In his much-anticipated debut collection A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley lays bare the full and complex interiority of black men and boys kicking against all manner of inexorable truths, while living an inch from ruin in Brooklyn and the Bronx. With stunning clarity and generosity of detail, each of the nine stories leaves its own lasting impression, while the book as a whole coalesces into a devastating tapestry of confused masculinity, familial responsibility, and the intractable power of privilege to impede upon and redraw the boundaries of a life. We’re thrilled to publish “Wolf and Rhonda” in ASF‘s spring issue, wherein a high school reunion serves as the site for a reckoning with the past, approached from two completely different but wildly illuminating points of view.
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Aaron Teel: I wonder if you can talk a little about your process, both generally and specifically with respect to A Lucky Man. Though not a linked collection per se, all the stories here are certainly of a piece thematically. Did you write them with an eye toward including them in a collection, or were the selections made after the fact? Were there stories you wanted to include that didn’t fit for one reason or another?
Jamel Brinkley: I’m glad to hear that you feel the stories have a shared thematic resonance. I think that’s more a function of unintentional staring (“staring” in the Flannery O’Connor sense: “There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without,” she says, “and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it. . .”) than any intentional design on my part. As far I was concerned, I was just writing one story and then another story and then another story, and so on. Of course, I hoped that they would fit together in some way, but I don’t think I started any of them with a theme in mind. Like many writers, I start with an image or a character as the catalyst, maybe a bit of dialogue. As the collection moved toward publication, a story I had come close to giving up on, “Everything the Mouth Eats,” was added, and another one was cut near the end of the editorial process, which I think was for the best.
AT: They definitely do feel of a piece to me, and very much in the tradition of a story cycle like Lost in the City with its movement from adolescence to maturity (physical, if not emotional) and recursive thematic concerns centered around fractured family dynamics and complex relationships to home and community—in this case a tapestry of life in Brooklyn and the Bronx rather than Jones’ iconic D.C., or even Alice Munro’s rural Ontario. Is it fair to say that part of your project at this point anyway has been to center and amplify the experiences of the people in these communities? I’m thinking of a story like “Clifton’s Place” in particular, with its deliberate foregrounding of people seen explicitly as background by the cultural tourists slowly gentrifying/colonizing this place that is a kind of home for people in the neighborhood.
JM: Lost in the City is one of my sacred texts, and Munro is one of my absolute favorite authors. I’d be pleased if my treatment of my Bronx and Brooklyn folks has even a trace of the wisdom, honesty, toughness, and love with which Jones and Munro write about their characters. I think it’s right to say that I want to center the experiences of people in the communities where I grew up. Empathy is a buzzword in the literary world, and many would have us believe that if privileged people read a story or a novel about “others,” if privileged writers toss in a few “others” among their more central characters, and so on, then, presto, they have achieved or displayed some sort of empathy. I seriously doubt it. I have doubts about empathy itself, at least the way it’s typically used in liberal, literary circles. In a recent dialogue with fellow poet Rickey Laurentiis, Solmaz Sharif says, “Empathy is emotional tourism.” I imagine that at least some of the gentrifiers in “Clifton’s Place” probably assume they are good, liberal, empathetic people. After all, they’re patronizing this historically black neighborhood bar. Assuming empathy is even a worthy and tangibly effective goal—and I’m not sure that a rigorous inquiry of the concept would show that it is—I think people are too quick to claim it as a personal value, as part of who they are. People tend to overestimate their capacity to be “empathetic” to another person and her situation, as if it’s easy. What’s the antidote to that in terms of writing? I have no idea. There probably isn’t one. You probably have to go out and do positive, often difficult work in the world. And that work probably helps you to write and read better. But aesthetically speaking, for me, maybe this all relates back to the idea of staring—my own staring as a story writer and inviting readers to stare right along with me, doing the work to understand these characters and their lives.
AT: I love O’Connor’s typically blunt notion of artistic staring, and I think it perfectly describes your style. A word I wrote over and over in the margins of the book is patient—each of the stories unfolds at its own unhurried pace without any of the compression or stylistic detours I associate with much current literary fiction. That’s not to say that the language isn’t beautiful, of course, but it seems to me that your primary concern is for the close, careful observation of characters. I assume that level of observation requires a kind of constant, quiet staring. Is that something you’re always engaged in out in the world? Do you carry a notebook for scribbling little anthropological notes everywhere you go?
JB: William Trevor called the short story “bony” and asserted that it is “the art of the glimpse.” He said it’s “concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness.” I like the creative tension produced by this central “disagreement” with one of my cherished writers. Maybe I’m too enamored with lifelike meaninglessness, or maybe my own experiences have made me more philosophically inclined towards it. While I don’t carry a notebook around, I’m definitely more of a watcher than a doer, more a listener than a talker. I agonize and mull over decisions instead of impulsively making them. I try not to be too quick to claim any sort of confident understanding of people or experiences. I’m a naturally doubtful person, I’d say, and I think observing, taking in specific sense impressions, helps anchor and direct the tendency of my thoughts to waver and wander. As a physical being I myself may be bony, but my stories definitely aren’t.
AT: Do you find yourself frequently returning to the same emotional and thematic territory in your work?
JB: I believe I do, at least in the work I’ve created so far. It’s a bit embarrassing to take a step back and see how obsessed you can be as an artist. But yes: fathers, brothers, masculinity, loneliness, shame, and intimacy of various kinds are part of the territory I’ve visited again and again.
AT: I’m not sure an artist without obsessions would be of much use to anybody, or at any rate would have much of anything very interesting to say. Have your own interests and obsessions been fully formed in you since you first started writing? Can you trace them to any formative experiences in particular, be they personal or artistic? What has your journey as a writer looked like?
JB: All the obsessions I mentioned have been with me since I was very young. I think a lot about brotherhood, for example, because of my relationship to my brother. I think a lot about fathers because of the absence and presence of such men in my life. And so on. The way I’ve thought about my obsessions has, of course, been shaped by my experiences as I’ve grown older and matured, and it’s been shaped acutely by my reading. I couldn’t have written “Everything the Mouth Eats,” from my collection, if I hadn’t read “Sonny’s Blues” over and over. I couldn’t have written any of my stories about fatherhood or brotherhood without the work of Baldwin and John Edgar Wideman and Charles D’Ambrosio.
For many years I placed myself in proximity to the writing or literary life but refused to put it at the center of my existence. Maybe it seemed like a luxury or too much of a risk to do so, especially coming from a working-class household in Brooklyn and the South Bronx. But, as I eventually discovered, whatever pressure I felt to make lots of money and have a conventional career in an office or a classroom was almost entirely self-imposed. Looking back on things now, I don’t think my mother put such pressure on me—not too much, anyway. In fact, what I see now is how she trusted me and gave me room to make my decisions and pursue my dreams. She, and my teachers, made my journey as a writer possible. Some people really love to beat up on writing programs and writing teachers; nothing is above critique, but I’ve had a pretty incredible experience with them. My teachers gave me confidence in my ability to write, and they also pushed me, challenged me, said things I strongly disagreed with and things I felt were so true I’ll remember them for the rest of my life. Without my teachers, there’s no way I would be able to continually take up the task of wrestling with words, and my obsessions, on the page.
AT: How has your relationship to your own communities (geographic or otherwise) informed your work? Do you draw heavily from your own experiences generally?
JB: I think there’s a trace of me—or of people and places I’ve known, refracted through my sense of them—in every character and setting in my book. I don’t believe that any of the stories are merely autobiography in disguise, but people I know well who read the book may recognize this or that detail as a version of something we encountered or experienced. I think I like the feeling of having some anchor in my stories from the “real world”—for example, the bar in “Clifton’s Place” is based on an actual bar in Brooklyn—but I prefer that anchor, however dense, to be small in the story, leaving me a lot of space to invent and explore around it. Sometimes, that anchoring detail is needed only as a compositional resource and it fades or disappears entirely by the time I get to the final version of a story.
AT: I read somewhere that you came to fiction with an interest in novels more than stories. How would you describe your relationship now to the short story as a form?
JB: My first thought is that it seems impossible for me to write a story that is under twenty pages. I’m more comfortable in the thirty-page range, and one story, the one that was added to the collection, is even longer than that. I love the short story form—its confinement, pressure, and focused power—but I also find myself unable to write with true concision. Maybe that’s because of my interest in novels. Maybe I just can’t shut up. Who knows? I majored in English and African American Studies in college, I was in a literature PhD program for a while, and I’ve also taught high school English. In those years of teaching and learning, the novel was definitely the primary focus. Now I’m much more interested in stories, essays, and poetry—short forms. But in my own practice I need to stretch out a bit. In that regard, the work of writers such as Edward P. Jones, Alice Munro, and Danielle Evans have been models for me, granting permission.
Aaron Teel is a writer and editor based in Austin, Texas. He holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and is the author of the novella Shampoo Horns, anthologized in My Very End of the Universe, Five Novellas-in-Flash and A Study of the Form from Rose Metal Press. His short fiction is anthologized in Nothing Short of from Outpost 19 Books and appears elsewhere in Tin House, New South, Smokelong Quarterly, and other journals.