The Lightning Room with Chris Terry

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Today, Simon talks with  Chris Terry, whose story “Graffiti” appeared in the August issue of PANK. His young adult novel, Zero Fade, is now available from Curbside Splendor.

 

1. This story is saturated with issues of identity – a biracial narrator terrified and compelled by the idea of standing out; like a public performance. How did you capture this delicate balance in your narrator?

Being a teenager is a form of public performance. “Graffiti” is an autobiographical story, so I tried to remember that teen feeling of wanting to assert my newly formed identity, but remain safe from scrutiny and suggestion. I was trying to capture that contradiction, while indulging in some blame-deflecting. I remember being in 9th grade, feeling like I had things figured out, and shutting myself off from criticism, in case it toppled the fragile house I’d built. That’s why there’s a lot of “And if this hadn’t happened” language at the beginning of the story. That’s the narrator denying any culpability.

2. Along similar lines, “Graffiti” is a story about hybridity and blurred barriers – can you talk a little about this?

I was drawing from my own experience. I’m a pale, half black, half white guy who spent the first fifteen years of his life in the Boston suburbs. I got in trouble for graffiti a couple of times in ninth grade, a time when my family was having a lot of financial problems that exacerbated my alienation in our fancy suburb. A lot happened all at once. I was forming my taste for alternative culture like skateboarding, hip-hop and punk while being forced to consider my racial identity while just starting to think of myself as black, having never thought much about race before.

I cut a section from “Graffiti” where I talk about being isolated from blackness at large in the ‘burbs, and learning to be black from pop culture. This was just after Rodney King, and police brutality was a big topic in early ‘90s hip-hop and black cinema. After watching Menace II Society and listening to Ice Cube, I expected the worst from the cops and turned that into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

3. You capture such a clear sense of history, of heritage, in just a few short paragraphs – how did you construct this story? Where did it start?

Thanks! Last winter, I took some of my high school students to Kevin Coval’s creative writing workshop at Young Chicago Authors. I’ll never forget him dropping the f-bomb while introducing himself, and all of my students looking at me like, “Mr. Chris! We can cuss here?”

In the workshop, we read some of Rage is Back by Adam Mansbach and a couple poems by Aaron Samuels. One of Aaron’s pieces was about a messed-up romantic relationship, and it used a “If this didn’t happen, this wouldn’t have happened” conceit. Kevin asked the students to write in the style of something we’d read that day. I took the chance to join in, and Aaron’s poem, plus the graffiti in Rage is Back inspired me to write about getting in trouble in high school. The first chunk, about Jesse, was the first thing that I wrote.

A few drafts later, I showed the story to Cyn Vargas, who suggested I move the stuff about race toward the beginning. I had it later, so as not to disrupt the action. I write a lot about being mixed, and am always trying to find a new way to work in the necessary details about my identity. Maybe I should do Henry Fielding-esque subtitles to everything: “Graffiti, in which our light-skinndeded narrator begins to reconsider his black father’s warnings about racism during a fraught encounter with local constables.”

4. You stand in front of a blank wall with a marker, a bag of paint cans, and an opportunity. What do you put there?

Thirty-four year old me would take the opportunity to promote his novel Zero Fade. Fourteen year old me would have made a horrendous attempt at a graffiti piece. The years in between would have been a toss-up between a Wu-Tang W, Crimpshrine lyrics, or a contour drawing of a face.

5. You have a young-adult novel, Zero Fade, out now from Curbside Splendor. Could you tell us a little more about it, and maybe tell us how this piece fits into the bigger picture?

I like writing about teenagers. It’s an inherently dramatic time.

Zero Fade is fiction. It takes places over a week in the life a thirteen-year-old boy, who is getting over his own homophobia as his beloved uncle comes out of the closet. It’s set in Richmond in 1994 and has a lot of the pop culture of the era worked into the story. It was my Columbia College Chicago MFA thesis.

“Graffiti” is nonfiction. I’ve got a couple hundred pages of true stories about my mixed-race identity. I’m figuring out how to combine them into autobiographical fiction. Right now, I’m on the fence between writing about middle school/early high school, and a noir story about what happened to my racial identity when I was suspected of a violent crime in my early twenties. No matter what it is, it will be about being mixed.

6. What would you tell the kids aching to get fucked up?

Have fun, but don’t let it get in the way of anything.

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Simon Jacobs curates the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for work of fewer than 30 words. He may be found at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.