Soon After First Light: Margo Jefferson
Soon After First Light is a series where we talk craft, process, and pandemic with Columbia's accomplished writing professors.
Here, we talk with Professor Margo Jefferson about truth telling, the relationship of memoir to criticism, and the importance of a social life to a writer.
Margo Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic. She has been a staff writer for The New York Times and Newsweek; her reviews and essays have appeared in New York Magazine, Grand Street, Vogue, Harper’s and many other publications. Her book, On Michael Jackson, was published in 2005. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation / Theater Communications Group grant. She has also written and performed two theater pieces at The Cherry Lane Theatre and The Culture Project. Margo's 2015 book, the memoir, Negroland, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, The Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, The Bridge Prize for Nonfiction and was short-listed for The Baillie Gifford Prize. The New York Times also listed it as one of the 50 best memoirs of the last 50 years.
What is a typical workday like for you when you’re in the middle of a project?
Margo Jefferson: I work better during the day than at night. I generally get seriously started around 10am. Before then I'm waking up, looking through things, listening to a piece of music. That time before I really get started is partly to do routine things, but also partly to get a receptive mood going. Depending on my energy level, I will start out immediately with something that I'm in the grip of. If I'm more tired, then I will start with something that's easier. A friend told me about this years ago—I find it’s a good thing to try to stop somewhere where you feel, okay, this is, this is good. This is interesting. A place where you still have a question and can set that in your psyche to fester or perhaps bloom there over the night. That can be useful in the morning. Recently, I've found that I need to start with easy things, and that has to do with this last COVID year because there've been so many other stresses. We've been living on the continuum that goes from just everyday anxiety to total dread. So I think we've all had to adjust these little things. I mean, writing is so much how you allot and align your energies.
I will work until I need to break for lunch—and I'm one of those people that have to have three meals a day—and then I will go back. At the end of the day, around late afternoon, I will usually exercise. Then I may keep really writing hard in the afternoon, but I may also do other writing-connected things, like looking up information that I need or—since a lot of what I do involves things I'm responding to—going back to that thing and re-experiencing it. Nighttime, assuming I'm home—and we were home a lot—is just for doing what I want. It's reading or again, doing something that contributes to the work that nevertheless feels more than just dutiful.
Do you have a routine or ritual that you follow, and how does that routine help you "stick to" your work?
MJ: I have a ridiculous number of notebooks, some of which are old journals, and so many of which I've found these last few years, but especially this last year when I was working on a new book. They're filled with quotes, with passages that it turned out I wanted to use—not my own writing, other people's words. They formed their own kind of collage. I find that anything, whether it's writing or dance or music, that I can shape into some sort of montage or collage where a lot of rhythms are working together, that is always good.
Do you feel that the writing process for nonfiction is significantly different than the process of writing fiction?
MJ: Maybe the role of the questioner among material that in some way rests outside the boundaries of the imagination—maybe that role is somewhat different than the one that literally creates a world. My wonderful (Associate Professor) Wendy Walters has said to classes that the fiction writer is inventing a world and so, in a sense, answering questions, and the non-fiction writer is always pursuing questions. And I like that.
How do you navigate truth-telling when writing a memoir? Specifically, how do you tell the truths that some people may not want to hear?
MJ: I have been a little fortunate in terms of this being somewhat simplified for me in that both my parents had died by the time Negroland was published. My mother, while I was writing it, my father before that. She saw a few sections. I did not show her anything in process—and I didn't know when she was going to die—that I felt would be tempestuous. And frankly, selfishly, that I felt would interfere with what I needed to write. I thought, Okay, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I felt I was saying, and re-imagining, and reflecting in ways that she might disagree with—she was formidably smart and opinionated—or be hurt by. But I did not feel that I was dealing lethal blows. Some people do. So I was lucky in that way.
How you handle it—I mean, I talk to my students and I talk to peers about it. You consider all of the possible outcomes. What can be the consequences of my words, my actions, my deeds, and what am I willing to endure, to put up with? How does this make me feel about myself as a writer, as a human being, and what ways do those two identities converge and diverge? You are constantly working through these questions.
In an interview with Jordan Kisner for Lithub, you described what it was like to acknowledge what you shouldn't say—to literally write on the page "I was not supposed to."
MJ: I put that in the memoir. And I couldn't get further in that book at one point until I wrote that sentence down, because that was crucial to the story I was telling. It also allowed me to, as one always does with memoir, play with which sides of myself would be foregrounded, backgrounded. And I realized that I wasn’t turning away from criticism and writing memoir—the critic was part of that process. And the critic is always scrutinizing. There's always a dialogue between the analytic self, the descriptive self, the emotional self, the resisting self, the accepting self. You responding strictly individually, you responding in some way for your audience.
What was the process like for writing Negroland?
MJ: It took me on and off a long time—on and off meaning, I was teaching, and some other things step in and take over your life. I really started working at it in 2008 or 2009, then there was time that I took off. So it took a long time. I finished it in 2014. Leaving real life aside, let's go to the real life of the writer, which is what you're asking about. It was very, very difficult. Little memoir elements had crept into pieces I was doing. I wanted the Michael Jackson book to show more intimacy and more kinds of debate and conflict between me as the critic writer and Michael Jackson. So in that way, that project was a little transitional, but still it was still Michael Jackson. It wasn’t Margo Jefferson.
Formally, there were a lot of things that I hadn't done before. I had not done extended pieces of dialogue. I hadn't done confession. I hadn't played with a lot of time—you're not free to really do flashbacks and flash-forwards in pieces of criticism (laughs). So there was a lot of technical stuff that I'd been reading and criticizing for years, but needed to use. So I did a lot of practice with that. The first pieces I wrote were all between anecdotes and short stories, because I thought that's the furthest away from criticism, and that's what I need. Those are the muscles I need to start awakening and getting acquainted with. Then the research went on for a long time. Structuring was very complicated, very interesting. I didn't want a fully chronological arc. So my first version was like mania-collage (laughs). I added chronology as well as digressions and flashes in time. So there was a lot of thinking through that and I just keep asking—what's that Sheila Heti title, How Should a Person Be?—what should my memoir be? What do I want it to be? What does "should" mean? Whose "should"?
What is your relationship to drafting and editing—and what is your advice for writers who may find the editing process daunting or difficult?
MJ: I worked in journalism for so long that I really loved, however difficult it was, the freedom and the privacy of drafting and editing only myself. I would print things out a lot. I did some highlighting, and I would play with different fonts (laughs) as codes to different approaches (or giving myself the illusion that this is a fresh new day (laughs)). I would always reread the next day what I'd done the day before. I also at a certain point joined a writer's group. There were just four of us, which was good. We would meet about once a month. So basically my work would come up once a quarter.
We did not edit each other as this is the definitive way. We were really questioners and prompters and hopefully stimulants. We tried very hard to do the thing that a really good editor does, which is really try to inhabit the world that the writer wants to create, and what you give them is faithful to that. You can ask questions about what they want to inhabit, but not step into it yourself with your own recognizable tricks. That was really helpful. And I did find, every few months, knowing that these three people I trusted (never start a writers group with people you don't trust, and whose work you don't admire (laughs)) would read my work—I looked forward to that.
How have the pandemic lockdowns affected your creative life?
MJ: It was called shut down. It was called lock down. And there we were. Except with Zoom. So, you know, that was intense too. The online world became all-encompassing. It was for your teaching life. It was for your social life. It was just your everyday tool. People were also Instagramming more than ever. They were Tweeting more than ever, so everything got louder and busier, right? Every space got occupied. I got very careful about that because you learn how much emotional energy Zoom takes up. So, on a day that I was teaching by Zoom and meeting with students, I would just do my best to avoid being on Zoom or on the phone.
Were your sources of inspiration affected by the lockdowns as well?
MJ: That really did change. Again, a lot of that went online. Suddenly you're visiting this exhibit or that exhibit virtually, and I haven't been to a movie theater in Lord knows how long now. That was part of the ritual—going to concerts when you have dinner with a friend before or a drink after, and you talk it through. It was an aesthetic life and a social life and a set of very pleasing rituals that just went. Um, I was actually thinking last week, cause I turned a manuscript in and everything's gotten a little better, I was thinking, Oh, I can go to this. I can go to that. I hadn't quite taken in how much things had closed and left me working on this book, but not sustaining it with all the materials that I usually had. Some of which are diversionary materials—but that's what you need! (laughs).
Do you ever experience periods of creative block? How do you counteract these?
MJ: Yeah, sure. Not huge. Let's say stymied. I think of "block" as I can't do anything but blockages, sure. Like you have a cold or flu and your nose is stuffed up for a couple of days or you're not right. You're not functioning that well for about that week. Writing equivalents of all those—sure. Absolutely. And I feel that I lost time. But the other way that I think I did lose some time is—partly because it's my temperament and partly because again, I worked as a creator of pieces for so long—I tend to write in a kind of piecemeal fashion. I'll have themes that I'm working on, I'll have categories, but I will assemble and juxtapose and collect—a friend of mine says I magpie, and I like that. But I think it's sometimes rubbed up against and clashed with that need to just tunnel vision. I think that clash slowed me down sometimes too. And I think that was partly COVID related, lockdown related—just the way time and energies were both fanatically controlled by us and not to be controlled by us.
I have a lot of little rituals—and that's what young writers need to be as resourceful and attentive to as possible, collecting their barrel of ritual. I developed, as a critic, a very sharp sense of writing, for example, or it might be a piece of music or photography or visual art, but let's stick with writing. I would think, There's a certain kind of rhythm or energy I need in my head to approach this artist that I'm reviewing. So I'm going to read—it might be a poet, it might be another critic, it might be four centuries back (laughs), it might be contemporary—something that would just jolt me. Give me some bolt. It might literally be a rhythm that I wanted to steal from or a tone. Oh, I'm feeling a little weak today. I'm feeling a little cowardly, what can I read that will embolden me? (laughs). I also use different kinds of music a lot to just give me pleasure, break up a set of responses or moods of monotony.
It sounds like music is a big source of creative energy for you. Are there others?
MJ: Music and dance first, then also visual art. Visual can include movies. The things that we've been talking about are missing—the intricacies of ongoing conversations with people, being at someone's house for dinner. I mean, these notebooks of mine are filled with quotes from friends and family members. You take that so for granted. And that quick change of mood which again, music, art, all of those things are so useful for, you can get that in your social life too. You can curate that and seek it out, and that was somewhat taken from us.
What are you working on now and what’s next?
MJ: I did just hand in a manuscript that is various combinations of criticism and memoir. There are parts in which the so-called critical material becomes a form of memoir or sparks memoir and sections where the memoir is treated as if we're talking about material or aesthetic culture. So it's a mix and mingling. It's called Constructing a Nervous System.
That's an amazing title.
MJ: Wendy Walters gave it to me! It came from a dinner we were having. You see, this is what you miss from before COVID. She said, Well how's the book going? And I said, Well, this is what I'm doing, and she responded, Wow, that's really hard. And I said, Oh thank you! (laughs) Why is it so hard? Tell me! And she said It's like constructing a nervous system. I said THAT’S MY TITLE! It turned out to also give me a more theatrical, performative form than I had known I was going to use.
What advice would you give to artists who are just starting to figure out process and routine?
MJ: I would say, don't separate the lofty high parts—engagements with imagination, prose, with prosody—don't keep those too separate from the everyday stuff. The timing of when your energies are at your best, when you’re most full of self-doubt. Cultivate a creatively meticulous awareness of your own temperament from literally your physical body, to the way your psyche works. Really attend to that.