My Monticello

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Guernica: Tell us about the origin of “My Monticello,” the titular story in your collection. What were the seeds, and how did it bloom in the way that it did? Lillian Smith Book Awards Recognize Short Story Collection, Nonfiction Book for Furthering Social Justice | UGA Libraries". www.libs.uga.edu . Retrieved 2022-06-06.

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

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson's book is an important work and easily the best thing I have read this year. Each story is completely different in style, yet all solidly land their message. This is her first published book and it certainly holds a great promise for the future. Five stars. a magnificent debut that holds so much in its gaze―great love and great oppression, tremendous individual courage and systemic racism, futures of joyful justice and futures of extremism. This breathtaking, artful book is a gift." By the time you read this, you may have figured it out. Perhaps your mother told you, though she was only privy to my timeworn thesis—never to my aim or full intention. Still, maybe the truth of it breached your insides:Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. And Monticello, where they stop on their way to the Piedmont Mountains, is the slave plantation of one of the founding fathers of America, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. Da’Naisha is a descendant of Jefferson through his historically documented affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. That Johnson chooses to make her protagonist a descendent of Jefferson reveals the twin legacies of the man in contemporary America: Da’Naisha embodies the desire for freedom, but she is also cursed by the legacy of slavery. More than 80% of our finances come from readers like you. And we’re constantly working to produce a magazine that deserves you—a magazine that is a platform for ideas fostering justice, equality, and civic action. 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. 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.

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The First Street neighbourhood has a tight, communal spirit: “Older kids keeping an eye on the younger ones,” Da’Naisha observes, “like we were all cousins.” And this spirit endures once they’ve been uprooted from their homes. As they make their journey through Monticello and into the mountain, the group agrees to “collect and share all the food and drink we found on the mountain”. I also based the neighborhood in the novella on First Street, which is right near my home. It’s very diverse and includes a cluster of public housing. In the story the characters are mostly fleeing from public housing. There are people from all over, who immigrated to the United States from all over the world. There are people of all colors, people of all ages, people of all ways of being in that space. I wanted the neighborhood in the book to have that quality as well, as I believe in the possibility of placing a lot of different people together and then finding some commonality. Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s debut novel, My Monticello, is a meditation on how the brutal past – and, in particular, the legacies of slavery – can be felt in the present.Library of Virginia Annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards". www.lva.virginia.gov . Retrieved 2022-08-22. I rarely read the blurb for a book, so at first was confused. I thought it was a historical fiction novel. WRONG. It is 5 short stories and a novella and the time period is NOW. NOW with all the racial problems we are beginning to recognize as endemic in the US. The narrative is bold, harrowing and unfolds with urgency. Johnson’s collection is . . . concerned with issues surrounding racial identity and the legacies of slavery and racism. Together they create an unnerving portrait of a country wrestling with its ugly past and present.” Short, precise sentences match the urgency of the story, and this economy seems also to inform the dialogue. Brief exchanges are incomplete; the dialogue at times more closely resembles a series of monologues, as each escapee is consumed with worry about the likely outcome of their situation. 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.