How do you find your voice? As a writer, how do you take what you know and what you believe to share your stories with the world? How do we let young writers know just how powerful they are and that what they do matters?
In How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill Pulitzer Prize winning, and National Book Award finalist author Jericho Brown brings together more than 30 acclaimed writers, including the likes of Tayari Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Natasha Trethewey, among many others, to discuss, dissect, and offer advice and encouragement on the written word. Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So I asked during our last conversation, before you edited How We Do It. As you think about the future, education, and the importance of the arts, what would you like young people to know, preserve and remember?
JERICHO BROWN
I would like for young people to understand just how powerful they are, just how much what they do matters, that they really can make changes that change themselves and change their communities. Change readership, change what a readership can be. Change people's ideas about what a writer might look like, for instance. That we do have agency, that we do have power, that we can make differences.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I read the essay by Natasha Trethewey in your book. She talks about the metaphor and how it entrenches us in a certain attitude towards things we're describing. Natasha talks about how the language right after Civil War was used to articulate this romantic attitude toward the Southern past and Black "otherness." How do we become more aware of the mythos, perhaps underlying some of the metaphors that are, you know, a very basic currency of poetic craft?
BROWN
As writers, it's our job to write what will become clichés. Not to write clichés, but to be original enough that we make something that people are still saying for hundreds of years to come. And if that's what you're doing, that's pretty powerful.
When I'm writing a poem I'm making a world. And if I can stick to that, then I have to believe that once a poem is out in the world, another world has been made, another way of living, another way of thinking, another way of seeing things.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
How We Do It certainly brings together so many masters of the art of writing. Tell us why it was important for you to create this anthology.
BROWN
I put this craft book together to create an opportunity for that advice, for those role models, for that access. And I think that what I'm grateful for about this book is that it is the book that I would have wanted back when I was a 19-year-old kid telling people I wish I was a writer. So, I think that's the real crux of the book.
This is a book for anyone who is a student of the craft. More particularly, though, this is a book for younger and newer Black writers in undergraduate and graduate workshops and in absolutely no workshop at all. We hope teachers find these words useful for their students, and we hope students who have yet to find their teachers learn from these thirty-two pieces born out of absolute generosity and hope for the future of Black writing.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I wanted to ask you about the How You Living? section specifically. You mentioned this in your previous interview with us too, it's almost an aesthetic to talk about dancing in the rain and letting your heart be broken and exposing yourself to the world. But in reality, I think it's very hard to look at a difficult unfamiliar experience that you might have had to pass through in order to open your writing to more possibilities and just say, "I'm going to do that no matter how much it's going to hurt me." And this includes writing into your hurt and your trauma, too, which is hard. How do you personally get yourself to do the uncomfortable things in life that might feed your writing?
BROWN
So you're afraid to change cause you don't want people to call you strange. So I sort of get that. But I grew up in a very different situation. I'm actually always surprised that I'm even in communication with my parents at all. I didn't think anybody in my family would want to have anything to do with me cause that was the message I got from the world when I was a kid, that people do not want to have anything to do with queer people other than queer people. That was what I understood, that queer people themselves didn't even want to have anything to do with one another. And so I was putting myself in training, you know, from the age when I figured out that I was into guys, which was very young. When I was in elementary school, I was in training for the day I leave my parents' house, they find out I'm gay and never speak to me again.
Now, that's not how things went, but if you have that idea, if you already have the idea that everyone in your life is going to reject you, then that makes it easier to write your trauma because you don't think you have anything to lose. And part of our fear about writing that which is intimate or personal or traumatic has to do with the fact that we are afraid that, yeah, I'll have the good piece of writing, but I lose this really wonderful relationship in my real life, and I don't want to lose my relationships.
Moving forward in time, I think it's different for me now. And I think it's easier for me to write into a kind of risk because I have trained myself to a point where I don't think about that risk as I am writing. I put myself in a position where I only have to think about that risk once I am at a point in a draft. And by that time the poem is so good, I don't care about that relationship. But in the beginning, as I was saying to Mia earlier, my goal is lines. Oh, that sounds good! Oh, that sounds good. Oh, this is interesting. Oh, I might be able to use this piece. If you take things down to the word, to the fragment, to the line, in some cases, to the sentence, to the paragraph, and you start putting things together, then you can begin to put them together because they go together, not cause they're about you in any particular way.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Tell us about your process and how the book came together.
BROWN
I tried to make something that I would have needed. And because that's what I tried to make, I'm hoping readers read something that they need. You know, that's the joy of books, that you come across something that you needed that you didn't even know you needed.
This is a book I wish existed 20 years ago. I would have led an easier life if it had. I want you to have what I always wanted. Here is an anthology that gives us modes to try on the way we might wear and change clothing. And these wonderful writers are proof that nothing ever beat a failure but a try.
And so one of the wonderful things that happen in the book is these writers aren't just writers, they're readers. So when they're talking about the work they love in their essays, they didn't know they were going to be in a book with some of these other people, but they end up discussing the work of other people who are in the book. And because they're doing that, the book ends up creating this web, which I think lets readers know just how intricate the world of influence really is for a writer, and how you get different things from different people along the way.
In order to make what you make, you have to use what you have. You have to submerge yourself, immerse yourself in what you know, in your own vernacular, in your own tone, in your own belief, in your own way of doing things and telling stories. And that's how the writing can get done.
