Nathan Dixon received his PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of Georgia. His first book, Radical Red, won the BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize. His creative work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Fence, Tin House, Carolina Quarterly, Quarterly West, Redivider, and elsewhere. His critical/academic work has appeared in MELUS Journal, 3:AM, Transmotion, and Renaissance Papers.
In the following interview about his collection of short stories, Radical Red, winner of the 15th annual BOA Short Fiction Prize, Nathan discusses art and protest, provincialism and craftsmanship, and poetry and prose.
BOA: In the Fall of 2023, George Packer argued in The Atlantic that writers and artists "might be the last people to turn to for wisdom" in a political crisis because "at the threshold of political controversy," they "are likelier to betray than fulfill the demands of their vocation." Rather than "bringing their special talents to bear," they "begin speaking in a characteristic tone of outraged conscience," indulging "in rhetorical excesses" and resorting "to euphemisms and omissions that amount to outright lies. They use the passive voice and abstract language to gloss over" atrocities and "ignore any facts that taint their purity of belief." In light of your unapologetically political book, how would you respond to Packer's insistence that artists "should keep a vigilant watch on the border between [politics and art] so that neither does too much damage to the other"?
ND: I cheer rhetorical excess and outraged consciences, but abhor the passive voice, abstract language, and purity of belief. Perhaps, I have thought more than once, certain stories in Radical Red are a form of masturbatory wishful thinking, more concerned with injustice and punishing the conservative power players who deserve punishment (thereby re-inscribing a bogus punitive pipedream) than with the comitragic struggle of humanity itself, which is, of course (as countless artists have told us), the purview of art.
Then again, "regular" people suffer in these stories as well. In researching books I might compare to my own, I noticed that the promotional copies for both Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Friday Black and Dantiel W. Moniz's Milk, Blood, Heat concentrate on "ordinary characters in extraordinary situations." The same might be said of several characters in Radical Red. The fact that both of these authors—and often, their characters—are Black Americans puts the lie to what might be called "normal people politics" (i.e., white reactionary politics) advanced by centrists on both sides of the political aisle who have always wanted to believe in America's fundamental innocence (e.g., It was Joe Biden, after all, who crusaded the U.S. Senate to end federally mandated bussing in the 1970s).
In the face of proposed reform, how often do we hear the sentiment repeated, "Why pay for a crime that I didn't commit—I was only a witness, not the perpetrator?" This was the 49-state mantra on the way to Reaganland. We all want to believe ourselves innocent. We all want to "preserve our neighborhoods." Which is to say, there are reactionary enclaves in every American geopolitical region, from the all-too-obvious South to the North, Midwest, and West. We find Faulkner's famous aphorism about history in his novel Requiem for a Nun: "The past is never dead," says the lawyer Gavin Stevens to the haunted Temple Drake. "It's not even past." This action occurs in a section entitled "The Courtroom," and I can't help but recall the opening of Kafka's The Trial in which Josef K. finds himself arrested "without having done anything wrong."
"It is the innocence which constitutes the crime," wrote James Baldwin to his nephew James Baldwin. "If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go." We must be careful that the stories we tell ourselves do not erase our complicity in maintaining—and profiting from—the structures we wish to dismantle. This is a lesson I keep having to teach myself. The Left might do itself a favor these days by rereading Barbara Ehrenreich who never fails to foreground her position and privilege.
When asked about the distinction between "purely literary work" and work in "the tradition of social protest," Ralph Ellison responded, "I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest" and insisted that critics of "so-called protest novel[s]" should be less concerned with messages of protest than with the "lack of craftsmanship and the provincialism which is typical of such works."
BOA: Can you say more about "provincialism" and "craftsmanship" and how this book came into being?
ND: Almost a decade ago, when I was in the thick of writing the first drafts of the linked stories in Radical Red, I scored a gig teaching "Humor Writing" and "The Hero's Journey" over the summer at the Duke Young Writer's Camp. I was qualified to teach the latter because I had read some Joseph Campbell; the former, because I had cracked some jokes during my interview. My students in both courses were young teens, and I instructed them to ruthlessly destroy their characters. On the one hand, I explained, it could be "comedy," and on the other, "heroism." It was an affluent crowd, and my instructions were antithetical to those do-gooding values instilled in them by their liberal (i.e., "minor-reform-is-the-best-we-can-hope-for") parents, their high-minded middle school teachers preaching the great American meritocracy in the ever-spreading suburbs, their virtue-signaling peers who righteously took to social media to air grievances, pick fights, and avoid conversations. Jen Silverman and Chimamanda Adichie, among others, have written about the penchant of young writers to confuse art with moral instruction resulting in "ideological orthodoxy" and stories that are "less nuanced and less able to engage with the realities through which we're living."
I wonder if it has become impossible to parody the (self-evident) absurdity of our reality.
Provincialism: as I completed those early drafts, I believed—foolishly (and optimistically) in hindsight—that the content, "the message(s)," of my stories might all-too-soon become irrelevant to contemporary readers. I said so, in many words, in my unsolicited submission letters, and the stories were rejected out of hand, by hundreds of literary journals.
Craftsmanship: as the country took long strides toward explicit autocracy, I continued tinkering with the stories, incanting the narratives in those echoing pre-dawn hours as the rest of the world slept. It was in re-reading/re-working them that I learned to become ruthless toward myself as a writer.
Perhaps it was through this process that my optimism faded. What if what Dr. King calls the "arc of the moral universe" correlates with the trajectory of bullets fired from assault rifles? What if the accumulation of "rights" is not steady, but a boom-and-bust cycle—inevitable under the auspices of capitalism? What moral universe—I keep asking myself—have I tried to create by taking the Right's words seriously, by bending the laws of so-called reality to accommodate their absurdity?
The hypocrisy that many of us on the left are inclined to point out among our brethren on the right is not a bug but a feature of the system(s) in which we live and the ideologies that we insist we live by (e.g., to justify the practice of owning human beings—and to paint himself as society's savior in the process—the white slave owner had to believe, or had to profess to believe, that the people he owned were, on the one hand, docile sheep in need of moral instruction and, on the other, rapacious wolves hungry for civilization's destruction). Of course, self-proclaimed leftists, liberals, and yellow dog democrats are guilty as well. "I believe in public education," says the "progressive" state senator, "I just think private school is a better fit for my children." At the root of the so-called "normal people politics" that I mentioned above is the commonly-held—and often, perfectly true—belief that elites can afford to campaign for reform because they remain immune from whatever effects that such reforms yield.
Yet, drawing moral equivalence across ideological lines can mask the truth as well as reveal it. Well-meaning liberals often fall into this trap when attempting to perform open-mindedness or while defending the paramount right of free speech. I believe, of course, that the best response to speech is more speech, but also that there are needs/rights (e.g., food, shelter, healthcare, transportation, belonging, autonomy, time to play, etc.) that our current system(s) of government do not accommodate for enormous portions of the population.
To be on the left, writes China Miéville, "is to say that we deserve better, and that betterness is not impossible," while to be "on the right is, at base, to say at very minimum that nothing can change, nothing can be done, systematically, to alter that system—if not that such a system is desirable, and that it's more important that some have the power to control the world, even if that means others in vast numbers suffering and being without power." The latter view is provincial. It lacks craftsmanship. I second Ellison in recognizing "no dichotomy between art and protest."
BOA: The stories in Radical Red often build to a climax—as evident in the language itself as it is in the events described. You mentioned "incanting the narratives" above. Can you say more about the sound of your stories and the role of the spoken word in your composition process?
ND: Perhaps at the heart of the matter is my considering myself a poet. Charles Olson:
"the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE"
I try to read as much poetry as I do prose. I'm friends with more poets than I am prose writers. I like listening to the sounds of words and talking about everything until blue in the face.
I have written at length about a passage in House Made of Dawn in which Momaday's Priest of the Sun makes much of the first verse of John: "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God." I recently listened to the poet Christian Wiman talk about the same verse on a podcast I love. One of the hosts quoted Wiman to Wiman. I transcribed what he said—a practice in which I often find myself engaged—before finding a print version in The American Scholar.
One follows the sounds. One follows them obsessively, religiously...One wants only the cadences to continue as if there were something in the words themselves that sought meaning—sought concretion, even—out there in the world, or something out there in the world that corresponded so intimately and utterly to the sounds of the words that the intensity and gravity of one particular existence—or even one moment within that existence—might catalyze the tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and every evil thing.
And every evil thing. This, I think, was the beginning of my book: an attempt to find some method to articulate my interest in—and revulsion to—conservative ideology, the prophets (homonym with "profits") who proclaim it, and the people who suffer under the tyranny of its dogma.
After hearing himself quoted, Wiman paraphrases Joseph Brodsky's argument that "The ultimate fallacy of history as we practice it is the assumption of linearity within it, which makes it fundamentally false. Poetry gets around that," he continues, "because it's embedded in sound. Those sonic currents are, in fact, the currents of reality," and because poets plunge themselves "directly into the currents of reality," they "can speak about reality in a way that historians can't."
This puts me in mind of Muriel Rukeyser's hope that "poetry can extend the document," and Ed Sanders' insistence "that poetry / should again assume responsibility / for the description of history." The line between poetry and prose is often awfully blurry, I think, as is that between fiction and nonfiction and (from the first question) art and protest.
I don't know how much these quotations about poetry relate directly to Radical Red, but I've been thinking alongside Rukeyser and Sanders (and all the others I've quoted here) during the decade I've spent revising these stories.
