Jamel Brinkley on the Little Pleasures of Language

This week on The Maris Review , Jamel Brinkley joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Witness , out now from FSG. Subscribe and download the episode , wherever you get your podcasts. Episode 216: Jamel Brinkley Forward 15 seconds Back 15 seconds Share Subscribe Description * from the episode: Maris Kreizman: I’m wondering if you could talk a little broadly about the variety of points of view you write from in this work, both from different people of different backgrounds, but also, POV. Jamel Brinkley : Well, the first thing I’ll say is that, with A Lucky Man , for a number of reasons, I think because of the book itself (obviously the stories were focused on black men but also the timing of the book’s publication) I think that the narrative that quickly solidified around the book was that this is a book about masculinity or black masculinity, or toxic masculinity or what have you. And I think there’s a part of maybe any artist where you start to chafe against being boxed in like that. And I don’t think people meant it in any sort of way, but there’s a way in which I could do more than that, or I’m not just that. And I do think that A Lucky Man covers more than just that topic. But with this book, I think I very intentionally wanted to write stories that sort of pushed out of that. So I do have point of view characters who are women or young women, old women, little girls. And yeah, it was also fun for me to write from a variety of POVs, different kinds of first person, where the first person is sort of muted or hidden for a while and then it starts to emerge. I think I had a lot of fun with that. Just seeing what’s possible within each of those POV choices, you know, to experiment within the first person, for instance, was a lot of fun for me. MK: I think that that really comes across in the collection. And now I’m gonna ask […]

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