[♪♪♪] -♪ Every day every day Ev ery day every day every day ♪ ♪ Every day I write the book ♪ [♪♪♪] -Welcome.

I'm Rose Martin, and we are Write Around The Corner in Charlottesville, on the grounds of beautiful Monticello, with an amazing debut novelist, Jocelyn Johnson.

Her book My Monticello is a collection of powerful stories that show people fighting to survive in America.

It includes a masterful novella set in the near future.

A young woman who is descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and a band of neighbors are forced to escape the white militia and take refuge in Monticello.

Tough-minded, vulnerable and brave - this book will pull you in, and I learned what it really means to belong.

Jocelyn, welcome to Write Around The Corner .

-Thank you so much, Rose.

Nice to be here.

-And this is such a beautiful setting to share your amazing work, My Monticello .

Before we get to the book, let's visit the early years with Jocelyn, and I'm thinking about your first book that you wrote in - while you were an elementary school student?

-Well, yes, I did.

I wrote a book in fourth grade.

It was an assignment, but I really took it seriously.

We had to like sew it together, write the text, illustrate it, and I was the kid who was really down for all those things - for drawing, for writing, creating a story.

So yes, I still have it - Prom Queen .

- Prom Queen , that's right.

I wrote that down.

Well, your background in art I found fascinating when I read about the next thing you created for yourself, which was your promo book jacket cover telling everyone all about you, your seventh grade, age seven school picture.

-Yes, so that was actually was before my Prom Queen .

When I was little, you know, I was really into drawing, and I was going back through all these drawings I had, and I found this book I'd made of drawings.

And I'd put an artist statement and an artist - I'd taken my school photograph and kind of written out my like bio and what I love about it is I wrote it in third person, you know - "This is the artist, she was seven when she made it."

And as an adult, I realized that is actually what you have to do.

But just that I was paying attention to this detail, you know, that the person at the end of the book, you should see who made it.

-Well, and I love that because you set that intention back when you were seven years old, and even though you're kind of like a debut novelist, you've been writing for a long, long time.

-Absolutely.

So, yes, I have been pretty much drawing and writing my entire life.

As a kid growing up in Northern Virginia, I was really interested in that.

All my projects, you know, had a ton of art and writing in them, and then through high school, I actually read S.E.

Hinton's The Outsiders , which she wrote as a teenager and published when I think she was 18 or 19, and I thought, ah, that's actually something I could do.

And I actually wrote a novel like, a few years later when I was like 16 and 17 years old.

-But you've been working in art for 20 years, the public school system, right?

You were - as an art teacher?

-Absolutely.

So, I've worked in several places in Virginia.

In Harrisonburg, Virginia, I went to school at JMU, and I became public school art teacher there for some years; I went to Arlington and then I moved to the Charlottesville area, Albemarle County and Charlottesville.

I've taught in all kinds of public schools, mostly elementary, middle school as well, and so, yes.

-At the time that you were teaching, were you also writing on the side?

-Yes, so I have been writing pretty much the whole time and more seriously since 2000.

I kind of started - my husband and I actually traveled around the world for a year.

-Oh, how fun.

-We weren't married yet, but we got engaged at the last place on that trip, and we moved to Charlottesville and got married after that.

But we traveled around for a year, and we actually had a blog back before blogs were cool.

And we like had to write the HTML in and type these things.

And so, he ended up kind of becoming an amateur photographer and photographing the places we went, and I ended up writing these essays so that our family and friends could keep up with us.

And so - -Wow.

So, that was really another kind of book that the two of you worked on together.

-Yes.

-And you have a 15-year-old son?

-That's true.

-Is he a writer?

-He is not a writer.

He definitely has that creative gene but I'm not quite sure how it'll come out, maybe in music.

He's interested in music.

-Oh nice, because you're a family of artists with your husband being in photography, and actually an engineer though, right?

Is he working as an engineer?

-He is a computer engineer.

Yes, he does that tech stuff, computer stuff, coding and all that.

-How about your family growing up?

A family of, I'm sure, insatiable readers and encouraging books.

Writers in your background?

-Oh my gosh.

I don't think that there's a distinct person in my family who's a writer but my parents are super encouraging, super smart people, kind of grew up in South Carolina and moved to Northern Virginia when I was a kid and kind of followed their like dreams of kind of, you know, economic success, having the things they wanted and were really kind of brave to like, they kind of set out and went kind of to a new place to kind of accomplish that.

And so, they were really into education, you know, into letting me follow my dreams even when they were a little impractical.

But then the practical side of me said I'm going to be a public-school teacher.

I'm going to do something where I know that I can have a job and then, but I kept writing, I kept making things all kind of alongside that.

-And I read that about you, like you love to make things and create something from nothing.

And I think that's, you know, it keeps the curiosity going and keeps the creativity alive.

The other thing I found fascinating was the fact of you focused on home - my place of home, what that means, and with growing up, going back and forth to South Carolina and then in Virginia, home seems to be something that has resonated with you and is really important.

Is it true?

-Yes, absolutely.

So, there's this way in this book in particular, but also just in my life.

You know, I was thinking about the ways in which I was born in Virginia, I was born in Northern Virginia.

I went to school in the Shenandoah Valley, I've lived here in Charlottesville area for a very long time, and it is unequivocally my home.

And yet there's this way in which it isn't entirely, I don't always feel entirely at home.

And that has to do with being a Black American, has to do with being a woman.

It has to do with just being the person that I am and noticing all these spaces where people are included or excluded.

And so, this project was in part thinking about, what does it mean to belong?

Who gets to be at the center of a story?

What does it feel like to be excluded?

And what is the cost for everybody, the people included, the people excluded, when that happens, and what else is possible?

What can be possible, as far as community, when everyone's brought in?

-That's really beautiful because I know I read about you, too, like you will wake up worrying about the planet, and working and thinking about all these things that are almost outside of yourself.

So, that idea of community, what could be, right?

What could be the possibility if, if, only if we do some things?

How long did this book take to put together to finally get to be a published piece?

-Yes, so I actually, I think, from story number one to the last story is probably about five years of writing.

There's five stories and then a novella, and the novella I wrote last.

But, you know, there were gaps in there.

I was full-time teaching the entire time I wrote this.

I ended up editing it into the pandemic, but I'd finished it before that.

-So, do you write in the mornings, at night, in your car?

Where's your place?

-So, because I was a full-time teacher, most of the time I wrote this - I did a lot of, I always in the summer, one nice thing about being a teacher is you have this space in the summer.

And I think as an art person, that's really great.

And I would go to try to do a workshop of some sort or a retreat of some sort and write there.

And then during the year, you know, I have a writing group that meets every month that I've been with for like ten years.

-That's nice.

-And so, like we meet every month and so every couple months, it's my turn to submit something.

So, I always had that accountability.

So, I just would work.

And I email myself a lot of - you were talking about waking up in the middle of night - I email myself these indecipherable emails that say, you know, my spoke autocorrect fixes it, and I don't know what I was thinking.

But like, some things felt really nice.

There was a sentence or there was an idea that I wanted to remember.

-So, you're also your own editor in a way, going back and emailing yourself - changes and things you want to go ahead and do remember.

-Yes, absolutely.

Yes.

-I read that you consider yourself still an outsider?

-Yes, I think I do.

I think there's a way - well, first of all, I think people who don't fit neatly in a space sometimes can make the most interesting art about it or are compelled to say something about it.

Maybe they don't make the most interesting art, but they're compelled to say something because they can see from the edge of something, you can see it.

I think when you're in the middle of something, you can - you see it differently.

There's a way that if you're right at the edge, and especially if you have one foot in and one foot out, that you can see things about it and you can describe it.

And so, I think that often, people in that position are compelled to say what they notice.

And, for me, that's interesting.

And I think this can be kind of a superpower.

I think like there's a way that in my life, I'm always like, oh, it'd be really nice to be on the inside, but I don't think that's my personality, my way of being in the world.

I think there's a way that I like to be at the edge of things, and that it grants me a little bit of freedom in a way.

-And observing, you know, observing things that are happening.

I read this, something that you said - "When I see something that I can't make sense of or that really irks or bothers me or agitates me, writing is one way that I can sit with it and look at it from different directions and try to unravel it."

So, that's how you process life?

-Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Yes, I think particularly in this project, but really just the way that I write.

A lot of my essays have been about something that either - something, it could be negative or positive but something that bothers me, something that gets under my skin, something that I noticed that I don't know exactly what it means.

As an artist, I once took a class called Writing As a Language of Thought where you were drawing not to say what you knew about something, but just to try to discover what it was.

And so, I think I write that way.

It's not like I set out to say, this is my manifesto, this is what I know.

It's like I feel this.

Why is this?

What does this feel like?

What does it look like?

What is this?

What could be different?

What could be better?

What could be worse?

You know, what is this thing?

So.

-That's really a great way to process things that are going on and really uncover things that are bothering you, or even work through some issues.

I think you've just given a lot of advice to everybody else on how to go ahead and deal with that.

Okay, so the biggest challenges to your journey in getting this book, in getting this amazing work published?

-Oh my gosh.

Well, I think the biggest challenge really has been just write, keep, to continue to write.

So, I've been writing really probably seriously for about 20 years, since 2000.

And so, you know, I had other projects that I had agents and I lost agents, and I wrote manuscripts and they went out, and someone almost liked them.

And, you know, so I had all these opportunities to say, well, if I'm not getting this particular kind of success, I could give up, or to just say, well, I'm going to make this thing.

I'm going to continue to make and see what happens.

I mean, I think, I wasn't writing just to be published but you do want to find audience.

When you're making something, you want to find audience.

It doesn't have to be a book, but you want your stories to maybe be published in a journal or someone to read them and say, "This mattered to me."

And so, for me, this particular project, really, I found support, partly because I'd gone through this process before, and I knew how to find partners that were excited about what was in this book.

And then people were excited about what was in this book, and I got a really good reception, which has never happened in these other projects.

But I had to keep going before there.

I had to keep continuing to write before I got to the point of submitting this book.

I had to decide to just continue to make things regardless of what the outcome was going to be, whether someone was going to publish it or not.

And so, I think that's a challenge.

That can be a challenge.

-You're kind of trusting yourself that this is just what you needed to do.

You talked about getting some feedback from people.

Jocelyn, the amazing feedback that you have gotten from people around the world on this book - do you pinch yourself sometimes?

-Yes, I can't believe it.

I don't believe it.

-Right.

So, you know, this someone from - "I want to sell this book more than I want to sell my own."

-Isaac Fitzgerald.

-Yes.

-He's so nice.

-You know, "Johnson's historically tethered story collection is startingly timely - a compilation of vivid, complex stories at a times reminiscent of works by Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead."

Wow.

It's amazing.

And, of course, Colson Whitehead himself: "A badass debut by any measure, nimble, knowing and electrifying."

-Yes, I sat down on that one.

-Yes.

-When I got that email, I was like wow, really?

-Wow.

So, let's get to the project, My Monticello .

So, you briefly shared with the viewers that it's six stories, five short stories and the novella.

Let's start with the first of the short stories.

-Yes.

So, "Control Negro" is the first short story, and it was the story that kind of was the energy for this whole project in the sense that it got anthologized in Best American Short Stories.

Roxane Gay, who's amazing, had tweeted about it early on.

-I've got her quote down here too.

-LeVar Burton read it live on stage in New York, which was amazing for a Black nerd like me.

-Well, and, you know, when you think about - - Reading Rainbow, we've got it all.

-Yes, and think about PBS.

So, he's LeVar Burton, and I think you called yourself the Mister Rogers of Teachers, so it - perfect.

-Yes.

So, that story is a story that was inspired by local events where a university student here at UVA was bloodied by officers, so it was that kind of violence towards young Black men, on our men.

But in the story, it's kind of this Frankenstein-like story of a professor who's kind of testing America's promise; you know, is life and liberty available for someone like him?

And he kind of watches his son and kind of manipulates his son to kind of look at that and see if I make my son so perfect that America cannot find fault in him unless we as a nation have placed it there, then can he also enjoy the privilege of my other students, my white students, these ACMs, these average American Caucasian males?

So, it's me thinking about a lot of things.

-I was struck by it.

I mean, I really was.

When I looked at the title, I thought, I wonder where this is going to go, and it was very emotional but really struck by it.

Okay, how about the second story?

-Yes, so "Virginia Is Not Your Home" - that used to be the title of the whole collection.

And, you know, there you have my thesis statement there - this idea of home belonging, where do you belong, and it's a story in second person.

This woman is telling herself the story of her life, and it's a lot more poetic.

It's a lot more language driven.

It's thinking about this idea of place and belonging, and it's kind of this - when I talk about a love letter to Virginia, I like wove in all these images of different places I've lived in Virginia.

You'll see the Shenandoah Valley, Harrisonburg area there.

That's where I went to school.

You'll see Arlington there.

And yes, so that's "Virginia Is Not Your Home" - little environment, you know, have this theme of environment, space and land around us, the animals around us you'll see in that story.

-I saw because what you're - the community and the environment, climate is really important to you and that's in your work too.

-Absolutely.

-Okay, how about the third one?

-So, the third story, I believe, is "Something Sweet On Our Tongues," which is, was the funnest story to write.

That's a story as a public school teacher for many years where I got to collect and think about and place myself in the "we" voice of this group of boys who are like a little power hungry, they're kind of demonstrating their masculinity to each other.

I hope that readers that read it really imagine like young boys, because they're just kids, and they have a certain power, but they also are aware of all the ways - their powerlessness and of their lack of power or their lack of agency in the world.

And so, it's kind of a, for me, that was really fun to take myself out of the role of teacher who's supposed to orchestrate and control everything and think about, what is the school like - day look like from the voices of these children and give them this kind of chorus of a voice about what's going on there, so.

-And how about "Buying a House"?

-Yes, so that's one of - I think that story is one of the closest to my heart, as far as my own worries and fears.

"Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse" is a story in the form of a list.

And I am a master list maker.

I make lists all the time.

-I read that and is it true, like lists on top of lists?

-Yes.

-Post-it notes of lists on top of the other list?

-Absolutely.

Like I have a planner, but then it's not enough.

I have to recast it on another paper and then put a Post-it on that.

My list can go up against anyone's list, I'll just say that.

So, yes, and it's the story of a single mother who's contemplating homeownership.

She wants to own her first home, but she also is pretty sure the world is falling apart.

And what I like about that story is, even though the biography of this mother is not my biography, there's a way in which I really identify with both - so worrying about our planet and what's going on both socially and environmentally, but also like wanting things, and wanting things that are in conflict with that.

So, she's like, you know, thinking about buying a house, thinking about what she will wear for the apocalypse, thinking about how her hair will be, you know, how, you know and how, but also how can she have a home for a parent - for her daughter?

Like not a home just like in this physical home, but like in the planet that we own, like a verdant wild home she's thinking about, and what will that look like?

-So, this amazing novella, brilliant novella, My Monticello - the inspiration, I have a guess, but why don't you share with everyone where the inspiration came from and how you were so impacted that brought this work to life?

-Yes, so, My Monticello was absolutely inspired by August 12th here in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 when white nationalists came here for the Unite the Right rally, which was, you know, about protecting the Confederate statues on its face, but for me, the experience of it was really much broader than that.

And the reason I feel that way is because of how they presented themselves to us, not only on that weekend but in the months, the weeks and months leading up to it.

You know, the emblems they chose to hold and carry and highlight, and the things they chose to say, from carrying torches that were reminiscent of, you know, my parents' time in the South, to firearms, to banners for past genocides, to chanting things that were very exclusionary and very specifically exclusionary to Brown and Black Americans.

And that just really made a huge impact on me, and I ended up in the year after that event going to all these different local events, you know, our community was reckoning with what does this mean that we're focused on the history of, especially Black communities here over time, Black and Brown communities.

And those events kind of told this history and reveal this history to me of violence and inequity and achievement, but a lot of sorrow and grief that went all the way back to the founding fathers.

And for us here in Charlottesville, the founding fathers are Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, which is a ten-minute drive from my house.

And so, yes, so I was thinking about that kind of pull together this idea of this current, this moment in history, August 12th, 2017, and then this long history.

-Well, and because it wasn't just a day or a weekend, I love the way the fact that you created this into the near future by taking the events and projecting what the world might look like and in what time - describe that for everyone.

-Yes, so in the novella, it's a near-future novella.

I call it apocalyptic light because it really is apocalyptic but it's really just taking the fears I have about this current moment as far as our environment, our investment in infrastructure, both human infrastructure and physical infrastructure, or our lack of investment in it, and our racial and societal conflicts, and pushing them just a little bit into the future and thinking, what will the world look like if we don't address these things?

What might it look like?

And then I've kind of placed my characters in that world.

And so, in the story, I really actually took a lot of details from August 12th, even in the way that I created this thing that I call the unraveling.

So, it's a moment of - that's how the character describes it to the reader, this moment of unraveling.

So, we know the power's out, we know that there have been some storms and fire around the country, we know that the cell phones don't work, and we know that planes have fallen from the sky and the detail of planes falling from the sky for me was, you know, we had a helicopter crash on August 12th, 2017, that was surveilling that.

So, just these very specific details and pulling them in and creating this world where my characters are in a bubble.

They don't know exactly what's happening outside of the bubble, but within all this kind of unraveling, these marauding white nationalists, white supremacists have kind of come to claim their neighborhood.

-And so, they begin to escape, with Da'Naisha as the main character, not sure if their bubble is only their few houses but collecting everyone they can.

And they all grabbed different things, which I thought was fascinating.

And then they begin a journey through a bus, and take us through that part of the story of their leaving the neighborhood and they end up right here at Monticello.

-Yes, so my story is kind of like a very dark map of Charlottesville because I got to put in, I really used my own neighborhood.

So, I live in the Ridge Street neighborhood, and First Street is a street that I've walked my dogs up and down 100 times; when my son was a child, you know, we'd push his stroller, that's our corridor to go to downtown Charlottesville to the mall where that rally took place, and where we spend a lot of our time.

And so, in the story, I have my characters rousted out of First Street.

They jump onto a JAUNT bus - for anyone who lives in Charlottesville, you'll know what that looks like.

And they're kind of driving past these local landmarks and then they're driving up to Monticello, past the community college, up past the orchard, these are all real places that we pass.

My main character, Da'Naisha Love, is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and she's with her grandmother.

And she's very aware of this lineage and she's worked here at Monticello as a docent, and so she has this kind of secret connection to it.

Yes.

-So, they end up, they start off in the gift shop, trying to figure out what they're going to do.

And then Da'Naisha - I love the fact that you had them come up with some kind of a contract for behavior.

Well, maybe we'll let all the viewers and your readers find out about that.

But they make their way into the big house in Monticello, and they really made it home.

It was almost like Night In the Museum , right?

-Absolutely, yes.

So, a couple of things.

One is the contract that they make - just to say briefly that, you know, I'm a public-school teacher, so I thought, well, how do you get a group of people who don't choose to be together to become a community, and anyone who's a public teacher knows that you create, you know, that first day of school, everyone's like, okay, what are we going to do for one another, we're doing this together.

And so, I have them do that, that idea of this public shared space.

And then as they come up to the house, you know, this is a space that they kind of make rules for, they're not here to destroy the house or hurt it but they certainly are claiming it - so, this idea of reclamation, particularly for the descendants.

-Well, and there's so many things about the house, you can tell that you actually made plenty of tours in the house, because I was going right through the house with you, and I think all of your readers and our viewers will see the same thing.

Would you read a passage for us?

-Sure.

I'm going to read just the very first paragraph, so it doesn't need any setup.

And so, you'll see how our characters come to be here.

The very first paragraph of the novella, My Monticello .

"My Monticello.

"We claimed it first, this little mountain, "me and MaViolet and a scattering of neighbors.

"All of us fleeing First Street "after men came to set our row of tin-roofed homes on fire.

"The men came at dusk, blaring an operatic " O say can you see .

"White heads rose up from dusty Jeeps "and dark hair thrashed in a harsh new wind "like tattered flags.

"OURS!

the men shouted.

"Their rifles gleamed as if they'd only just been bought, "a megastore militia.

"Through a hasty breach in MaViolet's blinds, "I even saw a boy among them, "blonde and sneering in a pickup window.

"Men leapt from back seats, sprang out of truck beds "and rushed toward the faces of our homes.

"White hands clutched metal canisters, "swung torches spilling flames.

"Bright shouts, the rising haze of smoke, "all that and more rousted us out.

"From our patchy front yards, we saw bodies blur, "as some of our neighbors charged forward "to try to stop them.

"We saw a teen struck with the butt of a rifle, "his temple sprang red.

"A toddler flailed, "diapered and clinging to its mother's hip, "as she sank knees first to the sidewalk.

"What we saw in those moments riveted us and then it set us free."

-So powerful, so very powerful.

Thank you so much.

-Thank you so much.

-Thank you so much.

My special thanks to the folks at Monticello for letting us have the show right here on this beautiful site, and to Jocelyn Johnson for her amazing work of short stories and the beautiful novella, My Monticello .

Everything in this book is re ally going to make you think.

It made me think about what we were going to do to make the world maybe a little better place and what actions we were going to make that happen.

I'm Rose Martin.

Tell your friends about us and I'll see you next time, Write Around The Corner .

[♪♪♪] -♪ Every day every day Ev ery day every day every day ♪ ♪ Every day I write the book ♪ [♪♪♪] ♪ Every day every day Every day ♪ ♪ Every day I write the book ♪ ♪ Every day every day Every day ♪ ♪ Every day I write the book ♪