{"id":41178,"date":"2015-05-21T01:43:03","date_gmt":"2015-05-21T01:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41178"},"modified":"2016-06-11T00:00:37","modified_gmt":"2016-06-11T00:00:37","slug":"the-great-american-mulatto-mat-johnson-talks-identity-and-facing-ghosts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41178","title":{"rendered":"The Great American Mulatto: Mat Johnson Talks Identity and Facing Ghosts"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Great American Mulatto: Mat Johnson Talks Identity and Facing Ghosts<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Gawker Review of Books<\/a>
\n2015-05-20<\/p>\n

Victor LaValle<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Mat Johnson<\/a> and I have been friends since we published our first books fifteen years ago. In that time we\u2019ve spent an untold number of hours bullshitting about writing, parenting, and sundry nonsense. Mat\u2019s new novel, Loving Day<\/a><\/em>\u2014which will be released by Spiegel & Grau on May 26\u2014is the story of a mixed-race comic book artist who returns from Wales to his native Philadelphia to discover a daughter he never knew he\u2019d fathered, a mixed-race cult that hopes to recruit him, and a pair of ghosts haunting his father\u2019s home. Our conversation appears below.<\/p>\n

Victor LaValle<\/strong>: Germantown\u2019s Finest, what\u2019s going on?<\/p>\n

Mat Johnson<\/strong>: I\u2019m sweating my ass of in Houston Fucking Texas is what\u2019s going on. It\u2019s like Philly in July but for six months down here.<\/p>\n

VL<\/strong>: That\u2019s going to ruin your image as a writer. Your Twitter profile photo makes you look like an elegant leg breaker, not a sweating goon.<\/p>\n

MJ<\/strong>: Breaking legs builds moisture in your arm pits. I am rugged fiction writer man. I make my own paper from the pulp I chew off trees, man…<\/p>\n

…VL<\/strong>: Art versus entertainment makes sense as a kind of push\/pull in lit fiction, but in the new book you\u2019ve added a third ingredient. Outrage. Some motherfuckers are going to be outraged by what you\u2019ve put in this book. Black, white, mixed. It\u2019s possible you\u2019ve even defamed ghosts with one of the subplots.<\/p>\n

MJ<\/strong>: I like being scared when I\u2019m writing. I enjoy building to the moment where I\u2019m like, I can\u2019t believe I\u2019m putting this on the page. All of Loving Day<\/em> was like this. Growing up mulatto<\/a>, looking white but being black. In the black community I never talked about being mixed. I was too busy overcompensating to fit in.<\/p>\n

Writing this book I kept thinking, black people are going to hate that I\u2019m even talking about this, mixed people are going to be annoyed about the way I\u2019m talking about it, and white people aren\u2019t going to know what the hell it is I\u2019m even talking about. Shit, I\u2019m still scared…<\/p>\n

Read the entire interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Great American Mulatto: Mat Johnson Talks Identity and Facing Ghosts Gawker Review of Books 2015-05-20 Victor LaValle Mat Johnson and I have been friends since we published our first books fifteen years ago. In that time we\u2019ve spent an untold number of hours bullshitting about writing, parenting, and sundry nonsense. Mat\u2019s new novel, Loving […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13743,8],"tags":[20106,2355,20105],"class_list":["post-41178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-interviews","category-media-archive","tag-gawker-review-of-books","tag-mat-johnson","tag-victor-lavalle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41178"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47527,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41178\/revisions\/47527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}