An Interview with Edward P. Jones - Interview

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by Lawrence P. Jackson

Jackson: Do you feel influenced by first-person writers like John Wideman or Darryl Pinckney?

Jones: No. At my age I've already worked out in my head how I'm going to do things. I was never one who followed. I remember a woman who used to write out in longhand the lengthy passages from the writers that she liked, just to get in the flow of writing. I never saw any sense in doing that; it just seemed like a great waste of time. If you want to write, eventually you get your own legs, without trying to follow the way someone else has been walking. I think I'm just influenced by good emotional writing. I can still remember the poignancy from reading Uncle Tom's Children, Wright's collection of short stories. "Fire and Cloud" has some very poetic lines. I was moved by all the stories. I think that was what I took away from them; you want to be able to recreate the emotion that other people create in you.

Jackson: Would you speak about becoming a writer and educating yourself?

Jones: I educated myself just generally for the pleasure of reading, and somewhere along the way a lot of things stuck. I can't get any clearer than that. I remember when I was 17 or 18 and reading From Here to Eternity. I'm not a very musical guy. I know the piano and the violin, but the horns are just one great hoop of horns to me. There's this character named Pruitt, and Jones is describing him standing on a hill playing a saxophone. And after reading that passage, for some reason I could just see that guy, and hear all the music, and hear all the notes that he was playing, just because Jones had written it that clearly. I took away from Pruitt's description a sense of where this guy was in his life as a soldier. You understand and care about him, and by that point on the hill, because you think you know him so well, it becomes very easy for you to hear him play. In order to do a moment like that in a story you have to prepare the reader.

You also notice a difference once you see your writing on the page. There's a long passage in "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons" where I'm talking about her routine in the morning and when she comes home from school and she sits in the chair, and the pigeons flock around her. It's all one paragraph. Then that long paragraph ends, and at first, I had in the same paragraph, "She turns ten and then she turns eleven." Then when I looked at it, to increase the emotional impact and to show that time had passed, I had to put "She turned ten" and then "She turned eleven" on separate lines. When I saw the lines separately I knew what I was trying to get at. I wanted to create a sense that the birds were in her life all of those years, one of the central themes.

Jackson: One of my students felt disturbed by "Young Lions."

Jones: One of them said that the "realism was too real."

Jackson: "Young Lions" and "In His Mother's House" deal in part with Washington and her criminal element. Do you feel that other writers neglect these themes? Were you thinking consciously about being different?