MORE BOOKS
PAGE 8 • GO! MAGAZINE
Continued from previous page
and they also force me to engage with sub-
ject matter that I’m not familiar with or have
very little familiarity with, so it’s also ex-
panding my knowledge base.”
Jackson said he was 21 and in prison,
where he was sent on drug offenses, before
he knew he wanted to be a writer.
“Even then, I wasn’t even considering be-
ing a writer,” he said. “It was like, ‘Oh, I want
to write a book.’ It still took me a long time
to figure out what it meant to be a writer as
an identity, as a profession. I was probably in
graduate school, really my second graduate
program.”
After serving time in prison, he went to
Portland State University, where he was part
of its then-new masters writing program’s
first class. “And then I went straight to NYU,
so I went back-to-back. I didn’t really know
what a writer was until I got to NYU.
He stayed in New York, where he wrote
and taught until last summer, when he and
his family moved to Chicago, where he
teaches at the University of Chicago.
In typical years he returns to Portland fre-
quently, about every three months, to visit
family still living there, “so it kind of tem-
pers my longing,” he said. “You know, no
place like home for me.”
Unfortunately, this past year has been
anything but typical.
Thursday, February 4, 2021 • The buLLeTIN
“I do miss it,” he said on Inauguration
Day. “All of my family is there still. I go back
often enough. Actually, this is the longest
that I have not been back for a while. It’s ap-
proaching a year now.”
That last visit was in February 2020,
during promotion of “Survival Math,” which
had been released in paperback. The idea
behind the title occurred to him from an in-
cident that happened to him in his early 20s.
“I was still selling drugs, and I was getting
in altercations with different people. And a
guy tried to break into my house,” Jackson
said. “I ended up seeing him very early in
the morning, and he pulled a gun on me,
and threatened my life. And he asked me a
question. He was like, ‘Do we have a prob-
lem?’”
In that moment, a flurry of quick calcula-
tions raced through his mind, Jackson said.
“In between him asking and me answer-
ing, I looked down the street, I was (like),
‘Are there witnesses? What’s the chances
of him shooting me? And if he shoots me,
where will he shoot me?’ All these calcu-
lations. And I ultimately said, ‘No, I’m not
looking for you.’ It turned out to be some-
thing that saved my life because he did end
up murdering more than one person.”
Years later, he thought to himself “What
would I call that?” he said. “And I called
those calculations ‘survival math.’ So the
shorthand definition is the calculations
one must make when faced with a mortal
threat.’ But then I also think it’s also like the
calculations one needs to make just to sur-
vive any kind of trauma or opposition in
the world. So I was saying, like, as a coun-
try, we’ve been in survival math for the last
four years.”
He was, of course, referring to the rheto-
ric, racial hostilities and general chaos en-
gendered by, in part, the Trump adminis-
tration, which came to a head with the Jan.
6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, in which five
people died.
“We didn’t even know. That’s the thing.
We were scared, and we had no idea it was
going to get this bad,” he said. “That’s the
thing that’s really scary.”
Inauguration Day came as a relief, he said.
“I hear several people comment, espe-
National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi
Coates is the author of “We Were Eight
Years in Power” and “Between the
World and Me” along with a number
of Black Panther titles for Marvel. He
joins Mitchell S. Jackson in conversation
Sunday for the second installment of
the 2021 Author! Author! series.
Photo: Gregory Halpern
cially people of color, talking about Biden’s
objective of, like, unity, and how it seems a
little naive when people who basically don’t
want to see any other alive, but I like his
hopefulness,” Jackson said.
“Because if the president isn’t hopeful,
even blindly or naively hopeful, or even un-
realistically hopeful, then what of the rest
of us? What can we be? … I don’t have that
same kind of hopefulness, but I do think we
can get back to regular oppression, like, pre-
Obama oppression, which I’ve been navigat-
ing all my life.”
e e
David Jasper: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com
SUP
POR
T LO
CAL
F ebruary & M arch Show
“High Desert Visions” Group Show
Show runs February 3 - March 26
Open Tuesday - Friday 10 - 4
and by appointment
ART
CUSTOM FRAMING
& GALLERY
834 NW BROOKS STREET | 541-382-5884
www.sageframing-gallery.com
ISTS