Professor of English Edward P. Jones has characters walking around in his head. They take up residence there for years—sometimes decades—before he gets them down on paper.
Some—like the grocers, mothers, bus drivers and doctors in his renowned short story collections Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006)—reflect the working class lives he saw growing up in Washington, D.C.
Others—like the Civil War-era Black slave owner in his 2003 masterpiece The Known World—settled in his imagination for years before he felt the time was right to let him out.
“Over 10 years, I was creating this world in my head,” Jones said. “I typed maybe six pages because I wanted to see what it looked like on paper. Up until then, it had just been in my head. And you really can’t see it very well in your head.”
Those six pages turned into a runaway success. The Known World won a slew of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. And this summer, it ranked fourth on the New York Times list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. All Aunt Hagar’s Children also made the list at 70.
In a joint statement, English Department Chair Antonio López and Assistant Professor of English Lisa Page congratulated Jones for his achievement. “The brilliance of Edward’s literary work is matched by his excellence as a teacher and colleague,” the statement read.
For the soft-spoken Jones, who generally avoids the spotlight, the accolades haven’t changed his life much. He doesn’t drive or use a cell phone. He’s accepted more invitations for readings—and now sometimes treats himself to a cab to the airport instead of a bus ride. After publishing The Known World, he moved “across the river,” as he puts it, from Arlington back to D.C.—a locale as central to his fiction as James Joyce’s Dublin or William Faulkner’s Mississippi. “By the time I was 18 years old, my mother, my sister and I, we lived in 18 different places in D.C.,” he recalled.
Jones continues to teach creative writing at GW. Page, the director of creative writing at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and a graduate student of Jones’ at George Mason University in the ’90s, also welcomes him into her own classrooms each semester. “Nobody—and I mean nobody—gives feedback like Edward Jones,” she said. “He doesn’t miss anything. He always respects the intelligence of the reader and the responsibility of the writer. He’s a genius.”
As a writing teacher, Jones sees his role largely as a “cheerleader” for students’ work. He rejects the idea that fiction writing is reserved for an intellectual elite. “My feeling is that we can all do this writing stuff,” he said.
In a Zoom interview from his home in Northwest D.C., Jones discussed creativity, his teaching methods and The Known World’s journey from a footnote in his head to an American classic.
Q: The Known World ranked as the fourth best book of the 21st century in the New York Times survey of hundreds of authors, editors and critics. It was the highest rated book among American writers. What is it about that book that resonates with readers?
A: I cannot answer that. In the last 25 years, there have been hundreds and hundreds of pieces of fiction published. And there are some wonderful, wonderful writers. I’m very fortunate that I had even one book on the list, let alone two.
But when you write a book, the only thing you are really concerned about is yourself, your book. You’re putting into it everything you’ve learned about writing fiction. And that’s it. You can’t think about any possible reader out there anywhere in the world. No one. So, I do not know. You would have to ask them why they chose my books and all the other 98.
Q: How did The Known World come about—the idea for writing a novel about a Black person who owned Black slaves?
A: I finished [Lost in the City] in 1992, 1993, and I was looking around for another project. I remembered some footnote back in college that there had been Black slave owners. And I went with that.
I had about 50 or so books on American slavery and I started in on one book. But I didn’t get any feeling from reading those first pages, so I stopped. I’m probably very fortunate in writing this fiction stuff because I could never be anyone’s researcher. I could never be a reporter. I could never do any sort of going to the library and looking things up. Making it up is much easier for me.
I had these 50 books and I never got around to reading them. Luckily, I was born with a serviceable imagination. The brain, I suppose, is made up of two aspects. One is the logical side and one the creative side. So the logical part was telling me I needed to read those books. And the creative side could not be held back by the logical part. And over those 10 years when I was not doing research, I was creating this world in my head.
Q: Can you tell me what you remember about writing The Known World? What was happening in your life at the time?
A: I had a day job with this esoteric tax magazine, Tax Notes. And then in 2001, on Christmas vacation, I thought just maybe I wanted to start working on this book even though I had not done the research. So I had about two weeks or so of vacation time and I gave myself five pages a day—actually more because on the typewriter it was single spaced.
And then in January, [the magazine] called me and said after some 20 years I didn’t have a job anymore. So luckily I had the book worked out in a very general way in my head. And for the rest of the month I just continued working. I forget how many chapters there are, but I worked towards making every chapter about 25 pages. And when I finished each chapter, there was another mountain to climb.
Q: Is that how you generally treat writing—like a 9-to-5 job?
A: With the novel, I probably did. I had a calendar where I charted the number of pages I wrote every day. But, no, I don’t as a rule. Now, I certainly don’t do that.
Q: And I don’t suppose you expect what you’re writing to be so successful.
A: I think there are people out there in the world who do. But that was never me. You know, when you go into bookstores, and you see the table for books under a dollar? If I had any thought about it back then, it was probably that maybe if I managed to get a publisher, the book would last several months before it was consigned to that remaindered table.
Q: I want to ask you about writing about a Black slaveholder. How are readers supposed to feel about him?
A: I don’t know, and I don’t care. If you start thinking about, “OK, what does this group think? What does that group think?” then you’re writing for all those people out there, not for yourself. I really didn’t give any sort of thought whatsoever about how the world would accept this. My only concern was that I write the best thing that I could at that point in my life.
Q: Let’s talk about teaching writing. How do you demystify the writing process for students?
A: When you have a mother, like mine, who can’t read or write, you tend not to see [writers] as people over there on a mountain top. I was the first person in my family to go to college. I never felt that I was any better than any other writer out there.
At the very first class, I tell [students] everybody is at the top of the mountain. Everybody has an A. If you don’t do 56 pages of fiction during the course of the semester, if you don’t come to class and let me know that you’ve read your fellow students’ work, then you begin to slide down the mountain.
But I don’t want them to come to class with their story and think I didn’t like this part or that character and that means they won’t get a good grade. That’s never the case. The best thing that I can do is be a cheerleader and an editor. Creative writing is subjective. I tell them: This is not a physics course. This is not a math course. There are no certain answers.