The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute (BMI) will host Tyriek White, author of the acclaimed debut novel, We Are a Haunting, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 19 in the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Auditorium. The reading is free with RSVP and open to the public.
We Are a Haunting follows three generations of a working class family and their inherited ghosts. Grandma Audrey, herself a living ancestor among the speaking dead, is about to lose her apartment; her indelible and vivacious daughter Key dies young after serving the Black women of her neighborhood; Colly, the son Key leaves behind, who holds deep-seated disdain for a community to which he has no choice but to be accountable. With a singular combination of urban fiction, the supernatural, and social critique, White depicts the palpable, breathing essence of outer borough New York City with lyricism and deep significance.
White discussed his writing process and major themes present in the novel with BMI’s Joshua Chévere Cohen.
Cohen: Your debut novel, We are a Haunting, was released earlier this year and has received significant praise. How are you processing this positive attention?
White: It’s been nice. It’s been affirming. Having people closest to me like my friends, my family, people around the community in which the book takes place — them coming up to me, seeing themselves, recognizing their experiences, their day-to-day, has been enough. The other stuff is cool, but being able to write this book about the place where I'm from, but also communities similar to that community, Black and brown working class communities, and then have people from those communities embrace it and feel seen and feel witnessed, that means so much to me.
Cohen: Did you have a sense when you were writing this book that it was going to be something special?
White: I wouldn't say that. I was praying I could finish it, and that it made sense with what I wanted to do with all these supernatural and magical realist elements. The vision that I had for it was always singular in these characters, and the most important piece of this story to me was the relationship between Colly and his mom, between this realm of life and death. I think all the other elements around it imbue it with a sort of intertextuality, a sort of lineage, a sort of literary and historical resonance.
Cohen: In addition to your public reading on the 19th, you’re also giving a craft talk to UNLV MFA and undergraduate students. With that in mind, I’m curious to know about the construction of the novel. How did you approach organizing and crafting this sweeping story?
White: A lot of it was done in revisions, in the editorial process, and that's a whole other kind of generative writing within itself because things move around, and you might have to write things in response to the new dynamic. Going back and forth in time might sacrifice a reader’s linear need to have things happen in succession, but by bouncing around it shows the cyclical nature of history, of stories. Walking the reader through these similarities, these re-happenings, these, in a sense, time loops that happen when you're in such bizarre systems – such as the American capitalist system, being Black in this country, being poor in this country – these are uncanny idiosyncratic moments. They're surreal. So being able to show the reader these similarities is enhanced by the structure.
Cohen: Ghosts play a significant role in the novel. Can you talk about your decision to use ghosts and other supernatural elements and to give a main character [Key] the role of medium in her community?
White: I wanted to talk about this cyclical nature of life and death and if those endpoints aren't actually a beginning point for each, and I also wanted to talk about history. I wanted to track the lineage of this neighborhood from its place before a Brooklyn or New York even existed. What did slavery look like in this place? How does the legacy or the afterlife of slavery cast a specter on the people living in the present? Any sort of disenfranchised or oppressed identity in this country can relate to the feeling. It's not just me that people see, they see me, they see my past, they see the perception of who I am, they see a stereotype. How do you explore that?
When a society takes away all rights or all autonomy from a person, that's a social sort of death. There's no way I can just write some realistic depiction of “inner city living” to capture the complexity and not reduce it to this stereotype. Wanting to play in a sandbox that's made up of magical realism, that’s made up of the uncanny or the surreal, I think it's kind of perfect especially when writing stories about vulnerable people.
Cohen: Are you a fan of supernatural fiction or horror movies? Do you see your writing as influenced by them?
White: For sure. I consume a lot of science fiction and a decent amount of fantasy. I play a lot of video games, I watch a lot of anime. I grew up in the thick of Harry Potter, when the young adult novels of the time took off to the moon.
I liken it to music. I grew up as a big Nas fan, big fan of Jay-Z, a typical fan of New York rap. Then I started listening to OutKast, their version of magical realism, or in a sense, AfroFuturism. Recognizing, especially in the South, the way folklore and myth-making is present in all of our communities, you realize the importance. It’s always been something that appealed to me.
Cohen: While we're talking about music, you're also a musician and you've released an album on streaming services. What role does music and music-making play in your creative life?
White: Just like another paintbrush, right? Thinking about the processes of other art forms and mediums helps me think about my own process. For me, music is more hands-on than writing. It’s a much more bodily way to engage in creativity and that collaborative aspect I love. Even though I make a lot of my music in a singular space, a lot of the process is built around people: playing people's stuff, or going to my homie who's a guitar player and being like, "So what do you hear from this?," and starting those conversations. And sometimes I look for ways to do that with my own writing, how to be not more collaborative, but more in community.
With music, I get to explore brevity that I don't usually get to explore in my own writing. The power of limiting verbiage in the benefit of rhythm and the benefit of flow. Turning certain things down in order to turn certain things up. And then in my own fiction writing, how do I capture flow? How do I capture rhythm? How do I capture cadence?
Cohen: You work with Lampblack Lit, which “seeks to provide mutual aid and various resources to Black writers across the diaspora.” How does that work affect your own writing and how you think about contemporary literature?
White: It helps because I'm always thinking about this industry in terms of access. The truth about writing is that it does take a lot of support and resources. Even if you're at a fully-funded program, a lot of us can't afford to move somewhere and get paid on a graduate assistant salary, which is below the poverty line for a lot of programs. If you don't have access to these things, you miss out on people who will determine your trajectory, right?
The publishing industry is very white, it's very heteronormative, it's very privileged. A lot of people don't have generational wealth or resources that can help them do that. Lampblack started like mutual aid, trying to provide some of those resources. Now we've grown into a magazine, a reading series, elements that can help emerging writers begin that network and try to cultivate our own community to help each other. I think a lot in terms of accessibility, but also the writers who come up after me.
Cohen: I picked up on a number of epic poetry conventions in your novel, particularly in the Prologue – invocation of a muse, the hero’s journey home, characters named Virgil and Dante, a catalog of public housing buildings like a catalog of ships. Was this done intentionally?
White: It was! A big chunk of this book was my thesis. We had to do contemporary writers that your story’s in conversation with and also the historical context. So mine was the Aeneid. There's a lot of references. It is to that lineage, to be in conversation with those works, but to also reinterpret, to tear down, to reimagine or reinsert these characters into an epic sense – not epic as in a Michael Bay film, but epic in the sense of the lineage of literature. There's a lot of anxiety around that tradition, staying in that tradition and talking back to that tradition. Me being a part of other traditions, not just the black literary tradition, but the hip-hop tradition, these other things. What does that kind of conversation look like? What is going to happen in that pot when you put all these traditions in?
About Black Mountain Institute
Black Mountain Institute at UNLV champions writers and storytellers through programs, fellowships and community engagement. From the brightest spot on the planet, BMI amplifies writing and artistic expression to connect us to each other in the Las Vegas Valley, the Southwest, and beyond. For more information, visit the BMI website.
