And I said, if he can write like this and get to that level of accomplishment, then there's a respect for this level of, or this kind of voice. And obviously he wasn't the first person to do it and maybe he's not even the best, but he was the first person that I read that was doing it in that way and had that level of,
00:27:16
Speaker
um respect from the community and so that was really what kind of opened up my senses to another way of thinking about how to well I was thinking about story I think maybe the best way to say it is before that I was thinking about story and
00:27:35
Speaker
you know, structure and POV. But you can teach that, right? But then like, once you really get into a voice, like a voice is an expression of a human, it's a thumbprint, it's a personality. And so you have to have someone open up a door and say, it's okay to be you on the page. And Wyman was the person that let me know it was okay to be me on the page.
00:28:01
Speaker
Yeah, that's so key that you can, by looking to other artists, just through the expression of their work, they can give you permission. Yeah. And at what point did... I don't want to belabor the point too much, but with your relationship with Lish, at what point did you sense that things were starting to splinter or fracture? After I got a book deal. Would that have been for the residue years? Residue years, yeah. He was the one that...
00:28:30
Speaker
helped me get the agent. He called me and said, take your manuscript over to this woman's house and leave it with her doorman and tell her Liz sent you. So that's how I got an agent. I've since changed, but she was my initial agent. And after that, he stopped returning phone calls. He was harder to get a hold of.
00:28:53
Speaker
He hung up on you. Yeah, he started hanging up on me. So I mean, it wasn't like I had to guess whether or not the relationship hits out. It was very, very obvious to me. But again, also, I had already read up on him and I knew I knew that this was a familiar storyline in terms of him and the way that he works with writers. And also because I met him through a workshop and there were other people in that workshop that had relationships with him.
00:29:22
Speaker
and other people in that workshop who he had changed the nature of their relationship to. So I wasn't wholly alone. So, yeah, I mean, I just took it as, you know, this man has given me what he can give me. And now I'm on my own. Now, did you come to realize that did he treat everybody like this or only people who garnered some measure of success? Well, I think that's up for debate. Some people say that
00:29:49
Speaker
he does it in particular to people who kind of take off. And I think that's one way to look at it. And the other way to look at it is I gave you what I can give you. And if you demonstrate that you got it, then it's time for me to move on or it's time for you to figure out another way to evolve.
00:30:08
Speaker
So I don't want to malign him too much. I'm very, very thankful for him. I'm absolutely certain I would not be whatever this position is. It certainly wouldn't exist without Lish. I didn't meet him until I was, let's say, four years out of my second MFA program. So it wasn't like I hadn't had professors before him.
00:30:32
Speaker
mentors before him. So, I mean, I really have to be, I have nothing but gratitude for him and, you know, tough love, if that's what you're going to call it. But he gave me something that
00:30:44
Speaker
keeps giving. I go back, I reread his notes. I even asked the people who were in the workshop with me for their notes. So I have compiled a huge Google Word doc of all of our notes together. So that's how much I respect what he's done. And everybody got their own personal issues. But he made a lot of people into something I don't think they could have been without him. And that's Carver included.
00:31:14
Speaker
How has your relationship to mentorship changed as a result of the dynamic that you had with Gordon?
Mentorship and Teaching Philosophy
00:31:22
Speaker
I imagine people at this point are starting to knock on your door, like, Mitchell, can you give me some of the sauce? Yeah, I mean, I think...
00:31:32
Speaker
It's not to the, it's, I don't have any mentorship relationship that is to the degree that I had with Gordon or even to the degree that I have. Maybe it's, it's, it's more aligned with my relationship with Jonathan Whiteman now. But the thing about Gordon is he was actually a sage. So I don't feel qualified.
00:31:56
Speaker
to mentor someone and also his mentorship was almost, it was like 95% just about the work. Like once you got into the career part of it, he didn't want really anything to do with it, even though he did point me.
00:32:08
Speaker
at an agent, but he was, he really, he used to call it a, he used to say, you gotta say F you to the witch doctor, you know, so you can't be trying to court this fame and celebrity as a writer that even exists. It's really about putting in the work and the art. And so in that you need such a,
00:32:32
Speaker
foundation of reading and thinking and experience that I don't feel that I'm in that place to give that to another person. Now, it's not to say that I won't tell you what I think about your work or, you know, I'll give you what I have, but I don't have
00:32:51
Speaker
the experience or the expertise to give in the way that Gordon did. But I do have people who lean on me for mentorship and I try to give them whatever I can. A lot of that is career advice and really a lot of it is just encouragement. It's like, no, man, go tell these people you're not doing that.
00:33:09
Speaker
But what I say in my strength, let's say in the classroom, is I can see a sentence, and I can hear it, and I can take it apart, and I can say, what if you move this over here, and what if you started it right here? And because I've been teaching this voice lecture so long, I also have a vocabulary for what I'm asking to be done to a sentence. So I can talk about an afro, I can talk about
00:33:40
Speaker
And so there's all these things that I can do on a sentence level. And then, you know, I think if I can see shapes, and I think this is one thing that happens in my nonfiction work,
00:33:54
Speaker
is once I get something down on the page, I'm able to say like, okay, what is the shape of this thing? And then, and I'm always, the one thing I always ask myself is, okay, like, where's the flourish? So, you know, so like, what's different about, I never want to write just a straight on conventional, anything really. And so you got to know the shapes, you got to know the conventions in order to be able to say, well, I don't, where's, where is this going to,
00:34:24
Speaker
venture off from convention. And so that's another thing I think I can do in terms of maybe not mentorship, but at least in the classroom, is I can say, okay, I see this thing and it looks like this, but what if we shifted this part over here or this part over here? So I don't want to say I don't have value in that way, but to actually, like Gordon is a genius. So to actually come in contact with someone who is a genius at what they do, like that's really hard to duplicate.
00:34:53
Speaker
I love this class on voice, the fact that you've been teaching it for a while now. And how has this class evolved over the years since you started it? Well, it's not normally a class. I mean, it's usually a lecture. So say the lecture started at
00:35:15
Speaker
Well, first of all, I talk about what voice is. I spent a few pages in the lecture, like, what is voice? Where does it come from? Why is it, to me, especially important that people of color or marginalized groups maintain their sense of voice and their connection to it? So we do that. And then I read a bunch of different quotes on voice. And then I have, I call it a toolbox. I'm like, you know, you can pull from these.
00:35:44
Speaker
The quotes used to be, say, a page. Now the quotes are four pages. And the toolbox used to be, say, maybe 20 different things in there. Now they're 50. So it just keeps growing and growing. And I'll keep reading and I'll say, oh, what is that thing that they're doing? And then I used to have examples. So the examples maybe were, say,
00:36:07
Speaker
eight to 10 examples in the beginning. And now it's probably 25 of them where I have like, you know, excerpts, paragraphs, and then we go through and we break them down and say, okay, right here, they're using this and right here, they're using this and the effect of it is this. And so, uh, you know, once they have that, that tool kit, cause you know, like you can, I can do a lot of things almost by accident on the page.
00:36:34
Speaker
But then it's harder to replicate if you don't know that you did it or you don't have a name for it or you don't understand the principle behind it. So for me, it's like giving people
00:36:44
Speaker
a language and a perception of things that they might already be doing, but also things that they haven't yet thought about. And most of it is really just poetics, right? It's like, you got to learn prose in the same way that a great poet knows form and knows all the little tricks inside of writing a good poem.
00:37:05
Speaker
Yeah, I imagine that in your lecture that you run across a lot of students who might have had that little spark or that voice sort of scrubbed out from their identity. And you probably have to encourage them to be like, you know, like find out, you need to sort of regrow your voice from scratch after having it erased for a while. Is that something you run into?
00:37:28
Speaker
Uh, I yeah, I think so. I think but it's also like when you when I say voice, so one of the things in the in the Lecture part of it is i'm like voice is always crap like it's it's always a composition so Some people can say like oh, I have a natural voice. Well, I don't actually believe that I think for me even it's not natural, right? It's not it's not the way that I talk
00:37:55
Speaker
And it's not necessarily just the things that I've read. It's like picking and choosing what are these things. Like I keep a long list on my phone of regular vocabulary, phrases, vernacular, and it's all separate, right? So like one of the reasons I like going home is because I'm awash in a lot of times vernacular from my past.
00:38:24
Speaker
And I'll even willfully go and sit with people who I know are going to speak in this way just because, oh, I forgot about that, or I forgot we used to say it that way. So I need that as much as I need to be reading Toni Morrison for me. And so I think to
00:38:43
Speaker
to push students away from this idea that you find a voice. No, you make a voice. And I think that's maybe the main thing is like, no, you get all these tools and then you forge the voice that you want. And if it's working well, then it's also an expression of your personality, right? Like you're a vibrant person, you know, how does that,
00:39:05
Speaker
play out on the page, you know, is that the sentence length? Is that the way that you're using the analogy or metaphor or whatever it is? So so I do think ultimately it has to feel natural, but I think it's also like, man, you really got to know piece by piece what it is that is making this thing.
00:39:23
Speaker
Yeah, and I understand that when you moved to New York, given that you felt that you had to essentially play a lot of catch-up in terms of your reading, and you didn't have a TV, you're like, you're going to immerse yourself in a lot of books, and that's how voice is cultivated also in learning form and learning what you can do, what you can't, not what you can't do, but you learn the conventions of whatever it is you might be tackling.
00:39:52
Speaker
So is that something, too, that you impress upon people that, as you were just saying a moment ago, that a voice is made? It's like, you know what you got to really do, guys? You got to be obsessed with reading, and you got to read with intention. Yeah. I mean, I think most of the people that I encounter are more readers than I am. If you spent money to be in an MFA program, it's very likely you're a lifelong reader. I think I was an anomaly that I wasn't a lifelong reader.
00:40:19
Speaker
So you already have, now you might be reading a genre, like you might've just grown up reading a bunch of suspense thrillers, but I think they have that.
00:40:30
Speaker
I do think, though, it's different to learn to read as a writer. So, you know, if you read romance, right, like you're reading for plot mostly, you might be reading for some whatever character development they have. But I think that's and also, I don't know how many romance writers are really, really pushing on sentences.
00:40:50
Speaker
So I feel like you gotta, it's not just reading and reading and reading, it's like reading the right stuff. Also, when you said you gotta know what you can do, I think you also do need to know that. I remember reading Jesus' son, which is a cult cult classic in MFA programs, and I could not in a zillion years
00:41:11
Speaker
come up with the metaphors and the leaps of imagination that Dennis Johnson came up with. Now, I don't know if that was drugs or post drugs or what, like, I just couldn't do it. And so I also had to recognize I can't do that. You know, like, I'll read someone else and I'm like, they just have a gift that I can't manifest. But also, I think
00:41:34
Speaker
you have to work at it long enough to know what your strengths are. And I forgot, literally used to say that a lot. He was like, people always talk about work on your weaknesses. He said, you also got to keep track of your strengths. And so I think part of what I want to do in the classroom too is help people figure out what their strengths are and how do they amplify them.
00:41:52
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great point too is like, yeah, you do have strengths and weaknesses and you don't want to necessarily level up all your weaknesses at the absence of focusing on your strengths. So for you, what would you identify as strength and weaknesses and how you balance leveling up the weaknesses without abandoning what makes you strong? Yeah. I mean, the strength is in the voice. The strength I think also is in the
00:42:22
Speaker
clarity of thinking like if you give me the information I think I have a POV inside of it usually and and I can come to some I don't want to say conclusions because I don't think you should necessarily be coming to conclusions but I can come to some reasonable judgments or even some some questions about any subject well unless we're talking like physics then I'm out of my depth
00:42:46
Speaker
But so the weakness is just in the reading for me. It's like, what do you read? How much do I go back in and catch the classics that I miss versus how much am I reading contemporary work? How much do I need to read into a subject to write about it?
00:43:07
Speaker
So I spent a lot of my time, when I was writing on Kendrick, you would think like, oh, I've been listening to Kendrick since he came out and so much. I mean, documentaries and videos and every single profile.
00:43:25
Speaker
you know, breakdowns of the albums and the history of hip hop, like there's so much reading that goes into that. Same thing with Chris Rock. Like, I mean, I studied all the famous black comedians and, you know, what was the genesis of black comedy in America? Like, so things that I wouldn't normally be reading, I have to read because now I've taken on this subject. So for me, but what I don't have is like,
00:43:55
Speaker
every Shakespeare play committed to memory. What I don't have is, you know, all the Greek mythology right at hand so I can draw from all the metaphors. So for me, it's like finding a space where I can do the work that I need to do in that kind of research and then also cultivating a space to like, I don't want to say catch up, but to steep myself in classic literature because I feel like
00:44:23
Speaker
If I have the same access or facility with the work, I can make whatever I want to make.
Life After the Pulitzer Prize
00:44:31
Speaker
And given the last few years, your profile as a writer has really taken flight. And I'm always interested in how people process going from relative anonymity to then suddenly being someone where people like Long Form or me are knocking on your doors, let's talk. Because when you're starting to draw that kind of attention, what's it been like for you to kind of process that?
00:44:58
Speaker
You know, it actually hasn't felt that much different because when residue came out, you know, maybe you don't know, but it was nominated for a lot of, I mean, I'm on a lot, maybe six or seven first book prizes, and it's a final list for probably five of them or something. And so from from the time that residue came out,
00:45:23
Speaker
it's pretty much been steady. Now, when the Pulitzer hit, yeah, I mean, it amped up a little bit. I might get a few more requests for speaking engagements, but I'm pretty steady in that sense. I think what changed it for me was becoming a columnist at Esquire. And then signing on with the New York Times Magazine put another expectation of writing, which is a little, I mean, it's not as,
00:45:52
Speaker
it's not as frequent as the Esquire, but it's still, it's always hovering. So now I think for me, there's always at least four deadlines, right? I'm on a novel deadline with FSG. I'm on a deadline with the New York Times magazine. I'm on a deadline or two with Esquire. And then I'm working on a, I just, I'm finishing up a copy book, which seemed like it wasn't going to be that much work in the beginning, but it's a,
00:46:22
Speaker
It turned out to be much more work and I put the same amount of effort in the sentences and revise it seven, eight times. And so here we are at that. So now it's like navigating these different deadlines and also wanting to
00:46:37
Speaker
not even maintain excellence, like wanting to exceed myself at every turn, which is hard to do when you gotta like turn here for five hours and work on this thing and then turn here for five hours and work on this thing. But in terms of attention, I don't really even feel it.
00:46:53
Speaker
You know, like, I mean, I think fame as a writer actually doesn't exist. You know, like, I'm hanging out with Colson Whitehead. Nobody's running up on Colson Whitehead for autographs. You know, like, to me, it doesn't get any bigger than that. In the space that I live in, who is a bigger writer than Colson Whitehead and Ta-Nehisi Coates in Judgment War? Like, that's it. And so I've seen that
00:47:18
Speaker
So imagine the equivalent of, the equivalent of Colson Whitehead is Kendrick Lamar, right? Maybe not even that. Like he might be more, I would say they're equivalent. But imagine what, like the response to Kendrick in the world, as opposed to the response to Colson. Like Colson can walk right down my street right now, wouldn't nobody know who he was. Let Kendrick walk down here.
00:47:44
Speaker
So I think when you say, you know, your profile has risen, it probably has, but it doesn't feel like anything. It just feels like, okay, you got these deadlines. How are you going to make them?
00:47:55
Speaker
Oh, man, I got to say, if I saw the four of you like, you know, Jasmine Colson, Ta-Nehisi and yourself down the street, I would I would sprint up to you and be like, please, please sign my journal. Yeah, I mean, I would see I would run up on them, too. But I just I mean, I think it's also a gift, you know.
00:48:14
Speaker
Like the gift that you can move through the world and make these things that are going to live forever, maybe hopefully, or at least, you know, decades and not really have to bother with fame.
00:48:27
Speaker
Going back to Chris Rogge, I just have a couple more things for you, Mitchell, to be mindful of your time. There was also a quote in there where he's saying, like, I'm just working. One day we're going to look and it's going to be like, oh, I did a lot of work. That's it. I did a lot of work. I'm just working, man.
00:48:45
Speaker
And that kind of gets back to the start of our conversation, where you're looking at the timeline of your awards and everything. And it's just like, yeah, that's the work, but I'm still going. And a lot of times when we do these kind of magazine stories, it's a lot of selection and what you put in there. And I imagine when you selected that quote to go in there, it's just like, yeah, I really feel that at its core. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, you get
00:49:13
Speaker
I didn't necessarily know, like sometimes you go into one of those pieces and you have a thesis already.
00:49:20
Speaker
And in this case, I didn't. And so I had done the work and talked to all these people. And I was like, what is this about? I was talking to my editor. And he was like, man, this guy doesn't want to be forgotten. I was like, yeah. And I think the question that I had asked to get that answer was like, where do you see yourself in the pantheon of Black comedians? Because earlier I asked him who was the greatest. And he said, almost without hesitation, that it was Dave Chappelle.
00:49:48
Speaker
And I thought, oh, that's really interesting that he can back quickly. And I didn't know if he was being deferential or he was, you know, what he was doing. But at the end, it made sense, right? Like, I'm just going to do the work. He also said something in there. He was like, you can't you can't be in the Hall of Fame and playing. And I was like, well, that again, you know, like, yeah, put me in the Hall of Fame after I'm done playing, which is strange because right before I got on this
00:50:17
Speaker
call with you, I saw his specialist coming out tomorrow. He's a Netflix special.
00:50:22
Speaker
I wonder for you if you talk about him not wanting to be forgotten, and I've heard you talk about writing and legacy and not caring about book sales, trying to be like, we don't necessarily attribute book sales to Baldwin, but we definitely attribute his thinking and the impact he has. And I wonder for you if an animating force for your writing going forward is just this kind of a need to leave a legacy but also not be forgotten.
Legacy and Influence in Literature
00:50:52
Speaker
Absolutely. It might be the biggest driving force now. It's like, and then, but it's also like, well, how do you do that? I think you just got to keep making things that speak to the moment that are artful. So in the here and now, I think, you know, awards are great. I'm not turning, well, I don't know, maybe there is one I would turn down, but I generally wouldn't turn them down. They often pay another Pulitzer. Yes, I'll take it.
00:51:20
Speaker
But also, for me, it's can you go into a room full of writers that you respect? And they respect you. Because you know, like, you can be the guy who caught a couple of good juries and they gave you a couple things and
00:51:39
Speaker
You are laureled in a sense, but you don't have the respect of the people that really know what it is to do this thing and have made this. So if I can go into a room with Jasmine and Ta-Nehisi and Colson and Terrence Hayes and Ava and Jordan and
00:51:58
Speaker
Uh, you know, uh, why the man to now Bali and yeah, and wide man and all of these writers who I respect. And then they say, Oh, he deserves to be here. Like I've read his work and I appreciate it. For me, that's the ultimate, ultimate measure of where you are in the here and now. And then in your intellectual capabilities.
00:52:21
Speaker
and hope that they resonate with people. Because you can also make some stuff that was the best that you could do. And it just, for whatever reason, people missed it. And then there was something else happening, especially in nonfiction, there was something else happening in the news that week. And it just didn't resonate the way it was supposed to. So I know there's some of that too. But I hope at the end of all of this, when you put it all together,
00:52:48
Speaker
it's going to look like this guy really cared about language. He really cared about his people. He really cared about pushing his art forward.
00:52:59
Speaker
Well, that's amazing. Well, Mitchell, there's always one question I like to end these conversations with. And it's always to ask the guest a recommendation of some sort for the listeners. And that can be anything from a cool podcast you're listening to, to a movie, to a brand of coffee. So it's up to you what's exciting you these days. And I'd pose that to you. What might you recommend for people out there? Damn. What am I excited about recommending?
00:53:27
Speaker
something people wouldn't know about.
Literature Recommendations and Closing Remarks
00:53:32
Speaker
I would say, I'm really looking forward to Jasmine Ward's next novel. Yeah. I have it downstairs. And now I can't remember the damn title of it. But I think it's coming out maybe August. And so yeah, to me, she's a measure of
00:53:57
Speaker
of a person who cares about language, who's really skilled and also obviously very laurel. And also a good person too. I love hanging out with her. So yeah, I would say look out for Jesmyn's next novel. She's just operating on a different level from another planet, man.
00:54:21
Speaker
Yeah. Oh my gosh. All she does is win National Book Awards, too. Yeah, right, right, right. She'll be up probably for another one this year or next year. Yeah, this year, too. Absolutely. Well, Mitchell, this was so great to get to talk to you about the arc of your writing today and just how you go about it, which is just really inspiring and super insightful. So just thanks so much for the time. And yeah, and thanks so much for all the work you do. OK, I appreciate you, man. Thank you.
00:54:51
Speaker
Hey thanks for listening CNF'ers and thanks to Mitchell for coming on the show. Brilliant, right? The Jesmyn Ward book he referenced that's coming out in October 2023 is Let Us Descend. So you might as well just chalk that up to another National Book Award because that's all Jesmyn Ward does. That's all she does is win National Book Awards, deservedly so.
00:55:15
Speaker
If you like this conversation as much as I did, and I did, consider sharing it and tagging me in the show at CNFpod on Twitter or at Creative Nonfiction Podcast on Instagram. The show will only grow because of you. As you know, I'm something of a nobody, so it's the validation of your endorsements that makes the needle move.
00:55:32
Speaker
there's so much content out there so many old shows and always new shows and this one will only survive the pod fade if you celebrate it so long as it's worth celebrating and also there's patreon.com slash cnf pod and uh you could consider heading over there and put a few bucks in the tip jar every month show is free but it sure is hell ain't cheap
00:55:54
Speaker
I don't have much to say by way of a parting shot this week. I've been a bit unmoored of late. I feel very disconnected from the show here, kind of like it's on autopilot, like I'm going through the motions, and I think that's true to some extent because I'm preoccupied in other ways. Obviously I've been in the throes of book research and trying to track down people to talk to, which
00:56:13
Speaker
as of right now is not bearing much fruit, only panic. Next Friday, Metallica's new album, 72 Seasons, dropped. I have pre-ordered my vinyl, but I'll listen to the record on a loop with my noise canceling headphones on Spotify all day.
00:56:34
Speaker
I'm excited. A Metallica album is an event, and so I'm pretty stoked. So anyway, I might have something more to say next week about the morass that is a life trying to write words and books and sentences and paragraphs and try to make sense of it and talk to people who also are trying to make sense of writing words and books and paragraphs and sentences.
00:57:01
Speaker
So, do your thing, alright? Stay wild. See you in efforts. If you can do interviews, see ya.