By Michael A. Antonucci

I met up with Jeffery Renard Allen in downtown Chicago one afternoon last September. Having completed the in-person portion of our interview session, we walked down the steps at the Randolph Street entrance of the Chicago Cultural Center. Jeffery noted the heat and humidity we’d been avoiding inside the building’s thick limestone walls. I can’t recall exactly what he said, but I know it suited the moment. We headed west, into the Loop, navigating the crush of people on their way to Millennium Park for the 2023 Chicago Jazz Festival, traffic moving in and out and away from Michigan Avenue, El trains passing overhead on Wabash. Jeffery—who grew up in South Shore, where he attended Bryn Mawr Elementary School—pointed out theaters where he’d watched Kung Fu triple features as a kid. It was both the Chicago he remembered and a Chicago he felt he no longer knew. Unassuming, unpretentious, and engaging as ever, he walked with me before ducking into the Red Line/Blue Line station at Jackson.

It had been some time since we’d seen each other face to face. And rarely do we find opportunities to spend time together. I’m not sure who introduced us to each other (Sterling D. Plumpp? Michael Anania? Duriel E. Harris? Garin Cycholl?), but we had the University of Illinois Chicago in common. Jeffery’s first novel, Rails Under My Back, had only recently been published in 2000, when I began my time as a Lecturer at UIC. By then, Jeffery had been a long-term resident of New York but he made frequent trips to Chicago to visit family and friends. In 2003, he generously agreed to do an interview with me while we were in Philadelphia for the inaugural meeting of the John Edgar Wideman Society. That conversation appeared in Other Voices. At the time, we both had young children and shared interests that included music and literature. I’ve since gone on to write about Jeffery’s Song of the Shank and to teach Holding Pattern in my classroom. But on that hot September afternoon, I’d just finished reading his latest collection of short fiction, Fat Time, which in November was longlisted for the Carnegie Award for Excellence in Fiction, one of Jeffery’s many accolades.

Michael Antonucci: We might start with some geography: where are you these days?

Jeffery Renard Allen: I split my time primarily between South Africa and the United States, specifically among Johannesburg, New York, and Virginia.

Antonucci: Why South Africa?

Allen: The reasons are many. For one thing, I’m hoping to establish a residency program for artists somewhere in Southern Africa. I have been working on that project for several years. Like so many other things, my efforts were preempted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Antonucci: I ask about geography because your new collection of short fiction, Fat Time and Other Stories, includes pieces that you note as being written in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Can you talk about writing in Africa?

Allen: I can probably date my interest in the African continent to the 1980s and the Divestment/Free South Africa Movement that I was actively involved in during my college years. However, I did not visit the continent until 2006, a visit that in many ways was accidental. Two years earlier, I was teaching for a program in St. Petersburg, Russia, where I met the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina. We became fast friends. In the summer of 2006, I was looking for somewhere to go on vacation and decided to visit Binya in Nairobi for a few weeks. Later that year, I returned to Kenya to teach for his Kwani? Literary Festival. I was very moved by what I experienced there, a convening of writers from all around the African continent. In fact, I was so moved that I decided to stage an international writers’ workshop in West Africa. To that end, I partnered with two other writer-friends, Arthur Flowers and Mohammed Ali. In July 2008, we held the Pan African Literary Forum conference in Accra on NYU’s Ghana campus, where we had over one hundred participants. After the Forum, I made subsequent trips to the continent, often for the purpose of supporting developing writers. For example, in 2012, I taught for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Farafina Workshop in Lagos. That same year, I participated in the Jahazi Literary and Jazz Festival in Zanzibar, then helped to organize the next year’s festival.

Importantly, it took me about ten years to write Song of the Shank, from 2004 until 2013, meaning that I wrote parts of the novel on the continent—namely, in Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania.

With that novel, Africa became central to my work. The maps of Edgemere and The City at the front of the book are based on the East African islands of Lamu and Zanzibar both important centers of Swahili civilization. I spent much time in both places, time that brought me into contact with Swahili culture and people and that gave me perspective on the dynamic blend of people and languages that constitute Swahili civilization. The same is true for the “colored” people of South Africa, people who are largely the descendants of slaves that the Afrikaners brought from various places in Asia. This immersion, this engagement, made me rethink the combinations and hybridity that I see in my own culture as a black person in the United States. In this way, Africa is very much part of my work and who I am as a writer.

A few years ago, I made the decision to live in South Africa. I love the country and the people even if South Africa often feels to me like the United States on steroids: the racial strife, the inequality—South Africa is the most unequal country in the world—the crime and violence, the violence against women and children, the xenophobia. For better or worse, I remain an optimist, and as a Pan Africanist, I have a sense that South Africa’s future will have a tremendous impact on Sub-Saharan Africa and the future of the continent. I remain hopeful.

Antonucci: Hearing you’ve lived in various places around the globe and writing in the United States, Europe, and Africa, I’m curious to hear what you have to say about the way place informs how you write and maybe even what you write about.

Allen: When I was a developing fiction writer, García Márquez helped me see that you could create an imagined space to speak to the real historical and existential realities of a specific region or place in the world without being locked into factual particulars. Later, I discovered that García Márquez had borrowed this idea from Faulkner. Still later, I was surprised to learn that Faulkner was writing about the part of Mississippi where the maternal side of his family had come from. I like the freedom that an imagined place gives me as a writer. You can invent a world, invent a history, and at the same time riff on the known world.

Antonucci: Do you also credit your interest in magical realism to García Márquez?

Allen: I think of myself as a writer working in the rich and varied tradition of the fantastic. I’m interested in the continuum of reality ranging from the everyday to dream, to the unconscious, altered states (the imagined, drug-induced modalities, delusion), the magical, and the supernatural. I try to show all these levels of realities in a given work of fiction.

This approach came naturally to me, in part because I was an avid reader of speculative fiction as a kid. Perhaps speculative fiction inspired me to see beyond my circumstances as a poor, black kid growing up in segregated Chicago. Given my upbringing, I don’t classify myself as a magical realist or an Afrofuturist as some have. I also find “magical realism” too broad a term in the way that some use it. And I feel that the term Afrofuturism often limits the scope of the conversation around what we do as writers and artists because it implies that black artists are only in conversation with one another as opposed to the larger tradition of creating, making. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that a white scholar coined the term.

But allow me to go back to your question about travel. I would say you try to absorb the rhythms of a given place and allow that to impact the imagined space you’re creating. You can fall through a world of not-knowing and discovery and bring things into your own fictional world without worrying about someone saying, “There’s no bar on that corner in Chicago.”

Antonucci: Speaking of Chicago, we’re inside the Chicago Cultural Center, formerly the main branch of Chicago Public Library, and that makes me think about Richard Wright, perhaps Chicago’s first important African American writer.

Allen: Certainly. As a black writer from Chicago, I think you have to come to terms with Richard Wright, kiss the ring. He’s ever-present. I remember reading Native Son for the first time when I was an undergraduate at UIC. That novel is so quick and powerful that it drew me in. I couldn’t stop reading it. I read it straight through over the course of two days or so. The book is both concrete and otherworldly. I’m thinking of some of Wright’s surreal or dreamlike descriptions and depictions of ordinary things, like snow on the ground and covering buildings. These moments seemed to break beyond the limits of naturalism or realism of the times.

Antonucci: That book often seems “fantastic,” to use your word.

Allen: Indeed. I think Native Son is too often simplistically defined as a “naturalist” novel, end of conversation. Wright showed me in that a single work can draw from multiple traditions—naturalism, realism, existentialism, surrealism, etc.—employ multiple styles, and that aesthetic conversation crosses boundaries and often happens across several spaces at once.

As a young writer, I learned so much from Richard Wright: by studying his work, I learned how to write powerful sentences. I don’t think I looked to him to learn how to write about race or other subjects necessarily. I mostly remember the way he used active verbs.

Of course, I was curious to read about Wright’s Chicago. But the Chicago he was writing about was the city back in the 1920s (American Hunger) and 1930s, which, since I was born in 1962, was obviously not a world I knew.

Antonucci: This might get us thinking about the burdens of “representation” and/or history and the way they fall on black artists. I mean, I’ve had conversations with people about Rails Under My Back where these questions come up. People say things like: “Those buildings are not there!” and “Chicago doesn’t have twelve rivers!”

Allen: As I mentioned earlier, when I was a kid, I really like reading sci-fi. But at a certain point, when I started to write, it became clear that I couldn’t write sci-fi. I just wasn’t any good at it. But I think that writing about imagined places is an element of sci-fi that I’ve been able to bring that into my work, part of the speculative aspect of my work. I like the practice of imagining a place that has twelve rivers, or a city that does not comply with what is actually on the map of South Shore but a city that geographically might be more like New York or Amsterdam.

Now I face a new challenge: I am working on a memoir, so I have no choice but to write in factual detail about the actual places where I’ve lived.

Antonucci: I won’t poke at the memoir, but perhaps you can say something about the way space works in Fat Time. Along with the pieces written in Southern Africa, the collection includes “American works,” or, maybe more specifically, stories that treat black figures who occupy space within American popular culture and the national imagination: Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, and Muhammad Ali, among others, find their way into the collection. Can you talk about the way you structured or organized the volume?

Allen: The stories were written primarily over a period of about six years, although the opening story in the collection, “Testimonial (Supported in Belief/Verified in Fact),” is a piece that I wrote after 9/11. At the time of those terrorist attacks, my oldest child, my son Elijah, was less than two years old. On September 10^th of that year, I had started a fellowship at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the main NYPL branch in Midtown Manhattan. The 9/11 attacks happened the morning I was on my way to the library for a tour of the collections. With everything that happened that day—no public transportation, downed phone lines—I was totally cut off from my son and had no clue if he was okay and I had no way to get to him. “Testimonial” came out of that experience. For the longest time, I thought the piece would serve as the prologue to Song of the Shank. But ultimately it was too tangential to the Thomas Greene Wiggins story, and I had to invent a different prologue.

Similarly, the Jack Johnson story, “Fat Time,” was also conceived as part of Song of the Shank, as the epilogue. I thought Wiggins and Johnson could serve as two contrasting archetypes of black men in their respective historical eras. Wiggins—Blind Tom—was born into slavery and spent his life and career, even after emancipation, responding to the American Plantation system and racial caste system. He died in June 1908. Later that year, on December 26, 1908, Jack Johnson defeated Tommy Burns in Australia to become the Heavy Weight Champion of the World. Here we have two black men who achieved the status of international celebrities, but Tom’s story was one of domination and exploitation, whereas in taking the belt, Jack Johnson seemed to represent the emergence and arrival of a “New Negro.” But the Johnson piece also didn’t make it into the novel since the story felt too tangential. I had to come up with a different way to end the book.

As memory serves me, I wrote the Johnson piece back in 2011. And I completed Song of the Shank in 2013. Then I spent the next two years or so trying to come up with a good idea for a new novel. I never did, but I started to get ideas for stories, one after the next, about thirty in all. So I developed Fat Time around the two pieces I didn’t complete for the novel, along with the best of the other story ideas.

Antonucci: Do you see the idea of place functioning differently in the new collection of short fiction than it does in say Holding Pattern or your two novels?

Allen: I would say that in both Holding Pattern and Rails Under My Back, I was riffing on Chicago, or West Memphis, where my maternal grandmother lived, or Fulton, Mississippi, where my maternal great aunts and great grands were from, which is essentially the locale of Faulkner’s imagined Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. In the new collection, I had to go other places: the Jack Johnson story is set in Australia; and there are stories set in imagined locals set in sub-Saharan Africa. The Muhammad Ali story is set in Chicago, in Woodlawn where Muhammad Ali and Elijah Muhammad lived at one time and where I lived for a time. But even that is a Woodlawn of my imagination because I haven’t lived in Chicago for thirty years and lack the concrete sense of the city that I once had. I can only write about Chicago from a remove, and as the years pass, and the further away I am from Chicago in body and mind, the less my desire to write about the city.

Part of that break from Chicago happened when I wrote Song of the Shank, a novel with a historical setting, primarily a version of nineteenth century New York. In the way I wrote and conceived the novel, I never thought of it as a “historical novel.” Instead, I was pushing the idea of “speculative fiction” in another direction, using it to offer an alternative history of the post-reconstruction era. And in the new collection of short stories, the settings have become even more speculative in their orientation.

Antonucci: I’ll say that for a novel written by a guy who says he can’t write sci-fi; Song of the Shank is pretty far out there in terms of settings. As you said earlier, Edgemere was inspired by Lamu, while The City was inspired by Zanzibar, so two African city-islands serving as the basis for two American island cities. Such an interesting idea. Also, in Song of the Shank, you move quite often between present and past action with a flash forward or two.

Allen: After I complete the memoir, I would like to write a totally speculative work, that is, a story set in the future, totally “beyond the now.” I feel like the first novel was a contemporary work, set in a present. The second novel was historical, exploring the nineteenth century. Then a third novel set with a futuristic setting. Three novels that represent three different periods in time. Now I just have to come upon a good idea for that third novel. (Laughing).

Will that book involve time travel? Will it be set on some planet other than earth? I don’t know. I’m having a hard time projecting what’s happening in the world now into the future. I mean we seem to be living in a precarious moment. The present is a dangerous place to live: the wealth gap between billionaires and the rest of us, climate change, wars, and the rise of fascism around the world.

Antonucci: It would be hard to imagine writing about a future and not catastrophizing as you explore what’s to come, as some of the stories in Fat Time do. So it seems that, on some level, you’ve been to Africa and seen the future; and you’ve been to Africa and seen the past. And what becomes apparent is that your travels have made you a writer who is no longer limited to the South Side.

Allen: The twelve stories in Fat Time try to, in many ways, look into the future to see what might be coming. Maybe more than that, in the collection I explore the idea of African Time, where present, past, and future exists all at once, in the space we live in. At this point in my life, I don’t think I can write about time in any other way. For that reason, I don’t know if I can ever write a purely “speculative novel” because I’m always going write a narrative immersed in African time, moving in many directions at once.

This brings us back to the matter of travel. Spending time on the continent has not only informed and shaped my imagination, but it has also broadened and expanded my thinking about what it means to be a black American. Perhaps in trying to think back into an African past—there are many—I am also trying to invent an African future, reinvent what Africa means to the world or might mean, a continent that is so often ignored, vilified, or dismissed. And I try to do all this without romanticizing the continent—the Negritude African, the Black Nationalist Africa, the Afrocentric Africa.

Antonucci: Can you say more about this?

Allen: When you’re in sub-Saharan Africa you see the terrible realities that many people experience every day, just to survive daily. So, you’re looking at the Old World in some ways, but at the same time Africa, as a continent, has the youngest population in world. There’s a tremendous potential for growth. At the time, as a black American, I’m trying to really understand what it means to have lost our past and what it means to regain it, assuming that we can.

I think this reclamation involves a process of reimagining, and reinvention. Whatever that past was, it’s been shaped and reshaped by slavery, colonialism, and various forms of post-colonialism and neo-colonialism. Something new must emerge. Somehow, something new has to be imagined, something beyond what exists today. It seems to me that young people on the continent are getting down to the business of trying to better their lives, not the same business as usual.

Antonucci: Sounds like you’re suggesting that the fantastic can place a role in helping to realize what could be described as “the impossible.”

Allen: Yes. Recently, I reading a book entitled Black and Female by the great Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga. At one point in the book, she talks about the importance of speculative fiction and the need to create a body of African speculative fiction. Speaking specifically as a black African woman, she makes the point that it is in the hands of culture makers—she’s also a filmmaker—to imagine a progressive, non-patriarchal society on the African continent. African women writers must envision that future. I think this is an interesting idea, and perhaps I’m undertaking a similar project with a different set of concerns.

Antonucci: It’s interesting that you say that because, I think the new work in Fat Time shows something in this vision. I mean, given that we live in ends/means conditions, when the questions get asked: “What good is speculative fiction?” or “What does that get for anybody?” you’re saying that we won’t get anywhere without it.

Allen: I don’t want to overstate the case, because I think it’s good to keep in mind that, for a long time, many sociological expectations have been placed on black writers and on black literature. DuBois said that literature should serve as propaganda for the racial cause. The more we move away from that position, the better we are.

I’m very suspicious of the way that writers and other artists in America at this moment claim to be heavily engaged in the struggle for social justice. For I believe that the most “political” writing might be writing that seems to be the least political. I believe it was Adorno who argued that Kafka was the most political kind of writer because he couldn’t be used by some ideology or dictator. I would encourage writers to strive for a unique voice and vision of the world and avoid committing themselves to one set of political solutions or another.

Antonucci: I see that impulse in the twelve stories that make up Fat Time. These stories enter what might be described as bleak territory, but in the way you construct and tell these stories, the work opens up new dimensions for readers to consider. For example, several of the stories are about notable black musicians and athletes, but, in their telling, the stories get us to think about these figures in a new light.

Allen: I write about certain historical figures who interest and inspire me. Specifically, “Pinocchio” and “Heads” are about Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis, two black artists—both musicians— that I have a great deal of respect for, in part because I am a failed musician.

Several of the stories in the collection are named after Miles Davis songs recorded with the Second Great Quintet with Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams, just as the title story, “Fat Time,” is a nickname Miles called both his drummer Al Foster and guitarist Mike Stern.

In writing about Miles, my first inclination was to create a story made up of anecdotes about Miles that various people had told me over the years. For example, I had the good fortune of meeting guitarist Steve Kahn at a book party in New York, and he told me about a revealing experience that he’d had with Miles. And Stanley Crouch told me stories. These were stories from the horse’s mouth that came off like tall tales. Tall tales always seem to keep growing, right? Hence, “Pinocchio,” which is the title of one song from this period. But then I came on the idea that Miles had discovered a way to extend his life eternally. Miles always seemed obsessed with youth and the new.

With Jimi Hendrix, I’ve been interested in his music and his life since I was sixteen years old. In “Heads” I imagine a friendship between Hendrix and painter Francis Bacon. As memory serves me, I first saw Bacon’s paintings in “Last Tango in Paris,” a film I saw as an undergraduate. It occurred to me one day that both Hendrix and Bacon lived in London at the same time and that, like a lot of other celebrities in the sixties, they also used to go on holiday in Tangier. So it’s possible that they met at some point, exchanged greetings, even had a conversation or two. In addition, both artists used “distortion” in their work. The commonalities between the two men might not be as strange as it seems.

With Miles, Jimi, Jack Johnson, and other historical figures who appear in Fat Time, I would say that I’m presenting a range of possibilities of blackness. So often, we are painted simplistically as a monolithic people and other received ideas about black identity.

Antonucci: Does “Heads” pull us back into a discussion of Afrofuturism?

Allen: Maybe. As I’ve indicated, I have some difficulties with terms like Afrofuturism. I mean, I have a scholar-friend who writes about what she calls Afro Surrealism. She’s a serious critic, but I find that term problematic, too. I feel that these terms define and limit us. Why must we as black artists be defined solely in terms of European artistic traditions like Futurism and Surrealism? Perhaps these terms might offer a reasonable way to think about some black writers but are totally useless in thinking about others.

Also, I don’t fully buy that idea that black children need depictions of black superheroes for their psychological well-being. Being the age that I am, I liked to watch the original Star Trek series. And The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. As for writers, there really weren’t many black speculative fiction writers to speak of. I first read Samuel R. Delany in the anthology Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison. But even that story was about characters who Delany never identified as black. All in all, my sense of the fantastic was shaped by “mainstream” elements, not a black speculative tradition. My own experience suggests to me that it’s not necessary for a black child to read a black comic book or a black sci-fi story to envision herself in that world. To me, that’s a limited way of looking at the imagination. I’m very much a believer in the conversation that happens across boundaries and against bone-headed social constructions like “race.” I don’t see the idea of Tradition as a confining, but “black” often is. Race was invented for just that purpose.

You know, I admire the way that abstract visual artists like Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, and Rashid Johnson aren’t locked into representational depictions of race and gender—or anything else for that matter. Then look at the weird and interesting work of Nick Cave. Or the stylistic range of a painter like Edgar Arceneaux. An exciting time for black artists! Perhaps we writers will get there, too, by and by.

Antonucci: Now that the new collection of short fiction is in print, are there any future writing projects that you’re especially excited about?

Allen: I had the great fortune of collaborating on a musical adaptation of Song of the Shank with George Lewis and Stan Douglas. I wrote the libretto, which is more of a riff on Blind Tom than material that I took from the novel. Needless to say, it’s the first time I’ve ever collaborated with artists from other fields, a musician/musicologist and a visual artist. It’s been interesting, educational, and highly rewarding.

The piece was performed in Germany and Austria last summer (2022). In part, the piece strives to address the absence of black classical and new music composers in Europe. Black composers have been left out or marginalized within conversations about European art music. George, as a musicologist and musician, spearheaded the production and found a company willing to commission the piece. For one thing, he is interested in bringing attention to black composers, like himself, who are writing new music.

In that regard, his goals coalesced with mine because one of my goals in writing about Blind Tom was to increase the public’s awareness of this important musical prodigy who has been written out of history.

Most musicologists ignore Tom because they think he was a savant and for that reason not a genuine artist, a performer and composer unworthy of study, let alone a genius. In addition, Blind Tom is a problematic figure for many who want to “uplift the race.” No denying that Tom raised money to support the Confederate cause during the Civil War, an unforgivable sin for some. Hard to see Tom as a “heroic” figure who fought for black freedom and progress. But I think this view is too simplistic.

During our brainstorming sessions, George, Stan (a black Canadian visual artist), and I had many conversations about black art and black agency in an effort to understand what Tom might have thought and felt. George has found in Blind Tom’s compositions a type of resistance to the various modes of oppression he encountered that I would have never been able to identify.

Antonucci: What you’re saying feels significant when we talk about at your work of speculative fiction as an act of historical recovery. I’m curious to know if you’ve received any critical responses to Song of the Shank from people other than musicologists or historians?

Allen: The novel has drawn some interest from film and television show producers, but so far nothing concrete has materialized. I’ve always felt like Blind Tom would be the ideal subject for a film or television show. Let it be so.

Antonucci: Feels like there’s something fantastic, maybe something impossible about Blind Tom, his career, his music. Is there, perhaps, even something a little Kafkaesque—if I dare to use the term—about your Blind Tom?

Allen: Indeed. You know, reviewers compared me to Ellison, Faulkner, and Joyce, and García Márquez, to a lesser extent, but my work also involves a conversation with writers like Kafka, Borges, Cortázar, Calvino, Rulfo, and other esteemed fabulists.

Antonucci: Looks like we might be moving into a discussion of national tradition or certain international literary movements.

Allen: If you’re a black writer in America, people always make assumptions about you. No one really thinks that Kafka may have influenced you in some way, for whatever reason. Rather than think “Kafka,” they are more likely to connect your work to another black writer, like Samuel R. Delany or Octavia Butler or N. K. Jemisin—whomever. Or if your work has elements of “magical realism,” they assume that you must be coming from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon or Beloved.

Again, I think that it’s important to recognize that art involves multiple conversations that move in many directions. Any writer or any artist is a part of every conversation in the larger tradition that’s come before and, essentially, all that will come after. I would just encourage scholars to think more about that fact before they begin to place limits on their discussions about influence.

Antonucci: When you mentioned magical realism, I immediately thought about Leon Forrest. No critic or reviewer ever seems to cite him as an influence on other black American writer’s work. In your case, the connection seems obvious since you are both Chicagoans.

Allen: Forrest was a truly singular voice. He did his own thing. I mean, I’ve read everything by him, just as I’ve read everything by certain other African American fiction writers, like James Alan McPherson, Ishmael Reed, Charles Wright, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and Paule Marshall, among others. As a writer, I feel like it’s your job to take what you can from a great writer, then bring that into your own work and make it your own.

Antonucci: Who are you reading right now?

Allen: I just read a novel called The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, a brilliant young Senegalese novelist. It blew me away. Now I’m reading Breyten Breytenbach’s memoir The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. I don’t know if people read him anymore, but he’s a celebrated South African poet. He wrote a trilogy of memoirs about his homeland, and Confessions is the second in the series. It’s a brilliant book, daring and inventive, irreverent, and lyrical.

I’ve mostly been reading memoirs because, as I said, I’m writing a memoir. I’m looking at the form, pondering what’s possible. I’ve said before that I’m a big believer in organic form and the idea that a work finds the way it needs to be told. The writer finds the way a story needs to be told.

Some writers don’t think enough about form, but instead simply go with the trends. For example, right now in American literature there’s a style of personal essay called the “hermit crab” essay where the writer writes about one subject then scrambles to another subject and still another. It might just as well be called “autononfiction” since this approach borrows the associative techniques of autofiction as established by writers like W. G. Sebald. In any case, most often when I read work in this vein, the form strikes me as arbitrary, a structure imposed on the work rather growing out of the work.

My memoir-in-progress, Mother-Wit, has a four-part structure based in part on Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Coltrane’s album involves a movement toward spiritual enlightenment. My book deals with a movement toward self-understanding and healing, given that the book centers on my struggle with bi-polar disorder. Although I have worked out the form of the book, I continue to read other memoirs to both discover new possibilities and to put myself into conversations with nonfiction writers I admire.

Antonucci: We have come this far in our interview and only now touch on music. How is this possible?

Allen: What more is there to say? (Laughter.)

Antonucci: You tell me.

Allen: Music is part of everything I do as a writer. I am always listening. I must listen because music moves me and inspires me. I have my old standbys: John Coltrane, Bessie Smith, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimi Hendrix, Mahalia Jackson, Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, etc. But I also listen to a lot of contemporary music because I get inspired and really fired up when I hear how the younger musicians of today carry on the tradition in their own way. Right now, my two favorite singers are Tems, a Nigerian artist, and a guy from Colombia, Maryland named Brent Faiyaz. Their voices take me other places. Like Coltrane they are otherworldly. I love singers like SZA and Summer Walker and rappers like J. I. D. and Earl Sweatshirt. I’m also a big fan of Oumou Sangaré, the great singer from Mali, although she’s no longer a youngster. She’s been on the scene for thirty years or more. The same for Erykah Badu. Then there is the great young jazz singer Samara Joy. And let me not forget the innovative instrumentalists like James Carter and Cory Henry, who show that the possibilities of jazz are endless, can never be exhausted. Famously, Baraka called black music the “changing same” in his 1961 lecture “The Myth of Negro Literature.” As Leroi Jones (before he was Amiri Baraka), he called for black writers to look to our music for inspiration since it represents our greatest achievement as artists. That challenge remains valid.

(Photo by Steven Varni)