{"id":45927,"date":"2016-03-08T01:06:21","date_gmt":"2016-03-08T01:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=45927"},"modified":"2016-03-08T01:06:21","modified_gmt":"2016-03-08T01:06:21","slug":"mat-johnson-black-white-read-all-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=45927","title":{"rendered":"Mat Johnson: Black & White & Read All Over"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mat Johnson: Black & White & Read All Over<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Austin Chronicle<\/a>
\nAustin, Texas
\n2015-06-18<\/p>\n

Wayne Alan Brenner<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Our interview with the Houston<\/a>-based author<\/em><\/p>\n

This is an interview with Mat Johnson<\/a>, who wrote the acclaimed Pym<\/a><\/em> \u2013 which is somehow a popular favorite and a cult favorite, simultaneously, we’d swear \u2013 and who is most recently author of the novel Loving Day<\/a><\/em>, which we’ve reviewed right here, just out via the Spiegel & Grau imprint of Penguin Random House.<\/p>\n

Note: Johnson had written a few books before those two, yes, and \u2013 here, that’s what this link<\/a> (thank you, Wikipedia) will tell you all about. And here’s the interview:<\/p>\n

Austin Chronicle<\/strong>: Your Pym was one hell of a wild ride, like a fantasy thriller crossed with cultural critique, and it seemed to go all over the map. An interesting map, and hilariously drawn, but with so much stuff, like, galloping through the story. <\/em>Loving Day, funny as it is, seems a lot more focused and relatively subdued.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mat Johnson<\/strong>: The type of work I\u2019ve been doing has its limitations and its strengths. And one of the strengths, I think, letting it go half wild allows me to take it to places I wouldn\u2019t have if I was planning it meticulously. So I realize that, basically, I\u2019ve been throwing knuckleballs<\/a>. You know? You throw a knuckleball, there\u2019s an acceptance that you\u2019re dealing with chaos, but, hopefully \u2013 through technique and through practice \u2013 you can manage to control chaos enough to get it into the general direction. And that\u2019s been the trick. Of course, the question is: How do you follow it up? And I don\u2019t know if I can! [laughs] With Loving Day<\/em>, what ended up being the entire book, I had imagined it as half of the book \u2013 but thank God I didn\u2019t go on for another 300 pages. When I started it, I was interested in looking at mixed identity, mulatto identity \u2013 which, almost always in literature, is an I, singular \u2013 \u201cThis is my experience, I\u2019m different than everybody,\u201d and that\u2019s the tragic mulatto<\/a> archetype. And so what I wanted to do was try and say, \u201cOkay, this is a different time, now \u2013 it\u2019s more of a we.\u201d What does it mean when you take something that\u2019s so often been described as an individual experience and you start looking at it as a group experience? That was one of the original impetuses \u2013 there were a couple of them. Another was just, I wanted to write about Philly<\/a>. [laughs] And the other one was that line, that opening line, \u201cIn the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father\u2019s house.\u201d And I really liked that line, and I caught myself saying it to myself \u2013 like it was lyrics to a song \u2013 and I thought, \u201cOh shit, this is something. Why is this interesting to me?\u201d Because sometimes it\u2019s my subconscious that\u2019s interested, and my conscious has to figure out why my subconscious cares. So it built from there. And ultimately, while I was writing it, I realized that the father-daughter story was the essential story. And so, once I had that, that\u2019s when I had my structure…<\/p>\n

…AC<\/strong>: Okay, here\u2019s a, uh, a Tricky Race Question. There are all these wrap-ups you see in the media \u2013 The Best Of The Decade, The Best Of The Century, and so on. The Best Black Writers Of blah-blah-blah. And not that it\u2019s a zero-sum game, but there\u2019s gonna be some list of The Top Ten Black Writers, and if you\u2019re on that list? And there\u2019s some other writer, who\u2019s almost as good as you are \u2013 like it could be gauged that precisely, so they\u2019re definitely next on the quality tier \u2013 but you\u2019ve knocked them out of that top ten. And they\u2019re not mixed, they\u2019re black. Are they gonna feel like, looking at you, \u201cWait a minute, what is this dude doing on the list?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

MJ:<\/strong> Yes, they will feel like that. Because one of the things, in the larger sense of Who Gets To Get Listened To? Part of the reason we have these lists \u2013 of The Top Ten African-American Writers or The Top Ten Latino Writers \u2013 is because when it\u2019s just The Top Ten Writers? It\u2019s actually The Top Ten White Writers, and with maybe one or two other kinds of people thrown in to, you know, integrate it. So the initial problem is that the black writers\u2019 response, other ethnic writers\u2019 response, is to the fact that there\u2019s really a kind of antiquated segregation in publishing. So that\u2019s part of it. The other part is, there\u2019s not a lot of black writers writing literary fiction, so you\u2019d have to get it down to about The Top Five, probably. [laughs] But one of the things that\u2019s difficult for writers of color is that your success is largely based on a white audience, so people who have sort of an in into the larger white mainstream are going to get more attention. Now, sometimes those ins are, you know, white readers are interested in getting a kind of inside look into a culture that\u2019s unfamiliar to them. And sometimes those ins are like with Loving Day \u2013 there’s my Irish father, and it\u2019s Irish this and Irish that \u2013 so that\u2019s also an in that kind of puts a sign on the door that says White Money Accepted Here Too. You know?…<\/p>\n

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

Mat Johnson: Black & White & Read All Over The Austin Chronicle Austin, Texas 2015-06-18 Wayne Alan Brenner Our interview with the Houston-based author This is an interview with Mat Johnson, who wrote the acclaimed Pym \u2013 which is somehow a popular favorite and a cult favorite, simultaneously, we’d swear \u2013 and who is most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13743,1196,8,20],"tags":[18107,2355,18106,18105],"class_list":["post-45927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-interviews","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-austin-chronicle","tag-mat-johnson","tag-the-austin-chronicle","tag-wayne-alan-brenner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45927","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=45927"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45928,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45927\/revisions\/45928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}