If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery makes the Booker Prize longlist

  

Jonathan Escoffery is an amazing writer whose book If I Survive You has been nominated for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Raised in Miami after his parents migrated from Jamaica, Jonathan's stories invoke a personal and universal search for identity. This is a book of the year, a huge bestseller that you need to read and share. Jonathan has provided a reading clip from Ursa Story Company and we encourage you to follow these folks as well. Under The Ackee Tree 

INTERVIEW JOE CLIFFORD

 

Interview with Joe Clifford, 10 Questions    https://joeclifford.com/

 

Questions for Joe Clifford (for Miami Writers and Books, interviewed by Neil Crabtree)

·         Joe, tell us about your Miami connection. You worked with the Creative Writing program at FIU, is that right?

 

Yes! I earned my MFA from FIU back in 2008, an experience, to quote the Hold Steady, almost killed me. I went through an ugly divorce and near-fatal motorcycle accident that left me like Darth Vader (i.e., more machine than man). But I’d do it all again in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t be a working writer without Florida International. Certainly not writing mysteries, which is one of the few markets with a built-in, profitable readership. Few MFAs even allow genre, let alone encourage it.

 

·         Say My Name is tremendously popular with readers. Give us a synopsis of the story and what you think makes it work.

The book has done well. Probably my best-selling effort since my debut, Junkie Love, my memoir chronicling the ten years I spent as a hobo. Or at least Lamentation, the first in the Jay Porter thriller series. Which is a little funny. I mean, most of my publishers have been mid-sized indies (Oceanview, Polis)—and I love them all. But for whatever reason, the small the press, the more I’ve sold. I think part of that is owed to putting the whole thing on my back and doing what I do best (being stubborn and banging my head against walls).

The synopsis? A mid-list mystery writer returns to his hometown of Berlin, CT, with the hopes of teaching at his alma mater, Central CT State, only to be sucked back into a decades’ old cold case involving missing twins. Two of those things are true. And I think you can apply that same formula to the rest of the book. Two out of every three things you read is 100% factual. It’s couched as “true-crime novel,” which, of course, can’t exist. One is true, the other make-believe. I think that dichotomy factors into why it’s been working. There’s less distance between the writerly “I” and the I “I.”

 

·         Tell us about your own story. How did you decide to become Joe Clifford, Author?

This is the age-old question, isn’t it? Do we choose our professions or do our profession choose us? In my case, I’d say it’s a little of both. I’ve always been an artist. I paint, draw, write, play music. All the skills that don’t come with a steady paycheck or health insurance. I also can’t do anything else. I’m not a “people” person. I’d last about an hour in an office setting. After the motorcycle accident, I can’t do much physically. If I do do something, e.g., golf, weight lift, exercise, I have to pick and choose spots, and I need patches and pills, lidocaine injections, periodic spinal ablations, etc. I’m also at a certain age (50-something) where I’m not learning a new skill set. I am easily confused by my TV remote. I haven’t worked a conventional day job since the mid-nineties. It’s writing or crime, and I tried the latter and wasn’t very good at it.

 

 

·         Who are some Miami writers you enjoy?

Too many to list! All the faculty I studied under at FIU (Les Standiford, Jim Hall, Dan Wakefield, John Dufresne, Campbell McGrath, Denise Duhamel, and of course Lynne Barrett, who is the smartest person I’ve ever met. And I can’t begin to touch on all the folks I studied with. I’ll single out Jennifer McCauley, because she’s next on my TBR!

 

·         What are your writing habits? Do you keep to a schedule?

I write in burst. Frantic, manic bursts. I think all writers are a bit mad, aren’t they? I write two books a year, one in January, one in August. Our subconscious does so much of the heavy lifting. I’ve kept this pace for 10+ years. So when December and July roll around, my dreams start getting … weird

 

·         How is your relationship with your publishers?

Like I said, I’ve been published by mid to smaller indies, so … easy? Most of these houses are a handful of people, so it’s quite personal, your interactions. The ultimate question (for these houses) comes down to: can I make money with this author? If the answer is no, or yes (for a while) and then no, it’s nothing personal. That’s the part about writing you need to keep in mind: it’s a business. The publishing part. The writing part? That I’m doing with—or without—permission. My books are going to get out there, one way or another. Which is a very liberating (and calming) feeling.

 

·         Tell us about your earlier books.

Can you narrow that down? It sounds like a humblebrag, but it’s not. Or maybe it’s a straight up brag, I don’t know. I honestly lost track of how many books I’ve written. I could take the time to count them up. It’ll be between 17 and 20 (when the last one slated for publication, I Won’t Say a Word: A Say My Name Novel, comes out in May 2024). If there’s a theme or center, milieu, I tend to write about the marginalized and voiceless that I know about, which is drugs addicts. Having survived drug addiction, I have, like Liam Neeson, a specific set of skills. Or maybe that should read “limited.” I know what it’s like to be homeless and hopeless, so all my work contains some element of addiction, even if it’s only in a supporting role. I have a book coming out in January 2024, A Moth to Flame (Square Tire Books ©), and it’s domestic suspense, and the characters are all suburban and married or at least live in a house, but the shadow of addiction can still be seen.

 

·         Tell us about what’s next for you.

I’m working on a book about harm reduction with a former professor. And I’ll be starting my next mystery in a few days. This one is about a man who returns to the house he grew up in, with a strange request of the new occupants: he’d like to die there. Of course from there things … happen.

 

·         Do you remember John Dufresne’s Friday Night Writers?

I do! But I’ll tell you what I remember more about John. When I had my near-fatal accident in 2006, John and Cindy invited me to live with them while I was recovering. I wasn’t even in a wheelchair yet. I wouldn’t walk for six months! And here are two people, who I’ve known less than a year, who offer to let me convalesce and come back to life and, literally, learn to walk again. That tells you all you need to know about John, FIU, and how I feel about that community. I owe them all a tremendous debt.

 

·         Are we going to be watching a Joe Clifford movie any time soon?

Funny you should ask! Actually, a couple years ago, I contributed to a collection called Culprits. It’s a collaborative anthology about a heist gone wrong, edited by Richard Brewer and Gary Phillips. Anyway, Disney+ bought it—and better yet it’s in production by Character Seven. J Blakeson is the showrunner and the folks who produced Killing Eve are handling that end of it. It’s supposed to come out soon. Although with Hollywood’s refusal to pay writers fairly (I also side with labor), I can’t say when that will be!

Thanks for having me, Neil. A pleasure! 

UNBOOK 1

Changed Man

             I take a castration chemo drug every day, Abiraterone Acetate, 1000mg in four tablets. To make it work, I take a steroid, Prednisone. Chemical castration keeps the prostate cancer from spreading to my bones via testosterone. Prostate cancer won’t kill me, Doctor Sharma assures me. Cancer in the bones could kill me and so we reduce that possibility as best we can. Low testosterone is a major industry target market, for most men feeling less vigorous than before. But…if you increase your testosterone level and thus increase your PSA, you may learn what price glory the hard way. I never see any warnings on the TV ads, and often wonder what the Society of Urologists has to say. Though why kill the cash cow? The waiting rooms of urologists are packed all day. Business is good when the prostate is bad.

            So I start the day with a good swift kick in the balls. I’m used to it now. And I get a shot of Lupron every three months, female hormones in a time-release injection. I’m not sure of the science of this, though medical journals swear by immuno-therapy as the best treatment. God knows it’s much better than the radiation therapy I endured for nine weeks. Radiation is like medical science meets the Spanish Inquisition. It beats the daylights out of you, then two years later your condition comes back but your prostate is so burned and scarred, corrective surgery is no longer an option. Castration actually seems like a good idea compared to more radiation. Heroin suppositories seem like a good idea compared to radiation.  Maybe you have had radiation. Am I right? And chemo-therapy is brutal in many situations. My wife’s beautiful hair is gone and it’s not coming back. She’s cancer free now, quite healthy in fact, but she wears a wig when we attend a social function. We all know people with cancer. We all know people who have had the different therapies. As my brother’s physician, Doctor Fox, told him after a trip to the emergency room, the hospital will kill you quicker than the disease. Life’s full of surprises. God has a very strange sense of humor and we are constantly amazed by what new thing He has thrown our way. A kick in the balls each morning helps keep things in perspective.

            Over time, I have noticed I am a changed man. The castration, the female hormones, none of it hurts in any way. But I am mellowing out. I’m not horny anymore, which is so strange. My life has been dominated by cold-blooded lustfulness, as a girlfriend’s astrologist mother told me fifty-three years ago. Capricorn is a sign prone to this, she said. It made me feel better, for some reason. At least it’s not just me, I told her. 

            This loss of hormonal instincts has made me feel different about a lot of things. It has affected my writing, lowered the competitive drive. In group this coming session, I want to see if I can be more respectful of the efforts of others. I want to be more helpful, look for the good in each submission. If this had happened to me years ago, what might have happened? Would I have been a better writer? Would I be more considerate? More helpful? Would I be less cruel?

The novel I have been working on for a dozen years has fallen to the wayside. The Covid pandemic drained the life right out of me. It’s hard to worry about imaginary characters when the people around you are in danger. Still, I sit down and make a change here or there in the manuscript. Time away from a draft is not always a bad thing. I can see the whole story more clearly now, rather than individual chapters. Put in a China reference in the first chapter that now appears in the sixth. Connect the two. Make the heroin deal a red herring, the real deal being for Chinese Virtual Reality code. Get rid of some side plots. Or convert them to the setup for the next novel. I have nearly three hundred completed pages to revise. It ain’t easy, but it’s not that hard. Making time is somehow easier now. The hangovers less painful. The loss of my best reader/friend seems to send its own message: Move on.

I grew a beard as my Manly Man protest to the all the biological warfare on my virility. What started out as a Papa Hemingway attempt is now closer to Poopdeck Pappy. I found by shaving the mustache and some chin hair, I can achieve a kind of Planet of the Apes look. After all, I too am amazed that humans can talk. Not much amazing gets said, but the effort shows hopeful signs. Some say words are all used up but it’s repeated words that are used up. See something on social media and share it and a thousand others will be sharing the same thing at the same time. So I read strange things, looking for the lost communication. Have I lost the ability to write?  Did I ever have it? What has always been a problem for me is finishing projects. That’s why I love cooking, especially on my Weber grill. I get an idea and try it out, change ingredients in standard fare menus, and actually create something new and tasty and my critics are right here, hungry and willing to try Swordfish Kabobs with Mango and Pineapple or grilled pizza without red sauce on crusts bought at the bakery. The art is not so much in the cooking as it is in the shopping. I make Swordfish kabobs for five people and my food costs are under twenty dollars ($20). Being poor enables me to do what my grandmothers did, take simple things and make meals everyone remembers. And it all happens in one day. I never got that satisfaction from writing. Or, back in the old days, I got so excited I sent out unrefined drafts to considerate readers who were probably embarrassed by my enthusiasm and need for praise. Testosterone! Vanity! I should have been castrated years ago. Now I’m a shopper, a cook, a driver for family members without cars. And people with anxiety come to me to tell all. Being stuck at the grill makes me a captive audience. Does that make me a confessor? I don’t think it’s quite that formal. It seems everybody has a lot bottled up inside and I do the one thing that helps: I listen. There is a terror attached to modern life that makes communication nearly impossible. With smartphones, we can modify pictures of ourselves and add monkey ears and tails. But we can’t say what we mean, can’t mean what we say. Why? Because that’s the same as writing. The writer takes responsibility for what he writes and so must have the courage to make it available to be read by others. On Facebook, for example, some confess to depression and get daily reinforcement responses from Facebook friends. The key is: responses. Someone says something from out of the void. But the same person says something amusing and gets no response. The bell doesn’t ring, the food pellet doesn’t drop into the bowl. Back to depression posts, fishing for responses. Just being alive is not enough. The Internet has created monsters, kids gang up on other kids and drive them to suicide, to risk-taking, to mass murder. The behavioralism of social media was predicted by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960’s. No reads McLuhan anymore. No one reads B.F. Skinner. Beyond Freedom and Dignity was the book that ended his career. Modifying the behavior of individuals generated enough liberal outrage colleges like USF dropped the School of Behaviorism from its Psychology curriculum.  Anthony Burgess and then Kubrick satirized it in A Clockwork Orange. You can’t take away their freedom and dignity! You can’t take away their AR-15s! What, are you some kind of fascist? So, we settle for endless conversation. Why do people act this way, we wonder? And every day on television there are at least twenty shows featuring murder as the plot source. There are video games where shooting, slashing, and beating are not only featured but are so graphically realistic you might as well be in a building actually shooting total strangers. Why do people act this way, we wonder? We are conditioning them to act this way. We are protecting their freedom and dignity while they are exploring how many rounds of ammunition are required to kill everyone in a gay nightclub.