Mitchell Jackson will read from The Residue Years at Powell’s on Sept 13 at 7:30. “I think it’s important to tell this narrative because it’s lost it doesn’t exist anymore. “I’m writing this as a love letter to the people that I grew up with I want them to read it and go, yeah, we did used to do that,” he says. Once The Residue Years is released, Jackson says, the people he most hopes will read it are those with whom he shared a now-vanished Portland. If I have to work on this for another five years, I’m going to do it.” “It crushed me, but I was like, I can’t do that. At first, Lish told him to throw it out, even saying, “If you publish this novel, its meagerness will be the measure of your mark on the world,” Jackson recalls. When he finally finished the manuscript in 2011, he sent it to his mentor, famed editor Gordon Lish. All the while, Jackson was turning a pile of loose-leaf pages on which he’d scrawled his life story while in prison into The Residue Years. By graduation, he had discovered a genuine love for the craft, which he chased to New York in 2002 to pursue a creative writing MFA at New York University.
“It was kind of out of vanity.”Īfter spending his first year in the program playing catch-up, Jackson got a big confidence boost: one of his earliest stories was selected for inclusion in the respected African American literary anthology Gumbo. “I wanted to have a master’s degree-that was it,” he says. Again, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, it was Jackson’s sense of superiority that lifted him to greater heights. But he had read an online announcement for the program while writing news scripts for a local TV station. In fact, he had read all of five novels in his life.
But when he applied to Portland State University’s then-brand-new graduate writing program at age 24 (he’d gotten his BA in speech communication at PSU, although he’d spent some of his tenure in prison), it wasn’t because he’d always wanted to be a writer. Reading such writerly turns of phrase, it’s hard to believe Jackson wasn’t composing poetry in the cradle.
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