Slip into place,
don't breathe.
Slam the screen,
quietly.
Fry the linens,
fold the chops.
Underestimate
the chickens next door.
Brooklyn's Jamel Brinkley
Photo Credit – Keisha Green
“Claudius Van Clyde and I both preferred girls of a certain plumpness—in part, I
think, because that’s what black guys are supposed to like, because liking it confirmed
something about us—but he had gotten to Sybil first. So for the moment I was left to
deal with the prophet of the bubble. I was fine with that. I needed a good distraction, and
a good thing about hanging with Claudius Van Clyde was that you never failed to get
noticed. He had come to Columbia from West Oakland with certain notions regarding
life in New York, that the city’s summer heat and dust, its soot-caked winter ice, were
those of the cultural comet, which he ached to witness if not ride. Because of these
notions—which were optimistic, American—he manipulated gestures, surfaces, and
disguises, seemed to push the very core of himself outward so that you could see in his
face, in the flare of his broad nostrils, the hard radiance of the soul-stuff that some people
go on and on about. Though not quite handsome, he could fool you with his pretensions
and he was gorgeously insincere. Among his implements were a collection of Eastern style
conical hats and two-, three-, and four-finger rings. His pick for that night: a fez,
which was tilted forward on his head so that we, both of us, were emboldened by the
obscene probing swing of the tassel.”
- from “No More Than a Bubble”
by Jamel Brinkley
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Jamel Brinkley and I met at the Kenyon Writers Workshop in 2012, where each day Lee K. Abbott assigned a writing prompt, and the next morning we responded with story beginnings. The prompts were more than good, and the stories we came back with were more than surprising. Out of those surprises came really great complications, enormous wads of southern-style levity, racy descriptions of girls rolling in paint, Pacific coast road trips, Flatbush house parties, and god-like archetypes. A range of work that blew us all away.
Jamel went on to other workshops and blew away a few more writers and teachers with his windswept street writing, inclusive of junkmen, Jamaican-African-American-Dominican girls, wild dogs, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, fez tassels, and near disappointment. His hard work and words have landed him a place at the Iowa Writers Workshop. No telling what the future will bring, but thankfully, it will include more stories and eventual volumes that bear Jamel Brinkley’s name.
Photo credit – Gya Watson
Jamel, you write short stories and are working on a novel. Could you compare the experience of creating short form vs. writing long?
The first thing I should do is confess that up until about two years ago, I was deathly afraid of writing short stories. The gaps in my knowledge of short stories, which are still significant, were then enormous. I was all about novels, and in a drawer somewhere I have a 600-page dung heap of a novel that is probably still steaming and stinking things up. I workshopped part of that novel at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop a few years ago, and I found much to my dismay that I had absolutely no understanding of structure. What I had written was an incoherent mess.
The novel I’m working on now might more accurately be called a novella, or at least I envision it that way. I’m trying to be way more modest about the scope and the pages, trying to be more mindful about structure, to exert more control so that it doesn’t turn into a “loose baggy monster” of the worst kind. I’ve been working more on stories than the novel recently, and my sense is that both forms are difficult as hell. Stories call for an extraordinary amount of control and efficiency, and in those miniaturized spaces, I find it particularly challenging to maintain the feeling and soul and voice I want while making things happen satisfactorily on the emotional and action plot levels. I’ve had a hard time ramping up the tension. I get caught up in sentences, a fact that is bad enough in a story, but imagine 600 pages of that nonsense!
The level of description and depth in your writing is phenomenal. Have you come to this from the foundation of years and years of reading and writing, or as this always been your inclination? Either way, who out in the world are your greatest influences?
Well, thank you, first of all. I do think I’ve always been drawn to vivid writing, to details and images, the possibilities of rhythm in a sentence and a poetic line. In high school and college, I fancied myself a poet, and I was devastated when I discovered that there was an unflattering name for what I had been writing: purple prose. One of my challenges is to avoid layering on images, adjectives, and details in such a way that my writing becomes obscure, muddled. So while I used to love Nabokov at his most florid, now I try to pay attention to writers who have a firm handle on what sentences can do, who know when to tighten and release the reins. This wishful list of influences will be necessarily incomplete, but here goes: James Baldwin (his essays and short stories), the James Joyce of Dubliners, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, J.D. Salinger, Marilynne Robinson (especially Housekeeping), Junot Díaz (especially Drown and Oscar Wao), Charles D’Ambrosio, Barry Hannah, Lee K. Abbott, Toni Morrison, Denis Johnson, Edward P. Jones, Amy Hempel, Nathaniel Mackey, Tobias Wolff, Gayl Jones, William Trevor, Alice Munro, John Edgar Wideman, Jhumpa Lahiri. I’ll stop here, with guilty feelings about leaving off so many of the fiction writers I admire, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Q-Tip, Black Thought, Lauryn Hill, Mos Def, Ghostface Killah, and MF Doom as folks who inspire and perhaps influence me. And don’t get me started on jazz!
Lions, tigers, or bears?
Lions, without question. I spent many years as an employee, undergraduate and graduate student at Columbia, whose mascot is the lion. I’ve also been called a lion because of my hair, here and there by friends who are adherents of Rastafari, and more significantly by former students who thought I looked like Simba from The Lion King. There’s not much that’s lion-like about me beyond that; I’m a November baby, and I’m definitely more Scorpio than Leo.
The character, Claudius Van Clyde, in your story, “No More than a Bubble,” comes across as an archetype, a kind of jester, large and laughing, in love with life; yet through the narrator’s eyes, Claudius is truly flesh-and-blood with vulnerabilities and a demeanor that lead him and the narrator to near disgrace. Is this larger archetypal view something you intended, or a natural direction that the story took? Are there Claudius Van Clydes in your life, the kind of magnanimous personalities that beg for story?
I did intend it. Claudius strikes me a particularly “New York” kind of character, in both the literary and life senses. There are many versions of Claudius Van Clyde where I live, in Brooklyn. These are folks who strike me as needing or wanting to match the grandiosity of New York City. In a place teeming with stimuli, they make elaborate efforts to draw attention to themselves, to make things swirl around them, and I think that they often have fascinating reasons for doing so. I’ve written about a couple of these character types. I think they draw my attention because they are so unlike me and because I have such strong and complicated feelings about them. I guess I’m happy to play Nick to their Gatsby.
How has teaching high school English had an effect on your writing, from managing time to influencing the subject and slant of your writing? The twist and swerve of language in your stories are completely new, utterly unique. Are you inspired by your students’ vocabulary and by the street-speak and sounds of the boroughs?
For me, teaching high school English pulls from the same well of time, energy, and mind that I need to write. So during the school year, I get very little work done. If I’m lucky, if there aren’t piles of student essays waiting to be read and graded, I get some work done on weekends. Otherwise I rely on holidays and seasonal breaks. Right now I teach in a very traditional independent school, so if anything my work with these students pulls me towards writing that is canonical. The qualities in my language that you very kindly describe, the vocabulary and the urban rhythm and vernacular, probably come from the way my upbringing, musical influences, more “experimental” reading, and earlier teaching experiences dance with the more traditional and canonical work I’ve been immersed in over the last four to five years.
Exciting times ahead! You’ll be leaving New York, as the Iowa Writers Workshop awaits you, and you begin in the fall, yes? A quotation you gave me from Ellison’s Invisible Man seems quite fitting: “The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.” What are your expectations, goals, and dreams as you approach the next two years? And beyond?
Yes, this is the first time in my conscious existence that I’ll be living someplace other than in New York City. I’m nervous and thrilled. I’m thrilled to have the gift of time, which is something that Lan Samantha Chang, the director of the Iowa program, emphasized to me in her typically generous and clear-headed way. It seems like such an obvious thing, but when you reach a certain age and have established routines, relationships, a career, realizing how enormous and precious a gift time might require someone like Sam to believe in you and your work enough to force-feed you a healthy dose of clarity and plain good sense. I’m thrilled to have the time and the opportunity to say “yes” to everything, which was Lee K. Abbott’s advice to me: study with everyone, take poetry classes, read read read. Despite the suspicion and criticism the Workshop sometimes engenders, it seems like it can’t possibly be a bad thing to spend two years reading and writing in a high-quality program where the very town takes you seriously as a writer. I want to finish my short novel and build a short story collection, but my real goal is to say “yes” to everything, to throw myself fully into this two-year conversation with brilliant teachers and peers, and into what Charlie D’Ambrosio described as a conversation with yourself “in the solitary struggle of writing sentences.” Of course, I want to be published someday—what writer doesn’t?—but I can wait for that to happen. “I want to be an honest man and a good writer,” as Baldwin said, and I think my experience at Iowa will help with at least one of those goals.
Jamel Brinkley is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. He has degrees from Columbia University and teaches high school English in New York City. This fall he will begin study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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The Poppy: An Interview Series
Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis,
black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.
*
This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.
Andrew Lam: Language, Memory, Bliss
“When I was eleven years old I did an unforgivable thing: I set my family photos on fire. We were living in Saigon at the time, and as Viet Cong tanks rolled toward the edge of the city, my mother, half-crazed with fear, ordered me to get rid of everything incriminating… When I was done, the memories of three generations had turned into ashes. Only years later in America did I begin to regret the act.”
– from “Lost Photos” – October 1997 – Perfume Dreams - by Andrew Lam
Andrew Lam—journalist, essayist, short story writer—reflects on the world in the way only one who has lost his homeland can: with compassion, understanding, and a global stance. His essays, personal and poignant, examine the Vietnamese diaspora and the bridges and barriers between hemispheres, while his story collection defines the idea of exile in completely new ways. Here, in the first installment of this two-part interview, Lam responds with depth and detail.
Your first languages are Vietnamese and French, and you write in English. It’s not surprising that voice and language play an enormous part in your stories. Do you think your aptitude for these languages carries into your fiction?
Absolutely. I fell in love with the English language, learning it while going through puberty. I am told that children learn foreign languages in the same primal part of the brain as their native tongue, but by high school it becomes a challenge, as brain plasticity has been lost. But in learning a language, your voice breaks, when plasticity is still available and language is both primal and not. That’s how it felt for me. Learning English changed me inside out: I was growing, and my voice broke, and I spoke in a new voice, with a new timbre. It was a kind of enchantment and I never fell out of it.
It helped, of course, to speak Vietnamese and French first. I hear the music in each language, the varying cadences, and the intonations used in different parts of the throat, the mouth, and the nasal area. I can hear voices from many of my characters very clearly – which makes writing short stories like writing plays. And, as an essayist of twenty years, I can hear my own voice very clearly, which makes it less troublesome to write in the third person narrative, that is, when using my own voice for the omniscient viewpoint.
I think I know the answer to this trio of questions, given your travels as a journalist, but readers here might not. And so: Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage? What were your experiences? How did this journey influence your writing?
An interesting set of questions, and the answer to the first is both yes and no. I never intentionally go on literary pilgrimages but have been to places where literature plays a profound role in the experience. Hanoi’s Temple of Literature, for instance, is one of the most beautiful temples I’ve ever visited. Etched on fading tablets atop giant stone turtles are the names of the Mandarins, those of enormous talent and will, who passed the Imperial exams, written as poetry forms, over a thousand years ago. I felt a kinship with these names, for I know the effort to stay awake in late evenings or early morns to write the next sentence, to hear aloud the cadence of your own voice, to get one more line in before darkness takes over.
There are places that remind me of books I’ve read. The Notre Dame de Paris of my childhood brought the memory of reading Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.” A promenade on the Thames and a visit to Shakespeare’s theatre, The Globe, made me recall “Prospero” and “Romeo and Juliet,” and imagine myself in the audience when the plays were first staged.
At my literary agent’s home in Boston, I was shown some of his prize treasures: door knobs that once belonged to Somerset Maugham, and, of course, I had to touch them, and felt—at least in my own imagination—their razor’s edge.
In Belgium once, through a chance invitation to a castle, my hostess—a Vietnamese woman married to the baron—prepared pho soup and the aroma perfumed the ancient halls. She gave me Vietnamese books to read. It was strange feeling: to be both at home and in a completely strange setting.
But perhaps nowhere have I found the act of writing more powerful than in the Whitehead Detention center in Hong Kong, where I covered the stories Vietnamese refugees who, at the end of the cold war, were facing forced repatriation. The experience became part of my first book, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora. But it was there, more than two decades ago, that I witnessed the act of writing as a desperate attempt toward freedom. People who were being sent back to communist Vietnam to an uncertain future wrote and wrote. As papers were hard to get, they told their life stories in tiny words so as to save space on a page. They wrote without having an audience. In the end, many gave me their diaries, their private letters, their testimonies and poetry to take out of the camp. These stories, told as a way to convince the UN of their political prosecution at home, could not be taken back to Vietnam, as they would ironically become evidence that they were “anti-revolutionary.” On the other hand, these writings were not admitted by the UN as evidence of those persecuted in Vietnam. I translated and published a few pieces, but the rest sat for years in my closet, a reminder that for some, refugees and persons who sit in a cell, writing is bleeding.
Who are your favorite writers?
I have been influenced by James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vladimir Nabokov, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Rodriguez, Maxine Hong Kingston, and so many more. I identify with books that I love, and I love these writers for particular books they’ve written.
What is your idea of absolute happiness?
No one asked me this question before, at least, in this particular phrasing. I am not preoccupied with happiness, absolute or partial. It seems to me that it is a conditional state, subject to its opposite, grief and sorrow. Of all these feelings, I’ve had my share. But I will say that for perhaps as long as I can remember, even as a child living in Dalat, Vietnam, my preoccupation is with freedom, in the Buddhist sense. In respect to literature and art, I feel a piece of work has its worth when it, at the deepest level, serves as a spiritual vector to awaken the mind, or to open the gate beyond which opposites loose meanings, and it’s where the Buddha sits, which is to say, the experience of absolute bliss.
All photographs: permission of Andrew Lam.
Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, which won the 2006 PEN Open Book Award, East Eats West: Writing in the Two Hemispheres, and most recently Birds of Paradise Lost, his first collection of short stories. Lam is editor and cofounder of New American Media, was a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered for many years, and the subject of a 2004 PBS commentary called My Journey Home. His essays have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, from The New York Times to The Nation. He lives in San Francisco.
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The Poppy: An Interview Series
Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis,
black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.
*
This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.