My Monticello

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The biggest challenge was thinking about the psychological and emotional costs of racism and extremism. It meant putting myself in the same mental space as my characters, being isolated and run out of home. That was hard to contemplate for characters that I grew to really like and care about. The night before the rally, groups of armed men started to turn up Guernica: Can you talk more about Da’Naisha Love? How and why is it that she’s the one to lead this group in this moment, and to this place, Monticello?

My Jocelyn Nicole Johnson Makes Virginia’s Past Present in ‘My

The My Monticello audiobook is narrated by Aja Naomi King, January LaVoy, Landon Woodson, LeVar Burton, Ngozi Anyanwu, and Tomiwa Edun. But mostly I knew my lineage the way most families know theirs: I knew because Momma told me, because MaViolet told her.” I admire Ms. Johnson’s creative plots that express herself in these short stories. The Control Negro and My Monticello are particularly clever and impactful. The apocalypse in My Monticello smartly equates to our current race culture in the U.S., and the protagonist’s secret pregnancy somewhat parallels Thomas Jefferson’s quandary of biracial children. Havi The professor fathers a son to serve as his experimental subject and observes him from afar. Sometimes he simply collects data, while at other times he tries to influence his son’s choices, by encouraging him, for instance, to participate in swimming rather than “the fraught cliché of basketball.” His goal is to “ prove [his son] was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.” When the young man nears the end of college, the professor convinces himself that his son has “made it out past an invisible trip wire, out to some safe and boundless future.” Predictably, his hope doesn’t come to pass—instead, the young man becomes the victim of police brutality.Guernica: One of the fascinating things about your work is how you tie in our history and legacy of slavery with the gradual destruction of the earth. Can you talk about this a little bit? Guernica: In many ways, the subject matter your stories and characters explore are both the most intractable and the most urgent issues of our time. Given this, where would you say your work — and your characters — land on the spectrum of hope and despair?

My Monticello - Wikipedia

Johnson: I’ve been a public school art teacher for many years, so that is my bread and butter: a bunch of people who are different and don’t really want to be in the same room, but are. They live in the same neighborhoods and are forced to create a community. Teachers are tasked with creating the conditions for that community to happen, and the very best teachers do it really, really well. I believe in those public spaces and the opportunities they present; they might be the only time you come together with a bunch of people you don’t necessarily want to be with. So I played with that: Da’Naisha is studying to be a teacher, and I used a lot of the things teachers do to create community. Her way of bringing the group together is this kind of hasty constitution, which is a very first-week thing to do as a public school teacher, generating a list of intentions and what our community is going to do together. I also liked “Virginia is Not Your Home”, narrated by January LaVoy. In rapid glimpses, this traces the life of the protagonist who is trying to escape her heritage. “You’ll look hard and wonder how the time passed so swiftly, how your mark on the world remains so shallow.” Staff reports. "Dove, Eastman, Johnson top winners at Library of Virginia Literary Awards". Richmond Times-Dispatch . Retrieved 2022-10-18.This fiction collection is an astonishing display of craftsmanship and heart-tugging narratives. Johnson is a brilliant storyteller who gracefully reflects a clear mirror on a troubled America. I was a public school teacher for 20 years and I’m a huge proponent of community. I’ve had classes where all kinds of people who might not otherwise have a lot in common create some sort of relationship and unity. I definitely tried to highlight that in the book. I really used the ideas of teaching to shape how my protagonist, Da’Naisha Love, tries to get her group of neighbours to work together in this very tense situation. She has them do what a teacher would do on the first day of school – they commit to a list of things they all do together, to get by. Current Winners of the Weatherford Award for Best Books about Appalachia". Loyal Jones Appalachian Center . Retrieved 2022-06-06. Strand, Karla (2021-10-01). "October 2021 Reads for the Rest of Us - Ms. Magazine". Ms. Magazine . Retrieved 2021-10-16.

My book is me nudging forward from Jocelyn Nicole Johnson: ‘My book is me nudging forward from

Octavia Butler was revolutionary in taking the tropes of speculative fiction and other genre fiction and using them to think about gender, race and identity in really interesting ways. Reading Beloved by Toni Morrison when I was 16 or 17 and thinking about creating art from parts of American history that were so obscene – that was really influential.

Announcing the Finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards". National Book Critics Circle. 2022-01-21 . Retrieved 2022-06-06. While I wasn’t blown away by My Monticello, I am curious to read this author’s other stories (which were sadly not included in my arc copy) and I would probably still recommend this to other readers. It is ultimately this love, if anything, that can sustain the group in the isolation of the mountain, as they are hunted down by the white supremacist militia – and by the legacy of racism which accompanied the stirring idealism of Jefferson. My Monticello is a suspenseful novella that presents us with a scarily imaginable scenario (given all the alt-right & neo-nazi rallies that have happened in the last couple of years & the Capitol assault) where a group of violent white supremacists engulf Charlottesville. Our narrator, Da'Naisha Love, escapes the violence and finds a momentary refugee in Monticello, which happens to be Thomas Jefferson's historic plantation. Alongside her are strangers, her white boyfriend, her elderly grandmother, and other people from her neighbourhood. Over the course of nineteen days, this cobbled group tries to carry on. Their fear is palpable, and more than once they find themselves faced with possible threats from the outside. Tensions run high and various members within the group inevitably find themselves disagreeing over what to do.