There are the stories and books that we simply read and cherish, and then there are those that we cannot stop thinking about, can quote verbatim, and find ourselves returning to. Why certain works transcend into the indelible is a mystery but we recognize it when it happens. For writers, these works become touchstones to not only aspire towards, but also to reread for comfort and renewed marvel.
This interview features three writers whose short stories I always return to and reread. Jamel Brinkley is the author of the story collections A Lucky Man and Witness. His debut, A Lucky Man, invokes questions around masculinity as it explores the nuanced relationships of Black men and boys. Brinkley’s latest collection, Witness, scrutinizes what it means to see the world around us and how we then choose to carry all that which we’ve seen. Both books dazzle with precise language that reveals the complexities of longing. Xuan Juliana Wang is the author of Home Remedies, a collection that is divided into three parts: “Family,” “Love,” and “Time and Space.” Wang’s stories depict the dynamic and fearless youth of a new generation of Chinese and Chinese Americans as they grapple with each of these themes, painting for us a contemporary landscape of the Chinese diaspora. Sidik Fofana is the author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, a linked story collection that gives voices to the tenants of Banneker Terrace, a high rise in Harlem, as they face gentrification. While Fofana flexes his impressive control and range of voice in each story, the true gift is in taking a step back and realizing what these voices accomplish when put together. We discussed fiction that they are obsessed with, how they read their own work while writing, and whether form, be it short story or novel, affects their reading.
Brandon J. Choi: Can you introduce your collection and what you were reading and rereading while working on it?
Jamel Brinkley: Some of the writers that I find myself continually rereading showed up when I was working on both A Lucky Man and Witness. I would say James Baldwin and William Trevor bridge the two collections in terms of my rereading. Not necessarily the same stories but something about the sensibilities of those writers stayed with me. For A Lucky Man, I was thinking about a story called “Three People” by William Trevor, whereas for Witness, I was thinking more about a story called “A Day.” Both stories fascinate me for different reasons. With Baldwin, there’s the obvious “Sonny’s Blues” influence on A Lucky Man. For the recent collection, it wasn’t so much Baldwin’s fiction but more of his nonfiction. I was thinking more philosophically about Baldwin and his idea of being a witness and what it means to face troubles of the world as a writer. In terms of differences, I was thinking about the work of Yiyun Li with A Lucky Man but for Witness, I was thinking about the work of Gina Berriault, who’s a writer not as well known as she should be. Her short stories are fantastic and have been collected in various volumes such as Women in Their Beds or Stolen Pleasures.
BJC: Are the writers you reread the same ones who you aspire to write like? Or are there writers whose works you can’t help but return to regardless?
JB: Toni Morrison is one of those people who I reread, even though I don’t think I write like her and wouldn’t try to write like her. In fact, I think it’s a deadly trap to try to write like Toni Morrison because 99.5% of writers who do that fail spectacularly. The imitative attempt with her is so obvious. One of the books that I’ve been rereading and have taught multiple times is Sula. It’s a slim book and there’s nothing in the book that I want to write back to or imitate in my own work. There’s something so fascinating in that book to me. It’s called Sula but when you read it, it’s so much more than a portrait of one character. It’s a portrait of a community, a friendship, the friend herself. Morrison’s biographical sensibility in her fiction is so expansive. It’s not a book that starts with the birth of Sula and ends strictly on her death. You’re in this book for dozens of pages before you even meet Sula. I reread to think about Sula’s presence and what it means to tell a story of a character that’s really the story of what’s around the character too. But I don’t want to try to write like Sula. Conversely, there’s a certain subset of my stories that feel like they have the influences of William Trevor, Yiyun Li, or Edward P. Jones. Their works feel more natural to the way I want to tell a story.
BJC: Did your writing process or reading influences change between collections?
JB: I think so. I wrote the bulk of that first collection while I was in graduate school when I was really just trying to learn how to write a story. I was thinking: what is a short story? Why are they so difficult? Who does this well? Let me look to them. With Witness, my attitude was more experimental. Not in the way that people commonly understand experimental fiction, but experimentation with the elements of storytelling. I thought a lot about the possibilities of first person narration. What does it mean to tell a story in the first person? What are the possibilities with this form that, despite the power of voice, can be quite limiting and difficult to pull off? I was experimenting with point of view, whereas with A Lucky Man, I was a bit more on the rails, so to speak, and not trying to play within the space of the story as much.
BJC: And what works do you go to for studying the capabilities of first person?
Something about obsessive rereading still guides me.
JB: One of the stories that I reread often is “Gold Coast” by James Alan McPherson. It starts off with a voice that jumps out. It’s funny and the personality jumps off the page. You’re getting a page or two of this big, enjoyable voice. What’s fascinating about the story is McPherson’s masterful job of manipulating and modulating the first person voice. It starts off big, present, and voicey, with tone, attitude, and personality, and then, he allows that voice to recede. It’s important to have that voice recede at certain times because all the other elements of the story get to pour in and fill in that space. By the end, which is very “I” heavy, it’s so moving when we come back to that strong first person voice, but it’s moving because he didn’t allow the voice to dominate the story from beginning to end. When it returns, the effect is just earth shattering.
BJC: Do you reread stories and novels differently?
JB: The first piece of literature I can remember rereading obsessively is Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I was a sophomore or junior in high school and I would literally get to the end of that book and then start it immediately over again. I did this multiple times, so much so that my mom thought something was wrong with me. Something about that obsessive rereading still guides me. I was a young reader, probably not a very good reader, but what I remember is the feeling of total absorption. It was a spell being cast either by the language or the intelligence of the voice. There was this dim sense that the novel’s design was working on me somehow. As I moved through the book, it was sequenced and structured in a way to achieve an effect and something about reading one chapter after another did something to me. That kind of absorption and pleasure in language, that the work’s form is working on me in a way, and that I have to grasp and make an effort to understand it guides all of my rereading.
A lot of the works I reread have a sense of scope about them. No matter their length, they just feel big. Even Edward P. Jones’s “First Day,” which is just a few pages, feels massive to me. How do you tell a story about your first day of going to school and it feels like you’re telling the story of your whole life? For me, no matter how short or long the piece is, it has something to do with feeling that the work is even larger and that I’m trying to catch up to it. In rereading, I might pick up a few new things but it still feels like the work is beyond me. I like that feeling so I go after that whether it’s in short stories or novels.
BJC: What would you recommend to readers to read, if they haven’t already, or reread with a new perspective?
JB: I have been rereading The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, which I’m also teaching this fall. The scope of that book is incredible but feels intimate to me at the same time. Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks, which is her only novel. People know her as the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, but she wrote fiction. This book is composed of vignettes and doesn’t really have a plot but I think the way she captures this little girl growing into a woman’s life is brilliant. The Street by Ann Petry, which is another novel. A story to reread is Edward P. Jones’s “Old Boys, Old Girls.” It’s a strange story—one of those untidy stories—and the ending leaves people confused but if you read it and reread it, it will continually reward you.
Xuan Juliana Wang: Home Remedies spans the entire length of my 20s. The collection begins with ideas about family, chosen family, and all of the joys and burdens of loving your family. By the middle of my 20s, I was more interested in the stakes of romantic love. Not just falling in love, but also disappointment and revenge. By the end, I had more existential questions about what it meant to be alive. That’s when I started to do more speculative fiction with a goal towards getting at some truth in a different way.
While working on my collection, I was rereading Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of my Youth, which is a collection of essays that I find I can never move too far out of my bookshelf. I was also reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, which made a huge impact on me.
Brandon J. Choi: What about rereading draws you in? Is your experience different depending on the form?
XJW: I really like rereading short stories in particular. There are certain ones that I read over and over again, like “Emergency” by Denis Johnson. Another is “Another Manhattan” by Donald Antrim, which I read whenever I am writing and need to remind myself that there could be an internal escalation. I reread James Salter’s short stories as well as Julian Barnes’s work. You can reread for different reasons. Sometimes, I’m just trying to get myself back in the vernacular. It’s like if you’re trying to hang out with these sophisticated friends, after I listen to them talk a little bit, I will become more sophisticated. The music of a James Salter story is nice to get into writing. I’m also a huge fan of Mary Gaitskill. Her exactitude of language and sharpness of her sentences and observations… I read her work just to sit up straight. Usually, when I reread a short story, it’s because I want to remember why I liked it in the first place. By the end of page one, I’m hooked again. How did it do that? I no longer have to try to enjoy it as a story but I can dissect it and try to figure out its parts.
The staying power of a short story is really fascinating to me.
BJC: How do you read your own work when writing and editing?
XJW: Alexander Chee once said in a class that he prints out his work with weird margins so it doesn’t look like his own writing anymore before he edits it. That’s really the only way. Now that I’m writing a novel, I have so many words in so many Scribner files. My problem is that if I start to read it, I start to edit it, and then I don’t know if that’s even an important part of the book. It feels like I’ve written many books because of this constant rereading. These days, I am trying not to reread that much. I’m letting it live, marking it as done, and writing a description of what I thought happened in it before moving on. When I do need to edit a story or something short, I print it out and go to a coffee shop. I usually try to put somebody in the coffee shop in the edit so it feels new. I can change a description to a person actually standing there so it feels fresh to me. For that final copy edit, I rely on a professional but before that, I read it aloud to myself. There’s really no better editor than listening.
BJC: Now that you’re working on a novel, do you find yourself still returning to the story form?
XJW: I just love the short story so much that I can’t stop thinking of everything as a short story. With my novel, I thought that if I wrote it as linked stories, I would find a way to make them into a novel. But five to seven years of doing that later, I realized it was still not a novel. So during the pandemic, I tried to shut down all of the threads that didn’t lead back to the original story. I still try to make every chapter as sharp as I would want in a short story. Every chapter deserves that.
I’m teaching an Asian American short story class right now. I’m amazed that there’s no anthology for Asian and contemporary Asian American short fiction. In preparation for teaching this class, I feel like I’ve read at least part of every Asian American short story collection published since 2000. I can’t help but notice technically what the story is doing, the trends that are happening throughout time, and what devices writers are favoring to highlight certain themes. Sometimes the themes are repeated, but they’re being sought out in a completely different way. It depends more on when it’s being told than who’s telling it.
BJC: On a related note, what stories do you always want to teach and put on your syllabus?
XJW: I like to teach Hilary Leichter. There’s something about the way she opens up the narrative that’s unexpected and makes students excited and want to write. I really like to teach a Bryan Washington story. His voice is very infectious and inviting. A lot of stories I put on the syllabus are because I’m reading it then and I think it’s doing something that I can see you learning from and doing yourself. It’s never somebody who is such a virtuoso that there is no way you can do that. I’ve always wanted to teach more Asian American literature so I’m glad to be able to do that now.
When I’m trying to write a story, I find the best part and make everything as good as that part.
The staying power of a short story is really fascinating to me. There are very few novels that I can tell you what happens next. But for a short story, there are a lot that I can tell you exactly what the sentence said or what happened in a scene. I think it has to do with length. It’s like a poem—you can carry it around, memorize it, and it stays with you. I find myself always wanting to teach “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff. The end of that story is just a refrain of “they is, they is, they is.” If I think about those two words, that whole story comes back to me. When I’m trying to write a story, I find the best part and make everything as good as that part. Make every sentence and every transition as alluring to you as the best run in the story. With a story, you can do that. It has to accomplish the emotional goal that you want the reader to walk away with, but other than that, you can do it in any form you want. Aspire to make it something that people can’t forget about.
BJC: What would you recommend to readers to read, if they haven’t already, or reread with a new perspective?
XJW: The final three stories in Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. They’re linked and address each other. Maybe it’s because of our culture—I just watched Challengers and there’s also Past Lives—but there are a lot of love triangles in these stories too. They’re filled with information and the love triangles are intergenerational. All of the details are supplied for you but that feeling is still as intense even though nothing wild is happening, per se. The stories are worth reading for that intensity of the love triangles.
Sidik Fofana: Stories from the Tenants Downstairs is a collection of eight stories that takes place in a fictional high rise in Harlem. Each story is told from a resident in the building. Since all the stories take place in one building, I was thinking about books that occur in a building, a part of a city, or just any one geographical location, as well as multiple perspective narratives. One book that I still hold dear to my heart is A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Another is The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor. There’s a book called The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany, which is basically Stories but in a building in Egypt. There’s also The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse and the ground zero of multiple perspectives set in one location: Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.
Brandon J. Choi: What stories, collections, or writers do you find yourself returning to?
SF: I’m a big Junot Diaz fan, so stories like “Fiesta, 1980” or “The Cheater’s Guide to Love.” I read “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” while writing my collection and I was in despair. I thought to myself, I quit! I’m stepping into this arena? Push by Sapphire was a book that definitely comes to mind. I also find myself coming back to Toni Cade Bambara. You could tell a lot about a writer’s process by the stories that they think about, the stories that they come back to, and why. I’m super fascinated by short stories and how short fiction can encapsulate a whole world. I’m even more fascinated by what happens after one finishes a short story. For the stories that I find myself coming back to, I can remember the beginning, middle, and end of it six or even twelve months after reading it. An example of that is “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff. It just resonates. There’s something so universal about capturing someone’s whole life in the moment.
If there’s a certain narrative issue that you’re trying to figure out, there’s always a short story for that. Just like hip hop where, no matter life’s problem, there’s always a song for that. I refer a lot to Flannery O’Conner and how she can navigate closed spaces, like in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” I go back to it anytime that I have multiple characters in the same place who are interacting. George Saunders is a master of voice and humor so I go back to his work frequently too. It boils down to: what kind of narrative issue am I trying to figure out and what story helps me think through it?
BJC: How do you read your own work when writing and editing?
You could tell a lot about a writer’s process by the stories that they think about, the stories that they come back to, and why.
SF: For a first draft, I’ll just write it all the way through. I’m not willing to go back to the work from the day before and look. When I first started writing, I wanted to write as close to a perfect draft as possible. Now, I focus on just getting it down on the page. After that draft is done, I’ll go on to something else and try not to come back to that draft for six months or a year. The goal is, when I come back, I want the words to be totally strange like a different author wrote it. Preliminary edits are to cut as much as possible. While looking at the old draft, I’ll rewrite from scratch. If it works, then I barely remember that I’ve written these words and I’m more critical of them. I’ll go through that process until around draft five, which is usually when I feel okay showing it to other people. I compare it to going to the barbershop in the hood. You can’t go in with messed up hair. You realize you have to get your hair semi-together so they can get it all the way through. My draft is not going to be perfect but I’m getting it to a place where people can help it. From drafts five to ten, I either go back to the drawing board or take suggestions. Sometimes, I abandon them. Stories has eight stories but, during that time period, I must have written close to forty.
BJC: How has teaching affected your reading?
SF: The pros of teaching in a public school are remarkable. I am one book in and maybe the hype or attention is due to the fact that I’m new. If it does turn out that I have any staying power in this industry, I’m going to attribute it to being a public school teacher. At a prestigious university, the readers are willing readers, especially in a graduate school for creative writing. Everybody wants to read, be blown away by a text, and think about literature. In public school, that’s not always the case. As a matter of fact, it’s rarely the case. You mostly have reluctant readers. What I’ve learned is that when a text hits, I don’t care if you read at a third grade level. It hits. I always think, how or why does that happen?
What kind of narrative issue am I trying to figure out, and what story helps me think through it?
In public education, there’s this idea of universal design. If you have an access point for the lowest common denominator, not only does the lowest level of learner have access, but the highest has access too. For example, if you’re reading The Great Gatsby and people don’t understand the language, so you use the movie to help you out or have the kids act it out, that will help the kids who are not reading at as high of a level, but it will also help kids who do read at a high level because they’re exposed to different ways of accessing the text. Kids will react to “A&P” by John Updike and it’ll be kids who read at a third or fourth grade level, but this is also a story that was in The New Yorker. As an artist, you wonder how you can do that. As a teacher, rereading those texts and seeing every year how they resonate with kids is priceless. There’s “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, “Thank You, Ma’am” by Langston Hughes, and “The Fix” by Percival Everett. For the most part, even if they hate reading, students love this stuff. Students love Junot Diaz. They think it’s against the rules, that his work is not supposed to be academic. For me, there’s complicated reasons for why I stay a teacher. I am here for the kids but that’s not the only reason. What I learn about fiction writing, audience, and how to connect with someone who’s not necessarily a reader is priceless. Going to those stories over and over again has been invaluable in ways that I can’t even enumerate.
BJC: What would you recommend to readers to read, if they haven’t already, or reread with a new perspective?
SF: Certain stories are anthologized over and over for good reason. I talked about Flannery O’Connor already. I also find myself coming back to “Old Boys, Old Girls” by Edward P. Jones, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie, “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” by George Saunders, and “People Like That Are the Only People Here” by Loorie Moore.
For more contemporary work: “Belles Lettres” by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, “We Love You, Crispina” by Jenny Zhang, “Shadow Families” by Mia Alvar, “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain” by Danielle Evans, “No More Than a Bubble” by Jamel Brinkley, “Peach Cobbler” by Deesha Philyaw, “Animals” by Uche Okonkwo, “Smash and Grab” by Michael Knight, and “Higher Power” Megan Cummins. In the next five years, I think someone is going to take on the task of doing a contemporary anthology, especially of writers of color. I can almost guarantee that some of these writers will be included.