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. Continue reading →