THOROUGHLY MODERN MARLON

NOVELEST MARLON JAMES WRITES HISTORICAL FICTION, BUT JOINS HIS STUDENTS ON THE POST-MODERN PLAYGROUND.

BY | AMY GOETZMAN '93

THERE ARE WRITERS who bemoan the Internet, and the ways it has transformed books and reading. And then there are writers who embrace it, distractions and all. “I am an Internet junkie, that’s my problem,” says creative writing professor Marlon James, who maintains the literary blog “Among Other Things,” fights a tenacious Facebook addiction, and can be found on YouTube promoting his latest novel, The Book of the Night Women.

“The Web is one-third blessing, two-thirds curse for the writer who doesn’t want to write,” he says. “I don’t know where I stand as a writer, but I am the finest procrastinator of my generation.” In other words, he knows exactly what his students are doing when they should be doing their homework. “But rest assured there will be three Armageddons before I hook up with Twitter.”

At 38, the Jamaican novelist is one generation older than his students, and it’s a critical divide; he was raised in a pre-online time and place, loving books. His students can’t imagine a world that isn’t at their fingertips, and that world is a veritable playground of amusements that keep them from writing. But it also can be a powerful tool: James says he researched most of Night Women, which takes place in slavery-era Jamaica, online. “I would never have attempted that novel without it. If I’d had to use conventional methods of research, it would have taken years,” he says.

James came to writing—and teaching, for that matter—in a roundabout way, after first spending six years in advertising and film production. “Yeah, it was fun,” he admits. “But it did nothing for me as a writer. I wasted those years. I believe that if you are a creative person and you spend too much time in a compromised career, eventually it’s going to affect you. You will lose that talent.”

He got out in time. One day, while reading Salman Rushdie’s Shame, James looked up and thought, “I should write.” He enrolled in the low-residency master’s of creative writing program at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, living in New York half the year and Jamaica the rest of the year. (He has a bachelor’s degree in literature from the University of the West Indies.) He wrote his first book, John Crow’s Devil, and watched 70 publishers reject it before he destroyed it—or so he thought. When the manuscript resurfaced months later, he found a publisher. (Discouraged writers, let that be a lesson.)

Now he pushes his own students to use their time wisely. The dreadlocked, supremely easygoing James guides his classes past the pitfalls that befall many young writers. “The margins of my notebooks from his classes are filled with the words from his ‘banned words’ list. We aren’t allowed to use these words in our writing ... words like ‘wafting’ and just about every adverb,” says Anna Rockne ’10, who signed up for James’s “Crafts of Writing” class after taking his creative writing class, because she knew “I would be getting a lot of blunt feedback and suggestions for improvement, and laughing a lot.”

Says James, “The one thing that separates brilliant people from everyone else is that inexhaustible capacity for hard work. I’ll say, ‘This is very good. Now rewrite.’ If you feel confident in your talent, then the work is not ready. Every time you start a new story you’re supposed to feel anxious, you’re supposed to feel nervous, you’re supposed to think, This is the one that is going to destroy me. I am going to fail. When my students tell me that, then I say, ‘Good! Now you’re ready.’ ”

James came to Macalester in 2007, first as a visiting professor. Now on the tenure track, he’s found a nurturing community in Mac’s English Department. “I lean on all of them,” he says. “The creative writers here are really cool— Peter Bognanni, Wang Ping; it’s cool having people I can talk to on multiple levels, as a professor, as a writer. The level of discussion here, even on trivial matters, is pretty high.”

Meanwhile, he’s back online, researching a new novel to be set in 1920s Europe. The Kingston native has quickly become one of the young lions of post-colonial literature, in the company of Junot Díaz, Zadie Smith, and Sherman Alexie, although his penchant for the past has earned him comparisons to Toni Walker and Gabriel García Márquez. His inimitable island patois in Night Women makes vivid the unspeakably cruel lives endured by the millions of slaves who worked Jamaica’s sugar and coffee plantations under British rule. “There’s nothing you can do about history. But grab a pen and suddenly, you have power. There’s a reason why the oppressors burn the books first,” says James, adding that the horrors he encountered in his research nearly caused him to shut down.

Perhaps the ghosts of the past spur James to join his students in the distractions of the modern world. Online, the self-described nerd writes passionately and cantankerously about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, rock music, politics, and race. As an outspoken black writer, he is a lifeline to Mac’s students of color. “While our department is incredibly diverse, especially for a very white-dominated field—permanent faculty include Chinese, Turkish, Indian, and Latino women, and our current chair, Daylanne English, specializes in African-American literature—having Marlon here has been very important to our African American English majors,” says department coordinator Anna Brailovsky.

James sees the Internet as a staging place for the next wave of African literature, a place where kindred voices can gather. “I wished I had a community of writers back when I started writing, somebody to tell me I wasn’t crazy for trying to do this,” says James—who only now knows that he wasn’t.