The author of “The Residue Years” talks about his memories of Portland, where his book is the 2015 Everybody Reads selection from the Multnomah County Library
“It’s cold!” says Mitchell S. Jackson. “It’s really cold in Brooklyn.”
Indeed. But in his native town of Portland, it was a balmy, sunny February day, the kind of day where somebody, somewhere in town, might be reading a book on a park bench. And it’s not so unlikely that the book would be Jackson’s.
“The Residue Years” is Jackson’s first novel, but it has garnered high praise from critics in the United States and Europe. It is also the Multnomah County Library’s selection for the 2015 community reading program, Everybody Reads. The program encourages everyone to read the same book — and then come together to discuss it and listen to the author lecture about it. Thanks to The Library Foundation, more than 3,200 copies of “The Residue Years” are available to borrow from Multnomah County libraries.
He received a masters in writing from Portland State University and a masters in fine arts in creative writing from New York University. Today he teaches writing at NYU.
Jackon’s novel chronicles the relationship between Grace, an African-American woman caught up in the dark side of drugs in Northeast Portland, and her son Champ. Though the novel was born from a series of autobiographical vignettes of Jackson’s relationship with his own mother and the experiences they had, the book is – he stresses – a fictional piece of work.
Jackson will speak at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Mar. 10 as a part of the Everybody Reads campaign. He is scheduled to host the Oregon Book awards in April.
S.Z.: We have something in common: We are both teachers. Tell me your a bit about your classroom experience and the importance of education.
M.J.: I was telling my students just the other day, my first class at NYU – I was like 26 years old. I had very little teaching experience and I was intimidated by the prospect. I thought how am I gonna go in there and fill up two and a half hours and not have them feel like they are wasting their time?
As time has gone on, it feels really natural to be in the classroom. I can’t really imagine my life without a classroom in it.
As many teachers say, it works both ways … I feel like I’m giving them something, but feel that I get a lot more than I give them – to learn their stories and to see people grow and to be inspired by what they say in the classroom, to have them push me and me push them – it’s a very rewarding experience.
S.Z.: Your novel, “The Residue Years,” was born from autobiographical vignettes about your life and relationship with your mother in a Northeast Portland neighborhood and evolved into a fictional story. How closely do Grace and Champ’s relationship parallel that of your relationship with your own mother?
M.J.: The specific incidents are fictionalized, but the nature of their relationship is pretty spot-on to me and my mother’s relationship.
S.Z.: For those who might not be familiar with the backstory of your book, can you talk a bit about your neighborhood as you remember it from your childhood?
M.J.: I didn’t really have a “neighborhood” because I moved around a lot, but I grew up in Northeast Portland. It was a really small community. It felt like everyone knew each other.
In elementary school, we would always go to King School. They had this amazing playground and we would all go do flips and play basketball. In middle school, it was King (School) or Alberta Park. In high school, everyone congregated in Irving Park. It just felt like you knew everyone and you felt really comfortable.
And then about the mid '80s is when the gangs started coming. Sometimes you would congregate and it would be a sense of danger around you – not enough to keep you from going out, but you were aware that things had changed in the community.
It would have been an anomaly if you saw white people riding around in certain parts of the neighborhood – that didn’t start happening until the 2000s.
When you lived in Northeast, you only saw African Americans at that time – we would have tournaments at the park and there would be no white people there. And then right around the time that I left, the neighborhood started to change. People’s grandmothers started selling their houses. Next thing you know, another person has moved away.
S.Z.: Pretty different from the liberal, hippie-hipster, progressive “Portlandia” that folks tend to identify with Portland.
M.J.: Yeah. I’ve never seen the show, but from what everyone tells me, it is starkly different.
S.Z.: What are your thoughts about gentrification?
M.J.: If you can make a neighborhood less dangerous and if you can improve the schools and if you can raise the care of the residents for that community, then it is good. What I don’t like about it is that people get displaced.
It is often people who look like me that are getting displaced. If there was a way to improve the community (for the people who live there without displacing them), I would be 100 percent for it. There doesn’t seem to be a way to do both.
I vacillate. Gentrification doesn’t fix the problem, it just relocates it.
S.Z.: Who is the audience for this book?
M.J.: I like to think there are two audiences. One, people who have had a familiarity with the experience (of the characters in the book) and then the literary audience.
I just wanted the book to be for people who love language, people who love literary fiction. I thought the story would resonate with the people from my background.
S.Z.: Your book helped me, as a reader, better understand the African-American experience …
M.J.: Thank you for that!
S.Z.: You used to live in a house in the heart of the Northeast with your girlfriend. In 2012, for the documentary, you and your mom were walking around (the old neighborhood). You tell her that you were robbed outside the house and she tells you about the first time she was in that house. What did she reveal to you?
M.J.: She told me it used to be a drug house and it got raided. She ran away from police, barefoot, from that house (which Mitchell’s former girlfriend bought years later).
My mom had that experience in the '80s and I lived there in 1996. The house my mom ran from was actually torn down and my girlfriend had a new house built in its place.
S.Z.: Talk about full circle …
M.J.: That whole day, walking around with my mom (for the documentary) and hearing those stories … yeah.
S.Z.: You served 16 months in the Oregon Department of Corrections System in two facilities: Mill Creek and Santiam. Do you feel your time in the prison system ‘rehabilitated’ you?
M.J.: Uh. No. Prison is not built to rehabilitate people. It is built as an industry. Guys who go there who have the will to make better decisions in their life, often can. It’s much more about your own volition than it is (about) you becoming a different person.
Now, I do think it can give you some skills. And I do think it can change perspectives or at least cause you to question your perspective. I don’t think it is a complete waste of time, but in my case especially, it wasn’t something I learned in prison, it was being in prison and deciding that I don’t want to be back here ever again.
S.Z.: What was the pinnacle moment in your life (if any) – the moment where you said “Enough.”
M.J.: I don’t think it was a moment. In 2002, I just committed myself to being a writer so that dictated a lot of my future decisions.
I think having that ambition gave me a sense of purpose that I didn’t have. Because when I was selling drugs, I didn’t have a purpose, really. I knew I wanted some money in my pocket, but I didn’t know what I was gonna do.
Once I decided what I was gonna do, it made everything that was not conducive to that goal less attractive.
S.Z.: How did you get the “Everybody Reads” gig?
M.J.: I’m probably the most pro-Portland, not-living-in-Portland Portlander there is. I’d heard about the Everybody Reads program about a year ago. I started to inquire about it. I felt like “Residue” had to be a contender.
I wrote this novel for Portland. As far as I knew, it is the only novel that talks about this part of Portland.
I asked the agency that helps me with booking events and they told me the content was kind of above what they were showing high schools. Maybe the next book … but this book wasn’t a good fit for the audience. I couldn’t accept that as an answer.
So, I researched the program and found out who was in charge of making the decisions, and I called around to Portland State, and I called (former Portland mayor) Sam Adams. I had my editor send out books to everyone who was even remotely related to (the program) with a note: “Please consider this. I think this story is important for Portland.”
I was on vacation last summer and my booking agent forwarded an e-mail from Andrew Proctor (executive director of Literary Arts) telling me “The Residue Years” was chosen as the Everybody Reads book for 2015.
Then at the bottom of the e-mail, they asked me to host the Oregon Book Awards!
I couldn’t believe it. I just danced around my hotel room for an hour.
S.Z.: How did you come to writing — or how did writing come to you?
M.J.: I went to Hurston/Wright (a foundation for discovering African-American writers) in D.C. for writers of color. It was between my first and second years of graduate school.
They selected a piece of my writing to be published in this anthology called “Gumbo.” It really gave me confidence because I hadn’t had a publication before that. I thought, well, I had just come to writing a year before that. I said, “If I can be published with all of these amazing people, I might have an opportunity to really do this if I set my mind to it and work hard at it.
That gave me the fuel I needed to pursue it seriously. That was a reason that I came to New York – because I believed that I could do it (become a published author).
That wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t have some kind of early marker. I needed something to give me permission (to enter this other world).
S.Z.: What is the importance of home?
M.J.: It means everything to me. I lived with my great-grandparents when I was really young and then we moved around so much, I never had a home.
When I moved to New York, I knew people – I’m thinking of one friend in particular – he does not like to tell people that he is from Portland. He identifies himself as being from Harlem.
To me, where I am from gives me sustenance. It is like a point of pride, but it also gives me a kind of energy that I don’t think a lot of people have access to.
I love being from Portland and I love representing Portland. I wouldn’t want to be from anywhere else.
I really think that the circumstances in Portland produced in me something that is not around everywhere. I like it. I’ve never written about anything other than home.
