REBROADCAST: Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his novel “The Underground Railroad.” It’s an alternate history of slavery in America from an author who has built a reputation on tweaking the boundaries of reality in order to reveal more about the world we live in. Today, we listen back to a conversation host Dave Miller had with Whitehead in 2019 when he was in town to accept an award from Oregon State University.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Colson Whitehead burst onto the literary scene in 1999, and from the very beginning, he seemed allergic to the straitjacket of genre. His debut, “The Intuitionist” was a noirish novel about race, politics and elevator inspectors. Later, he wrote a classic and realistic coming of age story and followed it up with a dark and lyrical novel about zombies.

By 2016, Whitehead had built the kind of professional life that most writers can only dream of, and then he published the “Underground Railroad,” which boosted his career into an even higher orbit. It, too, resists easy classification. It is a brutally realistic portrait of slave life and a book that asks ‘what if,’ as in, what if the metaphorical underground railroad were an actual railroad, under the ground? It won a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize and the official adulation and approval of Oprah Winfrey.

Whitehead was in Portland in 2019 to give the keynote address at AWP, an annual writers’ conference. He was in Corvallis to accept the Stone Award for literary achievements at Oregon State University. We came down to Corvallis to talk with him in person. Thanks very much for doing this.

Colson Whitehead: Hey, howdy. Thanks for having me.

Miller: I want to start with some music. In the acknowledgement for “The Underground Railroad,” you say that you listened to the punk band The Misfits while you were writing the first one hundred pages of the novel. I thought we could listen to one of the songs that you added to your playlist for the book. This is the beginning of “AstroZombie.”

[Music playing]...

Why were you drawn to The Misfits for this particular book?

Whitehead: I’ve always listened to a master playlist when I work. It’s songs that I’ve listened to for decades. It’ll go from Prince, Édith Piaf, The Clash, Run-DMC,...

Miller: Is it random?

Whitehead: [Chuckling] You know… it’s on ‘shuffle,’ for two thousand songs that I like. I grew up in New York, it’s very noisy, there’s always an ambulance going by, or a car siren,  your neighbor being choked to death, upstairs, screaming. So I’ve always worked with loud music. And I just happened to discover The Misfits [during] the spring of 2015 when I was working on the book. In high school, I thought The Misfits were a bit too heavy-metally, Glen Danzig’s voice was a little too heavy-metall-ish, and then I had a…

Miller: Meaning, not punk enough, not cool enough?

Whitehead: When I was like fourteen or fifteen, I was listening to Sonic Youth and the Bottle Surfers, Nick Cave. And it was what we called college radio back then, and it seemed like The Misfits or Glenn Danzig’s voice pointed more towards Quiet Riot, as opposed to Nick Cave. And then, you get older and you appreciate the ‘Danzigness’ of all things.

Miller: Why not listen to old spirituals or work songs when you’re working on a book like “The Underground Railroad,” music that your characters would have sung or heard themselves?

Whitehead: I don’t like spiritual work songs [Laughter]. And I’m not like a ‘method guy,’ that has to get ‘into character.’ I put on loud, fast, hip-hop, punk songs, dance songs that get me going and they’re my little friends, my little songs and I’ve been listening to, for a long time, to keep me happy.

Miller: And one of the lines that stands out from the song is “Who I do this for. Hey. Me, or you?” You wrote on the Powell’s Blog a couple of years ago that “that question is central to all artistic production: Who do I do this for?” Why?

Whitehead: Yeah, being tongue in cheek, but when you’re, you’re creating a novel, a poem, I do it for myself, but also I am using the English language. I’m picking words that other people then understand conventional grammar and syntax. And so, it is for me, but also for other people and when you’re working, you never know what’s gonna work. And when you finally hand it in, it comes out a year and a half later, you can understand whether it really was all for you or if other people came along for the ride.

Miller: We’ll get to that, we’ll get to the reception of this book in just a minute. But one of the things that stands out to me about this track, which is about zombies coming down from another planet and killing all humans, melting their faces, exterminating the human race, is it’s also a really catchy song. The second time I heard it I wanted to sort of sing along. Is that attractive to you? The idea of a dark idea, in an irresistible package?

Whitehead: Well, I think most of my work deals with some of the darker themes, darker aspects of life, but also has more jokes. And I think in the course of a day, of course of an hour, we are sort of vacillating between the great things about life and the terrible things. It’s a nice sunny day, then we remember something that happened bad to us in childhood. And so I think I try to reflect that sort of duality in my work and it is catchy. It’s also about killing everybody.

Miller: As I noted, in the end of your most recent novel, you said that’s one of the songs that you were really listening to at the beginning of the novel writing process. You say that at the end of writing a book, and I guess this has been going on for a while, you listen to two albums in particular – Prince’s “Purple Rain” and Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation.” I thought we could listen to the first famous track from Purple Rain, “Let’s Go Crazy.”

[Music playing]

Miller: What is it about this album and the Sonic Youth album that you turn to them when the finish line is in sight?

Whitehead: I started my first book and it was the last day of work, I knew I only had like two pages to write before I started rewriting. And I put on these two records that I’ve been listening to for 30 something years, “Purple Rain” and “Daydream Nation,” and then it became a thing… and meant that when I got to the last page of a book without getting hit by a bus or you know, I sort of made it through…

[Mutual laughter]

Miller: So it was celebratory.

Whitehead: Celebratory and now, nine books in, I know that whenever I put those two records back to back, I did it,

I survived somehow. Does it all come together? I’m not sure. But I made it to the end in one piece and I’m with my friends, my imaginary friends, Prince and Sonic Youth.

Miller: Is it always obvious that you’ve arrived at the end? I mean, you know the day that you at least have the first draft done?

Whitehead: Yeah, I’ve worked on the book for a year, a year and a half and there’s only one page of stuff that has to go. There’s only so much that has to be done, that’s been left unsaid, unwritten, and I know it’s about three hours and yeah, I look forward to it.

Miller: Is it a coincidence here that the music we’re talking about is from the seventies and eighties, when you were coming of age? I mean, is that the decades you still turn to most for music?

Whitehead: Sure, definitely. I think when I was growing up, there were all these sort of boomer pop cultural artifacts, American Graffiti, Happy Days. And it was boomers looking back upon their fifties childhood. And I was like, “That’s so pathetic, baby boomers get over it, get over it.”

[Mutual laughter]

But I’m of course in the same position, stuck in this sort of eighties groove, the bands that were important to me back then I still go to for inspiration, for solace. My daughter is 14 and I try to have a cheesy seventies playlist and that overlaps with her generation because like Guardians of the Galaxy has a seventies soundtrack. And so I’ll go, “Oh, I used to love the song, you know, summer, ‘77.” She’s like, “Yeah, it was great in that Marvel movie.”

Miller: Have you tried to be a cool dad who is hip to the music of today? It’s such an uncool question to ask.

Whitehead: I’m a sad, cool dad who [when] my daughter was a baby, got her like a Kraftwerk onesie...so that sad, you know, hipster dad.

Miler: Let’s turn to the writing of “The Underground Railroad.” In the past, you’ve said that the kernel for the idea, for what turned into the novel, it came to you back in 2000, so 15 or so years before you actually embarked on it and that you thought at the time that you you didn’t have the “writing chops” at that time to pull it off. How did you eventually know that you were ready?

Whitehead: I definitely thought that I would screw it up. I wasn’t mature enough as a person to deal with slavery. I didn’t have enough sense of craft and technique to pull it off, the structural gambit of this real railroad beneath the Earth. And so each time I finished a book, I would pull out my notes and think, “Am I ready?”

And this went on for many years. And then at a certain point it seemed, the idea stayed with me. So that was an argument in its favor. Sometimes you have an idea and then two years later, “That’s a really dumb idea.”

Miller: Or the next morning.

[Mutual laughter]

Whitehead: Or the next morning. And in this case, it stayed with me and seemed vital and I’d been avoiding it and it seemed to grow as a person, and a writer, not to be too self healthy. It would be important to take on the book.

Miller: How do you think you have improved as a writer since 2000? I mean, are there specific aspects of your skills that you recognize that you got in that intervening time?

Whitehead: Well, I think, if you do something for a long time, hopefully you get better and then you plateau and get worse. Hopefully I’m still able to learn about my job.

Miller: That was just fascinating. I mean, it seems like that’s deeply embedded in your character – as soon as you said something positive about yourself or the world, it was followed up with …

Whitehead: … It’s The Misfits. It’s good and the bad …”

Miller: But I’m wondering what do you see, specifically? How have you improved in your eyes, craft-wise?

Whitehead: There are certain moments I’ll think about. [In] my earlier work, I might have very encyclopedic or digressive narrators. And when I started “The Underground Railroad,” I felt I was being more focused and more on point. And there’s a section in the book where the main character, Cora, is working in the museum. She’s a living, sort of actor in these dioramas of history. And it came out, it was two pages and I was like, “Old Colson would have made it like a 20 page, postmodern, set piece with all, ‘who is the curator of the museum, what was his philosophy?’” And so page 80, I got to the section and I realized that I was in a different place.

Miller: Why would “old Colson” have done that? Was it a question of showing how much you knew?

Whitehead: I think it’s exuberance and sort of reveling in the possibilities of narrative. When I first discovered Thomas Pynchon or Ralph Ellison or Moby Dick, there’s that encyclopedic, exuberant, lively American voice that made a big influence on me. I wanted to write that way and find my own different topics and subjects that I could use in that voice. And then once you do something, why do it again?

Miller: What was it like to immerse yourself in this particular historical trauma day after day?

Whitehead: The writing of it wasn’t that bad. I think I was sort of compartmentalized. The sort of emotional, heavy labor happened when I committed to the idea and started researching slavery and I wasn’t like an eight year old watching “Roots.” I wasn’t a college kid, reading about different parts of American history. I was in my forties, I had kids and I appreciated, just being older, what the true devastation of slavery meant. I wrestled with the fact that in many ways I shouldn’t be here. It’s just an accident that this or that ancestor wasn’t killed in the Middle Passage, wasn’t killed in a plantation and they somehow protected the child who had a child who had a child, etcetera. And so in order to be realistic, what would I have to do to Cora, just not gloss over the horrors of slavery…

Miller: I should say, for people who haven’t read it, she’s a character, the person we followed the most and and we follow her terrifying trip as she tries to break free in various ways.

Whitehead:  She’s a 17 year old girl, [an] orphan. And to be realistic to the devastation of slavery, bad things will happen to her. Bad things will happen to the supporting cast. Going in, I knew it was not gonna be like “Gone With the Wind,” where a white lady is being self-actualized against the backdrop of slavery. You know, “They’re gonna burn my house down.” It’s like, “They should burn your house down, you’re a slaver, you know, you’re a bad person.” I’m coming from a different perspective, historical perspective, and so committing to being realistic was the hard part.

Miller: You mentioned, sort of in passing, “Gone With the Wind.” There have obviously been a lot of books and movies about slavery over the years, some of them made by African Americans, many of them made by white people. There are the slave narratives that you could draw on for historical perspective or understanding. What did you want to add to the existing literature or existing conversations about slavery for 21st century audiences?

Whitehead: Going back to “who am I doing this for, me or you?” I really just want to execute this idea I had, that would allow me to talk about different aspects of American history. We mentioned the real railroad beneath the earth, this fantastic construction. But each state that Cora comes out of, when she emerges from underground, is a different state of American possibility, “alternative America,” like “Gulliver’s Travels.” And that allowed me to talk about different points in American history in different ways.

Miller: Including some that seem much more like the 1920s than the 1840s.

Whitehead: Once he gets on the train, I’m mixing and matching different moments in history. And so, I wanted to, cross this journey, figure out what these different moments in history meant to me, how if I move things around and get a different sort of conversation going. Then, whatever you’re writing about, and it could be slavery or family or war, someone better and more talented than you has done it, whether it’s Toni Morrison or Homer. So, no matter what you’re writing about, it’s been done before or you have to trust that you have your own sort of story to tell and not get hung up on what other folks have done before.

Miller: You turned, as you mentioned, to a number of slave narratives to inform your book with historical details about language or dress or just daily life. But you’re also obviously creating a new fictional world, putting different worlds together, different times together. What kind of internal guide do you have for when to hew more closely to some version of historical quote, unquote “accuracy” and when to push the imaginative parts of your brain?

Whitehead: I think hopefully, over time, you get to learn how to calibrate your effects. Am I going too far in this direction? In the other direction? I think some people describe the voice in the book as being magic realist. And before I started writing, I went back to García Márquez and “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and he mixes the very real with the fantastic and he does it all straight-faced. So the real and the fake are sort of intermingled. And it seems like that would be a good method to use for my book.

Miller: You went back to him before you started, or in the process, because you recognized that there were some lessons in those books for the current book you were working on?

Whitehead: He stayed with me and it was very important to me in my teenage years and twenties. I didn’t think I picked it up for a model, but it ended up being the right book to pick up at the time.

Miller: What was it like for you to reread him?

Whitehead: I was on vacation, and I remember reading his book of his collected short stories when I was like 19 and in college and thinking, “Oh, I’d love to be a writer. I’ll live above a bar, I’ll write all day and I’ll hang around the bar at night.” And so it was 30 years later to come back [and I] actually was a writer and I don’t live above a bar. I’m pretty normal and boring. But to go back to his words and be drawn to his world, was very invigorating and inspirational and gave me a tool for how to blend the real and the fake in the book.

Miller: At that point in your career, before “The Underground Railroad” came out, how good were you at assessing how a book of yours would do, how it would be critically received, how the public would take it?

Whitehead: I never know. I think all my books are good. It’s not like I finish the book and I’m like, “Hey, editor, this is a piece of crap, you know, publish it.” [Laughter] I feel very optimistic about the joy that people will get if they pick up this book and it’s a zombie book, and you hate zombies. But I’m like, “Oh, but if you pick this one up, you might find a way into the story.” So I’m always optimistic and then you never know if people will understand what you’re doing or critics. So I think with my first book, “The Intuitionist,” I thought my ideal reader was like a 16 year old Black guy, weirdo, who might pick it up and think, “Oh, I can be a writer,” the same way I responded to fiction when I was I was a kid.

Miller: Were you essentially saying that the reader you had in mind for your first novel was a 16 year old version of yourself?

Whitehead: Sure, just strange kid who probably spends too much time indoors watching movies and listening to the punk bands and not getting a lot of exercise, who comes across, maybe it’s Spiderman, maybe it’s Stephen King or or Ursula LeGuin, and thinks, “I like fantastic literature, I’d like to write one day.” But then “The Intuitionist” came out and there were no 16 year old weirdos, Black or white in the audience. And I gain readers with a realistic book, lose readers with, say, a book about the World Series of Poker. And so I stopped thinking about who’s gonna pick it up and just try to not screw it up along the way.

Miller: You’ve lost readers and gained. You don’t think that they’re just Colson Whitehead fans who like where your brain is going to go? There are folks who like the zombie book you wrote and that’s all they’re gonna care about of your work. Or they like “The Intuitionist.” Or they don’t care about fiction at all, they just want to hear about a guy who somehow went to play the World Series of Poker, even though he’s not one of the world’s best poker players. Is that the way you think about your audience? You don’t have an audience, you have people who like the different books you write?,

Whitehead: There are a lot of people, there’s Jimmy from Tulsa, Lorraine from Gary, Indiana and they read everything.

[Mutual laughter]

But then, I have met people who are like, “Oh, I like ‘Sag Harbor,’ it was a realistic book, it didn’t have that sort of primo structure of John Henry days. But I hate zombies and I’m not gonna pick that up with your next book up. And then we’ll come back or not come back.” I’m used to disappointing people, from book to book; and then also, meeting new folks who want to come along.

Miller: But this is the opposite of disappointment. Very few novelists in their careers will ever have a year like you had after “The Underground Railroad” came out. I mentioned the awards, the Pulitzer prize, the National Book Award, [and] maybe the biggest award of all: Oprah’s blessing. And that sticker slapped on it, that it’s Oprah’s Book Club. With a little bit of hindsight now, what was that year like?

Whitehead: It was incredible. I wrote the last 30 pages and I felt a great sense of accomplishment and pride. I thought that was the best 30 pages I’ve ever done. The last 30 pages of “The Underground Railroad.” And I gave it to my wife and my agent and my editor, [it] was with three different people. And they really liked it and the way they like it is different than the way they like other books that are something in their voice.

So I just kept growing, as I went to booksellers and then the sales force and then advanced readers, that I felt that I had done a good job and other people were reacting very strongly to it and it just kept going and it was quite a pleasant year, I have to say.

Miller: You wrote an essay about watching movies in The New Yorker, back in 2012.

You wrote this:

“Mom and dad didn’t believe in censorship. We enjoyed beheadings, disembowelings, sexual assaults, all sorts of flickering R rated depravity, the way others might take in a Grand Canyon vista as a family”

How did that childhood shaped you, first as a consumer of pop culture, and then as a creator, that there weren’t really off-limit things when it came to movies?

Whitehead: Well, I think in terms of the type of stuff I was reading, the comic books, the horror novels and science fiction and then the movies, it’s all sort of good. Stanley Kubrick is an artist and so is John Carpenter. When you’re shut in, you take what you can get. And so I learned that you can use fantasy to talk about reality, and that’s one way of addressing how we live. And a realistic film or a book is another way of addressing reality. I think a lot of people of my generation grew up reading Lord of the Rings and reading comic books and they wanted to become writers because of Stan Lee, or something like that. That sort of artificial division between high and low never existed for me, it’s all just a different way of telling a story.

Miller: You did, though, become a critic. It’s one thing to say that the artificial construct of high and low doesn’t exist or is artificial. It’s another to say that everything is good. I mean, some stuff that is intended to be serious art can be really bad, and some stuff that is some pure version of a genre can be extraordinary. When did that more critical eye, which you also have, start to develop?

Whitehead: When I was a kid, basically if you made a movie, that meant you were a real artist.

[Mutual laughter]

Miller: Just by definition, when you’re young. I mean it’s a movie.

Whitehead: So I thought George Segal was the best actor of all time. He was in “The Terminal Man,” with Michael Crichton in the car movie [and] sex farce with Goldie Hawn on HBO. I was like, “He can do it all.” George Segal was gonna be around forever. Then I think you start writing and realizing what you value in the arts, what you want to get out there. Also, growing up in a family being a Black viewer, consumer of pop culture, you start saying, what we all know now, like, “The Black guy’s gonna die first,” in this movie, and that’s one form of criticism.

Miller: And you talk about that as a family? Or was it not even necessary to talk about?

Whitehead: We would sit around just making fun of, “The white lady’s getting chased by Michael Myers, she’s gonna fall.” There’s always these conventions and you become aware of them and then you start critiquing them. So being an outsider in America, you start having a perspective on mainstream pop culture. So perhaps it starts maybe [in] junior high and high school.

Miller: When you became a parent, did you have a similar kind of laissez faire attitude to what your kids were being exposed to?

Whitehead: Well, no. I think the seventies was the latchkey-kid-seventies ...

Miller: That’s “latch-key” slash “watch John Carpenter, it’s fine.”

Whitehead: Yeah, it’s different. But then with the “Who knows what my daughter’s watching on her phone?” And she was 11 and Emily wanted to see “The Shining,” and I was like, “Well, you know there’s violence and nudity and ya-da-ya-dah.” She goes, “All my friends have seen the shining.” And so I let her see [it] with her friend and she was like, “It’s not scary. Psychological horror, not real horror.” I was like, what do you mean? She was 11, psychological horror? Yeah. So, perhaps I am laissez faire, I’m not gonna let her see “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” which I saw at a very young age.

Miller: You grew up as a self-described goody-goody. And it seems like that description of yourself lasted until you got to college. How did you start to branch out from being a rule follower?

Whitehead: I think with no one watching, you start smoking pot hanging out, with weirdos and stuff like that. So not being a very rebellious teenager, and once I got to college and not being under the daily gaze of my parents, I started sort of acting out more. Of course, if you sleep late and don’t go to class, you [are] not really rebelling against the system, you’re just depriving yourself of a really good lecture.

Miller: You’re also just, in some ways, a pretty standard college student.

Whitehead: Yes. And my college English Department was very conservative and they didn’t really teach any novels after World War II. And so if I wanted to seek out Toni Morrison or Ishmael Reed or Thomas Pynchon, I had to do it on my own. There’s a sense that this conservative institution or department wasn’t gonna serve my needs. And I was definitely attracted more to sort of post-modern and post-World War II fiction. I was going to have to find it myself. I had to deviate from what they wanted to teach me, to sort of run around the stacks and find stuff that would feed my interest – John Barth or …

Miller: Did you also have to deviate from your parents’ idea of a career for you?

Whitehead: Sure. I mean, they wanted you [to] have a straight job, and…

Miller: Like, be a lawyer or a doctor. That sort of thing?

Whitehead: My first job out of college was working for the Village Voice,which is not a real sort of straight job. And it wasn’t until my first book came out that they’re like “Oh, we see what you’re doing.” It’s a physical object, it was reviewed in places.

Miller:  But it was a good chunk of time from when you started at the Village Voice until “The Intuitionist” came out, right?

Whitehead: That was about 10 years, and like I said, I’m used to disappointing people.

Miller: But that book came out and they realized that you could do this?

Whitehead: I mean, I had no visible means of support except my writing, so that helps, and it helps [that] I was very lucky in terms of the coverage it got. It was a first novel about elevator inspectors, who wants to read that? And it got covered in Time, The New York Times and Newsweek and so that made it more real for me – that it came out, it was a physical object,

it was more real for me, for my family too.

Miller: You gave a keynote address, as I mentioned at the beginning, at AWP – that’s the Annual Big Writers Conference, that happened to be in Portland this past weekend. On Twitter, you said about your keynote, “It’s a writing talk, it’s a fried chicken talk. It’s a writing talk and a fried chicken talk.” What is the connection? I mean, why talk about fried chicken in a talk to a whole room full of writers?

Whitehead: I’m a hobbyist. I cook a lot and I’ve been cooking a lot of fried chicken, the last 10 years. Some of it, you brine, there’s different kinds of dredges, there’s a variety of different things and it’s a creative act. It’s different than writing a book. But there are things about the patience, the experimentation, the learning curve of cooking, the overlap with writing. So sharing my love for these different types of fried chicken seemed to be a way in, to talk about writing.

Miller: I’ve read that you also talked about cultural appropriation because one of the recipes you’ve been working on is by David Chang, the legendary New York-based Chef. And you basically said - I think this is a radio-friendly version - that “You can write about anything just don’t don’t ‘f’ it up.”

It’s interesting to put that out in the world now. In 2019, when it seems like there is a pretty loud strain of criticism, or just of responses to work, where people say if you didn’t live some particular experience, especially if it’s the experience of a marginalized community, then it doesn’t matter how good your take on that is…that you shouldn’t really be writing that. It seems like in your talk, you’re arguing the opposite. As long as you do a really good job, you can do whatever you want.

Whitehead: The current outrage, I talked about it because I was sick of being asked about it. I think it’s a non-issue, but people…

Miller:  What’s a non-issue?

Whitehead: I think if you get away with it and it tastes good, that’s fine. And if it tastes like crap, then you screwed up and you should be a little bit embarrassed and do better next time. I don’t think the conversation is so much about you cannot write across race, class, gender. I think people who are criticized for screwing it up, get very defensive...but you only get called out if you screw it up, really.

“Are you saying that William Shakespeare can’t write about Othello?” Like “No one’s saying that.” They’re saying that if you didn’t transcend your bad programming around race, gender, class, we all sort of soak in “bad code” from the culture, from our families, our communities and it’s our job as artists to transcend that, in order to make good art. And when you screw it up, you should get called out. But people are really defensive and keep going on about these ‘PC’ [politically correct] armies and political correctness is out of control; it’s not that control, you just kind of screwed it up.

Miller: I mean, if a white person had written “The Underground Railroad,” what do you think the critical reaction would have been?

Whitehead: I hope that if it was good, it’d be great…

Our hypothetical white person, who’s writing a story about slavery, if they do a good job, people should read it.

Miller: The only reason I asked is because I imagine there’d be some people who would say, “Yeah, it is good, but still, you shouldn’t be writing about this.” I guess what you’re saying is don’t be too sensitive if you’ve gotten called out because you should look inward and make sure your blinders weren’t on.

Whitehead: I’m saying that if you got good reviews from people I liked or my friends and it was good, I would read it. I would not dismiss it out of hand just because it was written by a white person.

Miller: In that address, it seems like you also subverted the standard, and maybe cliche advice to writers, which is, “Write what you know.” Do you preach the opposite?

Whitehead: Well, I think I didn’t go through the workshop system, and so, all these sort of nuggets about like, “write what you know” . . . they always seem like sort of these foreign phrases to me.

Miller: You wrote a couple years ago, a very funny tongue in cheek critique of all of them where you sort of doubled down on each of those.

Whitehead: Yeah, I think rules [are] there for a reason. You also subvert them for a reason at the right time. In terms of “write what you know,” versus “write what you don’t know,” I’m always trying to figure out different ways of telling a story, which is why I have a coming of age novel, a story about slavery, a nonfiction book about poker. If I know how to do something, why do it again?

Miller: Is it scary when you start, then?

Whitehead: Yeah. There’s a challenge, as someone who’s not a horror writer, to write a horror slash science fiction novel. What do I like about the tradition? What do I want to reject? And I think because I am trying to tell different stories, it is always very scary when I start. And that’s what makes the challenge interesting, or the work, vital, is not knowing if you can pull it off. So, “write what you don’t know,” I’m not a zombie hunter, I’m not an elevator inspector, I’m not a slave. I’m imagining what these characters’ lives, inner lives are like, from a writing from the vantage of the late 20th century, early 21st century, and I’m writing what I don’t know and using, hopefully, when about people, what I’ve learned about writing over the years, to make them live on the page.

Miller: When you’re ready to start your latest novel, “The Nickel Boys,” which is coming out in July, did it feel different to sit at your desk at the very beginning of it, once again, after the critical success of “The Underground Railroad?”

Whitehead: It was hard, but it’s always hard.

Miller: It wasn’t ‘differently’ hard?

Whitehead: No, this book is hard because you’re broke, this book is hard because you’re depressed...

Miller: This book, you’re broke and depressed.

Whitehead: In terms of this book, “The Nickel Boys,” I was traveling a lot, promoting “The Underground Railroad,” and I was being published in different countries for the first time and meeting editors and different audiences. So I couldn’t have my six months just in my office being left alone. The hard part was learning how to write in hotel rooms and in train stations and on airplanes.

Miller: Was a chunk of this new book written overseas?

Whitehead: Yeah. I started in the spring of 2017. I was traveling so much that I just had to learn how to write at the hotel desk or pull down the tray in my train seat and write for an hour if I could get it.

Miller: Just this week, The New Yorker ran a part of the new book as a short story. The excerpt [is] about a boxing match at a segregated and viciously run reform school in Florida in the early 1960s. I’ve read that it’s based on a real school with a real horrific history. What made you want to write this particular book now?

Whitehead: I usually do “mix it up” in terms of what I’m writing about. I do write books to have more jokes, books that have fewer jokes and after “The Underground Railroad,” I was ready for something that wasn’t as heavy. Certainly, I guess, a critical term “heavy,”...

[Mutual laughter]

Miller: But I think we know what you mean…

Whitehead: It doesn’t get heavier. I was gonna save “The Nickel Boys,” for later, but after Donald Trump’s election and the strife and chaos we’ve been living in the last 2.5 years, it seemed that, just to make sense of where we are as a country, how am I feeling about things, I had to write this book about Jim Crow, about institutional racism, about people struggling against their various societal constraints, just to make sense for myself of what’s going on in the world. So I put aside the more lighthearted book and devoted myself to “The Nickel Boys.”

Miller: That book is still in you, the other one?

Whitehead: I’m working on it now. I worked on it yesterday, so I’m still working on the road in hotel rooms, but yeah.

Miller: It’s funny to think about this… I mean, in some way, books gestate like people do, but you can’t just put a gestating person on hold indefinitely for 15 years. Once it goes it goes. But books can be inside you for a long time and then they come out when they come out.

Whitehead: I mentioned I don’t have a lot of hobbies, I like to cook… and if there’s not much you enjoy doing, you might as well do the stuff you like, and I like writing. So I did this talk on Thursday at AWP, the writing conference, and I’ve been on the run for the last three weeks, working every day, weekend. So it’s my first day off on Friday. I was just like “I guess I just work on my book.” I’ve been working so much and other stuff, I missed doing the thing I actually like doing, which is figuring out what’s going to happen on page 87.

Miller: It’s pretty great that what you enjoy doing is what you’re very good at and what people want you to do.

Whitehead Yeah, definitely with “Railroad,” it’s freed me up to not teach for a while and focus more on my work. So, yeah, I feel very lucky these days.

Miller: It seems that “The Nickel Boys” book is in a more realist mode than some of your other work including “The Underground Railroad.” How do you decide, at this point, what mode is in the right service of the particular story you most want to tell?

Whitehead: I do love outlining before I start. And I have to know the beginning and the end. The middle can be fuzzy but I’m also figuring out who is the narrator – Is it a first-person narrator, someone addressing the reader? Is it an omniscient narrator who stands back and knows everyone’s thinking? Is it funny? Is it grim? Is it realistic or fantastic? And so my book “Sag Harbor,” which is about growing up in the eighties, doesn’t necessarily need a giant robot or…

[Mutual laughter]

…some sort of fantastic thing. It’s about being a teenager and “The Underground Railroad,” the fantastic structure allows me to have this sort of larger conversation with history, a different point of view that I couldn’t have if it was the first person account of someone running away. Before I start, I’m thinking about how the story has to be told and what tools can help me make it.

Miller: At one point in “The Underground Railroad,” your main character, Cora, hears the word “optimistic:” you write, “Cora didn’t know what ‘optimistic’ meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before she decided that it meant trying.”

There are a lot of great passages in the book, but to me, this comes as close, in four sentences or so, to encapsulate the entire feel of the book. How do you think about “hope,” specifically in the context of a struggle, like Cora’s?

Whitehead: There’s the violent devastation of the plantation and that’s all Cora knows, but she has an idea that there is a better place, in the North, and that’s “hope.” If you don’t have hope, you don’t leave, you don’t believe that there’s a better place and so you stay, and it takes a lot of courage to leave the plantation. It also takes courage to stay in the plantation and protect your children but without that idea that there is a better world, there’s no book. And even the book about zombies, I’ve been sort of mentioning, people are trying to survive in the post apocalyptic landscape – if they don’t believe there is a place of safety, you don’t go on.

Miller: It’s when they say there’s no book, it also seems like you’re saying there’s no life?

Whitehead: So you’re upset about the current political situation if you don’t believe that we can affect change, in however small way, personally, for banding together, to think of different strategies to, say, combat global warming; If you don’t believe that we can, that things can get better, how do you get out of bed? So that animating hope is in the books and I think if you’re gonna try and believe that the world can become a better place, also animates everyone else too.

Miller: What does give you hope right now? What you were saying, it’s an argument for the necessity of hope, as opposed to saying I actually have it?

Whitehead: I’m not sure. I have children. I hope that they are growing up in a better world than the one I was born into, the same without my grandparents, or, say, my parents, who wanted me to have a straight job and become a lawyer. My father was a first generation college [student]. He had the hope that his kids will be born into a better circumstance than what he was born into and he was very sort of negative and pessimistic. You have to have that idea, at least to hold on to, or else why to get to bed. And so, I’m not, say, taking my children and moving to the desert and giving them martial arts training and small arms training so they can survive the apocalypse. I’m talking about recycling,...

[Mutual laughter]

Miller: So, you’re a New Yorker.

Whitehead: Yes, I have hope and a lot of that is because I would like my kids to have kids and  find people to love, and in a world that is not 120 degrees every day.

Miller: You published - I guess it was an essay, first, and it turned into a book in 2011 - “Colossus of New York,” this great, sort of stream of consciousness, love letter in a sense, to various aspects of your hometown. How has being a New Yorker shaped you as a writer, do you think?

Whitehead: You know, I just get a lot of energy from the city. I’m still trying to figure it out.

Miller: Figure out the city?

Whitehead: Figure out the city and what it means to me. And if I get it right, I’ll stop writing about New York.

Miller: The zombies took over New York, right?

Whitehead: Right. And that’s sort of my utopian vision of the city, everyone’s dead and no one’s around to bug you. The wait in line at Whole Foods or for a Taxi . . . and that’s one way of talking about the city. “Colossus” has a very sort of ecstatic, coarse, like-narrator, who’s zooming in and out of different folks’ heads. And that’s another way of writing about the city.

“The Nickel Boys” takes place in the 1960s, and one of the guys who’s in the school moved to New York later and he has his own sort of New York. So if I could figure out what New York meant to me, I’d probably stop writing about it. Instead, I just keep finding different kinds of angles, and characters to write about in different ways.

Miller: After you published “The Intuitionist,” John Updike called you, “a young Black writer to watch,” in The New Yorker. Your response was, “I hear John Updike, John Updike is an older white writer on the ‘up and up.’”

Whitehead: He’s a credit to his race. I think he’s really painting his people in a positive way.

Miller: Does the category of quote unquote “African American Novelist,” feel useful to you at all?

Whitehead: Yeah, depending on the time period, it’s very useful. I think being a Black writer in 1965 and 1975 is something different within your peer group, as opposed to, say, when you’re being described that way by John Updike in 2002. I think “Jewish writer,” or a “writer who happens to be Jewish,” or you’re a “Black writer,” or a “writer who happens to be Black,” that’s part of the critical discourse. I think it’s not as bad as it was 30 years ago and I have not been asked “Are you a Black writer?” or a “Writer who happens to be Black?” in a while, so people are sort of catching up.

Miller: Hallelujah.

Whitehead: But it’s also part of the discourse and some of the blind spots in the critical culture.

Miller: After the 2000 election, you came up with this advice to yourself and others and maybe others and yourself: “Be kind to everybody, make art and fight the power.” Has that lasted for you? I should say, that was after the 2016 election or the 2008 election. Has that lasted for you as a mantra?

Whitehead: Be kind? I try, I definitely try. I’ve been making my art and part of me fighting the “power” is finding stories that can accommodate a critique of different aspects of power. So for the last two years, hopefully I’ve been living up to that; if I didn’t, I’d be okay too.

Miller: What do you mean?

Whitehead: I think we’re all sort of struggling our own way to get through the day, make our lives better, our family’s lives better, the world a better place. And some years, you’re more on top of things than other years. I think if you are thinking about it and struggling in your own way to make things better, kudos.

Miller: Colson Whitehead. Thanks very much.

Whitehead: Thank you, sir.

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