Portland State Magazine Spring 2014

12 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE SPRING 2014 IN HIS DOCUMENTARY Jackson says his lowest point was when his mother begged him for drugs, for a fix. “Mom was always on drugs so I became apathetic to selling drugs to someone else’s mother,” he says. But “that made me think, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” A year into his bachelor’s degree, he was arrested for pos- session of a gun and crack, a lot of crack. It was the first time he’d gotten in trouble; he’d never even been suspended from school. He took a break from PSU to serve his 16-month sentence. “Had I not made that mistake, I wouldn’t have that experience to draw from as a writer,” Jackson says. He started his novel in prison, infusing The Residue Years with observations that could only come from someone who’s been there. “And believe me,” his character muses in prison, “sometimes it’s as if I could die here, fall comatose on a mat- tress so thin, it takes a prayer for a wink of sleep.” He writes about job hunting as an ex-convict: “The first few times you tell the truth and hope for goodwill, but afterwards you take your chance on lie.” He continued writing after college in PSU’s Master of Writing program. “I wasn’t much of a reader,” Jackson says. He felt like he was behind other students, but “I saw the work other people were producing and felt like I could catch up. That heartened me. I started to think I could really be a writer.” McGregor remembers that while writing seemed new to Jackson, he was driven by enthusiasm. “Converts are the most zealous about things,” McGregor says. “He took the bull by the horns and was one of three people in the class that got a piece published.” Jackson’s first published piece appeared in the Portland Tribune , and was about three friends from Jefferson High School whom he thought should make it to the NBA. The story gave Jackson a chance to write about the world as he saw it—“a world where frankly most of our students don’t have experience,” McGregor says. For Jackson, sharing a personal experience, having a teacher invest in the final product, and seeing his byline uncovered a passion for the craft. “I’ve had students who were strippers, drug addicts, alcoholics,” McGregor says. “Students who write about their stories, especially in nonfiction, find their story has worth in other people’s eyes and adds to their ability to overcome their circumstances. “They have tangible results,” McGregor adds. “They don’t just learn something, they bring something out into the world and people respond to it.” AFTER HE EARNED his master’s, Jackson moved to New York City—where the writers live, he says—and started a second master’s program in creative writing at New York Uni- versity. There he read a short story by John Edgar Wideman, an African American author whose writing style resonated with Jackson. “It opened up my sense of voice,” he says. “I had been under the impression that I had to sound like a writer. He understood where I was from—both parts of my life.” Wideman inspired him to return to the novel he’d started in prison, beginning a long path to publication. The book had soul—what The New York Times book review called “warmth and wit, and a hard-won wisdom about the intersection of race and poverty in America”—but not structure. Jackson wrote, revised, rewrote and re-revised The Residue Years until finally an agent agreed to pitch it to publishers. It was rejected repeatedly—“we stopped counting at like 18,” Jackson says— until eventually Bloomsbury picked it up. The novel has since won glowing reviews. Growing up in northeast Portland, everyone had a dream of getting out, Jackson says in his documentary: “The sexiest dream is to be a basketball star. The second is to be a hustler.” “The expectation is that you’re not going to make it,” he says. “I made my way through life like that until I realized that I could be great.”  Sara Hottman is a PSU political science student and a graduate assistant in the Office of University Communications. Mitchell Jackson promotes his novel at a the 2013 Bookexpo America in New York City. He started his novel in prison, infusing The Residue Years with observations that could only come from someone who’s been there.