: Most of the stories follow black and brown queer folks living their lives around Houston. So, you could call it a collection of ghost stories about the city, or you could call it a collection of failed love stories, or you could call it a menagerie of very particular crisis points taking place across Harris County.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nMat Johnson calls Lot <\/em>\u201cthe confession of a neighborhood.\u201d What about these stories is unique to Houston and what is universal?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nMat\u2019s a really thoughtful guy. The thing that ties Houston narratives together is the fact that there\u2019s no \u201csingular Houston narrative,\u201d or \u201ca Houston story,\u201d or whatever. There\u2019s the sprawl, and the diversity, but everyone\u2019s experience here is very particular, and the characters in Lot<\/em> are no exception. So, what we need are more stories set in Houston: the more we get, the clearer a picture of the city we\u2019ll end up with.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nLot<\/em> is garnering praise all over the place\u2014Entertainment Weekly<\/em>, Buzzfeed<\/em>, The Millions<\/em>, Barnes & Noble, the Huffington Post<\/em>, Lit Hub<\/em>, the ABA folks, The Rumpus<\/em>\u2014is that as nerve-wracking as it is wonderful, or is it wholly blissful?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nAll of the praise should be going to Riverhead\u2019s marketing and publicity teams and also my agent\u2014they\u2019re who pushed the book out into the world, marketing it in a way that was appealing to readers, booksellers, and myself. That sort of cohesion isn\u2019t always a given.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nBut, for me, I don\u2019t have enough distance yet. I\u2019ve been working on other things as all of this buzz has been floating around, so they\u2019ve provided a pretty nice buffer. And in a lot of ways, the reader\u2019s conception of Lot<\/em>, or the iteration of the book that\u2019s getting recognition, is almost entirely divorced from mine: once you\u2019ve written the thing and worked with your editor and put it out there, it really doesn\u2019t belong to you anymore. It\u2019s got its own life.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nYou\u2019ve written for the New York Times<\/em>, New Yorker<\/em>, Paris Review<\/em>, Tin House<\/em>, and Bon App\u00e9tit<\/em>, among other outlets, and you write a regular column about Houston, called \u201cBayou Diaries,\u201d for Catapult<\/em>. How did that arrangement begin, and how do you decide what to share about your hometown?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nMy editor over there, Nicole Chung, is amazing. Like, the best. I asked her if she\u2019d be interested in a column about some of my experiences in Houston, and she was game for it, so we worked to make it what it is from there. Actually, writing the essays was an interesting challenge because I\u2019m maybe not so keen with writing about myself, specifically. But working with someone I trusted as much as Nicole\u2014someone with her thoughtfulness and generosity and perceptiveness\u2014made the experience just so much easier.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nYou\u2019ve written about the Montrose neighborhood, Hurricane Harvey, the Houston Rodeo, and the Rothko Chapel, among many other subjects. One of the columns is about finding sacred spaces, beyond the usual suspects in Houston, in which you write about finding \u201choliness in the noodle bar.\u201d What is sacred to you?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nCommunal spaces and places where you can find comfort mean a lot to me, whatever that looks like to you. For me, personally, that\u2019s restaurants and friends\u2019 living rooms and coffee bars and taquer\u00edas. There\u2019s a warmth that can arise from familiarity and those spaces mean a lot to me.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Writing about the Montrose neighborhood, you say it\u2019s \u201cunofficially codified as the nexus of queer life\u201d in Houston and \u201cthe neighborhood that gave us everything.\u201d What is everything<\/em>?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
In the context of that essay, \u201ceverything\u201d was just that: a new language, a new way of thinking, a multiplicity of vantage points for looking at the world. All of it.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
There were a lot of headlines in 2017 naming Houston the most diverse city in the country (though Jersey City disputes this). You wrote a piece for Bon App\u00e9tit<\/em> called \u201cMy Ideal Eating Day in Houston,\u201d which included waffles, tacos, and b\u00e1nh m\u00ec. How did the idea for this piece come to you? Is there any better way for disparate individuals to come together and appreciate each other than sharing a meal?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
The piece was actually assigned by the Bon App\u00e9tit<\/em> folks! I just thought it was cool to have the chance to write about some of my usual haunts. And I don\u2019t know if there\u2019s a better way to bring folks together (although I\u2019m inclined to say that there isn\u2019t), but food and sex cross all borders\u2014they\u2019re a global lingua franca.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Let\u2019s talk process for a bit. A couple of years ago you told Austin\u2019s American Short Fiction<\/em> that your early drafts are \u201call talk,\u201d \u201cpure conversation.\u201d Do you still write this way, and how did that technique begin for you? If you don\u2019t begin with conversation now, why not and what has changed?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Nah, that\u2019s still the case. I\u2019m mostly preoccupied with the quiet (or quiet-ish) moments in personal relationships and the creases between transition periods. And a way of capturing those on the page, for me, is through dialogue. I think it began from watching too many movies and being really entranced with their ability to conjure a sort of verisimilitude.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Short stories are my favorite literary form. Why did you decide that your first book would be a short-story collection, and is that also your favorite form? Which short-story writers do you admire and why?<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Victor Lodato, Xuan Juliana Wang, Jamel Brinkley, Yukiko Motoya, Osama Alomar, Amelia Gray, ZZ Packer, Sandra Cisneros, Alejandro Zambra, Ha Jin, and Patricia Engel are doing work that I admire deeply. They\u2019re able to capture the grandiose and the intimate and the in-between so deftly, building whole worlds to contain them. Haruki Murakami\u2019s probably the short-story writer I turn to most though.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nAnd I really love poetry! Tracy K. Smith, Paul Asta, Morgan Parker, and J. Estanislao Lopez are deeply inspiring.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Please tell us what you\u2019re working on now and what\u2019s next for you.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
I just finished a novel! It\u2019s called Memorial<\/em>. You might see it sooner than later.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Houston’s Bryan Washington on his debut story collection, LOT: STORIES, “Bayou Diaries,” sacred spaces, and the global lingua franca<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[940,875,810,813,830,955],"class_list":["post-1523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-houston","tag-interview","tag-lone-star-listens","tag-lone-star-literary-life","tag-lonestarliterarycom","tag-shortstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}