{"id":44289,"date":"2015-11-28T00:25:11","date_gmt":"2015-11-28T00:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=44289"},"modified":"2017-04-07T12:14:11","modified_gmt":"2017-04-07T12:14:11","slug":"pitching-chaos-an-interview-with-mat-johnson-author-of-loving-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=44289","title":{"rendered":"Pitching Chaos, an interview with Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pitching Chaos, an interview with Mat Johnson, author of <\/strong><\/em>Loving Day<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Electric Lit<\/a>
\n2015-05-26<\/p>\n

Dwyer Murphy<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

This week marks the release of <\/em>Loving Day<\/a>, the new novel from Mat Johnson<\/a>, author of <\/em>Pym, <\/em>Drop, <\/em>Hunting in Harlem, <\/em>Incognegro, and others. Johnson and I spoke last week on Skype. I caught him in his car, heading home from a school tour, and we continued our chat as he walked across the campus of the University of Houston, where he\u2019s a faculty member in the creative writing program. Johnson has an energetic, incisive way of speaking. He works historical analysis, social observation, literary critique and wicked one-liners into the span of a sentence or two, always with the kind of conversational ease that makes you feel like he\u2019s been mulling things over for a while and you were just the person he was hoping to see. We talked about race and culture in Philadelphia<\/a>, prioritizing entertainment in literature, fatherhood, the book community on Twitter, and \u201cthe idea of being a straight male interacting with the feminine\u201d (yes \u2013 sex \u2013 but other stuff, too\u2026).<\/em><\/p>\n

Dwyer Murphy: Over the course of your career, you\u2019ve shifted between novels, graphic novels, comics, and non-fiction. With Loving Day<\/em><\/a>, you\u2019re back to the novel. How do you decide which medium to work with? Does the story dictate the format?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mat Johnson<\/a>:<\/strong> Usually it starts with the idea. I would say I\u2019m a novelist first, but if the idea doesn\u2019t fit into a novel, then I look for other ways to tell it. The graphic novel is kind of my way of doing a short story. I don\u2019t usually write short stories, but I\u2019ve found that pieces that are about the length of a story and have a strong visual aspect tend to work really well as graphic novels, so that\u2019s how I\u2019ll tell those particular stories…<\/p>\n

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

This week marks the release of Loving Day, the new novel from Mat Johnson, author of “Pym,” “Drop,” “Hunting in Harlem,” “Incognegro,” and others. Johnson and I spoke last week on Skype.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,125,8,20],"tags":[22077,22068,22069,2355],"class_list":["post-44289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-dwyer-murphy","tag-electric-lit","tag-electric-literature","tag-mat-johnson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44289","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=44289"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53308,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44289\/revisions\/53308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}