Steffi Sin Interviews Mitchell S. Jackson
Photo by John Ricard.
Mitchell S. Jackson is the author of Residue Years and Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family. He was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson is a Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.
Steffi Sin: In my first workshop with you, you asked us about the attributes of strong writing. What is your answer to that question, and what are some examples that come to mind?
Mitchell S. Jackson: Imaginative writing—I think strong writing is imaginative. I think that it is interesting on the level of the idea. I think that it’s structurally interesting. And I think that it’s aesthetically interesting, so that includes structure, but I’m also thinking about the line level. I’m thinking about paragraphs. I think writing that pushes against genre—so examples I’m thinking about are Song of Solomon, Beloved, the classic Toni Morrison works, Sula. I’m thinking of Don DeLillo’s Underworld. I always used to go back to Drown and Jesus’ Son also.
SS: When giving advice to your students, you’ve said that in order to put out work that is meaningful and impactful, that we should write something that scares us. In what ways have you taken your own advice with each new project you take on?
MJ: Well, the first one was just to write, because I didn’t know that the novel was the act of writing itself and trying to learn the skills and the craft of fiction. I feel like that was kind of the act of bravery, or a way to challenge myself. Residue Years was that way because it was a different genre, and I also did some things with form and structure that I hadn’t tried before. I also used a different voice, like second-person narratives in Survival Math. I even tried my hand at poetry—I don’t consider myself to be a poet—and now, with this novel that I am working on, there is a different POV. I’m usually writing in first person, whether it’s my nonfiction or fiction, and this one is omniscient, which is hard to get a handle of. It’s also primarily set elsewhere. I usually write about home, and this one is set in a different place, which means learning about somewhere else, the people there, the history there. I think every project should have a challenge in it because if it’s easy, then you’re likely repeating yourself, and that’s one thing I don’t want to do.
SS: Reviewers and critics describe your work as “risky.” Do you agree with that? How else might you describe your own work, or want someone to describe your work?
MJ: “Risky”—yeah, I guess there’s some stakes in it. When I think about “risky,” I think about the more personal essays in Survival Math. But I guess even talking about my mother’s addiction and my brushes with the law in Residue Years is maybe a risk, so I guess that’s a fair assessment. I would describe my work as grounded in place and attentive to language and style.
SS: Do you ever revisit your first novel? How does your earlier writing inform or converse with what you are working on now?
MJ: I don’t explicitly revisit my first novel, but sometimes someone will tell me they’re reading it, and if they do that, I’ll usually ask them to send me a passage that they like, or even dislike. I’ll read it over and I’ll go back to a copy of that book, and I’ll read it and think, Wow, I really like that sentence. I have yet to get a sentence from someone and then reread it and ask myself, Why did you do that, so I’m really proud of that work. When I published the hardcover version and then it was going to paperback, I did a significant amount of revision, so there’s a difference on the line level between the hardcover and the paperback version of Residue. But after I finished that revision, it really felt like I could let it go in the sense of not having to revisit it, and I wouldn’t reread it and mark out lines. So that’s a good feeling, when you think you’ve hit the right notes.
SS: As writers, most of us keep a folder somewhere of projects or ideas that aren’t quite right for the moment, pieces that we’re still trying to figure out how to write. Where do you shelve writing projects for a later, future you? Are there projects or ideas you find yourself returning to? How do you know when something isn’t ready to be written yet?
MJ: I don’t. I don’t have that file. Because once I commit to something, I’m committed to it. And that might mean slowing down, it might mean throwing a lot of it out, but I have never given up. Residue took me thirteen years to write. There are plenty of draft, plenty iterations of different POVs, different characters, trying to figure out the language. I can see the value in writing something and putting it away and moving on, but I can also see the value in writing something and revising and revising until you get to a place where you feel proud of it, and that’s the tactic I usually take. I do write ideas I want to work on in the future though. But if I start something in earnest, then it’s going to become whatever version of it I can make it.
SS: Do you keep your old drafts?
MJ: Yeah! I was just working on my novel earlier. What I like to do, after I get a certain number of words, is work in track changes because what’s really satisfying to me is to see the iterations of something, and to see how many changes I’ve made. I love those red words on a draft, and I’ll make “Draft One,” “Draft Two,” so there’s probably some drafts of Survival Math where there’s thirty or forty different drafts of one essay.
SS: From your experience, what are the main differences between writing fiction and nonfiction? How do you decide, when writing, which genre the material belongs to? Is this decision a reflection of your mindset at the time, or something else?
MJ: It matters how the story comes to me. Probably ninety percent of my nonfiction now is someone asking me if I’m interested in writing about an idea. Every once in a while, I have an idea of my own, but I try to save that kind of creative energy for my own fiction because the difference between the two is it takes more creative energy to birth a world from scratch than it does to observe.
What I was really good at doing from when I was young was observing my circumstances. I wouldn’t write it down, but I was very meticulous in watching how people held a cup, or trying to figure out someone’s voice, or paying attention to how someone walked. So that’s really the skillset of a journalist. Even though I’m not a trained journalist, my work has that kind of grounding, which is helpful in fiction, so you can take some of that, but it’s hard to imagine a place you haven’t been. I find myself doing the work of a journalist when trying to write fiction.
When I was writing the Ahmaud Arbery piece, I looked at so many videos about the Golden Isles, trying to figure out what the Satilla River looked like, what color was it, and how did it sound, and I do some of those same things so I can write a fictional scene. It’s harder for me to write fiction. I have written very little short fiction. I’m usually working on a long project, and so I don’t have a lot of that: you start it, you finish it. And that’s the satisfying thing about writing short fiction. You can start it, finish it, publish it, and you can feel gratification at having done that. When you’re working on fiction, unless you’re publishing excerpts, you’re working years before you actually reap any kind of satisfaction in the world from having done that work. It takes a different kind of commitment to work on a novel.
SS: What are you working on now? What themes/motifs/characters/people are at the front of your mind?
MJ: The protagonist is based on an actual person who lived, this guy named Eldridge Broussard Jr. who was a basketball player who founded a group that became a cult, so I’m certainly thinking about him. I spent a year at the New York Public Library researching for this book and this cult, and I ended up doing a lot of research on the 1965 Watts Revolt. A lot of my imagination is grounded in that. It’s like a touchstone, so I’m trying to imagine how L.A. got from that revolt in 1965 to, say, 1992. So that means Rodney King is on my mind, Crips and Bloods are on my mind, and the L.A. Olympics are on my mind, so these kinds of historical moments, some of which I remember because I was alive and some I’ve read about.
SS: Will this be fiction? Nonfiction?
MJ: Fiction. Definitely fiction. A long novel.
SS: Some people write to figure things out; others write because they’ve figured something out. When Zadie Smith visited us here a few months ago, she talked about how her essays have been born out of an impatience with what is happening in the world. Does writing operate similarly for you, as a conscious response or reaction? How do you decide what to put work in conversation with, and does that change from project to project?
MJ: I think I’m similar to Zadie in that I don’t know if I would describe it as impatience, but I do think that it’s born out of noticing some injustice, or something remarkable about people I care about or a group of people whom I identify with. The last thing that I wrote was an essay on flying first class, which seems, on the surface, like not something you would normally write about. Except that every once in a while, I would get upgraded, and in that first-class cabin, I can feel the class system more explicitly than I can in any other moment in my life.
The way the people look at you, what the cabin looks like—it became a microcosm of American class, which is inextricable from American race. So just sitting in the cabin made me think, Oh, I have to write about this. I know I can’t be the only person. So, what do you research? I was researching instances of racism in first-class cabins, when was it invented, was it invented prior to the Civil Rights Movement—well, yes, it was—and what were the rules then, so all those things. It always comes out of the personal. I want to have a stake in it, and then I’ll figure out what I don’t know about subject, what I need to know know, and in this case, I actually interviewed some experts.
Zadie, I think, has the benefit of having a lot more information. She’s a voracious reader. She was schooled in the rigorous UK system, so there’s a lot more to draw from. I can imagine she can be thinking about an idea coming from what was already written down, versus an experience. Where I do it the opposite way. I’m like, this thing happened. Okay. What do I need to know about this subject to make a reasonable claim about it?
SS: In a conversation with Medium, you talked about how you were a writer before you were a reader. How has your relationship with reading evolved alongside your writing? Has teaching affected that relationship at all?
MJ: Yes. That relationship has evolved. In that interview, I talked about never reading for pleasure, I think, and that’s still the case—not to say that I don’t obtain pleasure from reading, but I never go into a book or an essay with the explicit objective of just enjoying it. I’m always going into it for what is valuable for me, and it might be a lesson of what not to do, but I’m still reading it for that, and so that is the guiding principle of my reading, which is also the guiding principle of my teaching as well, because I don’t want to give a reading without it having pedagogical substance. If I had texts I just enjoyed reading, I could assign those texts to people, but then if you can both enjoy and learn something from it, then that’s the text to use, rather than the text that you just like reading again and again. So to me, the instruction is always, always at the heart of it. Which is why I like reading difficult texts, and why I like reading writers that have really identifiable voices—all those things I’m trying to extract something from because to me, at this point, it’s almost a waste of my time to just be thinking about pure enjoyment. I’m behind the gun. I missed out on twenty-five years of this, on all that writing and reading for enjoyment that was supposed to happen in my childhood and teens and twenties, and since I missed out, I have to think about it in a different way.
SS: You talk a lot about empathy. On your first day of class here at ASU, you brought up the importance of empathy in writing, which is also something you mentioned in a past interview with The Paris Review. Could you expand on what it means to you to “close an empathy gap”? How does the project you are currently working on address this need? What experiences solidified the importance of giving someone the benefit of empathy?
MJ: I’m writing about a guy who started a thing that became a cult, and whose daughter was killed as a result of the cult that he started. Something I challenge myself to do is to take someone who readers would have little empathy for and try to portray them in such a way that their humanity is evident. To me, a guy who starts a cult in which his daughter is killed is a person who many people would just dismiss as a terrible person, so how do I find what makes that person human? That is the challenge in this work, and I think the empathy gap is really to show the full spectrum of a person, of their experience, so the reader can recognize some of themselves in whomever they’re looking at.
The things that are hard to digest becomes possible for the reader to understand, or possible for them to see themselves in those circumstances with a similar reaction. No one grows up thinking I want to be a terrible person, I want to start a cult that my daughter is going to die in, so then, who was this person, what shaped them, and what informed their sense of morality? Trying to get all of that in and not being didactic about it. How do you both show that this person is worthy of love and compassion and made mistakes? There’s a line between showing your humanity and trying to make an excuse for bad behavior. That’s very tough to do. Everybody doesn’t see it the same way, there are some people who probably think, Oh, he’s trying to make an excuse, and that’s my challenge. It’s tougher to take someone who has a more complicated identity in the world and to make people understand them. Not like them, but just to understand them.
SS: Joan Didion once said that she read everything about herself. Due to the prevalence of social media, do you ever look yourself up on the internet? What does this kind of access to praise or critique have on you? On your writing?
MJ: I have looked myself up, especially when I have something coming out. I do read my reviews, and it’s very hard. It’s a challenge to remain level-headed because if you get too much praise and you start to believe it, and then you get someone who’s going the opposite direction—if you don’t have any confidence, it can really demoralize you. I have been fortunate to have more on the praise side than I have on the demoralizing critique side, but there was a review—I will never forget this—it was the day that Survival Math was released, and I was doing an interview with this woman. My friend works at The New York Times, and he texted me, Hey man, I saw your review. It was my daily review on the day of my book release. If your daily comes out on pub day, that means they really gave you a prime slot. I’m thinking, Oh cool, a daily? And I was like, How is it? And he was like, Maybe I should just send it to you. I was like, Huh? And now, I have to finish this interview with this woman and I’m fearful.
I think he sent me an excerpt, and it was, in my opinion, a takedown review, it was beyond a critique, and more of a kind of literary humiliation. And I couldn’t believe it. It changed the tenor of the release of my book, and so, luckily I had a Sunday review that was going, and all the other reviews were great, but that really gave me an opportunity to see how resilient I was, how I was going to respond to that kind of critique, and did the book have enough positive attributes to withstand that kind of review, because that kind of review can take a career. So yeah. I read it. If you’re going to read it, you better learn to have some resiliency, some thick skin, because they can go either way.
I also think that after you win a Pulitzer, what do you write next? And for me, because it was in nonfiction, it’s, What’s my next story? I was lucky enough to have the Ahmaud Arbery piece come out in May of 2020. But between May of 2020 and when I won a Pulitzer, that’s a whole year, so I had already written enough to know I don’t have to stand on this one thing. Be careful about praise and be careful about critique. They can really take you out of what you came here to do.
SS: And my last question for you: When writers crossover into nonfiction writing, there is a tendency for audiences to assume things about a writer based on their work, in ways fiction often shields us from. Are there any myths about you that you’d like to use this as an opportunity to address?
MJ: I think whatever myth exists about me, I want it to endure. I remember listening to Tayari Jones who said, “When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.” I think that space between what is the truth and what isn’t is a healthy space for me, because so much of what I write is couched in my experience. And to be honest, because my fiction has been based so much on my experience, I’m not even necessarily sure sometimes if I’ve imagined a thing or if it actually happened, which makes me think of the West African proverb, “All stories are true.” I like to exist in that world. And as a myth, really, you want to be able to exist as a myth. You think of all the writers that we love that have endured, and they’re myths, right? You think of stories about Hemingway, or James Baldwin, or Toni Morrison, or Faulkner, they’re mythic. If you can find your way into mythology, you’ve done a good job.
Steffi Sin is a Chinese-American writer from San Francisco. She will be graduating from the MFA program in Creative Writing at Arizona State University in May 2022. Her work has been published by The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is Nonfiction Editor of of Hayden’s Ferry Review.