Jason Reynolds, New York Times bestselling author of critically acclaimed books, including National Book Award finalist Ghost, Newberry and Printz-honored Long Way Down, Coretta Scott King Honoree As Brave as You, and his latest, middle grade Look Both Ways, which was just named to the National Book Award Longlist for Young People’s Literature.
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Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Jason Reynolds, New York Times bestselling author of critically acclaimed books including National Book Award finalist Ghost, Newberry and Printz-honored Long Way Down, Coretta Scott King Honoree As Brave as You, and his latest middle-grade Look Both Ways, which was just named to the National Book Award Longlist for Young People's Literature.
I loved what Jason had to say about what it means to hold your square. How his past as a self-publishing spoken word poet impacts his professional life today. And encouraging kids to be curious and see intention in everything. So please sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation.
Sarah Enni: As you know, I like to start at the very beginning. So do you mind telling me where you were born and raised?
Jason Reynolds: So I was born in Washington, D.C. in 1983, which puts me at a smooth 35 years old. I feel very good about 35-ness my 35-ness is good. And then raised just outside the city in an interesting neighborhood called Oxon Hill. I would love to tell people Oxon Hill used to be a part of Southeast Washington, D.C. And then they moved the lines and it became one of those moments of Black folks being like, "Eh, I just need a little bit more space. I at least want a yard."
And so people coming from Southeast would go just across the line, because just across the line is a yard. And of course there was white flight and Oxon Hill became this Black neighborhood, but it was a Black neighborhood of working class people who just wanted a yard. And they were basically giving away the homes. So I grew up in this weird neighborhood, two blocks from the city line, that we would just walk across the street, you know what I mean? But we had a different zip code and we had a yard and a neighborhood.
Sarah Enni: Does that mean that the schools you went to were Maryland schools?
Jason Reynolds: They were Maryland schools. It was a weird thing, that whole area is strange. And in that area, people who live around there it's like, all right, you have Oxen Hill, Marlow Heights, Temple Hills, Capitol Heights, Forest Heights, District Heights. Those neighborhoods are very different than Greenbelt, Bowie, Silver Spring right? Very different community in terms of economics and in terms of culture, in terms of the way people are living. I liken it to sort of like Compton, right?
How Compton is a suburb of Los Angeles City. But the story of Compton is the same. You have working class folks who are like, "We have an opportunity, they're giving away houses across the street. Let's go over there and we can have a home and we can have a yard and we can have whatever we deem to be a pie in the sky a little bit better." Except the elements are all there. The elements come with you. So it was weird growing up there cause my mom was like, "Ugh, you gotta go here. You gotta be in before dark and don't be around here." I would tell our friends to be outta here when nightfall comes, because you have all the elements.
Sarah Enni: I want to come back to your neighborhood in a big way with Look Both Ways, cause it feels so integral to your understanding of your young life, which is fascinating. But to get to the writing, the question I usually ask is how was reading and writing a part of growing up for you? And your answer's a little different.
Jason Reynolds: Yeah. Reading writing was not a part of growing up for me. Reading felt kryptonite-ish. Writing didn't necessarily feel that way though. Writing essays felt that way. Writing book reports felt that way. But I grew up at a time when everybody was writing, we just weren't writing what we were supposed to be writing in school. But everybody had a rhyme book, right? We were all writing lyrics and trying to be [pauses] everybody wanted to be back then, let's see this would've been... Nas, my older brother wanted to be Slick Rick, Run DMC and Big Daddy Kane, Rakim.
We wanted to be those guys. So we would write if that's what writing meant for us. Right? If that's what writing was, we could do that. But we weren't interested in writing stories. I didn't go to no libraries. None of those things were... why would I go to the library where you had to be quiet, couldn't eat in there? If I got snacks and I'm hanging out with my friends and we hollering and screaming on the corner and I walked to the library and they're like, "Shush! No food, no drinks, and no talking." Why would I ever go to the library? [Chuckles]
And that's sort of what it was like, reading just wasn't a thing. And not just for me, for anybody around me. My father said recently he's like, "Yeah, you know, you never saw your parents reading. You never saw this wasn't a thing." And I have to say, the wild part about my household, my mom had all of her college books, so they were there, but it still felt like something that wasn't for me. I don't know. Cause I never saw her reading those books. They were in the house, but it's kinda like, "I don't know what these are." It's like decoration.
We had encyclopedias. The encyclopedia man would come by back then and my mom would be like, "Oh, we'll get a couple volumes." And so we're like [unintelligible] encyclopedias and it still was kinda like those are knickknacks. That's ephemera for the house. That's decoration for the house.
Sarah Enni: Books still serve as that function in a lot of ways right?
Jason Reynolds: Sure!
Sarah Enni: You've talked so much about this and we'll get to discovering it, but I wonder did you feel animus towards books? Where you mad at books?
Jason Reynolds: No. That's a good question. I wasn't mad at books. It was more like, it was just apathy. I just felt no way about them. And you don't realize. Look, the stories that I tell I tell from hindsight, right? So you look back and you're like, "Huh." But at the time you don't realize you're invisible. You know that something is funny. You know that reading feels static and dissonant, right? You know that the stories feel awkward in the same way that reading Chaucer now still feels awkward, right? It feels something far away, a different language, a different culture. It feels distant.
So there's that feeling intrinsically, but I don't know if I ever was kind of like, "Meh, I don't ever get to see myself,” in real time. I don't know if it was like that. It was kinda like, "Eh, reading is whack. Rap music is dope. Let's do this." You know what I mean? For children, sometimes it's that simple. Instead of me analyzing and intellectualizing how I feel about a thing, I just go to where the other things are.
Sarah Enni: The root of the question too is... I listened to an interview where you said that you sometimes got books as Christmas presents.
Jason Reynolds: Oh God.
Sarah Enni: And you're like, "Why am I not getting toys?"
Jason Reynolds: It's the worst. Oh my god. I had an aunt, my Aunt Maggie, who I love dearly. Aunt Maggie every year she would get me the classics. So like Treasure Island, Little Women and I just would be like, "What is this?" Every year. And every year I knew what it would be and I'd be so bummed out.
And I found out my mom was telling her, "Get him books." My mom was the one who was like, "He don't need no more toys. He got toys, he got clothes. Get him books." And she would give me the books and I'd be like, "Oh thanks." And throw um to the side. And they just sat sort of stacked up. I have never, to this day, I've never read Treasure Island or any of those books.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, those are pretty remote. There's classics and there's "claaasics" [drawn out].
Jason Reynolds: And I honestly, I still have no desire to read any of that stuff.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah, okay. Well let's shift into what you did discover. I mean, I would love to hear you talk about the shift from knowing that you were writing lyrics to deciding to express that as poetry and performing poetry.
Jason Reynolds: It's interesting, right, because I never really wrote lyrics. I mean, later on in life I did a little bit, which is a whole other part of my life I never talk about, but maybe we'll talk about it, you know? But I did do some of that stuff in my late teens, early twenties. But when I was younger, for me it was... I've always been a kid who has been fascinated with the way people spoke.
My grandfather's language, my mother's language, the way that my family members like their accents and the way that they put words together. My uncles, when they were a little tipsy in the way that they would run their words together. The neighborhood people, my coaches. I just have always been fascinated with language and what people can do with language.
And so when the rap thing happened, which was basically... and I'm sure the story's been told one gazillion times... but the CliffsNote is that I basically went to the store to get my first rap tape, this would've been 1992 if I'm not mistaken. And it was Queen Latifah's “Black Reign,” which was a lovely album. A classic.
Those are our classics, right? A classic album. And I remember I'm opening it up and pulling out the liner notes and reading the lyrics. I'm listening to it on the headphones, but I'm reading the lyrics because back then, for posterity, we should say that back then everything came with liner notes and lyrics. And you could read the thank you notes that an author wanted to write. It was a special thing.
Sarah Enni: I used to love that so much.
Jason Reynolds: It was like a two-fer. You got your tape and you got this piece, this object, that you could look through and thumb through and read and peruse. And it was amazing.
Sarah Enni: You could feel connected with them.
Jason Reynolds: You could feel connected to them as people, right? And Queen Latifah's lyrics opened up the possibility of poetry because then I kinda realized, "Oh, let me go read everything." I mean, Snoop had come up with “Doggystyle” and I'm reading that and I'm like, "Oh!" And I shouldn't have been, but I'm reading it, and I'm like, "Oh, it's interesting to see what he's doing with language."
Tupac or Slick Rick or... I'm just reading the lyrics and I'm realizing that I could do that. And it wasn't the rapping part, it was the language part of it that captivated me. And so I started to write poems. And it was all very rhymey and this, that, and the third, of course. But I felt like there was so much power in the words they were saying, you know?
I mean, I remember being thirteen-fourteen, my mom had an old record player. There was a belt drive record player, which means it didn't have the mechanisms to just turn the wheel, it had a rubber band that you... right? And so this one mechanism turned the rubber band, the rubber band turned the big wheel, and that's how the turntable spun. But when the rubber band wears out, then it doesn't spin.
So I had to spin the turntable. So I put the needle on it and I spun the turntable and it was Bob Marley's “Kaya”. I remember listening to “Is This Love”, Bob Marley's Is this Love, for the first time and I'm like thirteen or fourteen. And the words to that song where he's basically saying, "We don't have much. We're sharing in my single bed." Right? "We have a little bed, we have some bread, we have each other, I'm under this roof and that's it." Right? And, "There's this love that I'm feeling." Right? "Because even though I don't have anything, I still feel like I have everything." And the language, the words to that song just blew me away. I remember playing Nina Simone's “Four Women” for the first time as a kid.
I'm young, a kid, and listening to her tell the story of these four women with absolutely no conclusion, right? There is no conclusion. She's profiling four women, which represent arguably the four archetypes of Black women over the course of history of Black people in America. Right?
And for me to be a kid and listen to the story of Peaches, and Safronia, and Sweet Thing, and Aunt Sarah in the voice of Nina Simone did something to me in terms of language. See-Line Woman. I have no clue what that means and what it meant then. But the language of that, right? What is a See-LIne Woman? What does that mean? "She drinks coffee, she drinks tea, then she goes home." What does that mean? And so those are the things, it wasn't just rap music. I talk about rap music because I connect to young people better that way.
But it was rap music and then it was all the other things. My father, when I was a kid my dad he left when we were young, but when he was around he was the greatest dad ever. My mom worked far away and my father would have to take care of the kids in the morning, and he would take us to school. And when we were in the car we would listen to, this would've been '88, so we're listening to... Tracy Chapman came out with The Tracy Chapman album in '88. The biggest album that year.
My father was obsessed. And so to listen to Tracy Chapman and just to hear her sing “Fast Car” and to hear her say, "My old man's got a problem. He lives by the bottle. That's the way it is. His body's too old for working, but his body's too young to look like his." If you're a kid, and I'm listening to that, and all of it did something to me chemically at a young age. And it wasn't the music, it was what was being said and how it was being said. That's how it all began.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And the way you're describing it reminds me of short stories and poems when they ask more questions than they answer. Then, if you're a certain kind of person, that just starts all the gears whirring into overdrive. And you want to answer it in your own way, which is so powerful. So I can't not follow up on this. So tell me about performing. I want to hear about performing poetry, but did you try rap and music?
Jason Reynolds: Never. I never tried rapping. I did perform poetry of course, for a very, very, very, long time. And it gave me stage legs in a way. So people, it's interesting, I've had an interesting time in this industry mainly because I've been fortunate enough to have the ability to stand up in front of people and sort of do a thing, right? That comes from poetry.
But even before that, it comes from my mom. We were forced to be able to... she wanted us to make sure, as far as she was concerned, she said, "Look, your ticket to freedom, your ticket to success, your ticket to a life that is autonomous, has everything to do with your ability to articulate and to speak." And it wasn't about speaking "quote/unquote" well. And she was a stickler about that too, even though she ain't speak well you know? But she was a stickler about that as well.
But it was more about, if you have something you want to say, people will hear you if you say it like you mean it. Right? And I was raised in a household where we could talk back, which was completely against all the other households in my family, and friends, and neighborhoods, right? My mom was like, "Oh yeah, if you disagree, if I'm punishing you and I'm saying go to your room, you can say, I think this is unfair. I think you're mistreating me. I think you're talking to me in a way that is disrespectful." And we could say all those things, but if we were to say them, we had to say them like we meant it. So my mother would be like, "What'd you say?" And I'd be like [kind of mumbles] "I just feel like, you just being... "
And if I'm mumbling, she was like, "Oh. If you got something you want to say to me, stand on your square, pull your shoulders back, lift your head, and say it. It doesn't mean that it's gonna change the outcome, but I'll know you mean it."
Sarah Enni: I’ll hear you.
Jason Reynolds: "I'll Hear you. I'll hear you." And sometimes she would stand on the other side of the room. "What'd you say?" Right? "I can't hear you over here." And so as I got older, and performance poetry became a thing, it was nothing for me to stand up in front of people and make my voice heard. I had no problem because I had been raised to believe that my voice had a place. That it deserved a space in any atmosphere in which I was.
I've never felt like I didn't belong wherever I was because my mother made it clear that if you really got something you need to say, hold your square no matter what. And if they disagree, hold your square. So what? Stand there. And that's always been the way. I've always been that way.
Sarah Enni: That's an incredible gift.
Jason Reynolds: I'm grateful for it now. It was a bummer at the time. You know what I mean? [Laughs]. Because I'm naturally a little shy. I'm naturally a little shy. But her whole thing was, "They gonna run over you. They gonna run over you. So you make sure that if you've thought it all through, and you certain that you have something you need to say to the world, then you let it be heard." Spoken word came, and performance poetry came, and it saved me in other ways.
I mean it basically allowed me to take this, the musical elements of the thing, right? And put it into practice without the actual music. So now I could get on stage and I could add some rhythm, and I could stress it and accent it and dramatize it in a way that could tap into some of the musical elements that I had grown up listening to. And I could add emotion to it in a way that I hadn't been able to before. And that was cool. I did it for a long time. All through... I mean from fifteen to probably about twenty-five... twenty-four.
Sarah Enni: How do you think hearing your words out loud... not everybody does that, right? Not everybody engages with what they write in a way that they're speaking and performing. How do you think that [pauses] this is a hard question, cause I feel this is just intrinsically how you write, is thinking about how it's gonna sound. Do you think that's true?
Jason Reynolds: I do, but I don't think about how it's gonna sound. I just write in a way that sounds good to me. So this is my internal, this is my internal meter, right? Because I came through the back door. And because I came through music, and poetry, and spoken word, and all those elements, the only thing that matters to me intuitively is does it sound good? Does it feel good? I want the same chills that I feel every time I hear that Tracy Chapman line. Every time. It's been what now?
Sarah Enni: It's now twenty years.
Jason Reynolds: Twenty years.
Sarah Enni: Are we doing the math right? Is it twenty years or thirty years?
Jason Reynolds: Thirty years! It's been thirty years. And I still get the chills right? Or the A capella song. "Last night I heard the screaming loud voices behind the wall. Another sleepless night for me. It wouldn't do no good to call the police, cause they always come late when they come at all. If they come at all."
I can feel my body, I can feel the pennies roll down my spine right now. Reciting somebody else's lyric. I want that in my work. I want people to read it and when they're reading it out loud, or to themselves, they can feel the creepy crawlies run up their legs. I want that, but I have to feel it first.
And so, a lot of my process is me reading these things aloud and really trying to make sure that it sounds good to me, that it feels good to me. And all of that comes from the music and all the other things, you know?
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I've had people say this on the show, and I agree, that you can't ask a reader to cry if you don't cry while you're writing it. That's just gonna come through. It's just gonna feel that way when they interpret it themselves. I want to talk about college and the self-publishing experience you had, and that first book. Cause I feel like it has informed a lot of how you professionally move through the world. So do you mind telling me that story?
Jason Reynolds: So I'm sixteen and I get to college early.
Sarah Enni: Oh, I didn't know that.
Jason Reynolds: Yeah. I got to college, I was... oh gosh, I always mess up the math. I think I was about to be sixteen my freshman year. And I get to school, but before I got to college, I remember that summer I had been doing spoken word. I was everywhere. I was all up and down the East Coast. Cause I was a kid. I was young.
And when you're young and you're doing something that feels at the time like an anomaly, because I was so young. See now there's a whole crop of fifteen-year-olds… because there's youth poetry. We didn't have any of that. That wasn't a thing. So you had to go into the clubs with the adults, and you had to wait to lay-in and get on a microphone and get yours off. Right?
And so because of that I was known, because there's this kid who's always around. And so I remember telling my mother like, "Yo, I'm gonna write a book." Because I had been in Baltimore, and I would always go up to Baltimore, there was a spot called Five Seasons. And in Baltimore they had this really rich scene of poets. And there was one poet named Myisha Cherry, who's a dear friend of mine still to this day, and she had started a vanity press.
She goes like, "Yo, I'm basically gonna publish all of the writers who are around us. I'm just gonna put out their books." And basically all it was, was, "I'm gonna basically format your book and you're gonna pay for the printing of it, and that's gonna be that.” Right? "And I'm gonna figure out how to get an ISBN number." We were just learning all this process. "We gotta call the Library of Congress," and do this whole thing. And back then it was like thirty dollars to copyright. It's was so interesting.
Sarah Enni: It's so cool to be DIY about it like, "We can do this!"
Jason Reynolds: "We can just do it." Yeah. And I'm sixteen, I had finished my collection of poems called Let Me Speak, I'm in college, I meet this guy my first semester who's an artist. And he was like, "Yo, I'll do your book cover." And I'm like, "Perfect." And his name is Jason (Jason Douglas Griffin). So he does the book cover and I paid I think five hundred dollars or something and we get a thousand books, or five hundred books, or something like that. And start hustling, you know? I'm doing all these shows and now I have this product. At this time everybody, funny enough, was doing either Chatbooks, which are like stapled books, or were doing CDs. People were recording CDs.
That was like a big thing and all of them were terrible, right? Cause it's really hard to translate it. And so I got this book and I'm just hustling. I'm at University of Maryland and I'm doing open mics all over D.C. and up and down. I'm in Richmond, I'm in North Carolina. I'm driving to Richmond and back. I'm driving to North Carolina and back. I'm driving to Philly and back. And I'm just hustling. And I'm hustling out of the trunk of my car. I'm selling these books for ten dollars a pop so I can flip the money and get more, and I'm just hustling. Then the next year I put out another one called Jacob's Ladder, which I loved. It was poorly edited, but I loved that book. And I was seventeen and I'm hustling. That one was even more of a response. Right?
And then my junior year of college, the other Jason and I started living together, the artist Jason, and he's like, "Yo man, we should make a book together. Maybe we should make a book together." And I'm two books in and so I know how to do it, right? I'm like, "Yo, I've got a little bit of experience at this now, this independent publishing thing." And he's like, "We're gonna do a coffee table book of poetry and of art and it's gonna be this thing." I'm like, "Cool." So we take a year, we go through this process and we make this thing and then we have to figure out how to print it. Now I'm used to just calling a printer. There was a printer in Florida that we used. It was like no big deal.
It was like an old mom and pop shop. Five hundred bucks gets you five hundred books. You flip it and get five thousand, right? It was easy. But printing art was different cause he's like, "I need full color, I need this, I need that. I need saturation." A whole other ballgame that I knew nothing about. So we started looking for printers. I remember, and it's good to put this on record cause I rarely talk about this stuff, but I remember because the internet wasn't the internet then. You didn't know how to do or how to go about getting an agent or publisher, and all that kind of stuff.
I remember us sending the book to Phaidon like, "Y'all should publish this." I remember sending the book to the Pulitzer committee and them requesting three more copies... and the feeling of a response from the Pulitzer committee! But we didn't know that that's not how it works. But it's kinda like, "Hey, check this out!" So somewhere there's four copies. Somewhere the Pulitzer committee of 2000... this woulda been of '03. Whoever was on the committee, I should find out who these people were and reach out.
Sarah Enni: If you reprint this book, it should say "Pulitzer Considered."
Jason Reynolds: I know, right? And it's wild to think about it, right? But that's the kind of like... we were irreverent. We were kinda just like, "Yo, we're gonna... we don't care." We sent it off, but before we did all that, we had to print the book. And the way we printed the book was we found this press called Steinauer Press, they're gone now, and they used to print for the Smithsonian. Now here we are, I'm nineteen?
And they're like, "Yeah, we'll print your book. It's gonna cost you thirty thousand dollars." And we're like, "No problem."
Sarah Enni: Whoa.
Jason Reynolds: Like, think about the fact. I'm nineteen but this is before the economic crash when you could get a high limit credit card, right on your college campus. You can just walk to...
Sarah Enni: Mmm, they made that very easy, yes.
Jason Reynolds: You can get a Nokia phone and [laughs] and if you sign this paper we'll give you a Nokia phone and a thirty thousand dollar credit card. And that's what it was. Swipe. Swipe. And we get the books, thirty thousand dollars for a thousand books. The books come and we're like, "Yo we gonna have to sell them for fifty to make our money back." Of course... who buys a fifty dollar book from some nineteen-year-old kids? Your nineteen-year-old friends can't afford it.
Sarah Enni: No. And no nineteen-year-olds like, "You know what I need? Coffee table books." [Laughing].
Jason Reynolds: "A coffee table book for my dorm room." Right? But we had this idea. So we have this book, it's printed on these beautiful silk pages. Someone yesterday when I was signing books at BEA [BookExpo America] showed up with it in their hand and said, "Yo, I had to hunt this down. I paid an arm and a leg for it." And Caitlyn, my editor, had never seen it. She's like, "Yo!" No one's ever seen it. And it's this beautiful coffee table book. And it should be known that because all we knew was music, we said, "We'll format the book like an album. Sixteen songs."
So basically there's sixteen pieces of art and poetry. Then the second section was sixteen sort of... it's almost like breaking down each piece without giving too much away. But where was our mindset when we made the thing? So sixteen pages of that, sixteen spreads of that. And then the back half of the book, and we called it the meat, the flesh and the bones - or the flesh, the meat and the bones - the back half the book was the making of the book. So actual scrapbook pages of our book in the back of the book. We don't sell any. Jason quit school. I graduate and we moved to New York with these books.
And because all we knew was hustle, and because the internet wasn't the internet, we decided to run around New York City passing these books to... I remember running into the Simon and Schuster building and a guy at the front desk being like, "What are you doing?" And I'm like, "Hey, give this to anybody at Simon and Schuster. Take care man." And he's like, "I'm not." Right? Or running into Bomb Magazine or running into Poets and Writers [Magazine] and them chasing us out of there. Just trying to figure out how to get some traction, not knowing this wasn't the way.
And then eventually I had a buddy who was an actor up here and he said, "Let me get the book. I'll give it to my agent as a gift." That agent worked at Paradigm. They gave it to her, she gave it to her friend who worked in the literary department. The next day, eight o'clock in the morning, I got a phone call and the lady said, "My name is Lydia Wills." I'll never forget. She's out of the business now. She said, "My name is Lydia Wills I'm an agent for Paradigm. This book came across my desk. I would never look at unsolicited work, but I happened to open it. I have no idea what it is. I have no idea what it means. I have no idea if it's marketable, but anybody willing to invest this much in themselves, I at least have to take a meeting with." And that's how I got in the industry.
Sarah Enni: That's incredible. Because you didn't skimp. This was a beautiful thing.
Jason Reynolds: It's a beautiful object. Even seeing it yesterday, it's still - twenty years later, fifty years later, it's a beautiful object.
Sarah Enni: You did it the best... pretty much the best it was possible to do.
Jason Reynolds: Yes. And she said, "No publisher will ever do this. No one will ever spend this kind of money on a book." And six weeks later we were sitting in a fancy restaurant, fancy Chinese restaurant, with Joanna Cotler of Harper Collins who said, I'll never forget it... and we came in and we're defensive cause we were like, "They gonna try to change us." Cause we were thinking about music. "They gonna try change us."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. "We don't want to sell out."
Jason Reynolds: Exactly. And she said, "The first thing I want you to know is I want you to do exactly what you do. I just want to figure out how to help you do it in a way that's gonna actually sell." And she's the one who taught me how to write stories, taught me story arc. I had no idea. She's the one who said, "One day you're gonna write novels." I told her, "No, I wouldn't." I had no desire to. And she said, "Why not?" I said, “I don't have the education for it."
And then she's the one who said, which is my mantra to this day, she said, "Don't worry, your intuition will take you farther than your education ever will. Your intuition got you here. Your gut." I'm a kid who has stood on his gut forever. This is it. There are people who are scholars when it comes to writing. That's not me. I can tell you what feels good to me. I'm shoot'n from the hip. Every book I'm shoot'n from the hip. I always have. And it hasn't failed me.
Sarah Enni: I'm so happy that we got to hear that story cause I was researching and trying to create a timeline of your life and it seems like it was established pretty early that you were gonna do what felt right and hustle. And just knock on as many doors as it takes. So let's see here.
Jason Reynolds: It's still that way. I mean, my whole career. I haven't had a publicity plan. There's no marketing plan for me. Matter-of-fact we couldn't sell the first book. It's funny, I was with my agent yesterday and we're laughing about when, When I Was the Greatest, went out to auction. Nobody wanted it because they said there was no market for it. I
I'm proud of all the people who have come through the door. I'm proud my predecessors like, Jacqueline Woodson (author of Brown Girl Dreaming) and Rita Williams-Garcia (author of Clayton Byrd Goes Underground) got to see it. But the kind of book that When I Was the Greatest - and Walter [Dean Myers] - (author of more than 100 books for young people, including Monster, winner of the Printz Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, and National Book Award, and more) of course.
The kind of book that When I Was the Greatest was they literally said, "There's no market for this book." And this was 2012. "There's no market for it,” they said. "There's no market." We could not sell the book. Simon and Schuster took a gamble. Think about that right?
Sarah Enni: That's so recent.
Jason Reynolds: Yeah, 2012. So when I look at the landscape of literature now, young adult literature, and I'm looking at the Nic Stones and the Angie Thomas' and all these people who are swinging the bat and are doing their thing, all I can think back is like, "Man...man..."
Sarah Enni: There's some satisfaction in them being wrong. Right?
Jason Reynolds: Of course! Of course. You know what it is also, I feel grateful and humbled to have been able to [pauses] if any of it has anything to do with me, which it may not, but if any of it has anything to do with that moment, I feel super grateful to have made the door a little easier to open. In the same way that Walter made it. Right? And the fact that he had a thirty year career that was successful, and they still looked at my version of his work, which is all it was, and say like, "Walter has a market, but there's no market for this". Fascinating.
Sarah Enni: [Pauses] and so strange-headed now to think.
Jason Reynolds: Of course.
Sarah Enni: So nuts. Let's... I don't want to jump around too much, but I want to get to When I Was the Greatest. And then bounce back a little bit to your personal story of your friend being murdered when you were nineteen, and how that also interacts with your writing journey. But let's talk about... so you are in New York, you're making this happen.
Jason Reynolds: Makin' it happen.
Sarah Enni: How does When I Was the Greatest come about?
Jason Reynolds: When I Was the Greatest comes about after I quit writing.
Sarah Enni: [Laughs] Okay. Well lead me there.
Jason Reynolds: Yeah, so Jason and I get a deal with Harper. We take three years to write a book called, My Name is Jason, Mine Too with Harper. And I was fortunate enough to be walked through the process. We met with our editor every month and didn't realize, in her office, which never happens. Cause she was retiring.
So we were her passion project basically. And we go through this process. The book comes out. The moment the book comes out, America goes into recession. Publishing companies crumble. Everything goes bad. All bad. We sell no copies. And the book was a little experimental for that time as well, just way left. And so we fail, right? We don't sell.
I lose everything. Jason moves to Queens. We lose our apartment in Brooklyn. I don't have anywhere to live. I lose my job. All of these things are happening and I decide to take a job in a clothing store. I became a social worker for a while. There's a lot of things that happened, but I'm giving you the abridged version here. There's a lot that went on.
But I ended up landing in a clothing store and working in retail. And it turns out that I loved it. It's interesting the way that we think of retail, because I loved it. I loved being around the clothes. I loved helping people feel good about what they were wearing. I loved the element of tailoring something and making it perfect for the body. I loved working with women. It's an interesting thing, cause I sold women's clothes for the most part, and it was a wonderful experience for me to be in a space to watch women feel good. You know what I mean?
And to affirm them when they felt badly about the thing that they would put on. It was just a lovely experience, you know? And I did it for a long time. I loved it. I loved it. And I made so much money. That's the other thing. And people don't understand that, especially when you work in New York or LA, working retail in New York or LA is a career. My colleagues, I had colleagues in other stores that were like fifty. Because you don't want to buy a two-thousand dollar suit from a twenty-year-old.
Sarah Enni: Right. No. For sure.
Jason Reynolds: That's an interesting thing. Right? And so I'm working, I'm working, I'm working. I decide that I'm going to quit writing because I couldn't sell anything else. I had been writing and writing and writing, and the agent had basically given up on me and she sort of passed me off to her assistant. And he only published speculative fiction and I wasn't writing that. And he just wasn't interested in any of the things that the other Jason and I were working on. And so we just kinda called it quits for a while.
And one day, Christopher Myers, who's the son of Walter Dean Myers [pauses] usually when I'm telling this story to a crowd, I'm like, "Oh, he came in the store." He didn't come in the store. We were at the beach. So the real story is... because you have to tell the story so the story works for the audience, right?
We're storytellers for a living, right? Which basically means we lie for a living. But the true story is he asked me to come hang out with him at the beach cause I hadn't seen him in a while. And I told him that I quit. And he was very disappointed because he felt like... he said, "My father is getting older, somebody's gotta write the stories." And I'm like, "Well, I don't know who's gonna do it." He said, "I think it's gonna be you."
I felt I had been knighted. And he said, "I think it's gonna be you. I just think you got to give it one more shot." He said, "So I want you to go and read one of my father's older books, see if anything shakes loose." So I did. Because I love Chris and I respect him and I mean, he's like a big brother to me, another big brother to me.
And I went and I read this book called The Young Landlords. And for those of you out there listening, The Young Landlords is what the show 227 was based on, back in the day when we were kids. And Walter wrote that book. And it changed me. It did exactly as he thought it would. It gave me permission to just be who I am on the page. And so I sat at the cash register maybe a week or two later, and I started to tell my own stories. I started scribbling it in my own language like, "Who am I on the page?"
And I wanted to tell a story about my older brother. And so I took his life between the ages of twelve and eighteen and split it into thirds. The first third, which is between the ages of twelve and fourteen, the first two years of his teenage life. My brother had a learning difference and he was bullied terribly because of it. And that's where Needles comes from.
And then from fourteen to sixteen, my brother becomes a bully to the bullies. My brother becomes a bruiser and a bad, bad dude. And people were afraid of him, he was not to be played with. And that's where Noodles [comes from] he was angry for a lot of reasons that he deserved to be angry for. His life had been, he was dealt a bum hand. And that's where Noodles comes from.
And then when my brother was sixteen, he was stabbed in the face and he lost an eye. And when he came out of surgery, and it's interesting because all of his friends disappeared on him. And when he came out of surgery, it was me and him. And suddenly this little brother that he had been beating up his whole life, suddenly became his anchor point. And it was like, "This kid is gonna be here when everybody's gone. This blood. This is my blood. He's gonna love me no matter what." And he became the most loving person in our house. And that's where Ali comes from. And that's how When I Was the Greatest was born.
Sarah Enni: Wow. I mean, first of all, interesting that you're like, "I want to tell my story." And that comes about by telling your brother's story, but finding yourself in his narrative. That's so interesting.
Jason Reynolds: My parents. That whole book is like my parents, my neighborhood. I mean, everybody in that book, those are my friends. Like Black, the kid who cuts the hair. There's a real kid named Black that we grew up with who cut our hair, and was kinda a knucklehead that didn't quite make it out of the hood.
And then Malloy, the boxing coach, he was really a basketball coach, but that's how he was. My brother was a boxer who hated to fight. He could fight in the street. Couldn't fight in the ring. But he went to boxing practice. Just like Ali. All that stuff comes from... the Momo party was a real party. It's really called a Dobbits party at the high school that was just like that.
Sarah Enni: So what was it like to dip into prose and to go that way?
Jason Reynolds: Scary, but also liberating. It was amazing to write with such freedom. Just loose. I was kinda like, "I'm just gonna do it the way I do it. Do it the way I see it, the way I say it. And let's just see."
Sarah Enni: Well you're lifting some of the restrictions of poetry, right? Writing poems or lyrics certainly it's just more constricted. And in some ways prose is just like… let loose. You can play a little bit more. Did it feel like that? Was it terrifying or was it...?
Jason Reynolds: You know what it is? It felt like both of those things. The one thing that I remember my editor, when I got the first edit news, she said, "Your poetry background is gonna work in your favor because you know how to begin and end." Every chapter felt like [makes a swooshing noise]. I understood how to come in and how to get out. And how to build in that way or how to use repetition to bring people back to the one.
That's like jazz, right? No matter what, we always gonna come back to the one. In all of my stories, you'll see it happening, especially that first chapter. If you ever heard me speak and give a lecture, you'll see me meander into outer space. But eventually, it's gonna boom, we're gonna hit on the one. Every single time.
They're all just a tool kit. You know, repetition and metaphor and being unafraid. Poetry gave me fearlessness because even though you have the constraint of form, you have a plethora of device. And so you can just be like, "I want to use onomonapia. I'm gonna say pow, pow, pow if I feel it."' I'm gonna repeat this line over and over again if I think it adds to the story. I'm going to create more space in between the words.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, there's a visual element to all of your books.
Jason Reynolds: Always. Yeah, yeah. I mean that's just... it's about the poetry. I don't see them as that different. I tell people all the time, the only difference with poetry and in prose is that poetry is like pouring water from a ten story building into a single glass, right? You pour it and it comes down and [makes swishing sound] and it goes right into a single glass. And prose is like jumping into a swimming pool, going all the way to the bottom, and swimming around and looking at the mosaic tile on the floor. Both things are equally as beautiful and impressive. Right? [Laughs]
Sarah Enni: That's so funny. I'm very in the visual right now. I love that. So, what was the response to that book and what were your expectations? You wrap it up, you finish it. Where were you at, at that time?
Jason Reynolds: No expectation. I just felt lucky to have been given a second shot. Here I am back in the industry. An Industry that I hadn't been in in eight, nine years. And now it's like, "Oh, you're gonna get another swing at this thing." And when the book came out it got a good response. But everybody was afraid of it because of the cover, and we refused to change it.
It was an opportunity because for us, we saw it as an opportunity. It was like, "Look, let's put this cover on it." And it does have meaning. People think it's like an arbitrary cover. It has a meaning and there's a reason why we chose it. But the other thing was, imagine a kid on the A train and you're holding up this book and the kid across from you sees it, that kid's gonna say, "What you reading?”
And that, that was what we were trying to do. Make something that was evocative to young people they say like, "Yo, whatever this is, is cool enough." Now what we did not plan for was that schools would be terrified to carry it because of the conversation around guns in our country. Even though it's covered in yarn and all of that.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, this cover has a gun that's covered in kind of a crocheted sleeve kind of thing.
Jason Reynolds: I found it to be stark and beautiful, but that book I think would have done better if the cover were different. To this day, that book has sold the least. I also never see it in the schools because people are so afraid of the cover. It's interesting. Barnes and Noble threatened not to carry it. It was a whole thing. You know what I mean? But one upside I'll give my editor is that she [pauses] and if you are a younger writer and you're listening to this, this is a very important thing. And I wished that editors were still doing this. And by the way, if you're an editor, cut the shit. This idea of trying to make a star is dangerous.
Because when I was coming in the game Caitlyn (Caitlyn Dlouhy) said, "Hey, here's the deal. The book comes out in January, we are not even going to expect it to do anything. We will not be checking any numbers. We will not be checking any lists. We will see how it is doing in December." I got a whole year. And she said, "And by December it should be only at a simmer. It won't even be sizzling. It should be just at a simmer over the course of twelve months." So I didn't have the pressure of any list, of hitting the list. So what I got to do is work on my second book. I didn't have to worry. It was free. I was like, "All right that happened." I am not at any risk of losing my career.
It was like, "All right, now just work on the next thing and make it good too. And the next thing and the next thing. Don't worry about how the books are doing. Eventually there'll be okay.” Caitlyn and Louie at Simon and Schuster, I'll always make sure that I give her the credit of saying, "We're playing the long game. We're playing the long game. Don't worry. We'll get there eventually. Just continue to focus on the integrity of your work only. Just focus on the integrity of your work. You have to make a decision. Do you want to be a writer, or do you want to be famous? Those two things are rarely the same."
Sarah Enni: Mm-hm. That's so smart and very like an editor showing that they have faith in you, an author, for a career.
Jason Reynolds: For a career, not just for a money-grab. And it hurts me to know that so many debut authors are stressed, are stressed out. I mean anxious and going through all sorts of psychological and emotional changes, because they feel a pressure based on the amount of money they'd been paid from the onset about how their books perform.
The other thing that should be known, since I'm being an open book which is good, is that we asked Caitlyn for a ton of money. And she wrote me, I'll never forget, I'll have to look through my emails and see if I still have it. She wrote me an email that said, "I would love to give you that amount of money. I think your work warrants that amount of money. But if I were to give you that money and you underperformed, I have shot your career. So I'd rather give you this little bit of money and we'll just work it the slow way." And I'm so grateful that I said yes.
Sarah Enni: And also kudos to her for being like, "Let's have this conversation."
Jason Reynolds: "Let's have this conversation."
Sarah Enni: Like, "Let me be transparent about what the thinking is on my end." Whether or not you want to go along with that is a whole other story, but at least be upfront. There's a lot of um [pauses], I wish that there was more transparency in talking to writers like we're business people. Or fellow career people.
Jason Reynolds: Entrepreneurs. Exactly.
Sarah Enni: Yes. Okay, entrepreneur is the word, the exact word. So from there, I feel like your career has been defined a lot by you being out in the world talking about your work. That to me is so indicative of the going up and down the Eastern seaboard, being a young poet being unafraid to put yourself in a room. Tell me about how... that isn't how everybody works, but what was your thinking about like, "Okay, I'm just gonna get myself into schools."
Jason Reynolds: I knew that I didn't have a choice where there is no market for your book, “quote/unquote.”
Sarah Enni: You had to do the field work.
Jason Reynolds: I knew there'd be no marketing plan. And so I remember being at one of my earlier meetings at Simon and Schuster and they said, "Jason, we're gonna put you in front of as many people as possible." What that really meant, at the time was, “We have no plan.” And this isn't a slight, by the way, to Simon and Schuster. I mean, they've been good to me. I wanna make that clear. They've been good to me.
But that is the truth, right? I didn't get a rollout. Instead it was like, "Listen, we're gonna, as much as we can, we're gonna give this thing a boost. But the truth is, is that this is before the diversity push. This is before, "We need diverse books." This is before all of that. And it's like, "You gonna have to make them believers."
And so I did. And so what would happen, what ended up happening was, they sent me to my first conference which was ILA, or something like that. I think that's what... TLA or ILA? One of the LA's. There's a lot of them. So many of them. One of the LA's and I'm on a panel with Laurie Halse Anderson, (author of Speak and The Impossible Knife of Memory) Eliot Schrefer (author of Threatened, a National Book Award finalist) and Gene Luen Yang (author and illustrator of American Born Chinese).
Now, here I am, a no one. Right? Nobody knows who I am. I have this one book that I think it's about to come out. I think it's not even out yet. I think there's arcs [advanced reader copies] or something. And this particular panel wasn't a question and answer kinda thing. It was everybody gets to get up and give a 15 minute talk.
And here I am with titans, right? I mean Gene Luen Yang at this point he's like [makes a sound of blowing up]. He's on his way up. Laurie Halse Anderson is obviously a giant right? And Eliot Schrefer had been nominated for I think the National Book Award twice at this point. And so I get up and this is it, this is my debut. And I get up and I give a 15 minute talk connecting Go-Go music, which is the native music to Washington, D. C., to young adult literature.
And I tell this story about this music that no one's ever heard of and how it affected my life. And how it directly connects to young people feeling seen and witnessed. And the work that we do. And when I sat back down, Laurie Halse Anderson, who was sitting next to me, wrote on a notepad and slid it over to me and said, "Who are you with?" I said, "I'm Simon and Schuster." And then she said, "Who is your editor?"
And at this point, I think Gene is talking, right? And she's sliding me these notes. And I say, "Caitlyn." Who was also her editor for middle grade. So the seeds of American Trilogy, Caitlyn edited those books. And so she is like, "I'm gonna tell Caitlyn that I won't do any more conferences or any more festivals unless you're there."
And this is how it started. So that was my debut moment. And because Laurie Halse Anderson and Gene Luen Yang are in this room, the room was packed. And I get up and I do my thing. Shortly after that, I'm at another festival and it's the same thing. And then another festival. And then Sharon Draper puts out... Stella by Starlight is about to come out. Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming had just come out. Christopher Myers had some stuff out that he was bummin'. Laurie had just put out The Impossible Knife of Memory.
And so what started to happen was because the four or five of them were always in public spaces, they started to say my name [swish sound] every time. So Jackie would get on her microphone and say like, "Man, we're at ALA, or we're at PLA or TLA." Or one of the things that she'd say, "Man, I'm telling you all right now who you need to be looking out for is this kid named Jason Reynolds.”
Sharon Draper "Hey, I'm gonna let you know right now. There's this kid." You know? NCTE [National Council of Teachers of English] comes around. We go to NCTE. Walter dies just before, right? We go to NCTE. There's a guy at NCTE who says, "We lost the great Walter Dean Myers, and we're saddened by that, but it gives me great hope to know that there's this kid named Jason Reynolds who is literally coming up the ranks and is the student of Walter." Boom. Boom.
And so all these things started to happen. It was just the perfect timing. And so as all this is taking place, then it becomes like, "I've seen this kid speak. I've seen this kid speak. I wonder, does he do school visits?" Chris Myers started to tell me, "Every time you're on a microphone, just say that you do school visits." And the ball started to roll.
And once the ball started to roll, it really started to roll. And once people started to have me at their schools, all they do is talk to each other. And it's like [makes a chatter sound]. And it just exploded. But I knew that I had to figure out a way to make the books go. I had to sort of battery them myself. And I did that and it was rough, you know what I mean? But I had to make it work. I had to go. And so I did a hundred-and-fifty school visits a year, every year.
Sarah Enni: And by that, I want to be clear...
Jason Reynolds: Three talks a day.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I was gonna say that's one-hundred-and-fifty days...
Jason Reynolds: Three talks a day.
Sarah Enni: But that's not just one thing a day. That's your whole day. And you are so open, and you talk about yourself so much. It's really draining.
Jason Reynolds: Oh, it's, it's brutal. And writing books. So by the time When I Was the Greatest came out, A Boy in a Black Suit was done. As Brave as You was done. And I'm on the road. So I'm doing all this. I'm editing As Brave as You. Boy in a Black Suit is done. We're getting ready to get ready for that.
And because the book started to come out... because I had made a pact with myself that if I ever got back in the industry, I would knock the door down. Right? Because I felt like I would be shut out if I didn't. And there's a famous Walt Whitman quote in A Song of Myself where he says, I'm paraphrasing, but he basically says, "Unscrew the locks from the doors..." And then it's a beat. There's like a beat there. And then he says, "Unscrew the doors from their jams." It's almost as if he's like, "Hey, unlock the doors." And he's like, "Damn, that! Knock the door down."
And that is what it was. And I felt like if they just give me a crack, I'm gonna knock the door down by inundating them and bombarding them with so much work. That it would make it too difficult for Simon and Schuster to pull out of their investment.
So basically it was like, "We've already dumped a little bit of money in this kid. If we don't continue to take the things he's making, then we risk losing a ton of money to somebody else." I backed them into a corner. But with that back in the mental corner, I backed myself into a corner because I now have to tour and work all those books, because there's still no marketing plan for my kinda work. And it became like, "Jason Reynolds is everywhere all the time." Because I had to make the books go.
Sarah Enni: Which is incredible. I mean, it's a testament to you and your work ethic and your...
Jason Reynolds: My childhood. This is what it is. That's all I know. My mother said recently, maybe a year ago, I was at her house and I was exhausted… looking haggard probably. And you know, moms are always concerned about their kids, and she said, "You know, I look at you and I'm proud of the things that you've made," she said. "But I'm also sad because I made you a machine." It's true. Right? "I made you a machine and I don't know how much of that is healthy. It's given you the life that you live, but there has to now be some rewiring."
Sarah Enni: I've been thinking a lot about that too. I'm a hard worker also, but in therapy I'm like, "So here's the deal. I wake up every day and the question isn't, are you gonna work hard? That's a foregone conclusion. I'm gonna work really hard. But am I gonna work smart?" So lately, I have identified all these ways in which I need to not go into any situation and assume that the hardest work is the best work. And that's actually really hard to recalibrate.
Jason Reynolds: Tell me about it. It's so hard [chuckles and then sighs]. Tell me about it. But also, it's weird, right? Because then there's a part of me intrinsically and intellectually I know that to be true. But I'm hard wired to pound the pavement. I mean really keep my nose to the grindstone because I haven't been shown any of the way. And it's funny, because now I have an opportunity to work smart. I don't know if it would have been smart for me to work smart some years back. But I think that the sacrifice of working hard then makes it easier for debut writers to work smart now.
Sarah Enni: I think that's really true. I think you've modeled...
Jason Reynolds: I hope so.
Sarah Enni: A whole other way of being. For not only other authors, but for the publishing industry to see.
Jason Reynolds: Good and bad. Adam Silvera, shout out to the buddy Adam Silvera, I remember I told him when he first came out my way. And it did some damage. Because he tried it and it's not good. And I remember telling him, "I'm so sorry that that was my advice." But at the time that's all I knew. And now I'm telling people like, "No. No, don't do it this way." It's impressive. Everybody's like, "Man, three books a year! You know, that is impressive." It's like, "No, that is unhealthy. That's not okay."
Sarah Enni: So I wanna talk about getting to A Long Way Down a little bit. A Long Way Down is such a beautiful book. You almost can't even read the cover cause it's covered in stickers of things it was nominated for and things it won. Which is so, so deserved. I don't want to skip over that book because of the relationship too, again, the focus on neighborhood and growing up and coming back to your lived experience. So I'd love to hear about how A Long Way Down came about.
Jason Reynolds: So first, all right, so let's do the Long Way Down. But first let me just say, and I'm gonna give a quick, this is gonna be like a montage [long pause]. Fourteen-years -old, I started losing my friends and family. Well, ten-years-old, I start losing my family. Fourteen-years-old I started losing my friends. Boy in a Black Suit comes out of that.
Summertime’s my brother and I go down South and spend the summer with our blind grandfather, Brave as You comes out of that. My buddy Matt Carter, when he was nine years old, his father tried to shoot him and his mom and he ran and hid in the corner store, Ghost comes out of that. All the girls in my neighborhood, Patina comes out of that.
Sunny, with a guy named Randell, comes out of that. Lu, a guy named Jermaine, comes out of that. Right? These are all my stories. Now the same character that Sunny is about, is the same character who was murdered when we were nineteen. His name was Randell Dunkin, a dear friend of mine.
It wasn't the first time we'd lost anybody. It just stung in a different way. Because he was such a... he was just one of those people, you know? It's like, "Ah, you can't die." It's the equivalent of what we're going through, especially the Black community and the hip hop community, with Nipsey Hussle, right? It's like, "No, not you. You don't get to die." Like, "Now you Tupac. You don't get to die Tupac." Right? "You're too much of an important person in the community."
And that's who he was. If you wanted to laugh, if you wanted to feel like it was possible for you to do anything, you would look at him because he was so authentically himself all the time. He ain't worry about being cool. He just was cool. And because he just was cool, he could do anything and we'd say, "He's doing it. You can't do that, but he can do that." And it's cool.
And he was murdered. And it was a horrible death. It wasn't a gunshot. It wasn't like that. It was like execution. I like to be very explicit about these things because I want people to know the realities. He was, from what we could gather, his throat was slit, he was cut across the stomach, and he was burned from the inside out and left in a cemetery. That's the way it went. Identified by his teeth. This is a very real thing.
And I'm 19 when I get this phone call. And I had been with him a week before in Philadelphia hanging out, laughing, doing what we always did. And that night myself and all of us, we went to his mom's house and we told his mother, "We'll figure it out and we'll take care of it." And to some people that feels very like, "Oh!" But for people in our neighborhood, it's like, "What? Do you expect the cops to take care of it?" This is a guaranteed cold case. They didn't worry about this, so we'll take care of it. And because of the anger that we felt for taking someone, who at this point in his life, would have given the world so much. Would have given some children, I mean a family, right?
I knew for a fact that at nineteen I could have taken a life and slept like a baby. It's one of those things I reckon... I think about all the time. I could have killed a man and just went to bed that night. It's a part of our humanity that we don't like to discuss. But I know for a fact if something happened to me as a kid, my mother could have taken a life and slept like a baby. My father, I've watched him threatened people if he felt like his children were in jeopardy. It's a human, right? We're animals. We just don't to talk about it cause America, especially, hates sex and anger... oof! Terrified. But I was face to face with a part of myself that I had never met and I had to grapple with it.
And because his mother told us to leave it alone, we left it alone. We had respect for his mom. And it's like, "All right, because you say so we'll let it go." And we let it go. And the ice began to melt over time. And I'm grateful obviously that I didn't do any of those things, or any of my friends didn't do any of those things. And so this book is birthed out of not the idea of gun violence, which is what people like to talk about. It's like, "This is a book about put the guns down." Right? "No, this is how we marketed it." But the book is about humanizing the kids who picked the guns up and about how, in this country, we talk about guns and violence and gangs and we never talk about children. We never talk about what's really happening.
We blame them. We blame them for being the result of bad politics, miseducation, and poverty, right? All these things that are stacked, stacked up like bricks on their backs, and then we say, "Why did you pick the gun up? Why do you feel insignificant? What are you so upset about?" Why wouldn't they be upset? They have every right to be upset.
Everyone should be a little angry at what's going on around us in this country. And all we had the nerve to say is like, "Those kids are bad kids. They're thugs. They're gangsters. They're monsters." No, those are children that no one has ever asked why they're so upset. Why are they so angry? Why they're so afraid. Why they feel so insignificant and small. So small that they have to pick up a gun to feel big. What neighborhoods they live in, what are the codes, the cultural codes, the community codes, the ecosystems of their community, their family dynamics? No one's ever asked those questions.
Instead we just say, "Cast them aside, put them in a cage, treat them like the animals that they are." And they're not. And that's what this book is really about. And that's where it comes from. We were regular kids who had experienced something horrible and decided to act in a way that we thought was a necessary way to act based on our environment. And had we gone through with it, we would've been treated like gangsters. When really we were children who had been fractured. That's it. That's sort of what I wanted to do and why I wanted to write that story.
Sarah Enni: Yes. And doing it in prose. What was the decision-making for that?
Jason Reynolds: I had written it straight ahead and it just didn't work. My agent was like, "Man, you've been trying to write something in verse for a long time." Cause I don't... look, shouts to all the people out there who write in verse for everything, including my dear friend Kwame Alexander (poet and educator, and New York Times bestselling author of The Crossover: A Novel, winner of the Newbery Medal and a Coretta Scott King Honor). I think he's got a strong pension for it, he's wonderful. Ellen Hopkins (New York Times bestselling author of Crank), right. Shout out to all of them. And I mean this sincerely. Those who do it, I think they do it well.
Personally, I don't know if every book belongs in verse. I don't know if every book works in that way. I think that they're tailoring books in that way intentionally. So it's different. But I know for a fact that I can't write every book in verse. It had to be the right story. And I knew that if I wrote it straight ahead, I had wrote it in just a normal prose novel. It's really difficult for me to write a book that takes you a week and a half to read, and then convince you that it took place in 60 seconds.
I needed there to be tension. I needed you to feel like you were on that elevator and I needed just stomachs. I needed you to stay with me. Right? I needed to hold you here until we got through with this, because I want this to feel like a flash. A flash versus like, "Yo, this is a lot. It's happening. It's happening." When it's over, I want you to feel like those doors opening and like "Oof!"
Sarah Enni: I read it all in a go and that was quite the experience.
Jason Reynolds: Everybody does. Forty-five minutes... you sitting there banging it out. And I needed it to feel that way. And then the other thing is that I was writing it with the intention of making sure it was read in prisons, and read in neighborhoods and the communities where the books really are relevant, where that story is relevant. And I had to make sure that I did not give those kids an excuse to not read it. So a few words on a page eliminated the excuses. Eliminated the ability to pull out. I was like, "No, no, no! We're gonna keep you here so that we can have this conversation."
Sarah Enni: It's also beautifully designed. So not only does the pace at which you can read it make you feel like you're sort of that claustrophobic elevator feeling. Increasingly crowded elevator feeling. The texture on the page is the inside of it. I mean, the whole thing is so stunning. And it felt, when I was thinking about it, because though it's prose, but it's a long, it's a hefty book. Every page has so much space given to it, which felt like it was full of all of that.
Jason Reynolds: Yes. Like one of these people who got a Mavenist person, right? And ravenous when it comes to information. If it is to be known, I'd like to know it. I'm always taking in all these things and figuring out how to filter it into my life. And so you take a cat like Alfred Hitchcock (including Psycho and Rear Window), right? And you look at the work that he did and you realize that he wasn't really making scary movies. He just understood how to manipulate human emotion and he understood how to do it using camera work.
If he would, you know, two people are having a conversation and Alfred Hitchcock would sort of tilt the frame, make it just a slightly diagonal. And what that does to the human psyche? It creates discomfort because you know something is wrong and you don't know why you know. But you know something is uncomfortable, right?
It's what Kubrick did with The Shining. The Shining ain't really scary. It's just strange. It's strange that the TV is on and not plugged in and you never noticed it’s not plugged in? But it's not plugged in and psychologically it's fooling. It's strange that every single time we see Jack at the typewriter, the typewriter is different. And it does something right? And that's sort of why I was using the space in that way. How do you fool around with space and language? And all of my books though, that's the reason why I'm always fooling around with space. We have the power to control the reader. We have the power to control the reader and I want to fool around with that.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, that's not a bad thing.
Jason Reynolds: That's a good thing.
Sarah Enni: That's like you need to have control of that because that's gonna be... I mean talk about the classics and feeling repelled by them. How often do you open a classic book and a page is a paragraph? It's just wall to wall.
Jason Reynolds: Oof!
Sarah Enni: And that's impossible to connect with.
Jason Reynolds: It's a bummer. It feels like a prison.
Sarah Enni: It's feels so intimidating. Yeah. Where can you breathe?
Jason Reynolds: Where can you breathe? Like the musicians say, like Quincy Jones, right? Got to leave a little space for God. And that was his whole thing, right? Everything can't be filled up with notes. Leave some space there. You gotta leave a little space for God. You gotta to leave some breath there. It matters in literature too. It matters in all the arts. Everybody does this, right? Writers should do the same.
Sarah Enni: The best movies, the most intense and devastating movies, have those moments of levity because you have to break it up. And then you can kind of reconnect.
Jason Reynolds: Exactly.
Sarah Enni: Well, thank you for sharing that story. I know that's really important and that book is so powerful. But I wanna make sure that we get to Look Both Ways, which I just got the opportunity to read, which is so beautiful and so, so fun. It was like meeting a whole neighborhood.
Jason Reynolds: A whole world of people, I know.
Sarah Enni: Yeah! So fun. And that I feel like is connected to talking about your youth and your childhood and how you remember growing up. Because every interview I've watched with you, you come alive when you talk about your neighborhood.
Jason Reynolds: Ah, it's great!
Sarah Enni: Place matters to you. You live in the world and you want to talk about the world. And that's so fascinating to me. I feel like sometimes I'm in the clouds. I like writing about abstractions. And you're not.. you're here. So, talk to me about, well first of all, let's pitch Look Both Ways and then let's talk about hyperlocal writing.
Jason Reynolds: Look Both Ways is a connected series of stories to make a single story about one school full of kids, and how all those kids have a different walk home. And this book follows them on their journeys home. It's honestly just a story about the walkers, which was the original title, right? It's just a story about the walkers. Because when we think of school, typically if I were to say, “What are the symbols of school?” People would say, “Lockers and school buses and a lunch room maybe.” Right? “A school bell.” But the truth is, is that the kids who walk home are having a very different experience. Because it's 15 minutes of unsupervised time, and everything they learn about life in the world, typically, is coming from that walk home.
Sarah Enni: And we have sort of an epidemic of panic about kids during that time. That's when anything can happen.
Jason Reynolds: Anything can happen, exactly. The boogeyman is out there.
Sarah Enni: Yeah! So it felt very electric like, "Okay, the school doors closed behind you and then..."
Jason Reynolds: "Don't take candy from a stranger," comes from the kids who walk home. Right? The kids who are unsupervised and you're on your way. You know Boys in the Hood? The first scene of Boys in the Hood, “You want to see a dead body?” right? These kids who are walking there's so much adventure there. And I saw it as an opportunity to explore it.
Sarah Enni: I also was so interested because it felt to me like you've been so filled up by these one-hundred-and-fifty visits a year, three times a day. You see kids. You have met thousands and thousands...
Jason Reynolds: Probably a billion kids.
Sarah Enni: So this to me felt almost like you were so bursting with kids' stories that you couldn't just tell one.
Jason Reynolds: It's true. You know what it is? It's a few things, right? My approach and angle of writing it this way. One: That, right? There's this idea that sometimes you just want to write an instance. There are things you see that happen in schools and you're like, "That's hilarious." But it's not a novel. It's just a moment. But it's a good moment. So there was that.
Two: I cannot understand for the life of me why we've gotten away from the short story for young people. I think that the anthologies that exist right now like Fresh Ink, and Black Enough, these are wonderful anthologies. I'm so glad they exist. But I wonder why there aren't collections. One writer writing a collection of shorts for kids. I don't understand what that's about. I mean they didn't even want this to be called "a collection of short stories" because they saw it as bad marketing. It's interesting.
Sarah Enni: Very interesting.
Jason Reynolds: It's very interesting and I don't understand why. I don't know if I get why. I think there's some sort of stigma with the short I guess. But I would imagine for all the teachers in the world that this is a goldmine.
Sarah Enni: Oh my God.
Jason Reynolds: You can take a short and you can just dive in, do close readings, and you have a succinct piece of work to get into. And then in this case, you have that work and then you have all the other works, and if you want to read the whole thing, it works. If you want to extract one, it works. I don't know why we're not doing this. And so for me, I like to be thoughtful and a step ahead, you know? Just thinking it out like, "Why wouldn't we do this?"
So that was the other thing was like, "Why not make the thing that I think is actually going to work for the young people who hate to read?" Which are still the people that I'm thinking about, right? Let's do shorter work, right? It's an entire story in ten pages. And so we can talk about what it means to read an entire story, except you got to do so in ten pages. And if you want to continue, you can continue and read your first novel. Both things can happen simultaneously [makes a sound like mind exploding]. But to me, this isn't rocket science.
Sarah Enni: Well, there's some ways in which the way you've lived your life, and led your career to this point, means that you're the interpreter for all these different… publishing, authors, school teachers, librarians. You have interplayed with all of them so much that you might be the only person that speaks all those languages.
Jason Reynolds: Maybe, maybe, maybe. But I never thought about it. Maybe there's the intersecting point where it's like I'm around all these factions and they're all saying the same thing, which leads directly to this thing. To me this was the obvious choice. And so that's kind of where it came from.
And my fingers are crossed that it goes well. I don't know that it will, but I hope so. Cause everybody, you know, it's tricky, right? Ghost is big and The Track series was huge, Long Way Down was huge. All American Boys was huge. Right? All very different in terms of formatting and in terms of style and this and the third. And there's always that fear that you'll never be able to meet... you can't beat yourself. Right?
Sarah Enni: Right, right.
Jason Reynolds: Which is okay.
Sarah Enni: It's so interesting because, of course, of course you're concerned about that and thinking about that. But as an outsider looking at your career I'm like, "Well now you've gotten the chance to say these are the stories I think are important." Like right now you're building a career, you're in it. So you can kind of wing it a little bit.
Jason Reynolds: Yeah, exactly.
Sarah Enni: Which, this isn't even winging it. This still feels so true to how you've always told stories.
Jason Reynolds: Yeah, I hope so.
Sarah Enni: To me, these are grounded stories about all these kids who were all so sweet. I really loved meeting all of these...
Jason Reynolds: Loved those kids.
Sarah Enni: Seeing all of these little moments with them they're so... and really brought me back to all of the after school stuff. Little things mean so much. Tell me about choosing which kids to share about.
Jason Reynolds: I always want to create a range of young folks in any of my books. And each one of those young folks needs to have a range of emotions. We talk about diversity in these static ways, where it's like you have diversity of culture and ethnicity, you have diversity of sexuality, diversity of ability. There's all the diversities, but we never talk about the diversity of self. That I am many cells. I am diverse in and of myself. And so I always like to write young people who show all the different ways that they are who they are. And so that's always something I'm trying to figure out.
How do you tell stories about like I mean we could pick... You take a kid like TJ in that first story, and how he's this really funny, really compassionate kid, right? His best friend, who was a girl, which is also very important for me to show that boys and girls, people who identify as boys and girls, can be friends. We don't see [pauses].
Sarah Enni: I know. Especially at that age. They're just buds.
Jason Reynolds: I had so many, even in high school, had so many best friends. Some of my best friends to this day are women and nothing has ever happened. We've never dated. There's never been any romantic thing there. None of that. It's just these are my friends. And it's important to show that. They're friends who love each other very, very much.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, and are very silly together.
Jason Reynolds: Very silly, but they understand each other. And to show him in one scene, making her feel better in the hospital. And then another scene being afraid and her having to navigate his fear without making him feel small, is interesting. You know what I mean?
It's interesting because she knows that there's something he's afraid of. And even though he pretends to be fearless, and he pretends to be funny all the time, that really his jokes are masking another part of himself that she knows about, but that she doesn't press him on. But makes it clear that she's there for him if need be. And to show foster parents right? Like an adopted mother. And not the first one. And to really show, this is a kid who's complex. And to show this girl who is super strong, but has a disease that is trying to kill her, but still sees herself as like, "Yeah, I'm unbeatable. I'm an unbeatable thing."
Sarah Enni: And stronger because I'm with my friend.
Jason Reynolds: And stronger because I'm with my friend. Honestly Sarah, this book, whether it does well or not, it's for me probably the best writing I've ever done in terms of writing whole stories in such a short scope. You have a few minutes to write a story that is, I mean, every story is all of the layers, right? I mean you move on to Look Both Ways, right? There's a story about a young woman who's walking home from school and she doesn't have the friends.
And she's walking home from school and she trips and falls. And the fear of embarrassment has basically turned her into a person that wants to try to control the environment around her. Doesn't want anything to change because change equals danger, right? Change equals danger. And then she meets someone who is different. And we don't necessarily know why the person is different. But the person is different, and the person is a different adult at that. Is an adult and is unthreatening. But it's different.
And this person is challenging her. Challenging her imagination, challenging her creativity. But most importantly, challenging her standard of safety, and her standard of that which is real. Things not changing doesn't necessarily make for a safe world. I had a buddy of mine, he used to talk about Icarus and he'd say, "Icarus was told not to fly too close to the sun, not to fly too close to the water." It's Icarus, right? Isn't that right?
Sarah Enni: Yes, yeah.
Jason Reynolds: Cause if you flew too close to the sun you'd melt, if you flew too close to the water you'd drown. And so stay in the middle. Right? But my buddy said, "But the real question is, what if it were that the reason he was told not to fly too close to the sun isn't because he'd burn, it's because there was something up there for 'em? Nobody gets anything flying in the middle." [laughs] Right? There's nothing for you if you fly in the middle. And to see this young lady have to work that out.
And when asked, "How you gonna change the world?" She decides to say... spoiler alert... she decides to basically say, "Let me borrow one of those instruments that you have." Basically meaning like, "I am now going to engage with your world. I'm gonna engage with my own imagination. I am ready to play this game that is very different from the safe way I've been doing it." Like, "I am willing to open myself up to the embarrassment." Right? “I'm willing to open myself up.”
And watch this young lady work this out. Her father, who's a flight attendant, which means he's risking his life. He's suspending logic every day to get into a hunk of metal and fly at thirty-thousand feet in the air. Or her mother, who's a scientist, who are watching plants grow, right? Depending upon the light you put on them, they grow differently.
What all the different things, what does all this mean to this young lady's life? I mean, I could go on and on, but each one of these stories… You think about the young kid who... the two boys, right? And we don't know if one of these young men is gay or not. All we know is that something has happened and someone has stood up for him.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, yeah. I love that story too.
Jason Reynolds: Someone has stood up for him and he has tried to extend himself to say thank you. And then the moment that he tries to say thank you, the young man who stood up for him basically is telling him like, "There's no need. You've done nothing. You are innocent. You've done nothing.” And that, “We are fighting a war that we have been fighting for very long time."
The idea of World War II in the story. And the idea of the Nazi Germany in the story, the idea of an ethnic cleansing and this terrible, terrible bigotry. And then you have a young man who stands up and says like, "No more."
Sarah Enni: And I loved in that story, that it was those two boys may not have ever been friends unless they connected in this video game. There's an element, I think, that's so interesting to say the digital lives of children are their real lives. There is no boundary any more. So that the fact that those two boys were able to connect, they're so different, but meeting in that world. They had shared goals.
Jason Reynolds: That's it! Or the fact that you see this kid's father kiss him on the cheek every morning. So for him, none of this, none of this is awkward. What's the big deal, right? Boy on boy affection? What's the big deal? I tell my male friends, I love them every day. What's the big deal?
So these are the things that I'm trying [pauses], I hope that teachers and parents and whoever reads this book, has deep dives and complex conversations about what they're reading, and about what all these things mean. I think I mean, Oh God, my favorite might be Skitter Hitter, the one about the girl and the skateboard. What does it mean to be a boy? There's so much resentment toward girls who excel at things that boys see themselves as... It's such a weird... and we should probably talk about these things.
What does that mean for so many young women to feel so unsafe for no other reason than the fact that young men feel so insignificant.
Sarah Enni: And intimidated by.
Jason Reynolds: And intimidated and insecure, and we don't ever address it because instead what we say is, "You belong in all the spaces that you belong in, you deserve to be this, that, and the third." Instead of saying like, "No, anybody can be where you are if they work. And the fact that you've been given a seat, without having to work, is dangerous and harmful." So the people around you and the pressure put on the other boys to not do the thing, right? And the metaphor of a uniform, what does it mean right? "Oh, don't worry, the uniform is big. You'll grow into it". What are we really talking about? All of this stuff that is woven into these really short 10 minute tales about the world that we live in. And on top of all of that, just being really fun and light stories.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I mean, it was so joyful to read these stories, and these kids are dealing with very real stuff. It was also a story of, you go to school and you don't know what's at home for everybody in class with you.
Jason Reynolds: The journeys are different.
Sarah Enni: But when they do come to school, all these kids have moments of levity, and the stuff they're obsessed with, and jokes that they're playing.
Jason Reynolds: Simeon and Kinsey.
Sarah Enni: Yes. Those two were so funny and such like, everybody went to school and knows those two guys. It felt to me, while reading it, that there was some element… and this is full projection so tell me if this is wrong… but I was like, "He must've gotten so full up with all the stories that he couldn't limit to just one." You know? A book where you got to do a little bit of everything.
Jason Reynolds: Yeah, for sure. I definitely wanted to do a little bit of everything.
Sarah Enni: Not that it doesn't feel coherent, cause it absolutely does.
Jason Reynolds: Yeah. But I wanted it to be a bit of a kaleidoscope. And honestly, I wanted it to feel a little disjointed. I wanted it to feel a little ambiguous and a little bit like, "Huh." Look all of my work is, simply uses platform for conversation and springboard. I honestly am not trying to give away any answers or teach any lessons or any of those things. I just want people to finish each story and have a moment to be like, "What do you think this is about? How does it play into the larger landscape?" Right? There's literally just the kissing of their lives, but they're separate stories that exist in a single world. It's no different than a television show like High Maintenance. You know, that show High Maintenance? Same thing, right?
It's all these people. And the weed man in High Maintenance, would be the crossing guard in Look Both Ways. She is the glue, right? She's everywhere. She's technically the narrator. Right? And there's another Easter egg in the book. Oh, I shouldn't give it away!
Sarah Enni: Ahhh!
Jason Reynolds: But there's a scene where [pauses] so Look Both Ways, the story Look Both Ways, there's a scene where the bus comes, there's a kid who's laughing at her. There's a kid behind that kid holding his notebook up to his face. That's me. Right? So then in the real version, you'll see when that comes out, he'll have hair and everything.
Sarah Enni: That's so sweet.
Jason Reynolds: I wrote myself into a book. Yeah! Cause I am the observer. I am the narrator. I'm not laughing, I'm looking, but I'm not laughing. So doing all these [big breath in and sighs], Sarah honestly, if I'm being candid, I believe that it is incumbent upon us to challenge ourselves and to push ourselves in the work that we make, in the way that we make it.
Because we are creating a palette for young people in the works that they will grow up to read. And so if that means that I write a book that doesn't work now, it may work ten years from now. I don't know. But I want to make sure that we're pushing a little bit. And so I'm okay with the ambiguity of it. I'm okay with the fact that they just are just skimming each other in the stories. Right? You see sort of when Say-So's walking through the cemetery, she sees the skateboarder, right?
She sees the young lady on the skateboard there. And it's just a moment of like [makes a quick swooshing sound] she's there and then moving on with the story. Or you see, you know what I mean?
Sarah Enni: It was very successful. You could definitely read them independently and no meaning would be lost, and you can jump in at any point.
Jason Reynolds: And it's fine. Or even thinking about, I want everyone to rack their brains about what it means for the school bus to fall from the sky.
Sarah Enni: I know!
Jason Reynolds: What does it mean? And it shows itself over, and over, and over [chuckles].
Sarah Enni: I was like, "What?" It was so interesting.
Jason Reynolds: And I want people to be like, "What is happening?" And then every story, you know it's coming. There's gonna be this moment where there's gonna be that image of a school bus falling from the sky. And I want everyone to be like, "What is it? What is this about? What does it mean? Does it mean anything? And why does he keep using it?" Why can't we make high art for kids? Honestly.
Sarah Enni: And in my experience, kids are the most down with not having answers.
Jason Reynolds: Exactly.
Sarah Enni: When you're learning about life, none of it makes sense.
Jason Reynolds: None of it.
Sarah Enni: So they're way accustomed...they're like, "Great. Another story without an end. But that's pretty much my life."
Jason Reynolds: "That's my life And I don't know what any of this means. I don't know what my life means. Sounds good to me." Right? One of my buddies, Kevin Prufer, he's a poet and he said for him he's like, “Man, poetry is walking into a problem-solving-machine and just watching how the wheels turn without ever seeing what it solves." Right? And, "And that is what writing is like for me." Right? It's like "I'm not here to see the solving of the problem. I'm here to literally write down how the problem is being thought through. That's it. But I don't know how... I'm just watching the wheels turn and I want to put that on the page."
Sarah Enni: That's also such a compelling way to think about this thing that we all bump up against, which is, that you completely lose control of your book when it's in the world. You don't get to be like, "So what did you think? Wasn't the ending wonderful?" I like that you're completely engaging with the lack of control. It's like, "Then it's not up to me. I'm gonna leave you with a question because I'm not gonna answer it."
Jason Reynolds: Exactly. I think we give a little more freedom to what can be done. Right? So for instance, you read that last story. It's about the son of the crossing guard. And it starts off with, a school bus is many things, right? And it gives two pages of just all the things that a school bus could be. And there's gonna be a teacher who's gonna be smart enough to say, "What do you think?" Right? "Write your list of what a school bus is."
These are very simple things that you can do if you trust the intelligence of young people. I don't have to explain why I did that. Why there's two pages of just, “A school bus is a boxing ring.” And then this, and then that. And it's like stream of consciousness [makes a noise of ticking things off]. And then it finally gets to this kid, but for this kid, a school bus almost killed his mom.
Sarah Enni: A threat.
Jason Reynolds: A threat, right? And what does that mean? But there's gonna be teachers who are gonna say, "Oh this is great. We could use this." And you can have young people push themselves to think about what a school bus is? Or what a house is? Or what a sidewalk is? Or what a classroom is? This is what you could do if you sophisticate the work just enough, without turning it into something elitist or highfalutin. But there's a way for you to sophisticate the work to give a little more string. We have all this freedom to do what you want.
And this is all my work. The same conversations that we're having about Look Both Ways we could have with Long Way Down, we could have with Ghost. There's a woman, Jennifer Buehler. Do you know her?
Sarah Enni: No.
Jason Reynolds: She's the best. She's a professor of Young Adult Literature. I want us to talk about the complexities of children's literature. I mean really get into the layers of it. And maybe not all of us would be able to do so. That's fine. I don't think everybody has to be this heady. But I do think those of us who do, I would love to really get into it. Because I want teachers to ask, "Why boogers? Why does he talk about boogers? What do boogers do? What do we think of them? And why is it that he chose to use boogers?" Because there is a reason. There's a reason I chose this. Right?
I mean, you know why I chose the water bed cause they talk about it in the book. But when you think about what a booger is, and what we do with them, right? How we discard them. How this thing that is naturally made from both environment and us. Right? And it's coming out of us. And I was like, "Nobody wants to be a booger cause boogers get wiped away. They get blown out." And how that connects to this young man's life, and connecting that to his fear and his family. You have a completely different context and framework for the story.
So people are gonna read it and be like, "Oh that's cool." Just ask yourself. Just know that every decision that is made is made intentional. Every single decision that is made. If a teacher is listening to this, the librarian… I'm begging you all to do close, close, close readings of every story. I promise you that every decision is a decision made intentionally, and that all of it helps to frame the narrative, and frame the stories, and give context, and open up an entirely different kind of dialogue around what is being written on a page. Around the story in and of itself.
Sarah Enni: I think we owe it to books and we owe it to kids.
Jason Reynolds: Yes. Use the book to teach kids to think critically. Don't take it for its surface. Lord knows we've done enough of that. Have them really do a little work and ask themselves all the questions that may seem silly to ask. And then you realize, "No, there is a pot of gold at the end of it. No, there is a reason. There's a reason." All of it makes sense. I mean, from the cigarette butts and all of that story. Ooka-Booka Land story to the young man with the dog and everything that he's gonna... the boy who goes to get the girl's phone number.
And that story, which is all about friendship and family, but also about the uncertainty. The truth of the matter is, is that I hate the fact that we always tell stories where the boy goes and gets the girl and the girl is so grateful for the boy and it's like, "Oh finally I have love, I have this. I have that."
But really it should be like, "Here I am, this boy who isn't the cleanest. I'm not that cool. I'm not this and that and the third thing. They tease me cause I smell bad. I don't mind it, but they tease me. But this is what's happening and these are my friends." And you go to this girl's house and this is your time. You're doing it the old school way, right? And they greased you up and your lips are burning and this, that, and the third. And here's your chance. And all you want to tell her is that you're impressed and you like her for all the right reasons. And you're not so certain that she's not laughing at you. And we never know.
And there's something about writing a girl in a position of power. Everything is hinged on her opinion. She doesn't have to like you. Right? And so she's smiling. You're like, "She smiled.” And maybe it's the smile that comes just before a laugh. Or maybe not. And that's how the story ends, right? Then you're like, "Huh?"
Sarah Enni: Yup!
Jason Reynolds: But why can't we show that uncertainty and put the girl in a position of power instead of being like, "Oh, thank you for loving me. Thank you for liking me." No!
Sarah Enni: And then also that isn't realistic. This story is realistic.
Jason Reynolds: Yes. This is the way it really goes [laughing]. He's awkward and he's bumbling and his friends are like revving him up. "Come on, we're gonna do this. Ask her man. Ask her, ask her." And he's so sweet. He's so sweet. And he means well, but it does not guarantee him this girl's affection. She does not owe it to him. I am sorry because I get so manic about these things. First of all, because I am obsessively... like this is a big part of my process and storytelling.
I'm always thinking about vertical narrative as Brendan Kiely (author of Tradition, listen to his First Draft episode here) calls it, "The vertical narrative". What's the story under the story? And I want all of us, not that it's my place I'm no ambassador, but I would like for us to really be pushing or thinking about those things. What is the actual story that you're telling? Because if it's just the story, that's fine, but...
Sarah Enni: But know that. You'll be in a more powerful position if you know that.
Jason Reynolds: Exactly. If you know that, right? But man, if there are layered tales that are challenging our kids to think about the world in which they live, or thinking about the way that they're experiencing art. Not just literature, but art in general where it's like, "I wonder why the artist made these decisions? I wonder why the dancer did this thing? I wonder why the photographer chose this angle?" I want us to live in a world where young people are questioning all the things and assuming that there is intentionality behind all the things around them. Architecture. Every building is intentional. We need them to be thinking this way.
Sarah Enni: Yes, we do. We absolutely do, and I think we do a disservice. I know I grew up and was like, "Oh, films are full of choices." It wasn't foreseen that it would end up this way. This is every individual person who had the opportunity to be a part of this, made their own choices and when that works together, that's ten times more beautiful to consider than just that it popped out of the movie theater. It's a magic way. I would love to hear you talk about advice.
Jason Reynolds: To writers?
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I think primarily people listening to this podcast are writers.
Jason Reynolds: Yeah. Do your thing, You know what I mean? We really underestimate the weight of that statement. Do your thing. Walk your walk. Dance your dance. You know, at the end of the day, the only guarantee in life is that ten years from now you'll still be living in your own skin and you're gonna have to be okay with that. So pull the trigger, shoot from the gut, break all the rules. I honestly believe that the best art we'll ever make is the art that breaks the rules. That pushes it. Don't be afraid to be in your head. There'll be someone that'll help you suss out the parts that work and the parts that don't. But we have to allow ourselves the freedom to go, to really go.
Sarah Enni: Someone was telling me that their therapist, now I don't remember who was telling me this, but that their therapist was like, "Why are you worried about what your editor is gonna think? Don't do their job."
Jason Reynolds: They'll do it.
Sarah Enni: Be a writer.
Jason Reynolds: Be a writer. Just do your thing. I think we all would benefit from tapping back into our toddler selves who painted the kitchen with Spaghetti O's. Do that! Make a mess of things. And I think, God, the world would be a better place if the artists continued to make a mess of things. You know?
Sarah Enni: I feel like that's a beautiful note to end on. So thank you so much for giving me all this time. It was such a pleasure to talk to you.
Jason Reynolds: My please. My pleasure. Thank you so much.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Jason. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @JasonReynolds83. And follow me @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). For links to everything Jason and I talked about in this episode be sure to check out the show notes, those are @firstdraftpod.com. Particularly for this episode. Jason was throwing out a ton of other authors and their books. Some movies, some TV shows. There's a really rich set of show notes where you can find links to all that stuff. Definitely check those out.
Do you have any writing or creativity questions that you would like me and a future guest to answer in an upcoming episode? I would just love to hear from you. If you do, I set up a voicemail for those questions. You can leave a voicemail at 818-533-1998. I really would love to hear from you guys and see where you're at in your creative journey, and see if there is, you know, a single darn smart thing that I can say to help you out.
If you enjoyed the show today, please subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening. And if you have a couple minutes, leaving a rating or review on iTunes is an enormously helpful thing to do for the show. I'm gonna read an example of a five star review right now.
This five star review was left by Bruingirl08. Bruingirl08 says, "Obsessed with this. This is a sensational podcast exclamation mark! I don't usually podcast, but this has taken over my daily commute. The show covers all your favorite YA authors and also goes over so much in-depth knowledge of publishing. I've learned so much about writing, publishing, promoting, and just being a human by listening to this show. Thank you Sarah for all your hard work on this."
Bruingirl08 you are so welcome. That is an incredibly kind review. Thank you so much. I'm so glad you found this show and that it resonated with you. Thank you for your kind words and for taking the time to leave a review, it really helps with the iTunes algorithm. That means that the show gets promoted alongside other bookish podcasts and it's pretty key to organic growth, so it means a ton. Thank you.
Hayley Hershman produced this episode. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to production assistant Tasneem Daud, and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson. And as ever, thanks to you liars for a living, for listening.
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Have a question about writing or creativity for Sarah Enni or her guests to answer? To leave a voicemail, call (818) 533-1998. You can also email the podcast at firstdraftwithsarahenni@gmail.com.
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Every Tuesday, I speak to storytellers like Veronica Roth, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Divergent; Linda Holmes, New York Times bestselling author and host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast; Jonny Sun, internet superstar, illustrator of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Gmorning, Gnight! and author and illustrator of Everyone’s an Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too; Michael Dante DiMartino, co-creator of Avatar: The Last Airbender; John August, screenwriter of Big Fish, Charlie’s Angels, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; or Rhett Miller, musician and frontman for The Old 97s. Together, we take deep dives on their careers and creative works.
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