We are re-posting our
February 2010 interview with Mecca Jamilah Sullivan in honor of her reading here with us tomorrow! Join us
this Friday, May 11, from 7-9 pm for our Nor'easter Open Mic, featuring
Sullivan and
Nathan Long, with an hour of open mic to follow! For more information, you can visit
our site or the
Nor'easter blog.
Writing Profile: Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
February 22, 2010
1) How would you describe your writing?
I
write fiction that is propelled by characters and their language. I’m
always interested in people—who they are and how they’ve become that
way, what they do and why they do it, how their decisions change their
world, what experiences change them and force them to grow. I really
enjoy walking for a while in characters’ heads and lives, figuring out
how they think and how they speak. In many ways, I think our voices
reflect the depths of who we are and what we’ve experienced. So as a
lover of character-driven fiction, voice is really important to me, as
well.
2) How does writing fit into your everyday life?
When
writing isn’t a part of my day, I definitely notice its absence. Which
doesn’t mean that I get to write fiction every day, of course. There are
lots of days when I don’t write more than a to-do-list and a couple of
belabored emails. I think it’s important for writers to acknowledge all
of the different kinds of writing we do. I once took a course on print
culture from the Renaissance era onward, where the professor drew our
attention to all the various kinds of print we take in every day— the
text on sugar packets, five billion kinds of street signs, the logos on
the bottoms of our boots. I think writing is sort of the same way. We
collage and troubleshoot words in so many ways, and spend lots of hidden
time putting words together. I have good friends who treat nearly every
email they send like a confection, kneading and pinching and frosting
it until they feel it’s done.
Right now, I’m doing a lot of
critical writing for my Ph.D., which is definitely different from my
fiction. In many ways, though, it works the same muscle; almost any kind
of writing gives us the chance to conjure up thoughts and images, then
lasso them into being with words. Letters, journal entries, even
to-do-lists, even business memos, I imagine, can offer moments of play.
On days when I don’t get to write fiction, I try to really enjoy the
creative aspects of whatever I am writing. But I make a note of it, and
my day does feels a little different. I feel best when I’m creating
things with words.
3) What authors and/or poets and writers inspire you?
Oh,
there are so many. I am a huge, huge fan of Toni Morrison. I recently
rediscovered her short story “Recetatif,” and sort of fell tragically
and beautifully in awe all over again. I admire her for so many reasons,
and talking about her always feels to me like trying to talk about
love, to anatomize it. Her narrators are always completely authoritative
and yet infinitely supple—they let you know that they have an important
story to tell and that they are in control of that story, but they
somehow also charm you into listening, settling in, going along for the
ride, no matter how challenging and even painful it may be. I have
similar feelings about Virginia Woolf, especially in
To The Lighthouse,
and Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner. Jamaica Kincaid’s narrative
voices always make me itch for a pen. As does Gayl Jones’s imagination,
and James Joyce’s, too.
And there are lots of younger
contemporary writers whose work inspires me. Junot Diaz, Edwidge
Danticat, and Sapphire stand out as models of folks who explore multiple
worlds and multiple experiences—hip-hop culture, immigrant culture,
issues of sexuality and gender, exile and alienation, all kinds of
fusions and fractures—on a contemporary urban stage that my generation
can relate to. I grew up in Harlem in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and I think
I’ll always be drawn to stories rooted in that kind of time and place.
The voices of rappers like Queen Latifah, Sugar Hill Gang, and the
Notorious B.I.G. loom about as large for me as a lot of these authors
I’ve mentioned. So I admire writers who’ve been able to tap into the
urgency and complexity of young, urban voices and bring them to other
parts of the world.
4) How does the community of Philadelphia play a part in your writing?
Philly
has always felt like a home away from home for me. My mother was born
and raised in North Philly, and that side of my family is still here. On
a basic level, Philly and writing have always gone together for me.
Throughout elementary school, I would come and spend a week or two of my
summer vacation with my grandmother, and I’d always do a lot of
writing. Every morning she’d clip the Cryptogram word puzzle from the
Inquirer for me, and I’d do the puzzle and then write little stories
based on whatever the quote turned out to be.
Now, Philly’s
writing community is a sort of home-base for me. Most of the stories
that I’ve published were written here, on the slanted stoops of
buildings in the Art Museum area, or on the bus en route to West Philly,
or in coffee shops downtown. Art in general is really alive in a
special way in Philly. Community art is such an important part of the
culture here, with the Mural Arts program, for example, which makes a
walk through this city like a trip through Wonderland for anyone who
loves art. And there are so many talented writers here—communities like
Big Blue Marble, the Chapter and Verse series, the Light of Unity
series, Moles not Molar, Running Wild Writers, and the Kelly Writers
House all bring rich, interesting new fiction and poetry within close
reach. Then, too, the legacy of writers like Sonia Sanchez, John Edgar
Wideman, and W.E.B. Dubois is definitely an inspiration in itself.
5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community a little about it.
This is a tough one. I suppose that would be Jamaica Kincaid’s
Mr. Potter.
It’s a really stunning book about the life of a seemingly unremarkable
Antiguan man, told from the point of view of his daughter. As in all of
Kincaid’s work, the narrator taps into this unrelenting first-person
voice that hooks you immediately, and makes you crave her when she’s
gone. The book follows the narrator as she imagines and reconstruct her
father’s life, thinking through how forces like colonialism, poverty,
racism and classism, infidelity and love have shaped him, and, in turn,
shape her. It’s one of Kincaid’s more recent novels, and I think it
reflects everything that I admire about her work, and everything I try
to do in my own. It makes you fall in love with the characters even
through their missteps and cruelty, makes you root yourself in her
fictional world, even with its real-world treacheries and flaws.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is from Harlem, New York. Her writing has appeared or is
forthcoming internationally in publications including Callaloo,
American Fiction, Best New Writing, Crab Orchard Review,
Bloom, Lumina, Amistad, The Minnesota Review,
2010 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, Baobab: South African
Journal of New Writing, American Visions and GLQ.
She is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the William Gunn
Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, as well as honors
from Glimmer Train, Gulf Coast, American Short
Fiction, Best New Writing, Philadelphia
Stories, the Boston Fiction Festival, Sol Books, Temple University,
Del Sol Press, the NAACP, and others. She is the recipient of scholarships,
fellowships, and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The
Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, the New York State Summer
Writers’ Institute, the Center for Fiction, and Williams College. She holds a
Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She
recently completed her dissertation on voice and difference in contemporary
women’s literature of the African Diaspora.
