We thank Touré and Time-Warner books for giving the SCBC the opportunity to read The Portable Promised Land. Thanks Touré for answering a few questions for our project!

-SCBC, Inc.

Where are you from?  

I was born and raised in Boston, but I’ve lived in Brooklyn for ten years and that’s the place that really moves me and influences me.

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

Brooklyn is such a beautiful and vibrant world, like a Jacob Lawrence painting come to life. So much of my work comes from observing Brooklyn and trying to give you the feeling of being in this very black, very soulful universe. In my work I write a lot about Soul City, a magic-drenched, all-Black town somewhere in America. Soul City is very much inspired by the energy, pride, and blackness of Brooklyn (with a dash of New Orleans’s music and voodoo thrown in).

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I have always been a writer. I was born to do this. It wasn’t until I went to college that I got serious about doing non-fiction and not until graduate school that I began writing fiction, but I’ve always loved reading and observing and thinking deeply. I love picking words and shaping sentences and making paragraphs into shapes and piling words into images and rhythms. I love the solitude and intensity of the writing process. I love that fiction gives me an old and international tradition to be a part of.  I love the feel of my Uniball scratching into yellow post-it note pads. I love the whole writer thing. I think that comes across in the work.

Who or what has influenced your writing, and in what way?

Well, Joan Didion taught me how to properly structure your paragraphs and sentences and how to put the real honest truth into your work. Ralph Ellison taught me so much, like how to put musicality into your language and folktales and folklore and jokes into your narrative and how to write as a Black man. There is no book more seminal to the African-American experience than Invisible Man. There is no book more important in the African-American literary canon than Invisible Man. And not simply the message of its subject, but the messages and lessons implicit in its style and sentences.

And Nabokov is a genius. He said to me, do whatever you can dream of. Don’t worry about a thing. When I first read Nabokov and really understood what was really going on it was as if a door opened and the path leading out from the door was further than the eye could see. Of course, Toni Morrison gave us a whole nother idea of what it means to be a black writer and how to put that blackness into the work. Reading her really launched me into magic realism and showed me that you can’t hope to give an accurate portrayal of Black folk without exaggerating everything. We’re a magical people and for art that’s about us to truly evoke us the artist must go to tremendous artistic lengths.

What do you do to set the mood for writing?

First of all I need time. I don’t squeeze writing in. It’s not to be done here and there. When it’s time to write I clear off the day or the evening until the only thing I have to do until I fall asleep is write. Not write and make these calls and take out the trash and do the laundry (which will only take ten minutes!) No. The only way to really get at it is through the focus that comes when you really clear off the entire day and ignore the phone and plunge deep into your thoughts and block out the world and let the blood start to flow. Then you can get at some good thinking. Once I’ve carved out a day to work (and we’re talking about six to 12 hour blocks, I mean, writing until I fall asleep) then I pull up my laptop and begin going at it, typing in new words after reading the old ones to get back the vibe of the work the day before.

What new author has grasped your interest?

The book I’m waiting for is Zadie Smith’s Autograph Man. I think she accomplished something really special with White Teeth and at such a young age. Now that she’s a little older and wiser I think we may see a deep piece of fiction with this second novel.

Do you feel that the boom in African American writers is a fad or another renaissance?

I don’t think that there’s a fad going on at all. Renaissance may be too big a word to apply to what’s going on so far, but I’m not writing because it’s vogue or something. This is all I’ve ever wanted to do and I imagine the same is true of the others. It takes so long for a writer to grow that I don’t think you could call it a fad. Perhaps many of us who read Toni Morrison in high school are emerging to tell our own stories. I think Toni is definitely powerful enough to have created a writer out of someone who may not have been one before.

Do you see writing as a long- or short-term career?

Writing is all I want to do. Probably all I ever will do. I don’t see myself getting a job, ever. I hope that ten years from now I look back and there’s a stack of six or seven books I’ve written. And I hope that my books go on people’s shelf of favorites. I think everyone has that good shelf, where you put your best books or your best albums. I want to be on that shelf. That’s success to me.