You are an inmate, serving time in the Santiam Correctional Institution in Salem, Oregon, a facility that demands compliance from all who reside there.
Mesfin Fekadu, at left, in conversation with Mitchell S. Jackson about how Jackson approaches storytelling. Photo by Sophie Schaeffer, Arizona State University student.
Some men would simply sit and wait for their lives to resume, but instead, you choose to prepare for the future you desire. And so, you write.
You write about your life, and you turn it into a novel, and before you know it, you’ve found your voice. And you insist, come hell or high water, on sharing that voice with the world.
Mitchell S. Jackson, winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing, believes that a distinct voice is key to strong storytelling from any journalist. Jackson is also an award-winning author and the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Department at Arizona State University.
“My chief interest as a writer is singing through the page,” he said.
No matter what the story is and no matter which editor he needs to win over, Jackson insists on telling it in his own voice, carefully curated by his life experiences and his own ear.
“I tell my students now that if you’re not willing to do that, then you don’t care enough about the language.”
Jackson spoke on the power of voice, along with other craft techniques, during a conversation with Mesfin Fekadu, Society for Features Journalism board president, on Oct. 23 at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at ASU. Jackson was among a number of notable speakers at a conference organized by SFJ.
Jackson has had a long-running and prolific career, including the Pulitzer win for his piece, “Twelve Minutes and a Life,” about Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, a Black man killed in a hate crime in February of 2020. Jackson’s debut novel, “The Residue Years,” won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. He is also the author of the memoir, “Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family,” which includes material about his incarceration as a young man, and “Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion.” His writing has been featured on the cover of Time, Harpers, The Paris Review, The Guardian and elsewhere.
Jackson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Esquire. A number of his magazine articles have won praise, including his profile for Esquire, “Looking for Clarence Thomas,” and the 2023 New York Times piece “He Was My Role Model. My Mentor. My Supplier,” which chronicled the life and experiences of his former drug dealer, Lonnie.
“Lonnie was a paragon of a hustler (we called them ‘ballers’) in my hood,” Jackson wrote, “my main supplier during the strife-soaked stretch, in the mid-90s, when I sold more dope than at any other point, a man who by tacit and explicit means, mentored my dealing, and who, truth be told, inspired my admiration and stoked my fear.”
One of the most important themes presented in his work was the ability to humanize a subject, whether it was Thomas, Lonnie or Arbery.
“Arbery was more than a viral video,” Jackson wrote. “He was more than a headline or an op-ed or a news package or the news cycle. … He was more than a symbol, more than a movement, more than a cause. He. Was. Loved.”
These stories were crafted with a variety of rhetorical techniques, such as repetition and the use of a second-person perspective.
“They would call him Boy,” he wrote in his profile of Thomas. “Boy was born in low country on a one-dirt-road-in, one-dirt-road-out patch of mainland just an eleven-mile jaunt from Savannah, Georgia: Pin Point. … Boy coaxed from his mother’s womb by a midwife from another part of Chatham County, and per his mother’s mythology, Boy was too stubborn to cry.”
This repetitive reference to Thomas as “Boy” was meant to humanize Thomas, allowing his upbringing to exist in a space beyond his time serving on the Supreme Court. Jackson made the choice, despite saying that he “loathed” Thomas.
“Man, even the people you hate was babies, you know?” Jacksons said.
No matter what piece he is writing, Jackson said personal experience and a connection to the subject is key. This is why, he explained, most of his narrative subjects are people of color.
“I think to me, the key is purpose,” Jackson said. “You give me any subject, and I’m going to filter it through that purpose… I think it helps give you a focus.”
Jackson closed by answering questions from audience members, and offered thoughts on why the personal voice can be an especially powerful tool for journalists from marginalized groups.
“Some people who are not part of the dominant group feel like they have to make themselves a little smaller on the page,” Jackson said. “And I say, the only real chance is to make yourself bigger on the page. Let them deal with it.”
Clover Schwalm is a junior at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, double majoring in Creative Writing and Journalism.