A Greater Place of Empathy: PN Interviews Fiction Judge Jonathan Escoffery
Associate fiction editor Tori Rego chats with our Waasnode Fiction Prize judge Jonathan Escoffery about community, storytelling, and the best kind of apple.
Passages North: Your writings—I’m thinking specifically of “In Flux,” published in Passages North—dance around the concept of community. How do you see the idea of community operating in your work both on the page, and off the page?
Jonathan Escoffery: On the page, I’m interested in complicating and problematizing conceptions of identity and community; I’m interested in how we shape ourselves by degrees of opposition and conformity within our various communities. I think great art often helps us examine our assumptions and that even if, ultimately, such examinations lead us back to our original, often imperfect conclusions, stories can operate as proofs for how we arrive there, which can bring us to a greater place of empathy and understanding.
In the case of “In Flux,” I was interested in what complications an American-born boy of Jamaican parentage, and of African and European descent, presenting, to some degree, as racially ambiguous, might find in claiming a neat, pre-packaged identity, and how the competing attitudes—the contradictory denials and affirmations—held by those within his various communities might further complicate this, and how shifting geographic and class locations would complicate this even further.
Thinking in terms of literary community can help me situate my work in conversations that began long before my time, which, in turn, helps me consider what I might be adding to these conversations.
PN: I’m interested in your creative influences. What fiction writers have moved you? Any non-literary influences: chefs, performance artists, collagists, mimes, etc.?
JE: When I wrote “In Flux” I was thinking more in terms of lived experience versus influences. Then, at some point after my story was published in PN, I reread Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, which I’d first come across in college, and which is about a biracial (Black and white) woman’s movement between different communities (the Deep South, Chicago, Harlem, Copenhagen) in the 1920s, and how she feels stifled by these communities and their treatment of race and gender. When I read Quicksand for the first time, it blew my mind. It was the most nuanced portrayal of a certain kind of Black American experience that I’d read. That feeling got somewhat buried over time, but returning to it, I recognized immediately how it had influenced my writing—how it gave me permission to write about racial identity—and how the story, nearly one hundred years after it was originally published, feels ever more resonant, perhaps because I’ve lived in many more U.S. cities and have visited many more countries at this point and understand first-hand how geography changes one’s relationship with identity.
It won’t surprise anyone familiar with my work that I’m a fan of stories that track a set of threads over large spans of time, and Lorrie Moore and Jennine Capó Crucet were among the earliest authors I’d read who do this with great success. There’s so much beauty, pain, and humor in the works of Andrea Levy, Denis Johnson, Mat Johnson, Percival Everett, Paul Beatty, Kurt Vonnegut, and Justin Torres that speaks to me.
Outside of fiction and film, music has had the largest influence on how I approach writing. Nas and Biggie taught me as much about storytelling as any author I’ve read.
PN: As the judge of this year’s Waasnode short fiction prize, what pulls you into a short story? What makes a work of short fiction compelling or exciting to you as a reader?
JE: Stories that implicitly or explicitly introduce a compelling question that I’ll desire to learn the answer to grab me and keep me reading forward. Stories that do this successfully often pace the release of information well, so that I quickly feel grounded in context, rather than confused by a lack of information. If I understand the basic setup, I’ll want to see how it plays out.
For example: It’s the morning of Miami Carnival and our young protagonist is determined to find her estranged father at the parade downtown? Great, now I have a bit about the who, the where, the when, and the context, so I’ll read on to learn how these two characters became estranged, why she’s compelled to find him today of all days, whether she’ll find him at all, and what happens if she does. There’s built-in stakes with this kind of family dynamic, but more stakes will (hopefully) be introduced as I read forward. She needs something from him—a favor or a piece of valuable information maybe. There are consequences to her finding him, I hope, both tangible and intangible.
Of course, a story doesn’t need a conventional setup to be compelling—many of my favorite stories don’t begin this way—but if I’m asking who, what, where, when, and why several pages into a story, then there’s a problem.
I love a compelling narrative voice—a bit of personality, a bit of humor couched in some other emotion. I love a story that teaches me something. I prefer stories that demonstrate an awareness of the world we actually live in, even if the world of the story is unfamiliar.
PN: What are your favorite writing snacks?
JE: Is coffee a snack? I keep time by the gradual draining of my French press.
I love apples for a snack. A Pink Lady apple is like candy to me.
PN: Coolest word you haven’t figured out how to sneak into your writing yet?
JE: Off the top of my head? Braggadocious? Persnickety maybe? It’s possible that I’m just bad at using adjectives, or that writing workshops have beaten the idea of using adjectives out of me, so these are the words that often don’t make it into my writing.
On the other hand, I go through cycles where I’m just not all that interested in varying vocabulary so much as I am interested in creating a mood or a character’s psychology through rhythm and repetition, and playing with sentence length and combinations of syllables in my word ordering.
Jonathan Escoffery’s writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Paris Review, AGNI, ZYZZYVA, Pleiades, Salt Hill, The Caribbean Writer, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He has received support and distinctions from Aspen Words, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Somerville Arts Council, The Writers' Room of Boston, Kimbilio Fiction, the Anderson Center, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Prairie Schooner, The Best American Short Stories anthology, and elsewhere. Jonathan earned his MFA in Fiction from the University of Minnesota and attends the University of Southern California’s PhD in Creative Writing and Literature Program as a Provost Fellow. Jonathan is a previous winner of Passages North’s Waasnode Fiction Prize.
