The Interview with Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Today’s interview is with Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. She is the author of A Kind of Freedom, which was nominated for a National Book Award, and The Revisioners, winner of the 2020 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She’s also a friend. Although we’re both from New Orleans, I didn’t meet her until we were adults. She allowed me read an early copy of her brilliant The Revisioners. When she asked for a blurb, I couldn’t send it fast enough. Her third book, On the Rooftop, will be published September 6, 2022. As a writer, I always find Margaret’s work inspirational, so I can’t wait to read her latest. (The dazzling author photo of Margaret on this post’s thumbnail is by Smeeta Mahanti.)

Maurice: What are your earliest memories of reading and writing stories?

Margaret: I was an only child until I was 16, and my parents worked a lot, so I’d often be home with my grandmother, or alone. I wasn’t allowed to watch television during the week so reading books after school became my solace. In the beginning, I’d re-read the children’s books my parents had bought me, books like To Hell With Dying by Alice Walker or Jamaica’s Find by Juanita Havill. Later, I progressed to The Babysitter’s Club series and R.L. Stine. Regardless of the book, I used stories to coat my loneliness. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without those characters, the bits of their lives I could borrow to enrich my own. I would go on to experiment with writing my own stories in high school, also as a balm for whatever difficult emotions I was wading through. The fact patterns in those early stories did not mirror my life, but the emotional charge did. I still remember being in love with my first crush and not feeling like he was receptive. I wrote a poem about it called “The Mistress Will Cry.” I, of course, was not a mistress as the boy and I were both 15, but the intensity of my yearning demanded an equally intense narrative. J

Now, I rely on my own novels in a similar way. My protagonists are often guides for me. They possess qualities that I borrow, traits that perhaps were always inside me, but that I couldn’t access until I met them in the form of these characters. I bury my own pain inside my storylines too. Fears and regrets that are too powerful for me to process consciously come through; it has saved me to have somewhere to store them. 

Maurice: No TV sounds intense! But I'm happy you had those characters to enrich your life at such a young age. Did you share any of your early writing with others? When did you become confident sharing your writing with others?

Margaret: Only obligatorily at first. We were given an assignment to write a religious poem in the fourth grade at Resurrection of Our Lord School in New Orleans East, and the teacher entered the poems into a contest. I didn’t win, but I showed my dad the poem, and he raved about it, called all of his friends and read it over the phone. I remember how much conviction he had that it was special. I didn’t win the competition so I didn’t know how seriously to take his reaction, but he wasn’t the kind of person to casually dish out compliments, so I internalized what he said to some extent. Then, again, in the seventh grade, we all had to write personal essays, and at that time I was in an all-white school in Connecticut. I had just moved to the East Coast from New Orleans, and it was a terrible cultural adjustment. I experienced a great deal of racism from students and teachers alike; however, my English teacher selected my essay and read it aloud to the class. I don’t remember the subject of it, but I remember that when she finished, she said, “My husband teaches a college English course and says none of his students know how to write. I told him, ‘one of mine does.’” I don’t even remember that lady’s name, but I’ll never forget how much confidence she instilled in me that day. After that, I was not only not shy about sharing my work, I was eager to do so. I associated it with praise. I continued to share my work in high school and again, my peers and teachers were highly complementary, and the same went for college for the most part. It’s interesting because as an adult, I found that poem I wrote when I was in the fourth grade. It wasn’t spectacular even when taking my age into account. But my father saw potential in it, and he alerted me to that potential. To this day, I’m trying to live up to it. 

Maurice: What is your writing life like during the pandemic? Do you find that you write more or less than in the beforetimes? And how have you dealt with being stuck in your writing life?

Margaret: My writing life is the same during the pandemic as it was before it. I had the luxury of having some childcare during the very early months of it so even though I was at the helm of distance learning in our household, I was able to carve out some hours to write 5 pages a day. I will say it was a lucky coincidence that early on in the pandemic I was still at the beginning of my writing process for my soon-to-be-released third novel (ON THE ROOFTOP out September 6, 2022). My effort at that early stage of the book is always more casual and flexible. I imagine it would have been much harder to be at the substantive editing or even copy-editing stage. 

With regard to dealing with being stuck, I am stuck right now. I have a book coming out in a few months. That means ideally I would be working on a new book as we speak but the ideas haven’t come. Or maybe too many have come and I’m having trouble identifying the one. Either way, I have seen this part of the cycle before and have learned to respect it. I think I’m mentally wiped out from the book I just wrote and need to honor that creatively I need a break. I used to try to force stories during these stages and I’d end up writing whole books that never got published because they were contrived and not in the flow. Now I know to wait for the next idea that I can’t not write about, and hope it comes.

Maurice: One of the things in your novels A Kind of Freedom and The Revisioners that I find so wonderful is the attention to character. In The Revisioners, in particular, I felt a personal connection to Josephine and Ava who are dealing with similar problems in different eras. And I empathize with being stuck in the process of writing. It happens to me more than I'd like to admit. Where do your ideas come from? And what makes you want to stick with a work versus realizing it's contrived and worth tossing out?

Margaret: It’s funny, a few days after I talked about how I was stuck in a moment, but hopeful that an idea would come, one came. I felt my own conviction about the idea, and told my husband about it, and he shared the conviction. We were trying to figure out why we had so much confidence about this one idea when we’ve looked past so many others. I will say that some ideas come to me as brilliant ideas but the more I chase them down, the more I realize, they’re so complicated they’re convoluted (that happens a lot). Or maybe after some thought, I’ll think that I’ve done something too similar before; or someone has done something similar before and it feels cliché. Ultimately, I think what it boils down to though is whether or not I have the full level of investment in the project: if it’s something I’m personally committed to, and if I feel like I can tell a certain story in an extraordinary way and that the story needs to be told, I’ll figure out how to make it less cliché, or convoluted. That’s what makes this recent idea so special: it’s about an issue that has haunted me my whole life. In a way it seems so obvious, I can’t believe I hadn’t had it before. I don’t believe I could leave it alone even if I wanted to. It feels like it’s my story to tell.  

Maurice: I'm in agreement. I had a similar realization about my process. I need to be onto something that I've always been interested in, and I have to be obsessed with it in the time I'm writing about it. That's when I'm loving it. What is it about writing that you like, love, or adore? Is writing difficult to love?

Margaret: Adore is the word haha. It has healed me in a way I just couldn’t have predicted. It’s not the publication piece either, though the fulfillment of knowing people out there on the other side of the process are deriving their own meaning from something I created is unmatched. Still, it’s the solitary act of creation that sustains me. I can tell when I’ve gone too long without doing it because my moods are affected. I’ve started to think the power of it is that it’s a form of meditation for me, a way of communicating with my ancestors and the spirit world and a way of releasing emotions that might have gotten stuck to me. Maybe my characters experience depression because they are enslaved or because their son is moving on without them, but it’s no matter if the circumstances are the same as my own. It helps my own sadness to relay their experiences. It also just temporarily removes me from this world, and I am more equipped to deal with worldly matters with perspective because of the break. It is the easiest thing to love, and the love is contagious in the sense that it makes it easier to tolerate the aspects of the publishing industry that irritate me. The creative piece makes everything else worth it.   

Maurice: You're speaking my language, Margaret. I love a sad song or film. They make me feel better. And creating a sad story makes me feel best. It's an incomparable feeling. I'm a better person when I'm writing. Your work conveys that sadness so well, but also the complexity of hope and being alive. I always feel uplifted when I finish reading your work. What would you tell your younger self about the practice of writing, publishing, and the writing life? Any advice or warnings?

Margaret: Wow, that’s a great question to end this. I would tell my younger self what I tell my students, that resilience is arguably the most necessary qualification for this job, more than talent even. And then there’s something else I’m still trying to learn, something I’d tell my younger self and something I’d tell my current self too—I’m trying to edge the ego out of my work. I miss the purity of my debut experience. I was so thrilled to be published and I was so naïve, I truly didn’t know what prizes or lists were out there. It was enough that there was a book that I had created. I remember the night before A Kind of Freedom was nominated for the National Book Award; coincidentally, my husband had asked me about that very award. We were in my father’s house, and my father owned a copy of The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, which of course had won the award many years earlier. My husband asked if my book was eligible and I said no it wasn’t, not until next year. I had no clue and didn’t care anyway. It’s different now, but what I’d tell my younger/current self is, try to maintain and hold the innocence of the creative stage, even when you’re past that point and the book is out in the world. That’s where the power is. All you’re wanting to do in that place is to tell a good story that resonates with people who need it. That’s the only thing you can control anyway.