Writing for the Freshest Air
A Conversation with Jason Mott
Michael Colbert | November 2022
Jason Mott
Jason Mott is the author of four novels and two books of poetry. His novel The Returned was adapted by Brad Pitt’s film company into the TV series Resurrection, and his most recent novel, Hell of a Book, won the National Book Award in 2021. It was also nominated for the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In Hell of a Book, as a writer embarks on a whirlwind book tour, his world becomes increasingly surreal and absurd. Early on, the novelist meets a child, Soot, who nobody else can see. As they continue this odyssey across the country, the novelist can no longer run from the complex, racial legacies that have shaped the US. Currently, Mott is the Distinguished-Writer-in-Residence at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he also earned his BFA and MFA.
Michael Colbert: You’re a few months out from the news of the National Book Award now. How are things going?
Jason Mott: Things are good. Frenetic and insane are kind of the best ways to describe it. Winning the National Book Award is obviously a big deal, but I think everyone underestimates how busy your life becomes after you win that kind of thing. You suddenly have so much more attention, interviews, and travel, and all those things stack up. I’m just starting to throttle back and most of the touring will be done for a little while, so I can get back into my groove for the next couple months, which will be really good.
Colbert: Have there been any particular surprises?
Mott: I think there have been a lot of weird surprises. People actually want to hear what you have to say all of a sudden, and that’s been really weird. I’m the same idiot I was a year ago, but now you’re an idiot with a platform and people pay attention to what you have to say. In your brain, you always imagine that the person who wins those kinds of prizes is built for that and they’re used to it, but no, it’s a bunch of regular people who just happen to win an award.
Then, I also think there’s a low-grade emotional buoying that happens. As a writer, you spend your entire time doubting everything about yourself. As much as awards should not be a validation thing, they just are. For me, in particular with this book, there were a lot of risks that I took. I took a lot of chances and really doubted the entire thing, so to have it be a thing that wins the National Book Award, it really reassured me that my instincts aren’t total crap…
Colbert: While there’s something precarious you mentioned to external validation of your work, it sounds like it has also provided worthy validation of your process.
Mott: I talk to my therapist about this a lot. She makes a good point. External validation should never be a thing you seek or put too much stock in for all the obvious reasons, and yet at the same time we do all respond to it and want it. When it happens, how you deal with it afterwards oftentimes can say a lot about your personality and define you in different ways. It’s been really cool and really strange, but at the same I don’t take myself too seriously most of the time. I still do the same stupid stuff on a daily basis.
Colbert: Has it changed the way you think about the book?
External validation should never be a thing you seek or put too much stock in for all the obvious reasons, and yet at the same time we do all respond to it and want it. When it happens, how you deal with it afterwards oftentimes can say a lot about your personality and define you in different ways.
Mott: I think it’s still the same book. The book surprised me all along the way. I really thought it was a book no one was going to publish or read because it was too personal, it was too weird, it was too much Nic Cage, it was too much of a lot of things. So, I really didn’t think that it would even find a home, and then to have it win the National Book Award was even more perplexing. I’m still trying to unpack how that all happened, in a very positive way, in a very good way. It’s the happy accident, to quote Bob Ross.
Colbert: You mention Nic Cage and the things that made you feel like this wouldn’t get picked up. I’ve heard you speak before about the publishing journey of this book—pursuing it even when you were told it wouldn’t happen. This book is full of writerly flare and your own signature. Those particularities also present a challenge. I’m curious about how you relate to the adage, “kill your darlings.”
Mott: I’m still a fan of kill your darlings. There was a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor that I did not want to part with. It’s funny, the big Nic Cage scene happened because I had to kill one of my darlings and was resentful of it. So, almost as a dare, I told my agent, if I’m cutting this scene, I’m putting Nic Cage in a book, and she was like, I dare you, do it, see what happens. Kill your darlings actually led to one of the best moments in the novel by accident.
At the same time, I do trust my voice a bit more, and I do trust my ability to weave together very disparate things to make them hum and sing together. I’m learning where to step away from a lot of the authors I admire and their way of telling the story and instead do my thing, which feels really good.
Colbert: You mentioned influences. You’ve talked before about real-life inspiration for this book—I remember a story on book tour about an airplane. What about literary influences?
Mott: Hunter S. Thompson was one of the influences. It was honestly influenced a lot more by film than by novel writing. I wasn’t trying to make it a movie, but the people I worship in the literary scope would have never written this novel. So, in order to find this voice, I had to mix together parts of things I learned from them and their writing styles with the fun parts of my personality, my love of movies, the Coen brothers’ comedies, and Nic Cage. It was me taking foundational writing stuff I learned from watching Toni Morrison and John Gardner and William Golding—those are authors who would have never written anything close to this style of writing. I had to take the parts that were good there and mix it with my weird kid, comical, “don’t take things too seriously” goofy part of myself, add that all in, and that’s how this all happened.
Colbert: You’ve talked a lot about the noir influences for the book, and I can definitely see the filmic vision here. I’m curious, though, because you mention Toni Morrison. Reading, I was thinking about the ghost story and Beloved. There are so many genres—the comic novel, surrealism, noir—blended and remixed in your novel. How do you see the genres interacting? How did you figure out how to bring these things together?
Mott: It was very challenging, and that’s kind of why I figured the book wouldn’t work because I knew I was mixing things you’re not supposed to really mix in that way. You have film noir, you have Nic Cage, weird irreverence, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas surrealism. Particularly when it comes to Black authors, Black authors don’t get to be surrealist and comical. We’re not allowed to be. It’s not the kind of story we’re allowed to tell. And then I was also trying to have a discussion about race and serious heavy things. Trying to mix them all together was the thing I thought would kill the book. I thought I was writing the book for myself; this was too weird because of all those things. I wanted it to be this fun house that people entered and had no clue what the fuck was happening, where it was going, but just trust that they were being led in the right direction and that it was going to be okay.
Particularly when it comes to Black authors, Black authors don’t get to be surrealist and comical. We’re not allowed to be. It’s not the kind of story we’re allowed to tell.
It took a lot of revisions, a lot of gut instinct. I also had to shut down my inner editor more than I usually do. There was so much doubt and insecurity over some of the things that I was trying that didn’t have a lot of reference points. There weren’t a lot of authors I could go read to see how they did these things. There were pieces here and there. That’s why it mixes a lot of pieces of a lot of different genres. It was a strange long process that I just knew was going to fail. To have it actually work out, even when my agent liked it, I was really surprised. I grew more with this novel since probably I have with my first novel. I had so much freedom to work. When I signed this contract, it was a one-book deal. One thing my agent and I worked out is that I’ll never again have a multibook deal. I’ve learned that I need that freedom that you do not get when you’re under contract. There are tons of writers who work well under contract. I’ve found that I’m happier, more sane, more emotionally available, and I’m in a better space when I don’t have someone telling me what the book should be early on. Let me just fumble through it for a long time and let it grow, figure out what it wants to be, then I’ll sell it. That’s my new process.
Colbert: I can imagine when you’re doing something original, to have someone not only thinking about the book you’re currently writing but also the next one must create so much pressure.
Mott: Yeah, it does, especially when you’re doing something different. Everyone says they want something new and different until you give them something new and different. Then they’re like, “We don’t have a precedent for this. How do we market it and how do we sell it?”
I also wanted the freedom of being like, my next book is not a crazy imagination comedy thing. My next book might be really serious. I want the freedom to let it be that. With publishing, and this is all industries, once somebody becomes a known commodity—you can sell this many books to this many readers who expect this kind of thing from you—they’re always going to expect that similar thing from you, that same style of music, same style of film, and that’s why so many book contracts will steer you in the direction of making the same book over and over. Now, I have the freedom to make the next book whatever I want it to be. It’s funny, winning the National Book Award made me learn to not care what other people think because one of the first books I’ve written and truly just didn’t care winds up being one of the biggest hits of my career. I’ve learned, not to negate or ignore others’ opinions, but just to write the thing. That’s the simplest lesson you have to learn with writing, but you have to be reminded of it.
Colbert: Among all these genres that the novel is working with, it’s also metafiction, interested in the creation of the story, publishing, and the book world. This is a hard thing to pull off; so often books about writers get called out or deemed passé. Was there something about a book tour that felt particularly fruitful to you in engaging the novel’s deeper themes?
Mott: Eventually yes, not in the beginning. It was not some grand architecture that I thought of long ago. I wrote half a manuscript years ago that was a comedy about an author on book tour, and it was just me recounting a lot of weird adventures and adding some fiction in. It had an arc and development, but it didn’t have any discussion of race and America. Then fast forward a few years and I started writing these things about American race, identity, and myself, and then combining the two and that’s when I found out how they fit.
Being on tour, you feel very alone and isolated. That is essentially the American experience for a lot of minorities, and a lot of my personal experience growing up. Mirroring that sense of being unmoored, alone, and drifting through that chaotic universe and country, the book tour format began to work really well. It fit with that sense of loneliness, not having clear cut anchors, and trying to avoid certain things. That sense of never having a spot that is truly yours, a spot that you actually feel rooted in, that is something I struggle with on a day-to-day basis and a lot of minorities struggle with.
Colbert: As the book tour destabilizes one reality and draws out a deeper one, this unmooring also opens the door to the novel’s play with genre, that chaotic world you’re talking about.
A lot of critique of genre work often relates to escapism. In this case, the outer world starts to become more absurd and surreal to reflect his inner world. There’s a sense of where he’s moving. Do you see a relationship between genre and escape? Where can genre lead us?
Mott: Most genre writing is the quintessential escapism. We like genre writing because it’s like comfort food—it’s familiar. But with the surrealism and escapism tied together, I wanted to reflect how I navigate life and how writers navigate that because you’re always in your imagination.
I think of myself as a philosophical absurdist. I think life has no point and you’ve got to just laugh at it, and I like surrealism as an art form and in all genres. It deconstructs reality and reveals these things in very unsettling ways. Finding that space also made me realize how Black voices don’t ever get to be that. I have had a hard time finding other Black, surrealist, comedic voices. And yet, I know that for so many other people out there, they live that existence, and they want that voice. That was part of the fun, finding that space between the two. I think a lot of how you get through the existence of being Black, if you don’t laugh at it, you’re going to cry. So, you’ve got to laugh at it and make it part of the artistic voice and landscape.
I think one thing that’s been denied a lot of minority voices is the ability to be absurdist and the ability to be surreal. All people want from minority voices is, “Tell us your tale of suffering. And only do it in this realistic way so we can look at ourselves clearly and think about that.” I mean, one, what if I don’t want to tell you my tale of suffering? I could tell you a thousand other stories, and two, if I do decide to tell you my tale of suffering, maybe I don’t want to do it the way you’ve seen it a billion times. Go to someone else for that. With Hell of a Book, there is nothing new in terms of what is being discussed, but I do believe the approach has rarely been used. You’ve got James Baldwin and Toni Morrison who do it in a very realistic, grounded, conventional way, but I didn’t want this to be done in a conventional way. I wanted this to be a book for weird people, for weird kids who grew up into weird adults who still had to live through all the bullshit with everyone else but who want to express it in a different way.
Colbert: Thinking of your National Book Award acceptance speech also, do you have hopes for how the weird people and mad kids might connect with this book?
Mott: In a lot of ways, this book was like a letter to my younger self, and it’s the book that I would have loved to have read when I was younger. As a writer growing up, I never saw Black writers who wrote in absurdist comedy but also still did very serious stuff. If you get into movies, there are plenty of Black comedians, but I’m talking about literature and fiction. Absurdist, surreal Black voices are out there, but they’re usually either or. I hope if I were younger and I came across this book and found it was by a Black author and did all this weird, awesome, crazy cool, fun stuff but still having a very serious discussion, that’s the book I would have loved to have read. “Oh, I don’t have to do it just like all these authors who are established and canonical—and for very good reason—but I can also do it like this weird person over here did it and this can still actually work.” That was one of my big goals. I’m hoping someone somewhere connects with that.
Colbert: One thread within Hell of a Book is that the narrator—the author—is made to do these things as a Black man and a Black author. The relationship with his agent draws that out. There’s one scene at a book signing in San Francisco where they’re watching protests from inside the store. How do you see the relationship between writing and activism? Is that something you think about? It seems really foregrounded in the book—this question of what the protagonist’s relationship is to what’s happening outside of him. Obviously towards the end he can’t avoid it.
Mott: My opinion on that is always changing. All writing is a philosophical argument about something. It’s either for something or against something, reinforcing norms or trying to deconstruct social norms. That’s everything from poetry to fiction to movies to comic books. And so, as an author, activism becomes a part of that. It’s all about what volume it’s turned to. There’s always a low-grade kind of activism in even the most conventional stories. They tend to reinforce certain things.
One of the responsibilities of all minorities is to be the conscience of the majority. If you don’t remind them of the dirty shit they’ve done and how they’re doing bad things, they will just run over you. It’s not always malicious. What’s the quote—never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by idiocy—but that doesn’t negate the impact of it, and oftentimes it is malicious. And so, if you’re not being an activist, if you’re not speaking up, your voice fades away and you get ground under the machine. And yet at the same time, with minority authors, oftentimes the only time you’re allowed to speak is when you are being an activist and that’s another form of crushing a voice because now you don’t get some little Black or Hispanic kid writing The Lord of the Rings. All they can write are the activist stories. No, I’m sure they’ve got beautiful, amazing, imaginative stories they’d love to tell, but because they are a minority, you don’t want to hear that story.
There should be a balanced ecosystem. White authors, particularly white male authors, can be activists, they can be imaginative, do fantasy, they get all the choices, and that’s how it should be for minority writers as well. You should not have the requirement of always being an activist, you should be allowed to goof off sometimes and not try to change the world with every novel. Sometimes you just want to share an imaginative story and have people like it.
Colbert: To the point of the ecosystem, Carmen Maria Machado said on the Granta podcast how the problem isn’t that we need a certain kind of queer story, but that we just need more. Like you’re saying, that’s the real problem, how many stories have been able to be told.
Mott: Exactly, exactly, and that’s always going to be one of the hindrances because again when you’re any kind of a minority, you’re just identified as that. What happens in publishing, in film, the business side of things, they go with what they think the majority wants. You’re only allowed to tell those stories, you don’t get that diversity, you don’t get that lush ecosystem where everything is feeding off of everything and telling you different kinds of stories and they’re communicating with each other. You don’t really get to have that, and I think that’s a serious problem.
Colbert: Hopefully that’s something that can continue to improve in the publishing world.
Mott: Yeah, I think it ebbs and flows. The pendulum swings. Over the long term, things are definitely improving; I just think it’s slow going.
Colbert: It’s one thing I’ve been interested in with your book—we can think about storytelling, but also there’s this critique of the publishing world, which is particularly rich.
I wanted to think about craft with you, as well. One idea you’ve talked about in your workshops is that the writer keeps the reader underwater and needs to bring them up for air. This is something I think about all the time. For you, where is the water and where is the air in this novel?
Mott: For me the water is definitely the shootings. The Soot sections are very much underwater. All those heavy moments where the author is being forced to finally reconcile things, or face things, those are very much underwater moments. The air is the comedy: running naked through the hotel, the vomiting from the car, getting too drunk, Randy showing up. All those moments for me are that feeling of, “Oh, I can let go of the muscles that are tense now. I don’t have to grit through this rough scene, wondering if something really terrible is about to happen.” Then you start easing them back in. You don’t shock them by letting a really terrible thing happen when they were just relaxed. I’m reading a book right now that’s terrific, but I’ve been underwater for a long time, and I’m just like, “Okay when am I coming up for air at any point in this novel?” I’m here for stories that keep you under. I love dark, depressing, sad, rough stories. But as a reader, also I would love some air.
Colbert: Those moments of air in your novel are really joyful in these complicated ways that emerge from the absurdism. There’s a lot of love.
Mott: My philosophy was when I brought people up for air, I wanted it to be the freshest, crispest, strangest air, the most unexpected moments they could have. Those unexpected moments are the ones you remember, they stay in the brain longer. Especially if they’ve come after this chaos. It’s like coming out of a desert and you don’t just find water, you find an ice cream stand. Your brain is like, “What? I don’t care, but it’s awesome.” That’s what I want it to be, it’s not just coming up for air but powerful and distinctive and the most unexpected thing.
Colbert: You mention the ice cream stand. One moment that really stuck with me is when they’re at Hershey Park and they’re looking at the sun in this overly sweet place. The water and the air blur, and you realize you are underwater. That moment where the horizon blends, you can’t look at it, your reality starts to crackle in this remarkable way.
You’re teaching a workshop now too; what are you noticing in teaching and reviewing writing?
Mott: I’ve been training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu for a few years now, and it’s actually helping my teaching. Jiu-jitsu has very clearly defined progression points. Having done it for six years, you’re able to clearly see what stage of development someone is at. I think with my teaching, I’m able to see what stage of development writers are at, which really helps me give them better advice. A lot of grad students are at the pretty words phase. They understand how to make things sound awesome. They still don’t understand how to do plot well or how to connect all these things in a larger work. The most important part is that you learn you’re going to reach a point where you can do this one thing really well, but you still suck at thirty other things. That’s okay; that’s actually really healthy and really good because if you keep going you will get better at those things and you’re still progressing.
Writing is such a long learning process. It’s even longer than I had imagined it was. I could not have written Hell of a Book ten years ago, probably not five years ago, because I wasn’t the writer then that I am now. It took a lot of growth and experimenting for all those things to happen. When I give feedback to students, I really do it with this sense of trying to encourage them to be patient with themselves because our instinct, especially coming out of grad school, is to say, “I’m at the pinnacle of my powers and this is the best it will ever be.” Yes and no, you probably are at the pinnacle of your abilities, but you still have so many more abilities to grow. It’s not the end, it’s this pretty early stage in the process that you go forward with. That’s something I teach towards; this is a very long road and you’re all early. You’ve got such a bright awesome way to go if you can get through the desert of failure and rejection, which you have to go through because that’s a real thing.
Colbert: What are you interested in these days in your own writing? What are you experimenting with? What ability do you want to take on next?
Mott: Right now, my writing is very much trying to include so much more of my imagination, in the same way that Hell of a Book was me just dumping my imagination onto the page. I’m also trying to do more of that around other topics that I’ve wanted to talk about for a long time and things that I’m trying to understand. The challenge for me is trying to find a way to talk about these very conventional, large scale, very serious topics in a way that is different and weird, and not different for the sake of different but different because that’s how I want to tell the story. I want the story to be this mixture of comedy and philosophy and all these different things. Right now, I’m trying to find out how far off into the weeds of obscure, surrealist comedy I can go and still keep people grounded. It will cause failures. You cannot grow without failure. I’m definitely anticipating somewhere down the road there could be some massive, “Oh my god what was he doing?” and that’s fine. I hope that happens
Colbert: It sounds like Hell of a Book you wrote for yourself and in a similar way, as you experiment, knowing there will be failure is liberating.
Mott: It’s funny, one of the questions you get asked a lot—and it’s a fair question—but people say, “After winning the National Book Award, you must be feeling so much pressure for your next book because now everyone’s looking at you and blah blah blah,” and it’s funny because I have the exact opposite reaction. I feel the most liberated I have ever felt in my entire life creatively. I think the thought process is that because you did something big the next thing you do has to be bigger, and I have the exact opposite thought process. I just climbed Everest. I don’t have to do it twice. I really don’t. I can just climb a mole hill and sit and have a beer. I’ve learned that I have to guard my own creative space and emotional space. I’m the most liberated I’ve ever been because I don’t have a contract, I can turn the book in whenever I want, it can be about whatever I want, and I can just try to find a home for it. If it finds a home, awesome, if it doesn’t, I’ve already won the National Book Award, I can go my own way. I’m in a really cool creative space right now.
Michael Colbert is a queer writer based in Massachusetts. He holds an MFA from UNC Wilmington, and his writing appears in Esquire, NYLON, Catapult, and Electric Literature, among others.
Excerpt from Hell of a Book
I.In the corner of the small living room of the small country house at the end of the dirt road beneath the blue Carolina sky, the dark-skinned five-year-old boy sat with his knees pulled to his chest and his small, dark arms wrapped around his legs and it took all that he had to contain the laughter inside the thrumming cage of his chest.
His mother, seated on the couch with her dark hands folded into her lap and her brow furrowed like Mr. Johnson’s fields at the end of winter, pursed her lips and fidgeted with the fabric of the tattered gray dress she wore. It was a dress she’d bought before the boy even came into this world. It aged with him. Year upon year, the blue floral pattern faded, one shade of color at a time. The threads around the hem lost their grip on things. They broke apart and reached their dangling necks in every direction that might take them away. And now, after seven years of hard work, the dress looked as though it would not be able to hold its fraying fabric together much longer.
“Did you find him?” the boy’s mother asked as her husband came into the room.
“No,” the boy’s father said. He was a tall man with large eyes and a long, gangly frame that had earned him the nickname “Skinniest Nigga Breathing” back when he was a boy. The name had stuck over the years, lashed across his back from childhood to manhood, and, having never found a cure for his almost mythological thinness, the man had taken to wearing long-sleeved clothes everywhere he went because the empty air held within the sleeves made him look larger than he was. At least, that was what he believed.
He was a man who had been afraid of the eyes of others for all of his life. How could he not want his child to learn the impossible trick of invisibility?
“It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll find him soon. I know it. I’m sure that, wherever he is, he’s fine. He can take care of himself. He’s always going to be fine.” He took a seat beside his wife on the tired brown couch and wrapped the spindly reeds of his fingers around the fidgeting doves that were her hands. He lifted them to his lips and kissed them. “He’s a good kid,” the father said. “He wouldn’t just up and leave us. We’ll find him.”
“He’s the best boy in the whole world,” the mother said.
“Maybe he just went off into the woods to find some briarberries. I bet that’s where he went.”
“You think so?”
The father thought for a moment. “Not sure, but I’m hopeful, Dollface.”The boy’s mother chuckled at “Dollface” and dabbed the corner of her eye. Was she crying?
From Hell of a Book by Jason Mott. Copyright © 2021 by Jason Mott. Excerpted by permission of Dutton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
