The PEN Ten with Mat Johnson

Posted in Articles, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2016-05-01 20:28Z by Steven

The PEN Ten with Mat Johnson

PEN American Center
2015-03-17

Randa Jarrar

The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, guest editor Randa Jarrar talks with Mat Johnson, the author of Pym and the graphic novel Incognegro. His upcoming novel, Loving Day, will be published by Spiegiel & Grau on May 26. Johnson is a Full Professor at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

When did being a writer begin to inform your sense of identity?

Oh sweet lord, I don’t know. When people started to treat me with respect and stop reacting to me like I was a big goon asshole? That part’s nice. Not to be a twit and turn the question around just to show you how deep I am, but it’s kinda been the other way around. I already had an identity, writing allowed me to clear a place in the world for it to exist. I’m a 6’4”, 230 lbs guy who looks like a Latvian rugby player, but I’m actually a black man of biracial descent. On the page, with Incognegro and Pym, and this new one Loving Day, I created a place for myself, so the world can see me coming…

What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words?

This whole damn book I just wrote, Loving Day. I spent the first decades of my life overcompensating for my whitish appearance within the black community, rejecting mixed identity as an escape plan for self-hating blacks of mixed descent. Then as an adult, I slowly began seeing the merits of self-identifying as biracial, and eventually the need for it, despite larger ambivalence to it in the larger black community. So I was petrified to actually talk about this directly in my new novel. I know some old allies are not going to be happy. But art shouldn’t be about making people happy, or confirming their existing ideas. I had to say this, my truth. This book is my coming out as a mulatto

Read the entire interview here.

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