An Interview with Jonathan Escoffery

I first came across Jonathan Escoffery’s work in The Paris Review. I had recently joined the magazine’s staff as a fiction reader, and Jonathan’s name came up in one of our editorial conversations. Several of the editors said that we should look for stories that had voice. Jonathan’s story “Under the Ackee” tree explores the hybridized patois of the Jamaican-American experience and subverts any conventional expectations of plot or narrative; instead, the reader hears and lives his characters’ experiences through their voices, through their idiomatic expressions and truisms. When I reached out to see if he’d be willing to answer a few questions for us, he had recently sold his debut book and won a Stegner Fellowship. We were thrilled when he said yes and dropped wisdom on East Coast versus West Coast, gave insider knowledge on what happens between story acceptance and publication, and dishes on who he’d like to have read his first book if he could pick any reader in the world.

Northwest review

What is the last great book you read?

Jonathan Escoffery

I just reread Edward P Jones’ Lost in the City and I’m continually astounded by how it keeps giving and keeps opening up in new ways the more I read it. I suspect the same could be said of all of his books, which, together, operate like one ever-expanding organism, though I’ve only read his other two once each. I’m cautious about calling any book great that I haven’t read at least twice, but I was recently enthralled with Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women. It’s heavy and thought-provoking and a real page-turner.

NWR

Who do you re-read every year?

JE

I re-read Justin Torres’ We the Animals and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son yearly. They each hover around 130 pages and could be read in one long sitting. And if you’re a writer, they demonstrate for you what lean, powerful sentences can accomplish.They’re filled with poetry and heart, and they’re masterful examples of my favorite form, the linked story collection that could also be a novel, the Kaleidoscopic novel that could be linked stories. My debut, If I Survive You, operates this way, so I’ll be curious to see if I still return to these books once my book is out and my focus turns to a different kind of full-length work of fiction. NWR

What book do you wish every incoming freshman would read in the U.S. before they started college?

JE

James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. It’s another book that could be read in one sitting, and would potentially — if the reader were open to honestly considering Baldwin’s message — establish a baseline understanding for the project that is America and where we all fit within that project.

NWR

Your story “Under the Ackee Tree” won the 2020 Paris Review Plimpton Prize: how long had you been working on the story before it was published?

JE

It took somewhere between two weeks and ten years, maybe longer. I’d been walking around with various parts of the story for more than a decade. It wasn’t until I came up with the story’s final image that I knew where it needed to begin, and that’s when I sat down to write it. When I ultimately put it down on “paper” in 2018 it took about two or three weeks and was fairly close to the version that made it into the magazine, relative to the major revision work my stories usually undergo. It was selected for publication just under a year after I finished drafting it. I submitted it for two workshops in the summer of 2018, and in the first one I was literally told to throw it away and in the second one I was told to send it out immediately. Every time one of my stories garners such strong, divergent reactions, I know a prize is on the way.

NWR

How many rounds of edits did you and TPR do on the story before it went to print? What was it like working with Emily Nemens and team?

JE

Working with Emily and her team was wonderful. The number of rounds of edits was straightforward and a bit predetermined. When Emily took the story, we had a tight turnaround to get it into the summer issue: she took it in March of 2019 and the issue hit newsstands that June. I’m used to having much more lead time, so it felt high pressure to get everything correct on a first take, so to speak, plus, of course, as a first-time contributor there was the voice in my head telling me they might hate my revisions and this big-deal moment might be taken away. I don’t think there was a real danger of that happening as I’d already been assured that they liked the state the story was in when they’d received it.

There was a round for broad notes (in which there were three or four recommendations), another for line-level editing (mostly focused on making the dialect syntactically and grammatically consistent and cutting any redundancy), then copyediting, then fact-checking. The fact-checking, as I recall, was the only round that stretched on, just a little. Mostly it was very, very helpful and saved me from exposing gaps in my understanding of how the world works. And then there were the type of questions that illuminate how odd it is to be Black — and especially from a family of Black immigrants — in the U.S. One exchange (not with Emily) went something like:

Fact checker: “Would a character born in the U.S. in 1980 have the word Negroid written on his birth record — are we overdoing the satire?”

Me: “Negroid is literally written on my birth certificate.”

There’s an idea among some writers that top editors and magazines pressure contributors to alter their stories to fit some easily consumable mold and my experience has been the opposite. Good, well-read editors tend to understand the conversations and conventions you’re working in (or at least understand when they don’t know these things) and let you do your thing. Less well-read editors tend to have a very strict idea about what story is supposed to be. That’s not to conflate editors with smaller circulations with less well-read, necessarily.

NWR

Who are the poets working today that you find the most inspiring?

JE

Danez Smith. Clint Smith. Lupe Fiasco. H.E.R. Black Thought. Kano. Nas. It’s probable that I don’t read enough poetry these days.

NWR

Who do you wish more aspiring writers would read in order to improve their craft?

JE

I think all of the authors I’ve thus far mentioned qualify. I’d add William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family as examples of genre-bending longform work that might expand young writers’ ideas of how storytelling can work. I’d ask every writer to read Toni Morrison’s Sula at least twice to understand what it means to deal with moral complexity. Read Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “Who Will Greet You At Home” to remember that deeply imaginative stories can sing within a conventional story structure and Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours to understand your stories don’t necessarily need conventional structures to work beautifully. Read just about any Kurt Vonnegut. Read Dana Johnson. Read Percival Everett. But I don’t worry about who other writers are reading, honestly. I worry that editors and literary agents aren’t reading widely. That’s where I’d spend my wishes.

NWR

If you could convince any living writer in the world, to sit down and read one of your manuscripts straight through, and then receive their honest feedback in a 1:1 setting, nevermind Covid-19 or travel or anything, which writer would you choose?

JE

That’s a crazy scenario. Imagine if I had been a fan of the workshop instructor who told me to throw my Plimpton Prize-winning story in the garbage? I might have quit writing. Or at least abandoned the story, or revised it into something unrecognizable. That story got me my NEA and got me into U.S.C., and got me a lot of other things, including the favorable readings that led to my book deals across five countries. Writers need to develop an understanding of whether their writing is mostly being received as they intended and develop a level of taste for their own work, so that a few lazy or biased readers don’t throw them off course. It’s impossible to have total objectivity, but it’s about developing a general sense of reality. You develop this in your workshops maybe. You develop this by reading widely. Know when you wrote a shitty (cliche, boring, unintelligible, unfinished) story and know when you’ve written gold. Of course, different audiences value different things, so maybe develop an understanding of your audience.

But okay, Barack Obama’s technically an author, so I’d choose him and hope to make his favorite reads list. I actually think he’d give smart feedback and if he didn’t, that would amuse me too.

NWR

What is the main difference between pursuing an MFA in creative writing and a Ph.D. in creative writing?

JE

As I see it, a Ph.D. technically prepares and qualifies you to teach across three areas of expertise, on top of creative writing. This could make you more employable, but only if you actually want to teach classes outside of creative writing.

NWR

How is it different for an aspiring writer who lives on the East Coast of the U.S. versus the West Coast?

JE

Unfortunately, three-quarters of my time on the West Coast has been under Covid-19. But here’s what I’ve gleaned. If you tell a stranger in a coffee shop you’re a writer, in my hometown, Miami, they’ll laugh in your face and tell you to get a job. Why don’t you just drive Lyft? I was told last year. At best, they’ll ask if you’ve published. Yes? Where? The Paris Review? Never heard of it. In Boston, they’ll still ask if you’ve published, but they’ll know just about every magazine under the sun. AGNI? I helped found it. Prairie Schooner? I once gave Kwame Dawes a ride to a very important meeting when he got a flat tire. If you’re a story writer, they’ll say, But what about a novel? You’ll be offended, but three weeks later some editor in their orbit really will reach out to you for work. In L.A. they’ll get excited that you’re a writer, but assume you mean for TV. I optioned my pilot once, they’ll say and tell you every show they’ve been an extra on.

Unlike the other two cities, they’ll be nice to you during these interactions.