Contemporary Authors

• A Lucky Man ( short stories) Graywolf Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2018

1. A lucky man : stories LCCN 2017952103 Type of material Book Personal name Brinkley, Jamel. Main title A lucky man : stories / Jamel Brinkley. Published/Produced Minneapolis, MN : Graywolf Press, 2018. Projected pub date 1805 Description pages cm ISBN 9781555978051 (alk. paper) Item not available at the Library. Why not?

• Karin Cecile Davidson - http://www.karinceciledavidson.com/blog/rincdavidson.com/2013/05/the-poppy-interview-series-brooklyns.html

  Brooklyn's Jamel Brinkley
  May 29, 2013
  Jamel%2BBrinkley_Keisha%2BGreen.jpg

  Photo Credit – Keisha Green
  “Claudius Van Clyde and I both preferred girls of a certain plumpness—in part, I
  think, because that’s what black guys are supposed to like, because liking it confirmed
  something about us—but he had gotten to Sybil first. So for the moment I was left to
  deal with the prophet of the bubble. I was fine with that. I needed a good distraction, and
  a good thing about hanging with Claudius Van Clyde was that you never failed to get
  noticed. He had come to Columbia from West Oakland with certain notions regarding
  life in New York, that the city’s summer heat and dust, its soot-caked winter ice, were
  those of the cultural comet, which he ached to witness if not ride. Because of these
  notions—which were optimistic, American—he manipulated gestures, surfaces, and
  disguises, seemed to push the very core of himself outward so that you could see in his
  face, in the flare of his broad nostrils, the hard radiance of the soul-stuff that some people
  go on and on about. Though not quite handsome, he could fool you with his pretensions
  and he was gorgeously insincere. Among his implements were a collection of Eastern style
  conical hats and two-, three-, and four-finger rings. His pick for that night: a fez,
  which was tilted forward on his head so that we, both of us, were emboldened by the
  obscene probing swing of the tassel.”

  - from “No More Than a Bubble”

  by Jamel Brinkley

  *

  Jamel Brinkley and I met at the Kenyon Writers Workshop in 2012, where each day Lee K. Abbott assigned a writing prompt, and the next morning we responded with story beginnings. The prompts were more than good, and the stories we came back with were more than surprising. Out of those surprises came really great complications, enormous wads of southern-style levity, racy descriptions of girls rolling in paint, Pacific coast road trips, Flatbush house parties, and god-like archetypes. A range of work that blew us all away.

  Jamel went on to other workshops and blew away a few more writers and teachers with his windswept street writing, inclusive of junkmen, Jamaican-African-American-Dominican girls, wild dogs, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, fez tassels, and near disappointment. His hard work and words have landed him a place at the Iowa Writers Workshop. No telling what the future will bring, but thankfully, it will include more stories and eventual volumes that bear Jamel Brinkley’s name.
  Jamel%2BBrinkley_Gya%2BWatson.jpg

  Photo credit – Gya Watson

  Jamel, you write short stories and are working on a novel. Could you compare the experience of creating short form vs. writing long?

  The first thing I should do is confess that up until about two years ago, I was deathly afraid of writing short stories. The gaps in my knowledge of short stories, which are still significant, were then enormous. I was all about novels, and in a drawer somewhere I have a 600-page dung heap of a novel that is probably still steaming and stinking things up. I workshopped part of that novel at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop a few years ago, and I found much to my dismay that I had absolutely no understanding of structure. What I had written was an incoherent mess.

  The novel I’m working on now might more accurately be called a novella, or at least I envision it that way. I’m trying to be way more modest about the scope and the pages, trying to be more mindful about structure, to exert more control so that it doesn’t turn into a “loose baggy monster” of the worst kind. I’ve been working more on stories than the novel recently, and my sense is that both forms are difficult as hell. Stories call for an extraordinary amount of control and efficiency, and in those miniaturized spaces, I find it particularly challenging to maintain the feeling and soul and voice I want while making things happen satisfactorily on the emotional and action plot levels. I’ve had a hard time ramping up the tension. I get caught up in sentences, a fact that is bad enough in a story, but imagine 600 pages of that nonsense!

  The level of description and depth in your writing is phenomenal. Have you come to this from the foundation of years and years of reading and writing, or as this always been your inclination? Either way, who out in the world are your greatest influences?

  Well, thank you, first of all. I do think I’ve always been drawn to vivid writing, to details and images, the possibilities of rhythm in a sentence and a poetic line. In high school and college, I fancied myself a poet, and I was devastated when I discovered that there was an unflattering name for what I had been writing: purple prose. One of my challenges is to avoid layering on images, adjectives, and details in such a way that my writing becomes obscure, muddled. So while I used to love Nabokov at his most florid, now I try to pay attention to writers who have a firm handle on what sentences can do, who know when to tighten and release the reins. This wishful list of influences will be necessarily incomplete, but here goes: James Baldwin (his essays and short stories), the James Joyce of Dubliners, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, J.D. Salinger, Marilynne Robinson (especially Housekeeping), Junot Díaz (especially Drown and Oscar Wao), Charles D’Ambrosio, Barry Hannah, Lee K. Abbott, Toni Morrison, Denis Johnson, Edward P. Jones, Amy Hempel, Nathaniel Mackey, Tobias Wolff, Gayl Jones, William Trevor, Alice Munro, John Edgar Wideman, Jhumpa Lahiri. I’ll stop here, with guilty feelings about leaving off so many of the fiction writers I admire, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Q-Tip, Black Thought, Lauryn Hill, Mos Def, Ghostface Killah, and MF Doom as folks who inspire and perhaps influence me. And don’t get me started on jazz!

  Lions, tigers, or bears?

  Lions, without question. I spent many years as an employee, undergraduate and graduate student at Columbia, whose mascot is the lion. I’ve also been called a lion because of my hair, here and there by friends who are adherents of Rastafari, and more significantly by former students who thought I looked like Simba from The Lion King. There’s not much that’s lion-like about me beyond that; I’m a November baby, and I’m definitely more Scorpio than Leo.

  The character, Claudius Van Clyde, in your story, “No More than a Bubble,” comes across as an archetype, a kind of jester, large and laughing, in love with life; yet through the narrator’s eyes, Claudius is truly flesh-and-blood with vulnerabilities and a demeanor that lead him and the narrator to near disgrace. Is this larger archetypal view something you intended, or a natural direction that the story took? Are there Claudius Van Clydes in your life, the kind of magnanimous personalities that beg for story?

  I did intend it. Claudius strikes me a particularly “New York” kind of character, in both the literary and life senses. There are many versions of Claudius Van Clyde where I live, in Brooklyn. These are folks who strike me as needing or wanting to match the grandiosity of New York City. In a place teeming with stimuli, they make elaborate efforts to draw attention to themselves, to make things swirl around them, and I think that they often have fascinating reasons for doing so. I’ve written about a couple of these character types. I think they draw my attention because they are so unlike me and because I have such strong and complicated feelings about them. I guess I’m happy to play Nick to their Gatsby.

  How has teaching high school English had an effect on your writing, from managing time to influencing the subject and slant of your writing? The twist and swerve of language in your stories are completely new, utterly unique. Are you inspired by your students’ vocabulary and by the street-speak and sounds of the boroughs?

  For me, teaching high school English pulls from the same well of time, energy, and mind that I need to write. So during the school year, I get very little work done. If I’m lucky, if there aren’t piles of student essays waiting to be read and graded, I get some work done on weekends. Otherwise I rely on holidays and seasonal breaks. Right now I teach in a very traditional independent school, so if anything my work with these students pulls me towards writing that is canonical. The qualities in my language that you very kindly describe, the vocabulary and the urban rhythm and vernacular, probably come from the way my upbringing, musical influences, more “experimental” reading, and earlier teaching experiences dance with the more traditional and canonical work I’ve been immersed in over the last four to five years.

  Exciting times ahead! You’ll be leaving New York, as the Iowa Writers Workshop awaits you, and you begin in the fall, yes? A quotation you gave me from Ellison’s Invisible Man seems quite fitting: “The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.” What are your expectations, goals, and dreams as you approach the next two years? And beyond?

  Yes, this is the first time in my conscious existence that I’ll be living someplace other than in New York City. I’m nervous and thrilled. I’m thrilled to have the gift of time, which is something that Lan Samantha Chang, the director of the Iowa program, emphasized to me in her typically generous and clear-headed way. It seems like such an obvious thing, but when you reach a certain age and have established routines, relationships, a career, realizing how enormous and precious a gift time might require someone like Sam to believe in you and your work enough to force-feed you a healthy dose of clarity and plain good sense. I’m thrilled to have the time and the opportunity to say “yes” to everything, which was Lee K. Abbott’s advice to me: study with everyone, take poetry classes, read read read. Despite the suspicion and criticism the Workshop sometimes engenders, it seems like it can’t possibly be a bad thing to spend two years reading and writing in a high-quality program where the very town takes you seriously as a writer. I want to finish my short novel and build a short story collection, but my real goal is to say “yes” to everything, to throw myself fully into this two-year conversation with brilliant teachers and peers, and into what Charlie D’Ambrosio described as a conversation with yourself “in the solitary struggle of writing sentences.” Of course, I want to be published someday—what writer doesn’t?—but I can wait for that to happen. “I want to be an honest man and a good writer,” as Baldwin said, and I think my experience at Iowa will help with at least one of those goals.

  Jamel Brinkley is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. He has degrees from Columbia University and teaches high school English in New York City. This fall he will begin study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

  *
  800px-Poppy-purple.png

  The Poppy: An Interview Series

  Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis,

  black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

  *

  This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.

• author's site - https://www.jamelbrinkley.com/

  Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories (Graywolf Press/A Public Space Books). His fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Best American Short Stories 2018, A Public Space, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Epiphany, and LitMag. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was also the 2016-17 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His work has received support from Kimbilio Fiction, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Beginning this fall, he will be a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

  FICTION
  "Infinite Happiness" in A Public Space
  "A Lucky Man" in A Public Space
  "A Family" in Gulf Coast (also forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories 2018)
  "J'ouvert, 1996" in Epiphany
  "Wolf and Rhonda" in American Short Fiction
  "Clifton's Place" in The Threepenny Review
  "Everything the Mouth Eats" in Glimmer Train
  "No More Than a Bubble" in LitMag
  "I Happy Am" in Ploughshares

• American Short Fiction - http://americanshortfiction.org/2018/04/04/art-staring-interview-jamel-brinkley/

  The Art of Staring: An Interview with Jamel Brinkley
  by Aaron Teel | April 4, 2018

  In his much-anticipated debut collection A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley lays bare the full and complex interiority of black men and boys kicking against all manner of inexorable truths, while living an inch from ruin in Brooklyn and the Bronx. With stunning clarity and generosity of detail, each of the nine stories leaves its own lasting impression, while the book as a whole coalesces into a devastating tapestry of confused masculinity, familial responsibility, and the intractable power of privilege to impede upon and redraw the boundaries of a life. We’re thrilled to publish “Wolf and Rhonda” in ASF‘s spring issue, wherein a high school reunion serves as the site for a reckoning with the past, approached from two completely different but wildly illuminating points of view.

  —

  A+Lucky+Man+-+final+coverAaron Teel: I wonder if you can talk a little about your process, both generally and specifically with respect to A Lucky Man. Though not a linked collection per se, all the stories here are certainly of a piece thematically. Did you write them with an eye toward including them in a collection, or were the selections made after the fact? Were there stories you wanted to include that didn’t fit for one reason or another?

  Jamel Brinkley: I’m glad to hear that you feel the stories have a shared thematic resonance. I think that’s more a function of unintentional staring (“staring” in the Flannery O’Connor sense: “There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without,” she says, “and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it. . .”) than any intentional design on my part. As far I was concerned, I was just writing one story and then another story and then another story, and so on. Of course, I hoped that they would fit together in some way, but I don’t think I started any of them with a theme in mind. Like many writers, I start with an image or a character as the catalyst, maybe a bit of dialogue. As the collection moved toward publication, a story I had come close to giving up on, “Everything the Mouth Eats,” was added, and another one was cut near the end of the editorial process, which I think was for the best.

  AT: They definitely do feel of a piece to me, and very much in the tradition of a story cycle like Lost in the City with its movement from adolescence to maturity (physical, if not emotional) and recursive thematic concerns centered around fractured family dynamics and complex relationships to home and community—in this case a tapestry of life in Brooklyn and the Bronx rather than Jones’ iconic D.C., or even Alice Munro’s rural Ontario. Is it fair to say that part of your project at this point anyway has been to center and amplify the experiences of the people in these communities? I’m thinking of a story like “Clifton’s Place” in particular, with its deliberate foregrounding of people seen explicitly as background by the cultural tourists slowly gentrifying/colonizing this place that is a kind of home for people in the neighborhood.

  JM: Lost in the City is one of my sacred texts, and Munro is one of my absolute favorite authors. I’d be pleased if my treatment of my Bronx and Brooklyn folks has even a trace of the wisdom, honesty, toughness, and love with which Jones and Munro write about their characters. I think it’s right to say that I want to center the experiences of people in the communities where I grew up. Empathy is a buzzword in the literary world, and many would have us believe that if privileged people read a story or a novel about “others,” if privileged writers toss in a few “others” among their more central characters, and so on, then, presto, they have achieved or displayed some sort of empathy. I seriously doubt it. I have doubts about empathy itself, at least the way it’s typically used in liberal, literary circles. In a recent dialogue with fellow poet Rickey Laurentiis, Solmaz Sharif says, “Empathy is emotional tourism.” I imagine that at least some of the gentrifiers in “Clifton’s Place” probably assume they are good, liberal, empathetic people. After all, they’re patronizing this historically black neighborhood bar. Assuming empathy is even a worthy and tangibly effective goal­­—and I’m not sure that a rigorous inquiry of the concept would show that it is—I think people are too quick to claim it as a personal value, as part of who they are. People tend to overestimate their capacity to be “empathetic” to another person and her situation, as if it’s easy. What’s the antidote to that in terms of writing? I have no idea. There probably isn’t one. You probably have to go out and do positive, often difficult work in the world. And that work probably helps you to write and read better. But aesthetically speaking, for me, maybe this all relates back to the idea of staring—my own staring as a story writer and inviting readers to stare right along with me, doing the work to understand these characters and their lives.

  AT: I love O’Connor’s typically blunt notion of artistic staring, and I think it perfectly describes your style. A word I wrote over and over in the margins of the book is patient—each of the stories unfolds at its own unhurried pace without any of the compression or stylistic detours I associate with much current literary fiction. That’s not to say that the language isn’t beautiful, of course, but it seems to me that your primary concern is for the close, careful observation of characters. I assume that level of observation requires a kind of constant, quiet staring. Is that something you’re always engaged in out in the world? Do you carry a notebook for scribbling little anthropological notes everywhere you go?

  JB: William Trevor called the short story “bony” and asserted that it is “the art of the glimpse.” He said it’s “concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness.” I like the creative tension produced by this central “disagreement” with one of my cherished writers. Maybe I’m too enamored with lifelike meaninglessness, or maybe my own experiences have made me more philosophically inclined towards it. While I don’t carry a notebook around, I’m definitely more of a watcher than a doer, more a listener than a talker. I agonize and mull over decisions instead of impulsively making them. I try not to be too quick to claim any sort of confident understanding of people or experiences. I’m a naturally doubtful person, I’d say, and I think observing, taking in specific sense impressions, helps anchor and direct the tendency of my thoughts to waver and wander. As a physical being I myself may be bony, but my stories definitely aren’t.

  AT: Do you find yourself frequently returning to the same emotional and thematic territory in your work?

  JB: I believe I do, at least in the work I’ve created so far. It’s a bit embarrassing to take a step back and see how obsessed you can be as an artist. But yes: fathers, brothers, masculinity, loneliness, shame, and intimacy of various kinds are part of the territory I’ve visited again and again.

  AT: I’m not sure an artist without obsessions would be of much use to anybody, or at any rate would have much of anything very interesting to say. Have your own interests and obsessions been fully formed in you since you first started writing? Can you trace them to any formative experiences in particular, be they personal or artistic? What has your journey as a writer looked like?

  JB: All the obsessions I mentioned have been with me since I was very young. I think a lot about brotherhood, for example, because of my relationship to my brother. I think a lot about fathers because of the absence and presence of such men in my life. And so on. The way I’ve thought about my obsessions has, of course, been shaped by my experiences as I’ve grown older and matured, and it’s been shaped acutely by my reading. I couldn’t have written “Everything the Mouth Eats,” from my collection, if I hadn’t read “Sonny’s Blues” over and over. I couldn’t have written any of my stories about fatherhood or brotherhood without the work of Baldwin and John Edgar Wideman and Charles D’Ambrosio.

  For many years I placed myself in proximity to the writing or literary life but refused to put it at the center of my existence. Maybe it seemed like a luxury or too much of a risk to do so, especially coming from a working-class household in Brooklyn and the South Bronx. But, as I eventually discovered, whatever pressure I felt to make lots of money and have a conventional career in an office or a classroom was almost entirely self-imposed. Looking back on things now, I don’t think my mother put such pressure on me—not too much, anyway. In fact, what I see now is how she trusted me and gave me room to make my decisions and pursue my dreams. She, and my teachers, made my journey as a writer possible. Some people really love to beat up on writing programs and writing teachers; nothing is above critique, but I’ve had a pretty incredible experience with them. My teachers gave me confidence in my ability to write, and they also pushed me, challenged me, said things I strongly disagreed with and things I felt were so true I’ll remember them for the rest of my life. Without my teachers, there’s no way I would be able to continually take up the task of wrestling with words, and my obsessions, on the page.

  AT: How has your relationship to your own communities (geographic or otherwise) informed your work? Do you draw heavily from your own experiences generally?

  JB: I think there’s a trace of me—or of people and places I’ve known, refracted through my sense of them—in every character and setting in my book. I don’t believe that any of the stories are merely autobiography in disguise, but people I know well who read the book may recognize this or that detail as a version of something we encountered or experienced. I think I like the feeling of having some anchor in my stories from the “real world”—for example, the bar in “Clifton’s Place” is based on an actual bar in Brooklyn—but I prefer that anchor, however dense, to be small in the story, leaving me a lot of space to invent and explore around it. Sometimes, that anchoring detail is needed only as a compositional resource and it fades or disappears entirely by the time I get to the final version of a story.

  AT: I read somewhere that you came to fiction with an interest in novels more than stories. How would you describe your relationship now to the short story as a form?

  JB: My first thought is that it seems impossible for me to write a story that is under twenty pages. I’m more comfortable in the thirty-page range, and one story, the one that was added to the collection, is even longer than that. I love the short story form—its confinement, pressure, and focused power—but I also find myself unable to write with true concision. Maybe that’s because of my interest in novels. Maybe I just can’t shut up. Who knows? I majored in English and African American Studies in college, I was in a literature PhD program for a while, and I’ve also taught high school English. In those years of teaching and learning, the novel was definitely the primary focus. Now I’m much more interested in stories, essays, and poetry—short forms. But in my own practice I need to stretch out a bit. In that regard, the work of writers such as Edward P. Jones, Alice Munro, and Danielle Evans have been models for me, granting permission.

  [clear-line]

• Electric Lit - https://electricliterature.com/if-you-know-love-or-are-a-black-man-jamel-brinkley-s-stories-will-feel-like-home-bb03c6e375e6

  If You Know, Love, or Are a Black Man, Jamel Brinkley‘s Stories Will Feel Like Home
  The author of ‘A Lucky Man’ on creating reflections of the people he knows, and avoiding the white gaze
  Jamel Brinkley (Photo by Arash Saedinia)

  The short story certainly isn’t dead, nor is it making a “comeback.” It’s a concise form that continues to be cherished and dissected — and still has the capacity to go viral. Last year, a variety of short fiction collections gained acclaim, and it looks like 2018 has even more in store for us. It’s also an exciting time for new short fiction from authors of color.

  Jamel Brinkley’s debut collection, A Lucky Man (Graywolf Press), is one of those titles to look forward to. It parses out the intersections of masculinity, forgiveness (of self and others), and the lives of Black boys and men coming into their own. I could connect with the characters as an African American, as a New Yorker, but also as a writer who seeks to dig deeper into the questions of what drives (and scares) us as individuals. Brinkley’s stories do this with not only finesse but care, not always providing answers or a straight conclusion but always leaving readers sated. His work has been published widely and has garnered him a Stegner Fellowship, The University of Wisconsin’s Creative Writing Fellowship, and inclusion in the The Best American Short Stories 2018 edited by Roxane Gay.

  I had a chance to speak with Jamel about the shared connections and traumas of the Black community in New York and America, and how those experiences make their way into his stories.

  Jennifer Baker: I’ve talked with a few writers about this before: the suggestion from readers that your fictional work may be autobiographical. And I wonder if, for writers of color, this gets heightened. Be it in the workshop environment or simply when sharing it with the larger world. When it comes to stories that feature Black men in particular and that looks at so many particulars of coming-of-age have you found that these stories tend to be routed in something personal for you?

  Jamel Brinkley: This reminds me of something that happened at a reading I went to a few years ago. Chinelo Okparanta was the reader, and during the Q&A, a white woman asked a question that implied the work was basically pure autobiography, with maybe just a dash of fictional art. Chinelo answered the question in an elegant and diplomatic way, but then another published Black writer who was in the audience asked Chinelo if she often gets questions like the one asked by the white woman. It was a wonderful way to call attention to the presumption of autobiography that is often made of work by writers of color and, often, by women writers of all races. It happens a lot, yes, and even if it isn’t intended to be an insult, I take it as one. As if our imaginations are so lacking and limited that they can’t go beyond bare facts.

  That said, I think all writers use refracted experiences. So my stories are rooted in things I’ve lived, be they house parties in Brooklyn, or J’ouvert, or day camp, or what have you. But often the root that get be started on a story becomes very small by the time the story is done, or it becomes transformed in a really significant way.

  Jenn: And New York City has a big place in your collection.

  Jamel: Yeah. I grew up in Brooklyn and the South Bronx, and I’ve also lived most of my adult life in Brooklyn. Those neighborhoods and people loom large for me. Toni Morrison has that phrase: “From my perspective there are only Black people. When I say ‘people,’ that’s what I mean.”

  Well, when I think about characters or people that I want to write about, I think about the people I know from the Bronx and Brooklyn.

  When I think about characters or people that I want to write about, I think about the people I know from the Bronx and Brooklyn.

  Jenn: That’s kind of a refreshing take. At least to me it is, to not see us have to be “othered” in the way that we usually are in media but in NYC, when from and residing in NYC, I very rarely as a Black woman ever feel like I’m not part of the everyday population of this city.

  Jamel: Right. We are at the center of our own lives.

  Jenn: Do you find that’s also somewhat freeing to write about? In stories like “J’ouvert 1996” and “Everything the Mouth Eats” and “A Lucky Man” there’s no need to dissect race. Not to say you avoid speaking about race, but it’s not necessarily at the epicenter of an emotional or literary crisis for your characters. Which in itself is refreshing for me as a reader.

  Jamel: It’s freeing in the way that just hanging out with my family is freeing, if that makes sense. Or the way that hanging out with my friends in school growing up was freeing. We know who we are, Black and Brown folks just living, and there’s no need to pander to whoever, a white audience or white readers. Of course, white supremacy in all of its manifestations is there, along with other forms of oppression, but in my stories I think they’re there as just one part of all the things my characters have to contend with in the struggle just to live everyday lives.

  Jenn: What I also love are those details that I saw in my grandma’s house growing up. I don’t care who you are but if you were Black in America you more than likely had those oversized wooden spoons hanging on the walls.

  Jamel: Oh without a doubt! It was fun to dip into my memories of details like that, or to look at old photographs and see those incredible details, which are so specific but communal and shared at the same time.

  Jenn: And the fashion. House dresses. Scarves. Culottes all that comes to mind as a child of the ’80s living in NYC. The pyrex and cast irons that got passed down…

  Jamel: Yes! And this is part of what I mean by freeing like family time is freeing. What we’re doing right now reminds me of sitting around with the aunties and cousins and talking about so-and-so’s house, or that outfit he used to wear. That kind of sharing is freeing.

  Jenn: Extremely. I spoke to a (Black male) writer and he said to me that when you write a certain type of literary fiction and they feature Black men and you are a Black man that it’s hard to find your audience. It seems, to me at least, that A Lucky Man has found a lot of resonance based on what you’re saying of not worrying about a white gaze. But do you think as a Black male writer there is an absence of simply stories about young Black men living and not necessarily fighting for their lives in the sense of fighting against power structures/systemic systems?

  Jamel: One thing that struck me while my collection was being considered by various publishing houses was how often the editor’s comments would be along the lines of, “These are such sensitive and nuanced portraits of these men!” On the one hand, that maybe does point to an absence of such stories about Black men, but on the other hand, my thought was, “But these are the kinds of Black men I know!” I will say too that I think almost 20 publishing houses looked at this book. Not one major/mainstream/corporate/however-you-want-to-say-it press showed significant interest. Only a few independent houses wanted to publish my collection. I know that short story collections are tough sells, so I’m sure that was a big part of it, but the kinds of stories I’m writing about Black men may have been a factor too. Is it a risk to publish stories like mine? I hope not, but maybe it is.

  I know that short story collections are tough sells, so I’m sure that was a big part of it, but the kinds of stories I’m writing about Black men may have been a factor too.

  Jenn: “Everything the Mouth Eats” is one of my favorite stories in the collection. What struck me is the dynamics of healing but also the writing of trauma. This story made me think more on how we see trauma exposed, but also as a woman, how often I see it handled and how little I see of it presented in a way that cares for the character. As a writer I felt like what was in your story was, “I want to get this across, but I also don’t want to abuse this person again for your entertainment.” So how do you approach a story like that?

  Jamel: This reminds me of the discourse around sharing footage of Black people being murdered by the police, the ethics of that.

  Jenn: You know, that was on my mind too actually.

  Jamel: That story actually started because I wanted to write something that was in conversation with “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin. And one of the things that strikes me about that story, is not just the incredible language in that final scene — a miracle of a scene, really — but the way the narrator’s voice ushers us toward that ending from the very beginning. Baldwin’s story feels powerfully voiced and radically peopled, and I wanted to see if I could do that in my story. The center of my story isn’t the trauma or abuse the brothers experienced, it’s the relationship between the brothers themselves.
  Art Must Engage With Black Vitality, Not Just Black Pain

  Books like ‘The Fire This Time’ give depth and nuance
  to a reflection of Blackness in America
  electricliterature.com

  Jenn: Exactly. Because we’re leading up to an idea of what caused this fracture between them. And I feel like all of your stories are an interrogation of deeper feelings that exist yet cannot be verbalized. We’re dealing with this basic understanding and relating of one another on a human level. Is that always the seed of a story for you?

  Jamel: The seeds of my stories vary. A seed could be a particular place, or a snippet of memory, or a character, or a voice. But in the process of trying to nurture that seed, I do think I’m always trying to push toward deeper feelings that are difficult to verbalize. I don’t think language as given is very good at capturing the range and complexity of human feeling. Somehow “emotion words” show themselves as lacking. Literary sentences and poetic lines can make language do things that, as commonly used, it isn’t very good at. I never want to expose my characters. There’s something lurid or tabloid about that word, expose. I want to explore my characters, a process which assumes their depth, complexity, and humanity. It also assumes that I won’t get answers to all the questions my stories ask of them, and that there will always be more questions.

  Jenn: So, as an instructor of writing how do you push student writers to also pursue that complexity?

  Jamel: This is a question I’m constantly asking myself. I’m starting to think that one way of pursuing that complexity is to court a certain amount of “messiness.” The kind of messiness that is tolerated in novels but not usually in stories. Here’s what I mean: Student writers are often told that a great story, as opposed to a great novel, has to be perfect. But what if the pursuit of perfection in story (a perfect arc or narrative shape, a perfect ending, etc.) serves to lessen the complexity of that story’s characters? What if characters end up saying things only for the perfection of the story, or if they show themselves only to the extent that the so-called perfection of a story will allow? One of the things I love about Edward P. Jones’s stories is that they feel untidy in a brilliant way. You get the sense that he loves his characters and they get to take the stage in ways that don’t make conventional sense. Those fugitive paragraphs about “minor” characters are kind of rebelling against the perfection of the story form, and I really admire that. It feels like life. So I think I just have to find ways to get my students to love their characters a little bit more than they love the perfection of the story-object. Wish me luck.

  I’m starting to think that one way of pursuing that complexity is to court a certain amount of “messiness.”

  Jenn: Godspeed, my friend. In terms of other short stories to learn more about, well anything, are there any in particular you’d recommend?

  Jamel: Well, an Ed Jones story I’d recommend in terms of what I was just talking about would be “Old Boys, Old Girls.” I’d recommend “Virgins” by Danielle Evans to learn how to productively make trouble for your characters. “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” by Yiyun Li is so patient, and it brilliantly handles multiple points of view, and that ending — my god! “The Ascent” by Ron Rash is a great lesson in writing close third, especially from the perspective of a child, and it doesn’t sensationalize the boy’s traumatic circumstances. “A Day” by William Trevor is a wonderful “aftermath” story. And “The Mistress” by Gina Berriault is great in terms of the consequences of a character’s desires. And if you want your socks knocked off in general, reread “Sonny’s Blues” forever.

• Craft Literary - https://www.craftliterary.com/2018/04/25/interview-jamel-brinkley/

  Interview: Jamel Brinkley

  By CRAFT | Interviews | April 25, 2018

  Jamel Brinkley’s debut short story collection, A Lucky Man: Stories, is out this week from Graywolf. The stories, most of which feature black male protagonists, are set in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Most of the protagonists are on a journey—both emotional and physical—and that sense of movement works its way through each story and through the entire collection. Each story opens up a world, and each character—no matter how minor—feels fully developed. This outstanding collection can rightfully be compared to the classic collection, Lost in the City, by Edward P. Jones.

  We talked to Brinkley over email about the collection as a whole and about the craft in individual stories. His responses are thoughtful and expansive, as he considers both his own practice and how he’s incorporated what he’s learned from others. Reading his answers to our questions is quite like taking the best craft class, ever. This is an interview you’ll want to read slowly and revisit often, especially as you read and reread A Lucky Man.

  CRAFT: Your debut short story collection, A Lucky Man, lives and breathes New York, with most of the stories located in one, or more, of the boroughs. And while I believe you grew up and went to school here, you’ve been away from New York for a while now, and I wonder how that impacts your work. Is it harder or easier to write about a place when you’re no longer there?

  Jamel Brinkley: That’s a great question. I remember that someone who was trying to persuade me not to leave New York said something like, “It might be cool to write out there in the fields, but are they a match for the rhythm and energy of Brooklyn?” He made a compelling case, and I did begin to worry that I wouldn’t be able to write about Brooklyn and the Bronx while being so far away from them. But what I found, I think, was that my decades of life in New York had indelibly marked me. The memories that had stuck with me, threads of the obsessions and questions I write about, didn’t go away. Maybe my perspective on them was altered because I left New York, but memories are fluid and subjective anyway. As for the rhythm and energy my skeptical acquaintance felt I would miss, I could get that from books and music, which happily I could take with me. Besides, my immediate family and oldest friends live in New York, so I visit pretty frequently.

  C: The collection moves in time from 1995 to the present, and while most of the stories explore memory and the impact of the past on the present, the final story, “Clifton’s Place,” is quite deliberately focused on the passing of time. Did you consider other ways to organize the stories? Did you write any stories specifically for the collection, or was it a matter of collecting the best and ordering them appropriately?

  JB: I knew I was writing a number of stories focusing on black men, and I had hopes that enough of them could be gathered into a book, but I never wrote a story thinking that it was “for the collection” in any kind of predetermined way. I pursued each story with blinders on in terms of the other stories—at least in my conscious mind. During the editorial process, “Everything the Mouth Eats” was added and another story was taken out. My editors and I went through a few possible story orders, but I think “Clifton’s Place” always struck us as the closer. Why? I’m not totally sure, but I think it makes a different kind of sound than the other stories, maybe a sound that reads like the result of those other stories. Speaking of sound, I also like that it ends with music. The first story, “No More Than a Bubble,” begins with our two knuckleheads surrounded by, but not listening to, music at a house party. I like that we ended up with a musical bracketing.

  C: One of the things I love in this collection is that each story opens up a world for the reader, in a way that has the scope of a novel. Often these are worlds that may not be familiar to readers. “A Family,” for example, introduces us to Curtis, who has recently come home after being incarcerated for twelve years. “Everything the Mouth Eats” takes place at a capoeira conference. How aware were you at the time you wrote some of these stories you would be opening doors for some readers, showing them people and situations that might be new to them? How does that impact the way in which you describe each world?

  JB: I was very aware of it in the case of “Everything the Mouth Eats.” I had some knowledge of the world of that story because I was very active in capoeira for many years, but I knew most readers in the United States probably wouldn’t know much about it. So, craft-wise, it was important to have Eric, the narrator, be relatively new to it himself. It was probably important to have that scene, in flashback, in which he and Carlos discuss what capoeira is. Eric is also at some remove from the art form, even though he participates in it. He’s not very good at it, has some reservations, and is definitely not immersed in it the way Carlos and Sulay are. In these ways, he can kind of stand in for most readers in the story. Still, I did end up wanting him to have some level of familiarity and involvement. I didn’t want the story to be reducible to capoeira tourism. Much of the same could probably be said about “J’ouvert, 1996.” With the other stories, I don’t think I thought much about the fact that I would be opening doors for readers. Issues such as mass incarceration and gentrification, which some of the stories take up, shouldn’t be unfamiliar to readers.

  C: Your stories remind me of the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, and William Trevor, among others, for their deep focus on character and for the examination and consideration—the respect— of their characters’ lives. The collection feels as though it speaks, in part, to Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City. Can you talk about the writers who have influenced your work?

  JB: You just named three of my guiding lights. Li, Trevor, and Jones are all very important to me, and I return to their work again and again. I’ve been Yiyun Li’s student, and I had the pleasure of meeting Edward P. Jones in Iowa City. My good friend D. Wystan Owen and I got to have dinner with him and the late James Alan McPherson in 2015, a memory I’ll treasure as long as I live. Lost in the City is one of my most treasured books (and “Old Boys, Old Girls,” from Jones’s second collection, may be one of my favorite stories of all time). I’d say that my book is in the shadow of Lost—and what a shadow to shelter in! It shares a focus on black people in a specific place, New York instead of Washington, D.C.

  I love these writers and their work for reasons you mention: the focus and respect and love for their characters. A less prettied up way of putting it, Jones has said, is that it’s not so much compassion as it is the responsibility to attempt to know and tell a character’s full story. I also admire those writers’ sentences, and the fact they flout some of the current conventional wisdom about story craft. For example, there’s an idea that you shouldn’t write short stories from multiple points of view. I can hear them all collectively laughing at that notion. I also like what Yiyun Li says about editing: “Editing is not about craft. It’s about finding the life in a piece.” When I read any fiction by those three writers, I feel as though they’ve all gone in search of the life. I’ve tended to think about revision in terms of attending to craft, and I still think conscious attention to craft should be kept largely out of the early drafting stages, but because of Li’s words, and the example of all three of those writers, I now aim for another, post-craft, life-seeking phase of my revision and editing process.

  C: Yiyun Li often writes stories that speak directly to other stories: several of her stories respond to ones by William Trevor. In your collection, I felt as though the stories—while they may also be responding to other writers—speak to the other stories in the collection. Did you consciously write any of these pieces in response to another story, or are those connections there simply because of their proximity and their shared themes?

  JB: I didn’t consciously write the stories in that way, so that they speak to other stories in the collection, but I see why you ask the question. I think in the years I spent working on these stories, I was circling a lot of the same territory, coming back again and again for another look, a slightly different perspective, a new angle. I try not to write by thinking explicitly about theme though, at least not until the very late stages of revision. There’s too much story stuff to worry about, and I think if you allow yourself to be guided too much or too soon by theme, you’re in the bad kind of trouble (as opposed to the good kind of trouble you court as a story writer). Still, as I look at the stories now, I see how you can think of them in thematic or situational pairs: “No More Than a Bubble” and “Infinite Happiness,” “J’ouvert, 1996” and “Everything the Mouth Eats,” and so on.

  C: While this collection isn’t linked in the traditional manner, it feels linked by virtue of a number of common themes and threads, one of which is the focus on black men, with almost all of the stories featuring male protagonists. We see men at different ages, and in varied situations, but they’re all figuring out what it means to be black and male in America in the late 20th/early 21st century. As you were shaping the collection, how much did you consider how the stories would work together to create a prism of sorts, to allow us to see all these different men, side by side?

  JB: I didn’t think much about that effect until I began working with my editors on the collection and the order in which the stories would appear. I’m glad the stories feel linked, and not just like a bunch of stories tossed together. It was also important to emphasize the linkages while avoiding redundancy. One of the reasons the story I mentioned earlier was removed is that it had too much in common with the title story: a man misbehaving with a camera, attention to a father-daughter relationship, etc.

  C: Another way that the stories feel linked to me is that every story is a journey. While many (most? all?) stories are emotional journeys, these stories often feature characters moving through time and space. In “No More Than a Bubble,” the journey starts up at Baker Field, at the tip of Manhattan, and ends somewhere unknown, deep in Brooklyn. Because of these peripatetic characters, I think, there’s an underlying restlessness and searching in each story, and the journeys also function as a way to keep each story moving along. Can you speak a little to both the restlessness and to the sense of movement that lives in each of these stories?

  JB: Restlessness and movement seem appropriate to emphasize in a collection focused on New York City. And of course restlessness is a great quality for a story character to have, but it’s also interesting to think about movement and mobility in terms of race and class. So much of how racism, income inequality, and other forms of oppression work is about restricting free movement, controlling space, and limiting access. In that sense, I really like that my characters are in motion, going from place to place even if it’s somehow risky to do so.

  As you mentioned, a journey keeps a story moving and it provides what Antonya Nelson calls a shaping device. Where a journey begins and ends can communicate something of what a story is about. So, for instance, in “J’ouvert, 1996,” we start in a cramped, small, familial space, move into open, peopled spaces, and end in an open, but somehow intimate space with Ty and Omari. “Clifton’s Place” begins by ushering us into the bar in the way an outsider would experience it, and it ends by entering the bar again, but the space is very different, and maybe Ellis and Sadie are now the outsiders. The journey in “A Lucky Man” is a day at work, with Lincoln heading to his job at the beginning and going home at the end, but it’s anything but an ordinary day. I think these kinds of journeys suggest things about the meanings of those stories, but without being too heavy-handed or awkwardly symbolic. Story-wise, journeys are great because they invite the possibility of encounters and trouble. They make possibility possible, as one of my writing teachers once said. In these and other ways, there’s often something a little magical about a journey. I think my work is grounded in what is called realism, but I’ve had readers suggest that there is a subtle fairy-tale-like quality to some of the stories too, which I like.

  C: “Wolf and Rhonda” is the only story that changes point of view and, interestingly, it’s also the only story that features a female point of view. We begin with Wolf, and we end with Rhonda. Can you talk a little about what it was like to both write from a female point of view and switch POV throughout the story? Was Rhonda’s POV always in the story? Did you find yourself privileging one character over the other?

  JB: Beginning with Wolf and ending with Rhonda is part of that story’s journey, for sure. Time and place have their pull on both characters, but Wolf, in his preoccupations with the past, moves backwards in time, and with Rhonda, in her sections, we move forward. I did know from the beginning that I wanted to write a story with two different points of view, and once I discovered Rhonda would be a character, I knew the other POV in the story would be hers.

  It was challenging to write from two points of view, but I suspect that some of that had to do with the fact that I’d been encouraged not to write that way. In terms of Rhonda, I think about all the well-deserved critiques of female characters written by male authors. We, male writers, just need to reckon with that kind of critique and do so with humility. It certainly seems true that men have a much harder time writing women than the other way around.I’m sure the same is true of white authors writing non-white characters, or straight authors writing queer characters, and so on. To write convincingly across privilege from the more privileged position is more difficult, period. But I also like what William Trevor said: “I write out of curiosity more than anything else. That’s why I write about women, because I’m not a woman and I don’t know what it’s like.” The combination of humility and curiosity appeals to me, much more nowadays than the premature claims of empathetic understanding that writers often make. I prefer the acknowledgment of a lack. “I don’t understand so I’m going to work really hard and ask a lot of questions in an attempt to find out.”

  I think that’s how I approached writing Rhonda. Did it work? Who knows? I probably failed in more ways than are obvious to me. I was certainly taken to task in a workshop for how I had written her in one draft. But interestingly, more readers have felt that Rhonda is the more interesting of the two characters, and that the story’s approach to her felt more internal. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back here, but I do think that for most of the story the narrator is observing Wolf more than inhabiting him. Part of that is deliberate—in some ways, to me, his journey in the story is from type to character, or revealing the character hiding within the type—but part of it may be that I took more care throughout in my attempts to be humble and curious with Rhonda. I’ll readily admit that she’s my favorite of the two characters. But, again, I’m sure there are ways that I failed.

  C: I had read four of these stories in literary journals before I read the collection. When I reread those stories, I felt as though I was reconnecting with long-lost friends or acquaintances. This underscores for me the way that your characters are built, the way that they’re so completely developed. Can you talk about how you go about understanding your characters and allowing them to be seen so clearly by your readers?

  JB: Part of how I work with characters is trying to approach them with the humility and curiosity I’ve already mentioned. I also think about how long Edward P. Jones has his characters and their stories live in his head, and that’s before he even writes a word! I try as much as possible to allow my characters to lead the way, which may just be a mental trick or a kind of delusion, but I think it’s an artistically necessary one—for me, anyway. If my characters are going to lead, and not just be functions of the plot, they need to be substantial; they have to have depth. They can’t be flimsy, pushed around, or dominated. I cringe when I hear or read writers say things along the lines of what Lionel Shriver expressed during her infamous and very problematic sombrero speech, maybe the least of the objectionable things she said: that an author uses characters for his plot, that they belong to him, “to be manipulated at his whim,” she said, “to fulfill whatever purpose he cares to put them to.” She spoke of writers exploiting characters: “The character is his creature, to be exploited up a storm.” Well, that’s just not how I think of characters or fiction writing at all. It reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov saying, jokingly or not, “My characters are galley slaves.” As you can imagine, what that kind of approach suggests, in terms of aesthetics and ethics, just doesn’t sit well with me.

  I focus a lot on discovering my characters’ contradictory impulses, the things that make them interesting, not too easily or uniformly legible or reducible to a theme. I’m constantly asking questions, which makes for first drafts that come out very slowly. I’ve also been encouraged to think of every character, like every person, as having a rhythm, a specific baseline pulse or tempo that the time of the story itself works with or against. Again, I may be deluding myself, but I really don’t feel like I’m in control of my characters. I invite them to do certain things, but I can tell by how they do those things whether or not they really want to.

  C: In several stories, including “Infinite Happiness” and “No More Than a Bubble,” the story uses a flash forward toward the end, with the retrospective voice helping to make sense of the events of the story. I often find flash forwards to be such effective and interesting devices, to take the reader out of the moment of the story in order to shed light on it. Were the flash forwards in these stories there from their beginnings, or did you add them later in revision? How do you see the value of using a flash forward?

  JB: As I recall, the flash forwards were there pretty early on in both stories. The challenge was handling the retrospection throughout the stories, especially prior to the flash forwards. Of course, retrospection is a looking back, at something the narrator still doesn’t fully understand, at something that can help make sense of something in the narrator’s present, and so on. It has precisely the power you mention, taking the reader out of the moment of the story, but managing that power can be a huge and interesting challenge. In other words, I’ve been convinced that retrospection, as a lens or an interpretive device, can sometimes get in the way. It’s often best for the reader to be more or less fully immersed in what the narrator is looking back at, in the drama as seen from the perspective of the younger self, with as little interference as possible from the older, wiser, and often more clear-headed self. Look, not everyone will think about it this way. I had a decisive disagreement with one magazine editor about how the retrospection in “Bubble” should work, which is fine, but it’s my story, and after working on it for years I knew how I wanted it to work.

  I like my characters to be cared for and attended to, but not coddled. A retrospective narrator, with her knowledge, experience, and more distant perspective, can act as a form of excessive shielding of the younger version of herself, like an overprotective parent. If you’re not careful, the language used can reflect that parental narrator rather than the language that is truer to the heat of the moment or scene in question. The way I decided I wanted the two stories you mentioned to work is that the retrospective narrators, A.J. and Ben, sink almost entirely into their younger, more foolhardy selves. Reliving your own nonsense is a painful thing to do, but it seems true to how I often think and obsess about moments from my past. Each of the flash forwards, coming near the end of the stories, acts almost like a belated safety valve, a breath taken after being submerged for so long underwater. But of course, the safety of the flash forwards isn’t free and pure. They may help make a little more sense of the events of the story, but they are probably sources of pain and further complication too. A new perspective can give you an uglier angle. The light a flash forward sheds can be muddy. In her essay collection, Yiyun Li has a line I’m reminded of right now: “In retrospect little makes sense—perhaps all stories, rather than once-upon-a-time, should start this way.”

  C: In the Acknowledgments, you thank Brigid Hughes and A Public Space. Can you talk a little about working with APS and what that did for your work and for your career?

  JB: My first published story appeared in the pages of A Public Space, and my second story did as well. The journal’s advocacy of my work helped my book get published, through the partnership it has had with Graywolf. Brigid Hughes and Yiyun Li, who is a contributing editor there, are both brilliant, and I absolutely love the way they approach editing. They’re great with line edits (Li once color-coded my sentences; as I recall, purple highlighting meant they were bad), but what I’m thinking of more than that is the way they both so generously interrogate a story. Most of the edits I got were questions. Some were posed so I could clarify matters that were fuzzy, but most of them invited me to think more broadly and deeply about the world of the story. The questions helped me learn how to know my stories and their characters better, achieving clarity beyond what appeared on the page in ways that subtly, but often crucially, affected what ended up on the page. As with my editors at Graywolf, I always felt pushed, but respected and trusted at the same time. Not every editor can do all those things well and at the same time, believe me. The way Hughes and Li read my individual stories has made me a better reader in general.

  C: In terms of your process, where does a story often start? Do you have a sense of a character or an image? Or do you think more about a question that you might want to explore, something that you don’t quite understand?

  JB: I usually start with an impression of a character, a snippet of dialogue, an image, a place, or a memory. I need an anchor of that kind that can act as an initial compositional resource, but over the course of the writing that anchor usually dissolves, shrinks, shape-shifts, or vanishes entirely. I like to write into mystery and uncertainty, and I’m fine—though maybe not when it’s happening!—if a story starts to go places I hadn’t expected at all. In that sense, I probably subscribe to a version of the writing process described by Richard Hugo, whose ideas I was introduced to by Charles D’Ambrosio. The process requires the writer to distinguish between “the initiating or triggering subject,” which gets you started, and “the real or generated subject,” which you come to discover. Sometimes I wish I could do the Edward P. Jones thing and think about a story until I figure out the climax or ending and then write towards it, but I think I prefer not knowing the ending until I’m almost there. So, as a quick example of all of this, when I started “Clifton’s Place,” all I knew was that I wanted to write about a place that was based on the Tip Top Bar in Brooklyn. That’s it. My time spent at the actual bar had struck me and stayed with me for some reason. As I wrote, all the questions I had about my version of the bar—What’s my bar called and why? Who owns it? How has it changed or remained the same?—led me to where the story ended up.

  C: I know you edit and refine your stories carefully. Can you talk a little about your revision process? Is a story ever really done?

  JB: My first drafts take a long time because I’m asking lots of questions, like the ones I just mentioned. They also take a long time because I edit on the sentence level as I go. I can’t write the next sentence until I’m satisfied with the previous one, which is ridiculous because I often end up heavily revising those sentences later on anyway. But I need to feel a sturdiness under my feet as I go, maybe as a balance to the next scary step into the void.

  Once a draft is done, I like to let it sit for a while, if possible, and then I reread it and start thinking more consciously about craft. I’ll try to tighten things in terms of craft, paying attention to all the things that come up in writing workshops: scene, point of view, story shape, etc. For this, I’ve found that I like to use a version of Robert Boswell’s transitional draft method, in which you focus on just one thing during each revision.

  That used to be it. But then, as I mentioned earlier, I now like to have a revision stage that follows this. If the revisions attending to craft successfully tighten a story, I then like to loosen the story up again, just a little. I absolutely think a story should be crafted and well shaped, but I also believe it should not be schematic or stiff. I like the shape of a story to be organically felt, or seen only through rereading and studying, not in-your-face obvious. So I look for little ways to make a story, and its characters especially, more life-like. That can be through dialogue or action or whatever else. Anything that can shake the characters loose a bit from the designs of the story, its narrator, or its protagonist. I like it best when it feels like all the characters have been given their due, that they have their own lives and their own stories that could potentially be written. This stage of revision might be seen as my way of honoring the initial stage of drafting, with all the mystery of that encounter with life, language, memory, and the imagination. Of course, this all sounds a little pretentious, so I’ll end by emphasizing that I’m pretty new at this, and, if I’m fortunate enough to keep writing, I’m sure many of my ideas will change.

  JAMEL BRINKLEY is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories (Graywolf Press/A Public Space Books). His fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Best American Short Stories 2018, A Public Space, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Epiphany, and LitMag. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was also the 2016-17 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His work has received support from Kimbilio Fiction, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Beginning this fall, he will be a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

• Millions - https://themillions.com/2018/05/the-millions-interviews-jamel-brinkley.html

  A Mix of Paean and Elegy: The Millions Interviews Jamel Brinkley
  The Millions Interview
  Adam Vitcavage May 24, 2018 | 2 books mentioned 5 min read
  Related Books:

  Jamel Brinkley’s nuanced debut A Lucky Man collects nine short stories set in places the author knows very intimately: Brooklyn and the Bronx. The writer grew up in these diverse neighborhoods and years later immersed himself in the lives of men and women to create these powerful stories that have been featured in a variety of publications, including the forthcoming The Best American Short Stories 2018 collection edited by Roxane Gay.

  The writer’s work explores many aspects of what it means to be person of color in America today, including masculinity and social class. I corresponded with the author about how the collection evolved, what New York City means to him, and what to expect from him in the future.

  coverThe Millions: These stories take place in New York City, which feels like its own character at times throughout the collection. Why was capturing the city you grew up in so vital for this collection?

  Jamel Brinkley: I’m guessing here, or trying to make sense of things retrospectively, but I think one thing that must have been in my mind as I worked on the stories in this collection was the violence of gentrification and the way it has been rapidly changing New York City and the lives of many of the people who have lived here. (I’m in New York as I respond to these questions.) The collection begins solidly in the 1990s, and by the end, with “Clifton’s Place,” we come closer to the contemporary moment and gentrification becomes more explicit as a subject, though there are traces of it elsewhere. Also, I’ve spent the vast majority of my years living in New York, so in many ways, this city is all I knew when I was writing the stories. Seven of the nine stories in the collection were written while I lived in the Midwest, in Iowa City, so I think that distance from New York made me long for it. For all these reasons, with respect to the city, I feel like the stories are a mix of paean and elegy.

  TM: All of the stories have been previously published. Why did these make it into this debut collection?

  JB: Well, at the time that the collection was sold to Graywolf, only two of the stories had been published, both in A Public Space. The rest of the stories were placed at the same time the book was being edited and prepared for publication. During that time, one story was added and another one removed. I think the resulting nine were the stories that spoke to each other in some way and could be arranged into a shape that made sense.

  TM: What about the story “A Lucky Man” is special to you?

  JB: I chose to use the title of that story as the title of the collection for a few reasons. “Man” just makes sense because every story features a male narrator or protagonist, though “Wolf and Rhonda” also has a female protagonist. “Lucky” resonates for me in a number of ways. I feel like each story in my collection is about an ordinary person, along the lines of what the writer Frank O’Connor called “the Little Man,” in contrast to the traditional hero of the novel. In the title story, the idea of being lucky is reflected upon and interrogated. We see that luck can vanish or be stripped away in an instant, and that taking the notion of luck seriously means realizing that it says absolutely nothing about the innate character or qualities of the person it happens to attach itself to. In that story, we also get the idea of luck as an empty, haunting presence. The word “luck” also makes me think of the idea of being exceptional or special. Whether we’re talking about kids in school or writers in the publishing world, institutions often regard black people and other people of color by using the scarcity model, which assumes that there can only be “a few.” Only an exceptional few will make it out of the hood and go on to live successful lives. Only a special few will be chosen by gatekeepers to become the representative voices of their people. Stuff like that, ideas that I obviously don’t agree with. So “Lucky” in terms of that story, and in terms of the collection overall, is tinged with irony, under scrutiny, or under erasure. At the same time, that word suggests some kind of happiness, and in that sense I want to embrace it without irony. My hope is that the moments of happiness and joy, however fleeting, feel authentic in the collection.

  TM: Though this is your debut collection, your name and stories have been floating around for a while. What lessons or skills have you learned throughout the years that make your writing so special that you wish you knew right when you started?

  JB: I wish I knew that experiencing resistance while writing, being stalled in the face of the unknown, is often a good sign, and that lots of easy fancy footwork with prose can often be a warning sign. I’ve always loved language, and I want my sentences to be solid and stylish, but language in the kind of fiction I want to write has to be responsible to character, first and foremost, and to the world that characters I write about inhabit. When I first started writing, I would get carried away with “lyrical” writing and stylistic flourishes and kind of forget about my obligations to the characters and the story. I would get impatient with difficulty. Who knows how many stories I missed out on writing because I couldn’t handle being uncomfortable in that way.

  TM: What is it about the short story form as opposed to novels that pushes you to keep writing them?

  JB: I like the density or layers of stories, relative to their length and perceived simplicity. I like that you can more or less hold an entire story in your mind and heart. I like that stories exert a constraint of gathering on you as a writer. One of my writing teachers says that stories, from their beginnings, are in the process of searching for their endings or shutting themselves down, and that feels true to me. Novels, by contrast, tend to feel like they are opening up and expanding. I also like that stories feel like they lean towards poetry.

  TM: Now that this collection—which thematically explores race, masculinity, and social class—is out, what other parts of society would you like to explore?

  JB: I think race, gender, and class, among other things, will always be present in my work because there’s no way of talking about society without reference to them. But my honest answer to your question is, I don’t know. I think I discover what I’m writing about only in the middle of the process of writing it. And that’s a best-case scenario. Sometimes it isn’t clear what I’m doing, or what I’ve done, until after I’ve done it. That’s actually the way I prefer to work. I don’t want to set the thematic cart before the sentence-writing horse.

• ABA - http://bookweb.org/news/qa-jamel-brinkley-author-mays-1-indie-next-list-pick-104216

  A Q&A With Jamel Brinkley, Author of May’s #1 Indie Next List Pick
  By Liz Button on Tuesday, Apr 24, 2018
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  Booksellers have chosen Jamel Brinkley’s debut short story collection, A Lucky Man: Stories, out May 1 from Graywolf Press/A Public Space Books, as their number-one pick on the May Indie Next List.

  A Lucky Man coverIn A Lucky Man, which received starred reviews from both Kirkus and Booklist, Brinkley presents a poignant, raw collection of nine stories set in Brooklyn and the South Bronx, where black men and boys struggle to salvage relationships, escape past mistakes, and define their own lives in a world shaped by race, gender, and class and permeated by the promise of luck — or its absence.

  “A Lucky Man marks the arrival of a brilliant new voice in contemporary fiction. In quiet, elegant prose, debut author Jamel Brinkley renders characters who are universally relatable yet entirely unique, with all the complexities and subtleties of living, breathing people,” said Jason Foose of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona. “As I read their stories, I was swept up into the lives of these characters, so much so that at times I forgot I was reading fiction and felt instead that I was reading letters from old friends. This is an important and powerful collection. Its slice-of-life stories glow with a soft light, revealing rich detail and vibrant beauty in the dark corners of human experience. Every moment held me in silent awe.”

  Brinkley, whose debut was also selected by booksellers for the Winter/Spring 2018 Indies Introduce program, was raised in the Bronx and Brooklyn and is a graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has received support from the Kimbilio Fiction writers’ community and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Brinkley is currently a 2018–2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

  Here, Brinkley discusses his debut work with Bookselling This Week.

  Bookselling This Week: Each of these stories takes place in Brooklyn and the South Bronx. How have those places influenced your writing?

  Jamel Brinkley Photo credit: Arash Saedinia
  Photo by Arash Saedinia

  Jamel Brinkley: In some ways, those are the only places I’ve known for much of my life. I grew up in various parts of Brooklyn and in the South Bronx, so when I think about characters, about people, naturally I’m thinking about the people that I grew up with, whether it’s my family or my friends or my neighbors in those places. Those are my people, in a lot of ways. As far as an inspirational resource or a compositional resource, that’s naturally where my mind goes because that’s what I’ve known pretty much my entire life.

  BTW: Are many of these characters based on specific people or are they mostly amalgamations of different people’s traits?

  JB: I think they’re amalgamations. In some ways, a lot of the characters are partly me. There’s a range of them; I think there are elements of me in all those characters, but, of course, I’ve observed other people or certain types of people and have taken little bits and pieces from them. I like to pull from life, but I like whatever I pull to be as small and sturdy as possible so that I can imagine around it and really build a story. I don’t want to have the elements of my stories be pulled too much from autobiography or biography.

  BTW: Many of these stories deal with confusion about masculinity or elements of the concept that are problematic for certain characters. Can you talk a bit about writing about that topic?

  JB: I didn’t set out to write a collection of stories that dealt explicitly with masculinity. I was just moving from story to story, focusing on these individual characters, and now that this is all gathered up into a book, I can stand back and see it, that that’s what the book is doing.

  I think that masculinity, or any sort of gender identity, is kind of like ill-fitting clothing. It’s something that we wear from day to day and sometimes it fits well and sometimes it doesn’t. There are certain expectations put on us about what it means to be a man or a woman, to be masculine, to be feminine, or something else, that I think don’t always connect with who we really are, so the characters in the stories are feeling the weight of the expectations of masculinity put on them. Really, I think what the collection is trying to do is open up ideas of masculinity — that it can be a range of things, that there are many ways to be masculine, which I think is interesting especially right now, when we’re having a lot of conversations about toxic masculinity, for instance.

  BTW: The title of the collection, A Lucky Man, comes from the title story, which follows Lincoln, a private school security guard who is reflecting back on his marriage and his life. How does the concept of luck appear in the story? Does that theme run through the rest of the collection?

  JB: I think the idea of luck does spread throughout the collection but it resonates differently in different stories. In “A Lucky Man,” Lincoln is starting to come to this painful recognition that he’s been called “lucky,” jokingly, for much of his life, but he starts to realize, wait a minute, maybe my good fortune has nothing to do with me. Maybe it is just luck, maybe it has nothing to do with my talent, with the kind of person that I am, so that the luck is simply that, something that has been bestowed upon him and can easily be taken away.

  With some of the other stories, luck transforms or is connected to other ideas, such as being exceptional or the idea of happiness — characters who are in situations that might seem good or beneficial or happy to them. That term, whether it’s “lucky” or “exceptional” or “happy,” is always sort of tinged with irony in the collection.

  BTW: Have you always wanted to be a writer? How did you come to writing as a career?

  JB: I’ve always loved reading, which is something that most writers will probably say. When I was a kid I would play these games where I would make up characters and scenarios, which, looking back on it, seems like part of the origin of my writing life. Since then, I’ve put myself in close proximity to writing without actually taking on the writing life. I taught high school English for a while, I was an English major in college, I started a PhD program in comparative literature, so I’ve always been around literature — reading it, teaching it, critiquing it — but it wasn’t until a few years ago, around 2012, that I really explored the possibility of putting writing at the center of my life. I went to a number of summer writing workshops that year, which were really encouraging and nourishing, and I came across exceptional teachers. That really made me think, hey, maybe I should try this. This makes me happy.

  BTW: What has been the role of indie bookstores in your life?

  JB: Indie bookstores have been important to me everywhere I’ve lived. In Brooklyn, Greenlight Bookstore was my home away from home; I would always be in there browsing or buying books, adding to my stack of books to be read. When I left New York for Iowa City, Prairie Lights became my home away from home, and from there I moved to Madison, where A Room of One’s Own became that place, and now in L.A., there are stores like Skylight Books and Eso Won Books that are really important to me.

  I think indie bookstores are so important because, well, it’s the people, really. It’s the booksellers, who are, to my mind, really committed and enthusiastic readers first. It’s always a great experience to go into a bookstore and hear the folks working there talking happily about books and what they just read and to see their recommendations on the shelves and have them recommend books to you. That kind of person-to-person contact from an enthusiastic reader is really energizing.

• Midwest Gothic - http://midwestgothic.com/2018/05/interview-jamel-brinkley/

  Interview: Jamel Brinkley
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  Jamel Brinkley author headshot

  Photo Credit: Arash Saedinia

  Midwestern Gothic staffer Kathryn Cammell talked with author Jamel Brinkley about his debut collection A Lucky Man, the challenge of writing a short story, how to overcome rejection, and more.

  **

  Kathryn Cammell: What’s your connection to the Midwest?

  Jamel Brinkley: I drafted and/or revised every story in my debut story collection while living in the Midwest—in Iowa City and Madison, specifically.

  KC: Your forthcoming debut, A Lucky Man, is a collection of fiction short stories about the interwoven lives of men and the nuances of their relationships with other people in their lives. What drew you to this subject matter?

  JB: I didn’t set out to write about one specific thing, but I suppose I must have been drawn to my subject matter by my own experiences, memories, and obsessions. In my life as a boy and then a man, I’ve thought a lot about masculinity (especially black masculinity) and human relationships of various kinds. A Lucky Man is a work of the imagination, but really I wrote about the kinds of people I’ve known, whose lives are rich, complicated, nuanced, and full of love and loss.

  A Lucky Man book cover by Jamel Brinkley

  KC: What is the importance of short stories, especially when many short story authors are pressured to write longer works?

  JB: I’m tempted to say that simply resisting the market-driven preference for longer works itself makes writing and reading short stories a virtue. But I won’t stop at that. The compression required in a short story, whether it’s five pages or thirty pages, presents a distinct formal challenge (for the writer) and pleasure (for the reader) that you don’t get from a longer work, which has its own challenges and pleasures. Whereas even good or great longer works typically have the freedom to slack off every once in a while, good short stories usually have to work from sentence to sentence, in a lapidary way. Also, and maybe more importantly, I think they tend to mirror how I, and maybe other people, actually narrate life, not as one long cohesive, plotted narrative, but as a collection of smaller stories, each one told as though at a bar with a friend: “Hey, let me tell you what happened the other day…” I like that stories tilt in some ways toward poetry, and I like the feeling that you can hold an entire story in your mind.

  KC: The stories in your collection focus on luck and its absence, in the lives of men living in Brooklyn and the South Bronx: how did your own childhood growing up in those places influence what you chose to explore in your stories?

  JB: As I mentioned, I don’t feel like I consciously chose to explore any particular thing in my stories. My childhood growing up in a particular place probably influenced me the way anyone’s childhood growing up in a particular place would. Toni Morrison said that “universal” is a word hopelessly stripped of meaning. She went on to say, “Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. It is good—and universal —because it is specifically about a particular world. That’s what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water.” I wrote about what I didn’t know about the particular things I know, and what I know is, largely, Brooklyn and the Bronx. If I managed to depict, even in an oblique way, a fraction of what life in those places has been like, then I can be happy with that.

  KC: How do the places that you lived in the Midwest compare to Brooklyn and the South Bronx? Is there anything from your time in each place that you can identify as influencing your writing?

  JB: The thing that struck me immediately about Iowa City and Madison is the quiet in those places, relative to where I lived in New York. Sure, there was the occasional band of frat boys hooting and hollering, or the sound of a car passing in the rain, but mostly my sense was, “Wow, it’s really quiet here.” I don’t know that this quiet influenced my prose itself, although maybe it did. Some stories, many of the ones I began in the Midwest, do have a quieter prose style than the stories I arrived with. Mostly, I think the quiet and relative lack of distractions just helped me get more writing done.

  KC: Since having recently gone through the process, do you have advice for writers who are looking to get their books published?

  JB: Try not to get too bent out of shape about rejection. My book was rejected by the vast majority of publishers who looked at it. If possible, try to choose an agent and an editor whom you instinctively trust, who push or nudge you as necessary but always show respect for you and your work and understand what you’re trying to do. Have people in your life who are also going through the same process you are, or who have gone through it. They will understand the very particular challenges and anxieties involved in the process. Regardless of what is happening, good or bad, keeping writing and reading so you stay connected to the fundamental joys that made you want to be a writer in the first place.

  KC: What does your writing process look like? Do you have a specific environment where you find you work best?

  JB: I always work at home, wherever home is, unless I’m at a residency or something like that. I’m not a writer who can work in, say, a cafe. I think my process is primarily character- and language-focused. I write first drafts slowly, asking lots of questions, nitpicking my way from sentence to sentence, but I try not to think too much about issues of craft or the kinds of things that usually come up in workshops. If I’m not under pressure from a deadline, when I’m done with a draft I let it sit for a while. When I look at it again, I start thinking more deliberately about craft: scene, point of view, dialogue, etc. I find Robert Boswell’s transitional drafts method helpful. Finally, I try to make sure I haven’t “crafted” the life out of the story. If I feel stuck, then I have trusted readers I can turn to.

  KC: What’s next for you?

  JB: I want to write more stories, and maybe something longer too. We’ll see.

  **

  Jamel Brinkley was raised in the Bronx and Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has received fellowships from Kimbilio Fiction and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and beginning this fall he will be a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

• Literary Hub - https://lithub.com/on-writing-a-short-story-everything-is-always-happening-all-the-time/

  On Writing a Short Story: ‘Everything is Always Happening, All the Time.’
  Jamel Brinkley Talks to Brandon Taylor About His New Collection, A Lucky Man
  July 11, 2018 By Brandon Taylor
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  The first time I met Jamel Brinkley, he made a remark so sharp and so true that I let out a loose holler of laughter in an alleyway. He had delivered the observation with such wry politeness that there could be no defense against it. When I opened his debut collection, A Lucky Man, I encountered that same quiet compassion and keen eye for detail. Jamel attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received a prestigious creative writing fellowship from Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. A Lucky Man has been on almost every Most Anticipated and Must Read List for the summer, and it’s easy to see why.

  Brandon Taylor: In the opening story of this collection, “No More Than a Bubble,” we encounter a familiar scene: two young men at a house party scoping out two women. But what follows is one of the most uncomfortable stories I’ve ever read. And in later stories, there seems to be a common motif of characters encountering the most uncomfortable incarnation of their desires and wishes. Can you talk a little bit about how you court and shape discomfort both for your characters and for the reader?

  Jamel Brinkley: It might be true that discomfort is one of my own primary modes of experience. So much of living has been about discomfort for me. Maybe discomfort is related to vulnerability and sensitivity, and maybe for me it’s one of the most effective ways by which a person or character can be presented with the opportunity to grow or change, or at least have their settled notions of themselves pierced to open up a space (a wound?) for self-reflection. I’m deeply suspicious of the idea that people or characters can suddenly undergo deep and genuine change, or that radical change and true epiphanies are common, but I am completely faithful to the idea that there are moments when we can be profoundly shaken.

  It’s a cliché in fiction to have a dog barking in the distance, but what happens when that dog actually shows up? What happens when harmless potentialities peel themselves from the inert background, become fully animate and dimensional, and intrude on our mental and physical space? Naomie, one of the girls in ‘No More Than a Bubble,’” says, “There’s always more to what you want than what you wanted,” and generally speaking I think she’s right. What characters desire, and what we as readers desire for the characters, can be so simple and solid, but what they actually get as a result of their pursuit is complicated, unstable, and fluid, especially when those desires involve other characters and their desires and complexity. Or, what you want might be difficult or impossible to name, but it hears you calling it anyway, and it answers with full, unavoidable force.

  BT: This collection contains quite a few longer short stories, which to me feel like a different breed of story. It’s not quite novella length but its maybe a little longer than the typical short story (whatever that is). What are your thoughts on the long short story?

  JB: I used to teach high school English, and sometimes students would grouse about how hyper-interpretive English teachers are. It seemed silly to some of them that we could seemingly find symbolic meaning in even the most banal detail and that we were seemingly encouraging them to do the same thing. Being good at English class, some of them felt, meant being good at finding (bullshitting?) symbols at every turn. Of course their characterization of literary instruction was an exaggerated one, but I bring it up for a reason. Sometimes very tightly compressed stories can feel as though they are offering themselves up a little too easily and earnestly for symbol-hunting and other analysis of that kind. Or maybe what I’m saying is that my own unsuccessful attempts to write shorter stories have felt that way. They feel airless to me, and each sentence feels merely (and so embarrassingly) instrumental, as though it has been written in color-coded neon ink, to be read through a megaphone.
  “Everything is always happening at the same time, and that truth about time is what makes life dense, confounding, rich, and haunting.”

  Since a number of my stories are journeys, a greater length helps me engage and take advantage of the interesting possibilities inherent to that shape, such as detours and random encounters. Longer stories also enable me to play with time in ways that aren’t strictly limited to a vivid, central present story and a gray, subordinate back story. I like that “minor” characters are granted more room to emerge. I like that I can slow down the pace and find layers to explore. Longer stories demand the particular kinds of shapeliness and tension you find in shorter stories, but I like that they permit me to include some of the lifelike “untidiness” one is more likely to find in a novel.

  BT: The way that you handle time in these stories is so complex and so delicate that at times, I found myself gasping. Short stories are often defined as the moment in a character’s life that causes that life to change. And I think what you demonstrate so deftly in these stories is how that moment is really a summation of moments. In your stories, everything is always happening at the same time. Can you talk a bit about your approach and your thoughts on time?

  JB: There’s a kind of dummy version of the short story that I find myself writing against. So, for example, a short story has to take place on “the day that is different.” Well, yes, sometimes, but that model, hardened into a rule or a law, contains a theory of time, one which can mislead you into thinking that everything prior to that day is less important than or subordinate to that day. The past is permitted only insofar as it feeds into the present or “real” story. But my experience has been that the past can be as (or more!) alive, seething, persistent, and forceful than whatever is going on in the present. I’m drawn to writers, like Edward P. Jones and Alice Munro, whose stories convey the past just as vividly as the present. I’m drawn to writers, like William Trevor and Yiyun Li, who aren’t afraid to write “aftermath” stories, in which the most overtly dramatic thing has already taken place and the present story is set in its wake. I think you’re exactly right: everything is always happening at the same time, and that truth about time is what makes life dense, confounding, rich, and haunting.

  BT: You’ve already spoken at great length in other interviews about the themes of masculinity that recur in this collection, but something I’m still quite curious about is the role of intimacy in these stories. We see again and again, the men in these stories trying to connect with each other and with the women in their lives who occupy an array of complicated roles. It seemed to me that collection was not interested in masculinity writ large so much as the ways in which masculinity made intimacy more difficult to achieve or maintain. Can you talk about intimacy and how you see or don’t see it operating in these stories?

  JB: I want to thank you for this question. One fear I’ve had, as I’ve watched the collection emerge and find readers, is that its various concerns are being simplified and pigeonholed, stamped with the singular thematic label of masculinity. Of course that theme is in the air presently, as we engage in an important and necessary critique of toxic masculinity, and on a surface level, with male protagonists in every story, my book lends itself to that thematic labeling. But I never consciously set out to write a book about masculinity. I never began any of the stories thinking, This will be about masculinity. You’re right to point to intimacy as a concern. Vulnerability, loneliness, and privacy as well. The kinds of things that shape friendships, romantic/sexual relationships, and families. Those things feel more primary to me as felt experiences, closer to the nerves. Masculinity feels more conceptual, or it feels like it is itself made up of things that are more primary or granular, if that makes sense. To go at masculinity head-on, for me at least, would be a mistake.

  But, yes, to answer your question more directly, I do think intimacy, and our confusions about intimacy, are at the heart of these stories. The ways in which we confuse intimacy and sex. The ways in which attraction might be operative in supposedly heterosexual male friendships. The ways in which the space of intimacy can feel like a violation or also become a space of potential or actual violence, especially in the case of siblings. The things people will do or accept out of desperation for intimacy. These kinds of questions are fascinating to me. I realize that, in the interest of exploring them, I like putting my characters in physical spaces that draw or force them close together.

  BT: The collection also seems interested in the permutations of loss and the permutations of family, often within a single story. A family seems like a kind of ideal unit for a writer to try out different modes and effects of loss. What are your feelings about the domestic space and what are the questions you’re most drawn to regarding families in your fiction?

  JB: Families and domestic spaces are great for the kind of fiction I’m interested in writing. Domestic spaces, especially the kinds of small, cramped apartments that poor and working class urban families tend to occupy, force people together in ways that court some of the elements we’ve been talking about, discomfort, intimacy, and privacy (or the lack thereof) among them. I also like that families tend to come with webs of obligation already loaded in. Desires multiply because there are multiple people, and duty can energize or make active a character who otherwise doesn’t want (to do) much of anything at all.

  In terms of ideology or desire, families can be powerful because there is such a prominent and idealized notion of what a family is supposed to look like. The whole idea of the white, well-off, heterosexual nuclear family that is marketed to us. Any deviation from that ideal family can feel like a massive loss or lack. So part of why Ben is so angry in “No More Than a Bubble” is that his family has been broken. The missing father is a haunting presence in “J’ouvert, 1996.” Notions of what a real family and real home are supposed to look like have a powerful grip on Freddy and his imagination in “I Happy Am.” And so on. I’m interested in how people construct families, in life and in their own minds, out of a deep desire for them, but also, and often at the same time, how people resist and rebel against such a collectivity. I’m also interested in how families act as a profound kind of training ground for what it means to be human, and what happens when the way we’ve been trained comes into contact with entirely different notions of what it means to be alive.

  BT: Finally, I’d like to know about the other forms and genres that inform your work. And the writers and artists who keep you fed, in an artistic or spiritual sense.

  JB: Music and poetry definitely inform my work. Someone recently pointed out—I wasn’t aware of this—that music or dance appears in almost every story in the collection. Maybe that’s not profound or unusual, but the collection does name or allude to specific musicians: Ol’ Dirty Bastard, The Fugees/Lauryn Hill, Willie Colón, James Brown, Ray Charles, Antônio Carlos Jobim, T-Bone Walker, Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth, Bunny Wailer, Burning Spear, The Abyssinians, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, and Donny Hathaway (multiple times!). These names give a pretty good indication of the kinds of music that inform my work and feed me, but yikes is that list male! In real life my playlist has way more women.

  Carl Phillips, William Blake, and Robert Hayden are the poets mentioned or alluded to in my book. Ralph Ellison gets a nod. “Everything the Mouth Eats” was inspired, in part, by James Baldwin. I’ve already mentioned some other writers who are important to me: Jones, Li, Munro, Trevor. Like you, I am a Mavis Gallant stan. I’d also mention James Alan McPherson. There are so many writers I could list, and I know I would unintentionally leave people out and then feel terrible about it. Let’s just say I feel fed by a pretty wide range of short stories, poems, novels, essays, films, television shows, criticism, music, and visual art. It’s very strange and alarming to me when writers don’t read, or when artists snobbishly make distinctions between “high art” and “low art.”

A Lucky Man
Publishers Weekly. 265.13 (Mar. 26, 2018): p90+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
A Lucky Man

Jamel Brinkley. Graywolf (FSG, dist.), $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-55597-805-1

The nine stories in Brinkley's promising debut address persistent issues of race, class, and masculinity across three decades of New York City's history, from Manhattan's corporatization in the mid'90s to the outer boroughs' gentrification today. In "No More Than a Bubble," two black Columbia undergrads crash a very white house party in Brooklyn, where they pair off with two older women with confounding, less-than-successful results. An imaginative young man finds his expectations of upper-middle-class life dashed during a day trip to the suburbs in "I Happy Am," while a former convict reconnects with a dead buddy's girlfriend in "A Family." "A Lucky Man" and "Clifton's Place" are the collection's two most successful stories, conveying the particular sadness of older African-Americans left adrift by market forces and "revitalization." Other entries, in plot and in prose, can feel too polite and mannered to register as memorable, nodding toward a stylistic exuberance and transgressive edge that never fully appear. Nonetheless, Brinkley's stories offer penetrating perspectives and stirring tragedies. Agent: J in Auh, Wylie Agency. (May)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Lucky Man." Publishers Weekly, 26 Mar. 2018, p. 90+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532997120/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=885c6366. Accessed 14 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A532997120

Brinkley, Jamel: A LUCKY MAN
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Brinkley, Jamel A LUCKY MAN Graywolf (Adult Fiction) $26.00 5, 1 ISBN: 978-1-55597-805-1

An assured debut collection of stories about men and women, young and old, living and loving along the margins in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

In "I Happy Am," one of nine tales Brinkley spins here about dreamers constricted or confounded by realities, Freddy is a young black boy from the Bronx who, at least for the length of the trip his summer camp is taking to the suburbs, imagines himself as a superpowered robot. Upon finding the house his camp is visiting to be "a bigger version of the apartment where [he] lived," Freddy begins to wonder whether real life "spoke...to what his imagination guarded": that there may be more potential for wonder and mystery beyond his dream life. This story shares with the others a preoccupation with characters' reckoning with unfulfilled promises and unrecognized possibilities. The title of "J'ouvert, 1996" refers to an all-night revel originating at Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza during which a teenage boy, his wide-eyed younger brother in tow, intends to find, and assert, a grown-up self. In "A Family," an ex-convict grapples tentatively, even a bit reluctantly, with the idea of becoming a lover to the widow of his closest friend. The title story is about a middle-aged man who believes his wife has left him and taken whatever luck he could claim with her, while "Infinite Happiness" navigates the dicey emotional maze of a lopsided romantic triangle playing out in the promised land of present-day Brooklyn. It's difficult to single out any story as most outstanding since they are each distinguished by Brinkley's lyrical invention, precise descriptions of both emotional and physical terrain, and a prevailing compassion toward people as bemused by travail as they are taken aback by whatever epiphanies blossom before them.

A major talent.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Brinkley, Jamel: A LUCKY MAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959979/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=473a37ef. Accessed 14 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959979

Race, family, childhood and the many varieties of love; FICTION: Insightful, impressive stories about black men haunted by their past
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN). (June 17, 2018): Lifestyle:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Star Tribune Media Company LLC
http://www.startribune.com/
Full Text:
Byline: KEVIN CANFIELD

Special to the Star Tribune "Infinite Happiness," a story in Jamel Brinkley's perceptive debut collection, "A Lucky Man," is about two men who've fallen for the same woman. One's a blithe "player" named Micah; the other, A.J., is a pensive teacher. Although A.J. is headed for heartbreak, his role in the episode yields some important realizations. "For most people there is a gap, for some a chasm, between the way they dream themselves and the way they are seen by others," he says. "That gap might be the truest measure of one's loneliness." Brinkley's book is packed with valuable, if disconcerting, insights. His stories, frequently set in New York City, where he grew up, often focus on introspective black male characters. Race is an important theme, but it's just one of many subjects that inspire him: He's particularly sharp on the ways in which children use fantasy to fortify themselves, and his depictions of love's many varieties are subtle and deeply observant. "Everything the Mouth Eats," a story about estranged half-brothers from the Bronx who meet up for a martial arts conference, is a representative example of Brinkley's skill. Although his characters, Carlos and Eric, initially fail to relate, they soon realize that they should discuss their traumatic past. As boys, both were abused by their father. Ever since, older brother Eric has been haunted by "the terrible things I knew about and might have prevented." It's a harrowing tale, and it becomes even more powerful when Brinkley ends it on a hopeful note. The book's other stories showcase Brinkley's impressive range. In one, he writes about a Brooklyn man released after serving 12 years for a drunken-driving death. The woman who died was black, but if she "had been white, Curtis knew, he would still be in prison, with many more years there ahead of him." Eventually, he moves in with a late friend's ex and her son. Curtis and Lena "wouldn't love each other," Brinkley writes, "but there was love they openly shared, and that would be enough, for now, to make a kind of family." Another story features brothers who are navigating the contours of a tumultuous household. Omari, 11, roams about all summer in a Halloween mask, and 17-year-old Ty loves fantasy novels. With their father in prison and their mother asking them to vanish while she entertains her new boyfriend, the boys stay out till dawn, an adventure that proves terrifying and transcendently beautiful. And in the story that provides the book with its title, a frustrated middle-aged man risks his marriage by using his smartphone for seedy purposes. When his secret is nearly revealed, he tries to confess to his daughter. "He told her what he could," Brinkley writes. "He told her a lie." With this observant book, Brinkley demonstrates an enviable capacity for narrative compression. In the space of 25 pages, he's capable of creating complex and memorable emotional worlds. This is a very hard thing to do, but in "A Lucky Man," he pulls it off in one story after the next. Kevin Canfield is a writer and critic based in New York City.

A Lucky Man By: Jamel Brinkley. Publisher: Graywolf Press, 243 pages, $26.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Race, family, childhood and the many varieties of love; FICTION: Insightful, impressive stories about black men haunted by their past." Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN], 17 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543403811/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a6a11a05. Accessed 14 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A543403811

A Lucky Man
Jonathan Fullmer
Booklist. 114.17 (May 1, 2018): p62.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* A Lucky Man.

By Jamel Brinkley.

May 2018. 256p. Graywolf, $26 (9781555978051).

In nine perceptive stories about broken families, loners, and social outcasts in search of redemption, Brinkley's stunning debut depicts urban life in all its lonely, wearying detail. Set in Brooklyn and the Bronx, in poor neighborhoods and on school campuses, these tales are imbued with pathos, sexuality, and moments of violence and tenderness. In the title story, a private school security guard secretly snaps photos of young women in public and wonders if his wife has left him for good. In "I Happy Am," a boy attending a Catholic day camp shares an unlikely bond with a suburban woman, even though she's not the wealthy blonde he anticipated. "No More Than a Bubble" follows two college friends who crash a Brooklyn house party, where the girls they pursue teach them a lesson in hard-to-get. The former inmate in "A Family" stalks his deceased friend's son and widow until an unexpected encounter reveals his intentions and complicated history. These characters may be hanging on by frayed threads, but they are very much alive and not so much guarded against whatever hardships may befall them as, rather, looking for a lucky break and welcoming chance with open arms. With this memorable collection, Brinkley emerges as a gifted and empathetic new writer.--Jonathan Fullmer

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fullmer, Jonathan. "A Lucky Man." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 62. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647375/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4bea9e06. Accessed 14 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A539647375

Jamel Brinkley whose debut story collection, A Lucky Man, was published in May by Graywolf Press
Poets & Writers Magazine. 46.4 (July-August 2018): p48+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Poets & Writers, Inc.
http://www.pw.org/magazine
Full Text:
INTRODUCED BY Danielle Evans author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, published by Riverhead Books in 2010.

Jamel Brinkley's debut story collection, A Lucky Man, was published in May by Graywolf Press and has already been greeted with critical acclaim by NPR, among others. Brinkley is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a former fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Kimbilio Retreat, and the Tin House Writers Workshop, and beginning in the fall he will be a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. The nine stories in Brinkley's collection are about both memory and moving forward; they give space to the complex interior lives of their black male protagonists, boys and men living in Brooklyn and the Bronx, who are sometimes not given credit for that complexity by the world around them. At their heart the stories grapple with the idea of masculinity: They explore the relationship between tenderness, vulnerability, and violence among characters who deal with love, loss, disappointment, and hope.

As readers might guess from the title, so many of the stories in this collection engage a kind of fraught masculinity, a tension between what manhood seems to promise and what is actually possible, or between the performance masculinity demands and the tenderness it wants. Were there stories or characters for which exploring that theme felt particularly important for you?

The collection's opening story, "No More Than a Bubble," comes immediately to mind. In it you've got two young men aggressively performing black heterosexual masculinity, on a stage that's a little too big for them. The connection between gender and performance isn't a new idea, but it has remained a fascinating one for me. Your phrase "the performance masculinity demands" perfectly captures what it has felt like to be alive. Ever since I was a boy I had a sense of impersonating some masculine ideal. This impersonation was something I sometimes embraced, but other times I felt coerced. Other people made me very aware of when I fell short in my performance, but the harshest rebukes of my failure often came from myself.

Sometimes in a story with a difficult ending, the joy feels like it is there only to remind us it will be taken away, but in your stories the moments of beauty and grace seem to linger outside of the sadness.

How do you think about writing these scenes?

I was very conscious of not wanting to write black trauma porn, but the fact that that's the narrative form of black experience certain readers prefer to consume was secondary to me. My main goal was to write honest depictions that other African American readers might recognize. On the one hand this meant I couldn't shy away from sadness, heartbreak, or even trauma as parts of the content of my characters' lives. On the other hand I needed to work hard to render black pleasure and joy. I think about those scenes in terms of sound. Of course sound and rhythm are always important in writing, but in order for a scene of joy or pleasure to linger and sustain itself despite difficulty or sadness on the level of content, action, or plot, maybe that scene has to work harder on the level of sound. If I can manage to tune the sentences the right way, then the sound of them might help the joy and pleasure in that scene feel true. I'd have to look back to confirm this, but I suspect that most of the lyrical writing in the book comes in moments of joy or pleasure, and the sound of the lyrical mode, if done well, can grant a sentence or a scene a life of its own, one that issues from the trouble of the story and resists being eradicated by it.

Years ago a mutual friend put us in touch because you were thinking about making a life change and heading to Iowa for an MFA. I think my advice at the time was, "Go, absolutely" and then a characteristically long list of caveats or things to watch out for. Now that you've finished the workshop at Iowa and have been involved in a number of other writing communities like Wisconsin and Kimbilio and Tin House, I am curious about what you've gained from the process of workshop and community and how it has shaped this book, and also what would be on your own List of warnings or caveats for writers starting out on this path?

Writing workshops come under a lot of scrutiny, often rightfully so, but I've had a pretty amazing experience with them overall. Some workshops don't run as well as others, for various reasons, but the best workshops I've been in have been incredibly mind-expanding. It was scary to make a life change, but the time I've been given and the friends and community I've found made the risk worthwhile. I wrote or revised every story in my collection while living in Iowa and Wisconsin, and that will always be meaningful to me. In terms of warnings and caveats, I'd say first of all don't go into debt to pursue this life. Be skeptical of writing communities that are not intentionally diverse, aesthetically or otherwise. Try to protect yourself against the collective anxiety and egotism that artistic communities can sometimes become. And read obsessively. The most interesting writers I've met in the past few years are those who read a lot, and widely. The breadth and depth of your reading will augment or impoverish your experience in writing workshops.

Agent: Jin Auh

Editors: Fiona McCrae and Steve Woodward

First printing: 10,000

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Jamel Brinkley whose debut story collection, A Lucky Man, was published in May by Graywolf Press." Poets & Writers Magazine, vol. 46, no. 4, 2018, p. 48+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542576406/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ac392928. Accessed 14 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A542576406

"A Lucky Man." Publishers Weekly, 26 Mar. 2018, p. 90+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532997120/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=885c6366. Accessed 14 July 2018. "Brinkley, Jamel: A LUCKY MAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959979/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=473a37ef. Accessed 14 July 2018. "Race, family, childhood and the many varieties of love; FICTION: Insightful, impressive stories about black men haunted by their past." Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN], 17 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543403811/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a6a11a05. Accessed 14 July 2018. Fullmer, Jonathan. "A Lucky Man." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 62. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647375/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4bea9e06. Accessed 14 July 2018. "Jamel Brinkley whose debut story collection, A Lucky Man, was published in May by Graywolf Press." Poets & Writers Magazine, vol. 46, no. 4, 2018, p. 48+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542576406/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ac392928. Accessed 14 July 2018.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/05/02/605001067/a-lucky-man-challenges-masculinity-with-love
  Word count: 885

  'A Lucky Man' Challenges Masculinity — With Love

  May 2, 20187:00 AM ET

  Ilana Masad
  A Lucky Man
  A Lucky Man

  Stories

  by Jamel Brinkley

  Hardcover, 264 pages
  purchase

  In the wake of the #MeToo movement, it seems like everyone's talking about toxic masculinity. But masculinity, toxic or not, has been on Jamel Brinkley's mind for far longer; his debut short story collection, A Lucky Man, brilliantly examines the topic from a range of angles. To be clear, Brinkley isn't excusing the troubles of masculinity in these stories. Instead, the collection is intent on recognizing what masculinity looks like, questioning our expectations of it, and criticizing its toxicity — and somehow managing to do all of that with love.

  Several of the stories examine what it means for a man to believe he deserves — whether that's a woman, a kind of life, or a certain kind of freedom in the world. In the title story, we follow Lincoln, recently separated from his wife of a couple decades and working as a security guard at an Upper East Side school in New York. On his subway ride to school, he takes a photograph of a young woman's face: "Something like a scowl, the expression seemed different on women of a certain beauty, like they never had to justify their use of it — they just assumed they had the right." This description is doing two things: First, it is perhaps the most loving description of what's often called "resting bitchface," and second, it is a wonderful example of how cleverly Brinkley uses parallels in his stories. Just as Lincoln is impressed with this woman's right to close her face to him, he also believes he has the right to capture that face in a photograph and take it home with him — there's nothing wrong with taking a picture of a face, right? Nothing lewd in that, Lincoln thinks; at least he isn't taking pictures of the undersides of women's skirts. It is in this place that Brinkley dwells so brilliantly, examining the way men excuse their own attempts at ownership of the world around them.
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  There's a fine line between outright, blatant, or malicious sexism and this more comfortable, seemingly less offensive place where men are merely ignorant of the ways they take possession of women — their looks, their labor, their humanity. And this is the line Brinkley knows how to straddle, creating fully formed characters who wrestle with what they think they have a right to. As a result, many of the stories also show women's power to stymie men. In the startling opening story, "No More Than a Bubble," two men, close friends, pursue two women at a party. As the night progresses, they lose and regain the women's interest over and over, and eventually manage to get the honor of walking them home. A rabid dog comes across their path, and — maybe because they're all a little drunk — the two men have no idea what to do. Meanwhile, one of the women, Sybil, kicks the dog squarely in the snout and the other, Naomie, joins her. "Then the animal wasn't moving or breathing. All of its wildness had been extinguished." In this moment, as the women exhibit strength that is feral and violent, they also extinguish the wildness belonging to the men.

  ... the collection may include only nine stories, but in each of them, Brinkley gives us an entire world.

  Another theme appearing in almost all the stories is that of touch between men. In a world where "no homo" is still common parlance, there is always a charge present when heterosexual men touch in full view of someone — in this case, the reader. The touch Brinkley explores is varied, gentle or fierce, and it's almost always uncomfortable, yet beautiful, because it's an expression of a deep need that so many human beings share. In the story just mentioned, the two friends are forced to gaze at one another naked. Elsewhere, two usually-close boys get into a physical altercation, one man claps another on the shoulder, and two brothers share the complex dance of capoeira — the Brazilian martial art — while trying to discuss a wholly different and terrible kind of touch they both remember. Brinkley is masterful at conveying the importance of this tangible element between his male characters, while also allowing it to seem entirely natural and necessary.

  And while it's clearly a topic that concerns him, Brinkley's book isn't only about masculinity. It also deals in family relationships, love, aging, loss, and disappointment — the universal themes that keep us coming back to literature — while also conveying versions of black male experience. In fact, the collection may include only nine stories, but in each of them, Brinkley gives us an entire world.

• Masters Review
  https://mastersreview.com/book-review-lucky-man-jamel-brinkley/
  Word count: 1483

  Book Review: A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley

  In the age of the #MeToo Movement and the worldwide cultural shift, at least in awareness, to the ways in which gender and sexuality inform our experience of living in the world, Jamel Brinkley’s debut collection, A Lucky Man, comprised of tenderly poignant narratives of boys becoming men, of fractured intimacy, of masculinity as learned performance, is vital and necessary.

  Brinkley’s brilliant interrogation of what it means to be a man, specifically in the context of the lives of young men separated from their fathers, points to an essential blind spot in our current discourse. We are living in a time where the narrative around men can feel singular or reductive: A man is either a savior or a villain. That is not the way that humanity works. People are more nuanced. This becomes even more salient when we add the dimension of race. Men of color are most often portrayed in popular culture as evil, as aggressor. This is a false narrative built upon a history of racism which perpetuates mass incarceration and violence.

  A Lucky Man is not a book about race, it is a book about longing, about intimacy. A collection about navigating the space between adolescence and adulthood, about understanding the powers and limitations of the body, about the ways in which we let traumas fester when we leave them unattended. Brinkley uses his profound gift of language to speak for characters who themselves do not have the words to express their pain. The unsaid is perhaps what is coursing most vigorously through the veins of this collection. It vibrates underneath the surface, it threatens to erupt, to dismantle the construction of normalcy that we cling to, to retain order; to avoid confronting our demons.

  These masterful stories build gradually; they compel us to slow down, to give ourselves over to them. In the collection’s standout, “Everything the Mouth Eats” Brinkley’s description of capoeira is perhaps also an instruction and meditation for how A Lucky Man begs to be read:

  Part of entering the world of capoeira angola is a constant training in vigilance….I realize now how strange it is to exist otherwise, especially in a big city, and I marvel at people rushing, rushing, headlong into things, how full of trust they are, how they can’t see what often lurks behind the floating vapor of a smile. But isn’t the family the first arena of such knowledge? Isn’t it family that, in so many ways, determines our approach to life’s deceptions?

  It is the subject of family that Brinkley returns to again and again to remind us that we are products of our upbringing. That the young man looking to get laid in the collection’s opening story: “No More Than A Bubble,” was once a little boy idolizing his father. It is that same hunger for comfort, that the boy felt when his parents separated, that returns in the form of his sexuality: a desire to be held, to be made whole.

  In the collection’s most moving stories, Brinkley lets us sit inside childhood memories, allows us to enter into the ugliest and most fragile remembrances that his characters suppress in order to find ways to persist. We are all holding our brokenness. What is most astonishing about A Lucky Man is how Brinkley carves a space for men to examine theirs in the presence of humor, sensuality, adolescent curiosity and grief. He lets all of these deeply human experiences coalesce.

  In “J’ouvert, 1996” the narrative opens with a young man’s desire to go to the same barbershop as his father. He has never been to a barbershop before and his longing to enter into a lineage of “clever men, grooming each other’s masculinity” becomes a way for him to acknowledge his yearning for his father who has since been incarcerated. The story develops into a meditation on the ways in which the narrator and his younger brother process their father’s absence. The younger brother, Omari, wears an owl mask and is accompanied by an imaginary friend, who Brinkley beautifully renders by describing Omari as holding out an outstretched arm grasping nothing. His older brother, our narrator Ty, does not have the luxury of pretend, he has outgrown it, he has already experienced too much pain.

  The collection, while startlingly authentic, also dips heavily into imagination and escapism to construct fantasies that have the power to transport characters, at least temporarily, outside of their circumstances. We see this in “I Happy Am” where the young protagonist imagines himself as a robot. “In the cartoons and movies, robots could see through walls and across long distances or sense a body by its heat or detect the smallest thing that was wrong. Freddy tried to open himself in this way, as he did when his mother locked herself in her room or stayed out at night a lot later than she said she would.” As the story progresses, with a summer camp excursion brimming with promise that quickly deflates, the title folds into itself: I Happy Am. It is a happiness that can never be, a state that for this child, in his experience of mounting disappointments, feels unattainable.

  Brinkley has mastered the art of storytelling, most explicitly, with regard to pacing and scene setting. His descriptions are lush, vivid, and precise. We can see the streets he’s rendering, but more so, we can feel the heat of the sun on a bare back, we can taste the greasy potato chips, we can smell the urine in the elevator shaft. His control over the shape of these stories is remarkably well-done. They are sculpted with tension and infused with levity. Throughout, we are constantly bracing for viciousness, for emotional or physical eruption, but instead of gratuitous chaos, we are met with the anticipation of loss and pain, and that is far more affecting. It is far more human, meditating in the space of reckoning, with small moments of violation and the tiniest glimmers of connection.

  In “Everything the Mouth Eats” Brinkley dissects all we think we know about masculinity, about brotherhood, about childhood innocence. The story slowly builds upon the complexities of familial love and ownership. Throughout, there is a tragic refrain: “De quien tú eres?” a question the narrator’s stepfather continually poses to both of his sons. This inquiry began in childhood and manifests into a compulsive and violent attempt to lay claim upon a child who does not identify as that man’s son. In a collection so full of longing for parental presence and love, that forceful effort to erase the biological father, and the subsequent harrowing violation that occurs, wounds the reader astoundingly. It evokes a pain that stings long after the book is set down.

  Recently, Junot Diaz published an essay in The New Yorker about his personal history with sexual assault. A public discourse on victimization and perpetrations of sexual violence ensued. The reactions to Diaz’s piece have spanned from solidarity and gratitude to intense fury. Diaz’s piece is complicated for a number of reasons, including the suggestion that it both implicates and absolves him from guilt. I bring it up here because in A Lucky Man, Brinkley tackles the intergenerational construction of masculinity, particularly in communities of color, that Diaz invokes. If we temporarily extract Diaz, the individual, from the conversation, we can focus our attention on the intensity of the response. On our societal reluctance to speak openly about sexual violence, particularly when that violence is inflicted on men. Violation is believed to be in opposition to power and strength. How can we rewrite that narrative?

  A Lucky Man begins to do just that. It is an urgent collection that compels us to reconsider the ways we understand manhood, that beautifully articulates the comingling of grief and abandonment that is felt when boys are separated from their parents. When children grow up without hope. In “J’ouvert, 1996” as the narrator awaits his haircut, performed haphazardly by his mother in their living room, he laments: “I had probably just stumbled again into that stagnant puddle of mud: belief. It was silly to think good things could possibly happen, but I had no choice.” This collection gives a deeply human and deeply affecting account of living in the world, of searching for connection and longing for love. A Lucky Man demands our attention. Few works in the frenetic energy of the modern moment are capable of capturing us as fully. Brinkley’s prose, the ferocity and authenticity of his narratives do; they astound and wound.

  Publisher: Graywolf Press

• Ploughshares
  http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/a-lucky-man-by-jamel-brinkley/
  Word count: 1017

  A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley
  Author: Laura Spence-Ash | Posted in Book Reviews, Fiction

  A Lucky Man book cover in a repeated patternA Lucky Man
  Jamel Brinkley
  Graywolf Press | May 1, 2018

  Amazon| Powell’s

  There’s something magical about a great story collection. The stories bump up against each other and speak to each other, as well as to the reader, creating a whole that’s significantly more than its parts. In A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley’s stunning debut collection, the stories are not formally linked, and yet they are, implicitly, by their beautiful prose, by their intimate gaze at character, by their focus on black men, by their setting in New York City. These are stories that can be read again and again because each time through, the reader learns a bit more: about the characters, about the world, and about themselves.

  The nine stories are roughly arranged in a timeline, stretching from the mid-1990s to the present. Using both close third-person and first-person points of view, Brinkley examines what it is to be black and male in America. His protagonists range in age from nine-year-old Freddy in “I Happy Am” to college students in “No More Than a Bubble” to a middle-aged man in “A Lucky Man.” This creates a prism of sorts, as we look at the same world through different eyes. In “Clifton’s Place,” which closes out the collection, a primary theme is the passing of time, and the architecture of the book reflects that theme as well.

  The collection will rightly be compared to Edward P. Jones’s story collections, and Brinkley’s stories also bring to mind the work of William Trevor and Yiyun Li. This is mostly due to the respect that Brinkley has for his characters and his deep interest in portraying his characters honestly. Trevor said, “Each character is somebody that I know very well—as well as I know myself.” Brinkley could say the same, I think. These are real people on the page, characters that we root for and believe in, characters that are searching for answers to questions that they may not yet fully understand.

  Often, Brinkley’s characters are a bit on the outside, looking at a world that seems somewhat unknowable and unknown. “A Family” opens as Curtis, back home after being incarcerated for twelve years, follows his old friend Lena and her son Andre during a rainy Friday night, getting close enough to hear their conversation, but not enough to be seen. In “I Happy Am,” Freddy is on a trip with his summer day camp, exploring the home of a stranger. And in “No More Than a Bubble” and “Infinite Happiness,” each narrator has a friend who always seems—to the narrator, at least—a step or two ahead.

  This sense of a journey—of following a path, often circuitous and winding—is a central theme throughout the collection. The characters are often searching for an understanding and a connection, and that emotional journey is reflected in the ways the characters move through their physical worlds. There’s a restlessness here, in the way that the characters are always on the move, never quite at peace in the moment, an innate understanding of the boundaries that resist exploration. “He was terrible at idleness,” the narrator says of his friend in “No More Than a Bubble,” “much worse than I was, and could quickly lose his way. Without an exact destination, the map of his life had no significance or shape.”

  The idea of a map appears in a number of these stories. A map, after all, is a representation of the world, one that is clearly connected to both journeys and boundaries. Fiction functions in a similar fashion. A wise writer once told me that every great short story is about writing. That is the case here, in every one of these stories. You can feel Brinkley’s keen interest in craft, in developing characters that are full of life and stories that are layered with meaning. At times, the connection between writing and the story is made plain, as the space between the narrator and the writer shrinks. “Everything the Mouth Eats” begins as follows:

  I’ve started this story many times and deleted the pages many times. The reasons aren’t a mystery. I keep seeing the face of my brother, to the exclusion of anything else, and I keep getting lost. But perhaps there’s no other way it can be written.

  At other times, the connections are more subtle, the reflections on language more metaphorical. In “Wolf and Rhonda,” where the point of view shifts between the two characters, Rhonda listens to Wolf speak and thinks “He kept going on about his memories, laying them out like an arrangement of stones. His words piled on themselves in a strange rhythm. They formed walls that he could take shelter in.” And the world of the imagination is one that many of these characters retreat to, as they seek to find answers but also as they create parallel worlds, worlds that they can control and worlds which they can be free to explore.

  There is a gentleness and a kindness that runs through this collection and, even though we learn how difficult it is for these characters to live in the real world, there is a thin thread of hope that love is the thing that will allow these characters to persevere. “A Family” ends with Curtis and Lena together: “He and Lena wouldn’t love each other, but there was love they openly shared, and that would be enough, for now, to make a kind of family.” In “Clifton’s Place,” the protagonist, Ellis, reflects that “All of us should be loved, he thought again. No matter what, even if it’s just for one night.” A collection as fine as this, of fiction that is reflecting our wor

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