Editor’s note: Kevin Brown gave us a fantastic essay for our “In Praise of…” section of Midnight Mind Number Seven. We are very happy that he agreed to be our first author to do our new, “5 questions with…” series, where we’ll go behind-the-work with authors featured in Midnight Mind‘s print editions and get to know them a little better.
Question 1: What books are you reading right now?
I just finished The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao, one of those books that spans decades and helps readers feel like they get to spend a long time in a world that’s quite different than their own (1950s to 1970s India, so different for me, anyway). I’m currently reading Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit. I’m only about a third of the way into it, but I’m really enjoying it so far. Since I’m on break from teaching, I tend to read more fiction, as that’s more challenging to read during the busy periods of the semester.
Question 2: What authors have inspired you and why?
When I was coming up in the 1980s and into the 1990s, I lived in the world of the Dead White Male. Thus, I loved writers from the American Renaissance, especially Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman. I also really enjoyed Victorian novels, especially Dickens, as he could create a character in a sentence or two that had more life than most authors’ main characters. When I first hit David Foster Wallace, though, I was hooked (though only his nonfiction). I hadn’t found a writer who could be that smart, but also that funny. As I’ve grown as a writer and reader (and, hopefully, a person), the writers who inspire me are the ones who tell stories that are quite different than mine, stories that mainly didn’t get told in the twentieth century. While I’ll still read some great white male authors, such as Richard Powers, it’s writers like Dinaw Mengestu, Rachel Khong, Isabella Hammad, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Xochitl Gonzalez, Leslie Jamison, Hanif Abduraraqib, Tommy Orange, Kiley Reid, Fatima Farheen Mirza, and Eula Biss who have knocked my socks off this year alone. There’s so much great writing coming out, so I spend most of my time taking inspiration from writers diving into the world we live in today, even when they’re writing about people from throughout time and the world.
Question 3: What’s a book you haven’t read that you really should have read already?
I could be snarky here and ask who’s to say which books “should” be read, and I kind of think that to be true. There are so many great books continuing to come out, I’m not sure I feel the need to go read Peregrine Pickle (which I once owned and moved from one state to another before admitting I would never read it). That said, if I were playing a game where I had to name something everybody else had read, but I hadn’t, I’d go with The Iliad or The Aeneid. And I plan to go to my grave without rectifying those omissions.
Question 4: What’s the biggest drag about being a writer?
Rejections seem to be the most obvious answer here, but it’s also true for me. Or, perhaps, it’s the entire submission process. I hate having to spend the time doing the necessary work of sending out pieces, especially given how long it might take for something I’ve written to find the right place at the right time. I wish I could spend that time writing, and it could magically appear in just the right spot.
Question 5: What is it that inspires you to write?
Curiosity, probably. A variety of people have made a comment along the lines of E.M. Forster’s “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” but that’s probably because it’s true for most of us. I go into an essay or a poem thinking I know where it’s going, but there’s always at least one turn it takes along the way that I hadn’t expected. I understand something better after having written a piece, even if that something is only myself. There have been several times over the course of my writing life that I’ve thought about stopping, but I always come back to it. Writing is, on some level, one of the main ways I process the world. Even if nothing I ever write gets published again (but, please, no), I know that the writing itself is doing good work.
