Three Questions and A Quote: Novelist and Nonfiction Writer Mitchell S. Jackson

Mitchell S. Jackson, award-winning novelist, journalist, and nonfiction writer

Mitchell S. Jackson has become a force in U. S. literature and journalism, as well as an outspoken advocate for, and critic of, his hometown of Portland, Oregon. His evocations of Portland’s Black community life, in both fiction and nonfiction, have garnered national attention and numerous awards. In recent years, he has become a major figure in magazine writing, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award for his profile of Ahmaud Arbery in Runner’s World and, more recently, profiling other important Black figures and writing about vital national issues as a columnist for Esquire.

For a full bio, see below.

Mitchell S. Jackson

WNW: What aspect of the Northwest do you feel hasn’t been adequately addressed in writing yet?

MSJ: Good question. I don’t know if I’m qualified to answer that question, but for me, I love writing about the Black experience in Oregon. It was something I didn’t read about growing up. I’m interested in recording the history of Black people. In revealing or reifying the value of our experiences. I could be wrong, but I have a feeling that much of the writing about Oregon reflects its demographics, which are overwhelmingly white. We need voices that aren’t represented in the area in great numbers. We need stories about groups that get pushed to the margins, silenced, forgotten. Not just Black people but any group that fits that description. I’m interested in pushing against the master narratives.

Martin Luther King Jr. mural in N. Portland, image from The Guardian

WNW: How would you characterize your approach to the Northwest in your own writing?

MSJ: At least ostensibly, my writing is narrow in scope. Mostly, I’ve written about Portland. Not Oregon at large. Not the Northwest. And to be more specific, I’ve mostly written about the Black community in Portland. That said, I believe in that microcosm I am able to write about things that are universal or at least not limited to Black people in Portland. We aren’t the only ones who’ve faced housing discrimination. Aren’t the only ones who’ve had to deal with a problem of youth violence. We aren’t the only ones whose community has been wracked by mass incarceration. We aren’t the only ones who created culture out of our oppression.

WNW: What is your favorite book about the Northwest and why do you like it?

MSJ: My favorite book about the Northwest is Fight Club. I love what Chuck [Palahniuk] does with voice. Love how he captures the anxiety of a generation, captures men’s fascination with violence. I love love love those Tyler Durden monologues. And then there’s the surprise at the end, which testifies to how well it’s plotted. That book is so good. So, so good. And the fact that he wrote that book while in Tom Spanbauer’s Portland-area workshop makes it more special to me. That book is a tie with Jesus’ Son. Among other strengths, the poetry of that book’s prose is unrivaled. I read it every year or so just to be reminded of what prose can do. That book is magic.

WNW: What is one of your favorite passages about the Northwest from your own writing?

MSJ: It’s the opening of Survival Math. It’s written as a letter to Marcus Lopius, the first Black man on record to step foot in what became the state of Oregon. Writing that essay pushed me to research more of my home state’s history, and let me tell you, it was revelatory. Something else: I can’t talk about that essay without mentioning Dr. Darrell Miller of Portland State (Go Vikings!) to whom I’m indebted for making me aware of Lopius and other important elements of Oregon’s history. In the essay, which is titled “Dear Marcus,” there’s a point at which I write about the beginning of whatever significant Black population Portland has:

“Scores of us can trace our roots in this city, the Rose City, to the 1940s, when one of our kinfolk from down South peeped a Help Wanted ad in their hometown paper, packed their life into bags and-or suitcases, and caught boxcars called the Magic Carpet Special or the Kaiser Caravan into Portland for a chance to build a new life working in one of Henry Kaiser’s shipyards. Those relatives locomoted into the City of Roses and found a hovel or shacked up with friends or relatives or in some cases slept on the pool table of a tavern and washed their private parts in a squalid bathroom. Or else moved to a slapdash development dubbed Kaiserville and renamed Vanport City. No matter the shelter they found, they could feel gratified building Liberty ships that would help the Allies beat the Nazis while clocking more dough for work than they ever did where they came from.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His essay collection Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was named a best book of 2019 by fifteen publications. Jackson’s other honors include fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the NYPL, the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and TED. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Time, and Esquire, as well as in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Esquire. He holds the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professorship in the English Department of Arizona State University.

Visions of NW Writing: Nature, Stereotypes, and the White Default

*Fishing, ca. 1920, Asahel Curtis, General Subjects Photograph Collection, 1845-2005, Washington State Archives, Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov, accessed: 11-4-21*

If you Google “writing the Northwest,” one link that pops up is a 2004 tongue-in-cheek piece from The Stranger called “How to Write a Great Northwest Novel.” Among the elements author Ryan Boudinot suggests be included are several that are nature-centric: salmon, weather, and trees. While the others—like strong-willed women, technology and industry, and boats or cancer—don’t relate exclusively to white people, it’s hard not to think the type of novel Boudinot is poking fun at would have a white protagonist and be written by a white author.

Another link you’ll find is for a film called “Writing Oregon,” a lush tribute to the natural beauty of that state, with gorgeous video of gently flowing streams, snow-capped mountains, and austere sageland alternating with writers talking about the importance of being in nature and the dire need to preserve it. Although the film includes poems by Native American authors, all but one of the writers who appear on screen are white.

A third link takes you to the home page for the Oregon State University MFA in Creative Writing program’s ongoing Literary Northwest Series, in which 23 of the 27 writers who have read to date have been white. (I don’t know how many of these writers write about nature or even about the NW, but it’s a good bet many of them do.)

I list these items not to criticize the people who put them together or those who appeared in the Oregon film or have read in the OSU series, but merely to point out how much of what people (inside and outside the NW) have imagined to be “Northwest writing” has been related to nature and written by white people.

(In more recent years, Boudinot has founded an organization called Seattle City of Literature which runs a program called Racial Equality and the Literary Arts and has a board with a majority of people of color, while OSU’s MFA program has brought an impressive number of writers of color to campus for its Visiting Writers Series and actively pursues diversity. As for the film, its focus is nature and the writers featured in it have devoted much of their writing to the celebration and preservation of nature.)

Even now, in the midst of a racial reckoning and reevaluation, when some of the most visible protests have taken place in Portland and Seattle, the visions readers have of NW writers and writing subjects generally have little to do with people of color. They also have little to do with the parts of cities where most Chinese immigrants, Asian Americans, and African Americans in the NW have resided; the kinds of farming most Japanese did before WWII or many Latinx immigrants have been forced to do; or earlier regional battles for racial justice.

If you were to ask most readers—especially those from other areas—what antagonists NW characters face, their answers would likely be: environmental threats, the hardships of living in nature, natural disasters like fire or earthquakes, internal demons (brought on by all that rain, you know), and maybe—just maybe—some kind of prejudice, generally of the settlers-vs.-Indians sort. (The online summary of the entry on “Writing the Pacific Northwest” in Cambridge University Press’s A History of Western American Literature, for example, is devoted exclusively to what it calls “the persistence of the Pacific Northwest as an ecological rather than social or political imaginary.”) The unexamined assumption behind most of these is that the protagonists and authors are white.

It’s no surprise, of course, that most literature written about the Northwest up to and including the 21^st century has been written by whites and focused on white interests. Since the devastation of the Indigenous population in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the region’s residents have been overwhelmingly white and the writers born of this dominant group have written for white audiences. While many of these authors have written books that are deeply sensitive (especially toward Indigenous culture) and focused in the broadest sense on what it means to be human, the fact remains that the experiences of NW people of color have been terribly underrepresented.

Among the voices seldom heard beyond a small circle are those of: the Native Americans who have outlasted repeated white predations; the Chinese immigrants who settled in the area in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, only to be driven out again; the tens of thousands of African Americans who’ve flowed into the region since the start of World War II; the Japanese Americans who developed successful farms and small businesses before being brutally bundled off to internment camps; and the increasing number of Latinxs, Asians and Asian Americans who have arrived in more recent times to take jobs in the tech industry and a wide variety of other fields.

There have been exceptions, of course, to the lack of attention paid to the lives lived by NW people of color. Among the breakthrough books are:

* Almost anything by Sherman Alexie, who did more than anyone else to highlight the self-told history and contemporary life of NW Native Americans before his personal actions caused many readers to shun him.

* Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s widely-read Thousand Pieces of Gold, which explores the plight of Chinese immigrants in the days before and after the Chinese Exclusion Act.

* Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which gives a glimpse of prewar Japanese American life in Seattle before taking readers into the hardships caused by FDR’s Executive Order 9066.

* Mitchell S. Jackson’s bestselling novel Residue Years and his hugely popular memoir Survival Math, both evocations of daily life in the Black areas of N. Portland.

Fortunately, in a region of increasing diversity, more and more writers of color are publishing works about their own experiences, as well as the stories of relatives, historical figures, or imaginary characters living rich and often difficult lives. These works provide alternative views not only of the NW but also of life itself—views that have the potential to move readers beyond the stereotypes of the past, showing them that the NW is more than salmon, weather, and trees.

Links to help you find some of these writings:

* From the Seattle Library: “PNW Asian American and Pacific Islander Authors”

* From Humanities Washington: University of Washington English Professor Anu Taranath’s “Top Ten Pacific Northwest Authors of Color”

* The Seattle-based African-American Writers’ Alliance

* Resilience Through Writing: A Bibliographic Guide to Indigenous-Authored Publications in the Pacific Northwest before 1960 (The writings here aren’t literary, per se, but the 2,000 entries give some idea of the volume of Native American writing available.)

A few books you might start with:

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (novel) by Heidi W. Durrow
Piecing Me Together (novel) by Renee Watson
No-No Boy (novel) by John Okada
Fools Crow (novel) by James Welch
Women on the Run (short stories) by Janet Campbell Hale
Legends from Camp (poetry) by Lawson Fusao Inada
Seven Hands Seven Hearts (poetry & prose) by Elizabeth Woody
What Madness Brought Me Here: New and Selected Poems, 1968–1988 by Colleen J. McElroy
Requiem for the Orchard (poems) by Oliver de la Paz

These offerings are only a sample of all that’s available.

What are your favorite books that explore the NW lives of people of color?

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October 31, 2021December 16, 2021

What Does It Mean to “Write the Northwest” Today?

Exactly 75 years ago—on Halloween weekend in 1946—a group of authors, journalists and academics gathered for three days at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for the first and only Writers’ Conference on the Northwest. The conference organizers’ stated aim was not to hold a traditional writers’ conference, in which young writers learn from more-established writers, but to discuss the essence, history and future of a region: the Pacific Northwest.

In his introductory remarks, Reed College President Peter H. Odegard said that, in many respects, “the Pacific Northwest is coming of age. In literature and art, in history and biography, in music, the record and resources of the region should be a source of pride and confidence. We need to discover our own cultural heritage and to encourage our own youth to look about in their own back yard to find inspiration and employment for their creative talents. It ought not to be necessary for them to go to New York for recognition or for their need of glory and reward. New York will come to them.”

The conference took place just after the end of World War II, which did more to focus attention on the Northwest than anything before it. Northwest contributions were viewed as vital to the Allies’ victory: Boeing planes built in Seattle, Kaiser ships assembled in Portland and Vancouver, nuclear weapons created in secret at Hanford, and aluminum and other metals forged in scattered plants—all powered by FDR’s huge new Columbia River dams.

Given what Odegard called the region’s “coming of age” and the inevitable self-examination (and self-regard) occasioned by its outsized role in the war, it must have seemed natural in 1946 to consider how those writing about the region would depict it. After all, scant years before the war, the Northwest had been a backwater to most Americans.

“During most of its history,” Odegard said, “the Pacific Northwest has been a colonial outpost of the East. It has been looked upon and has regarded itself as a source of raw materials to be shipped to eastern cities for processing or fabrication.” After comparing the region to the American South and talking about “cultural colonialism,” in which a region or country is guided by cultural standards set elsewhere, he proclaimed, “There are signs that the colonial period of northwestern history may be coming to a close.”

While Odegard and the other conference participants—including politician and journalist Richard L. Neuberger, folk writer and Northwest interpreter Stewart Holbrook, and noted Columbia University historian Carl Van Doren—deserve some credit for beginning the difficult task of defining a region in literary and historical terms, they, like other white men of their time (and today), failed to see that what they were engaged in was a colonializing enterprise itself.

The Pacific Northwest they were discussing was a white Pacific Northwest that began, in their minds, when “tens of thousands of migrants” moved into a region that “lay hidden on the outer fringes of western civilization, inhabited only by people of primitive culture, whose science was magic and whose literature was the folklore of the tribe.”

It goes without saying, I suppose, that all of the conference organizers and speakers were white men, as were all but a few of the participants in its discussion panels—and those few were white women.

I learned about the 1946 conference when, in the course of doing research for a Northwest-centered project, I discovered a book called Northwest Harvest: A Regional Stock-Taking (The MacMillan Co., 1948), a collection of the conference’s major papers. As you might expect, given the time and makeup of the conference, the entries in it are chockful of ethnocentric and supremacist views, not only of the Northwest but of literature, the United States, and the idea of “progress.” Its main value lies in the snapshot it gives of dominant-culture thinking about the Northwest at a time when its straight, white, privileged, and male inhabitants were just beginning to consider it a distinct place.

The purpose of this website is to do a new kind of stock-taking—to present and examine literary and historical depictions of the Pacific Northwest in a contemporary context. Over the past 75 years, the Northwest has become not only a place people pay attention to but also a place of diverse perspectives and strong, divergent voices. Among the Northwest writers who have entered the national literary conversation are: Mitchell S. Jackson, Cheryl Strayed, Kathleen Dean Moore, Sherman Alexie, David James Duncan, Molly Gloss, Sharma Shields, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Timothy Egan. The visions these writers present of the Northwest region are not only vastly different from those expressed in that 1946 conference, they’re also vastly different from one another.

While contemplation of contemporary literary depictions of Northwest life and history will be one of the website’s main aims, it will also present less-lofty considerations of the region’s history, environment, social change, and popular culture. The main intent is simply to explore the many ways writers and others are—and have been—Writing the Northwest.

To that end, I hope you’ll send me suggestions for topics to explore and writings to present or link to, especially those that might be less-known. And if you have a post to propose, please send me a query. I’ll get things started with a few initial posts, but my hope is to make this site a place of many viewpoints and robust discussion.

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