Jesus Boy @ Books & Books

Sometimes you think you know a person, but you really don’t. This was the impression that I got when I attended Preston Allen’s reading from Jesus Boy at Books and Books on Friday, March 19, 2010.


Wearing his now trademark hat, Preston read two chapters from Jesus Boy, his February-June romance about Elwyn Parker and Elaine Morrisohn. In the sections, “The Little Preacher” and “The Boy from Opa-Locka,” we were introduced to Benny, Elwyn’s half-brother, and Benny’s girl friend, Marie. The contrasts between the hyper-religious Elwyn and the secular Benny could not have been more distinct, and Preston’s reading clarified the differences in worldview of these two brothers-from-another-mother.


It was, however, when Preston opened the floor to questions that I was in for a shocker. One of the first questions was innocent enough: “How long did it take you to write the book?”


Preston gave the details: “I began the first drafts of Jesus Boy when I was about eighteen and finished it when I was closer to Sister Morrisohn’s age. When I began the book, I knew the character of Elwyn very well. By the time I finished the novel, I knew Sister Morrisohn a lot better.”


Fair enough. Then came a question that I thought I could have answered: “Who were your influences in writing Jesus Boy?”


When Preston said “John Cheever” I almost fell off the chair. John Cheever! How did a white New England writer come to influence a Black, Honduran writer who now lives in Miami?


Preston explained:

It was "The Country Husband" that inspired "The Leap," the first section of Jesus Boy that I wrote.


Francis Weed is in a plane that almost crashes, but doesn't. The plane emergency-lands safely in a field, and since no one is injured, the rescue workers at the site get the passengers home at almost the exact time they would have gotten home on a regular work day. Francis tries to tell his wife that he was in an extraordinary event, a plane that almost crashed, the same one being reported on the radio playing behind her, but she is too immersed in the petty day to day problems of the suburban middle class housewife to even listen to him. In fact, once he is sucked back into that routine, no one will listen to him about the plane or anything, except for the teenaged baby sitter, with whom he begins a troublesome affair.


I was married to my first wife at the time. And sucked into a middle class day to day routine of my own, I found that many of my near fatal crashes went ignored. Sister Morrisohn was my baby sitter, so to speak...I understood Cheever's story completely.

And I thought I knew Preston’s work! The audience questions made me aware of some aspects of his work of which I was unaware, and it’s one of the reasons why I like to attend author readings—I never know what extra stuff I’ll learn that will affect my reading of the text. And many times it takes an attentive audience to bring out the best in a writer.


When Preston talked about the relationship between Jesus Boy and Cheever’s “The Country Husband,” it suddenly changed how I saw both stories. I guess it was like what T.S. Eliot said in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

Preston has changed how I read Cheever and I will certainly re-read “The Country Husband.” If I’d known about the relationship before the reading, I would have liked to follow up with certain clarifications.


But I guess that will be up to his audiences in New York at the PEN World Voices Festival where he will be reading at Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette Street, New York City on Thursday, April 29, 2010 @ 7–8:30 p.m. and at Scandinavia House, 58 Park Avenue, New York City, on Friday, April 30, 2010 @ 3:30–5 p.m.


It's worth looking forward to.

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About the author:


Preston L. Allen, a recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, is the author of the critically acclaimed novel All or Nothing (Akashic) and the award-winning collection Churchboys and Other Sinners (Carolina Wren Press). His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals and have been anthologized in Brown Sugar (Penguin), Miami Noir (Akashic), and Las Vegas Noir (Akashic). He lives in South Florida.

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• Book Review: Jesus Boy by Preston Allen (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)

Book Review: Jesus Boy by Preston Allen

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to church, Preston Allen writes Jesus Boy, a story about a young Christian, Elwyn Parker, who falls in love with an older woman, Elaine Morrisohn, a matriarch in the Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters.

In many ways this was a difficult book to review, not only because Preston Allen is my friend and colleague at Miami Dade College, but also because of my own history with fundamentalist Christianity and Preston’s ability to depict the tortured consciousness of a teenage true believer at war with his faith and his flesh:

At sixteen, I met my first great temptation, and I yielded with surprisingly little resistance, I who had proclaimed myself strong in the Lord. There had been, it seems, a chink in my armor, through which Satan had thrust his wicked sword (34).

And as if dealing with his hyperactive conscience wasn’t enough, Elwyn’s plight is exacerbated by Elaine Morrisohn’s deliberate pursuit of him, even during church services:

As she sat down with a satisfied smile on her face, she knew she was being naughty. She shouldn’t have shouted like that, but she was trying to send him a message by shouting like she did during orgasm…She just wanted to rip off her clothes and fly to him. He was so tight and so fresh and so full of juice…he was a lean, strong fresh-tasting black boy—he looked good enough to eat (77).

But Elwyn wants to be saved. Desperately. Yet the God that Elwyn serves is a God of wrath who is eager to punish sinners, especially women who wear pants or jewelry and who listen to “worldly” music. Growing up in this kind of environment Elwyn becomes a holier-than-thou preacher—an attitude that he exhibits long after he has left the fold:

God’s people have to be apart. They have to be different. Christians these days—I don’t understand them at all. They go to parties, they drink, they have premarital sex, they wear the fashions of the world. Even the music. These days you can’t tell the difference between a church song and hip hop (361).

What is remarkable about Jesus Boy is Allen’s use of point of view. He writes as an insider, someone who knows the secrets within the black community and reports the intimacies of people who want to live, love, and praise God. And he does this without resorting to stereotypes or clichés. Allen explores the black family and black religion without the filters of white validation, effectively banishing the "double consciousness" theory of W. E. B. Du Bois. The characters in Jesus Boy exist in a milieu in which whites exist peripherally. Jesus Boy asserts without rancor: This is our story.

And this perhaps is one of the major accomplishments of the novel. Allen uncovers the hypocrisies within the black church in the way that James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain exposed the vision of its adherents—a world divided not along racial lines, but between the “saved” and the unsaved. And because being “saved” requires denial of the most basic human impulses, the “saved” are always in state of guilt over the state of their soul:

Demons, I was certain, frolicked in my room after the lights were turned off. At night, I watched stricken with fear, as the headlights of passing automobiles cast animated shadows on the walls of my room. Only God, who I believed loved my singing voice, could protect me from the wickedness lurking in the dark. Thus, I sang all of God’s favorite tunes—hummed when I didn’t know the words—in order to earn his protection (13).

 

There is much to admire about Jesus Boy. From the cover designed like an old family Bible to the genealogy list of the begetting that took place in Elwyn’s family, the novel has hints of Faulkner with an oversexed patriarch and a family history of incest, abuse, and illicit romance. Preston Allen has truly written what Dennis Lehane has deemed a “tender masterpiece.”

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Preston L. Allen, a recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, is the author of the critically acclaimed novel All or Nothing (Akashic) and the award-winning collection Churchboys and Other Sinners (Carolina Wren Press). His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals and have been anthologized in Brown Sugar (Penguin), Miami Noir (Akashic), and Las Vegas Noir (Akashic). He lives in South Florida.

All or Nothing in the New York Times

Preston Allen's remarkable novel, All or Nothing, gets a rave review in the New York Times.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Nevertheless, just as he’s finally lost his family, P does win — and big. This leads him to Vegas, where he plays in big-stakes poker tournaments, sporting the requisite black Stetson of the “whale,” or perennial high-roller. Even when his fortunes improve, P senses his spiritual bankruptcy, eventually attaining a form of sobriety through solitaire. He still haunts the casinos, however, as a sort of Ghost of Jackpots Past, dispensing funds and cryptic wisdom to desperate gamblers. (That he sleeps with some of them complicates his newfound saintliness.)

Black Enough?

Preston Allen, whose novel All or Nothing will be reviewed in the New York Times this Sunday (June 15th, 2008), writes a must-read post about race, ethnicity, and storytelling.

clipped from allornothingthenovel.blogspot.com Yes, when I was a young writer, I used to feel self-imposed pressure when I did not write black stories. I had stuff that I wrote for myself, and then I had “serious” stuff that I wrote for the black community. Like I said, I was young. At the same time, I was very much interested in science fiction, thrillers, and classic American lit 101, most of which did not have much to do, thematically, with African Americans. Thus, many of my stories were already “roaming beyond the African American thing,” but I felt a little bit guilty about it. Like I was selling out my race. I was young. So young. When I grew up, I said, “I am going to write what I write and let the chips fall where they may. I will master my craft and become the best writer that I can be. Readers will like me because I am a good storyteller, not because I have a certain color skin.”

So, You Want to be a Writer?

Here's a great opportunity to begin a conversation with Preston L. Allen, author of All or Nothing (Akashic Books 2007). Preston will field your questions with his characteristic wit and tangent. All you have to do is read these books and become a regular visitor to this blog: http://allornothingthenovel.blogspot.com/

A. Manette Ansay: Blue Water

A. Manette Ansay: Vinegar Hill

Alice Munro: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship

Alice Sebold: The Lovely Bones

Alice Walker: The Color Purple

Angie Cruz: Let It Rain Coffee

Anne Rice: Interview With the Vampire

Bernays Painter: What If?

Carol Taylor: Wanderlust

Carolyn Ferrell: Don't Erase Me

Chris Abani: Song for Night

Christopher Moore: Lamb

Colin Channer: Iron Balloons

Dedra Johnson: Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow

Dennis Lehane: Mystic River

Felicia Luna Lemus: Like Son

Geoffrey Philp: Uncle Obadiah and the Alien

Gonzalo Barr: Last Flight of Jose Luis Balboa

Gordon Parks: The Learning Tree

Hallema: Mass Deception

Ivonne Lamazares: The Sugar Island

James W. Hall: Gone Wild

Jarret Keene: Las Vegas Noir

JK Rowling: Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows

John Cheever: The Stories of John Cheever

John Dufresne: Lie That Tells a Truth

John Dufresne: Johnny Too Bad

John Rechy: City of Night

Junot Diaz: Drown

Kwame Dawes: She's Gone

Laura Valeri: The Kinds of Things Saints Do

Leonard Nash: You Can't Get There From Here and Other Stories

Les Standiford: Miami Noir

Les Standiford: Meet You in Hell

Lewis Nordan: Music of the Swamp

Lynne Barrett: Secret Names of Women

Martha Frankel: Hats and Eyeglasses

Michael Craig: The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King

Pat MacEnulty: From May to December

Philip Roth: Human Stain

Preston L. Allen: Come With Me Sheba

Preston L. Allen: Hoochie Mama

Preston L. Allen: All or Nothing

Preston L. Allen: Churchboys and Other Sinners

Richard Wright: Native Son

Sapphire: Push

Simon Winchester: The Professor and the Madman

Stephen King: On Writing

Stephen King: Different Seasons

T Cooper: Lipshitz Six

Uzodinma Iweala: Beasts of No Nation

Vicki Hendricks: Cruel Poetry

William Goldman: Boys and Girls Together

William Zinnser: On Writing Well

Yann Martel: Life of Pi

No question is out of bounds. E-mail him at PrestonTheWriterAllen@gmail.com, and be prepared to laugh and learn. Preston also posts a growing list of some pretty great and often unusual books that you should read if you want to be a writer.

Preston L. Allen, who was born on Roatan (Honduras), is the author of the novels Hoochie Mama, Bounce, Come with Me, Sheba, and the short story collection Churchboys and Other Sinners. His stories have also appeared in several of the Brown Sugar series. Preston is the winner of the Sonja H. Stone Prize in Literature and a recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Fiction. He lives in Miami, Florida.

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Preston Allen's Blog

Preston Allen has started a blog, Preston L. Allen's Ing and Bling Book Review: A blog for lovers of the printed word (novels, short stories, poems--the Ing so to speak), popular film, politics, and casinos (the Bling).

In his initial offering, Preston is running a poll, "Do you support Las Vegas style casino gambling in Florida?", and Cash 3 and Play 4 numbers that he's dreamt about.

For the literary, he has a video of Norman Mailer and a list of recent great reads: Johnny Too Bad Stories by John Dufresne; The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini; The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; The Last Flight of Jose Luis Balboa by Gonzalo Barr, and Let It Rain Coffee by Angie Cruz.

If his eclectic mix of religion, literature, and gambling still doesn't tweak your interest, you can read "Interesting Gambling News" or check out Preston's latest novel, All or Nothing, about a hapless gambler, P., who lives in South Florida.

I've already subscribed via Google Reader because I know his posts will always be interesting.

2008 is already looking up!

***

Preston will be reading at St. Thomas University (16401 NW 37th Avenue, Miami, Florida) on Wednesday, November 28, 2007 at 6:00 p.m. For more information, please e-mail Professor Conley (jconley@stu.edu) or Ms. Jensen (pjensen@stu.edu).

In My Own Words: Preston Allen

Just So Stories

One of my earliest reading influences was the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. I think this has something to do with my approach to storytelling--though the stories in that book are largely forgotten and from what parts I recall, they were not just so. But I liked the idea of a story that was just so. This is the way it is, and that's that. So I guess I like to write stories that tell the truth, or perhaps "expose" or "reveal" the truth.

By this, I do not mean that I want to shock people, though my stories are sometimes shocking in their frankness. I want the readers to come away from my stories with their heads nodding in recognition. I want them to say, "This is the way we are. This is what we do." But I don't preach in my works. I don't tell you what to do. To use a medical metaphor, I'm not the doctor who writes the prescription—I'm the one who sticks the needle in your finger and draws your blood, I'm the one who grabs your testicles and tells you to cough, the one who reads your x-ray, the one who tells you that you're pregnant.

Maybe there's another way to look at it. It's hard to do, but I try to study people without judging them too much. I want who they really are to shine through without too much interference from me. Case in point, in my collection, Churchboys and Other Sinners (Carolina Wren Press 2003). The recurring characters are Elwyn and Sister Morrisohn, two born-again fundamentalists who share a secret and forbidden love. The thing that pleases me most about their story is the reaction I get from my fundamentalist friends who say: "You told a good story, a funny story, but without demeaning their Christian belief. How did you do it?" I am not exactly sure how to answer that, but I do know that when I wrote those parts of the book I tried my hardest to write it from inside their world. I became who they are, I believed what they believe, I tried to think like they do—and with no cynicism. To my way of thinking, that is the only way to get to truth without being condescending and/or cynical; and you still get to be funny—funny in the sense of how honestly funny (peculiar) people are.

Similarly, in my new novel, All or Nothing (Akashic 2007), I do not judge the protagonist, the profligate, wastrel, degenerate gambler P—though he is all of those adjectival things. I simply tell his story the way he would tell it, which allows it to flow to its logical conclusion. People who have read this book are saying things like: "The book is about addiction—any addiction that you or I may have—gambling just so happens to be this poor protagonist's chosen vice." I'm getting some pretty good reviews of this book and they all seem to be saying much the same thing—that the book is honest though over the top (and that is only because gamblers live an over the top life). This is the way it is. There is no other way to say it. All or Nothing is a just so book on gamblers and gambling.

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All or Nothing: Review

Category: FICTION

A gambler's hands and heart perpetually tremble in this raw story of addiction. "We gamble to gamble. We play to play. We don't play to win." Right there, P, desperado narrator of this crash-'n'-burn novella, sums up the madness. A black man in Miami, P has graduated from youthful nonchalance (a '79 Buick Electra 225) to married-with-a-kid pseudo-stability, driving a school bus in the shadow of the Biltmore. He lives large enough to afford two wide-screen TVs, but the wife wants more. Or so he rationalizes, as he hits the open-all-night Indian casinos, "controlling" his jones with a daily ATM maximum of $1,000. Low enough to rob the family piggy bank for slot-machine fodder, he sinks yet further, praying that his allergic 11-year-old eat forbidden strawberries—which will send him into a coma, from which he'll emerge with the winning formula for Cash 3 (the kid's supposedly psychic when he's sick). All street smarts and inside skinny, the book gives readers a contact high that zooms to full rush when P scores $160,000 on one lucky machine ("God is the God of Ping-ping," he exults, as the coins flood out). The loot's enough to make the small-timer turn pro, as he heads, flush, to Vegas to cash in. But in Sin City, karmic payback awaits. Swanky hookers, underworld "professors" deeply schooled in sure-fire systems to beat the house, manic trips to the CashMyCheck store for funds to fuel the ferocious need—Allen's brilliant at conveying the hothouse atmosphere of hell-bent gaming. Fun time in the Inferno.

Author: Allen, Preston L.

Date: SEPTEMBER 15, 2007

Publisher: Akashic Pages: 280

Price (paperback): $14.95

Publication Date: 11/29/2007 0:00:00

ISBN: 978-1-933354-41-5

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-933354-41-5

Kirkus

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Preston Allen and Dedra Johnson will reading at Books and Books on Thursday, November 1, 2007.

Review of All or Nothing by Preston Allen

Allen’s dark and insightful novel depicts narrator P’s sobering descent into his gambling addiction. P, a Miami native, is a school bus driver and desperate gambler who spends his nights (and many of his days) in South Florida casinos.

Both a surprisingly likable and an often despicable character, P is a perpetual loser with a $1,000-a-day habit who lies to his wife and scrounges in the seats of his bus looking for loose change the kids left behind. He takes the small amounts of cash that his destitute, dying mother offers him to support his obsession. P knows he’s sick, but he doesn’t want any help; he lusts for the next big score.

Finally, his luck begins to change, transforming him from a broke degenerate into a legendary professional gambler in a signature black cowboy hat. The well-written novel takes the reader on a chaotic ride as P chases, finds and loses fast, easy money. Allen (Churchboys and Other Sinners) reveals how addiction annihilates its victims and shows that winning isn’t always so different from losing.

From Publishers Weekly (August 13, 2007)

***

Preston L. Allen is the author of the novels Hoochie Mama, Bounce, Come with Me, Sheba, and the short story collection, Churchboys and Other Sinners. His stories have also appeared in several of the Brown Sugar series. Preston is the winner of the Sonja H. Stone Prize in Literature and a recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Fiction. He lives in Miami, Florida.

Five Questions with Preston Allen

Preorder your copy of All or Nothing by Preston Allen

ISBN 978-1-933354-41-5

Forthcoming from Akashic Books: All or Nothing by Preston L. Allen

Preston L. Allen's witty, charming, and very likable school bus driver, named P, is a desperate gambler. He has blown the hundred thousand dollars he won at the casino six months ago, but his wife and family still think he's loaded. P spins out of control on the addict's downward spiral of dependency, paranoia, and depression, as he must find ways to keep coming up with the money to fool his family and fund his growing addiction. The bets get bigger and bigger, until finally, faced with the ultimate financial crisis, he hits it really big. Yet winning, he soon learns, is just the beginning of a deeper problem.

The one constant for P--who rises from wage-earner to millionaire and back again in his roller-coaster-ride of a life--is that he must gamble. That his son has died, that his wife is leaving him, that his girlfriend has been arrested, that he has no money, that he has more money than he could ever have dreamed--are all lesser concerns for P as he constantly seeks out new gambling opportunities.

While other books on gambling seek either to sermonize on the addiction or to glorify it by highlighting its few prosperous celebrities, All or Nothing is an honest, straightforward account of what it is like to live as a gambler--whether a high-rolling millionaire playing $1,000-ante poker in Las Vegas or a regular guy at the local Indian casino praying for a miracle as he feeds his meager life savings into the unforgiving slot machine. All or Nothing is the first novel to dig beneath the veneer to explore the gambler's unique and complex relationship with money. If you've ever wanted to get into the heart and psyche of a compulsive gambler, here is your chance.

All or Nothing
by Preston L. Allen
ISBN 978-1-933354-34-7
Fiction l 280 pages | $22.95
Forthcoming: November 2007

Preston L. Allen is a recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship and author of the thriller Hoochie Mama, as well as the collection Churchboys and Other Sinners. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals and have been anthologized in Brown Sugar (Penguin) and Miami Noir (Akashic). He lives in South Florida.

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Photos of Preston Allen & Vicki Hendricks: "Noir Night" @ Books and Books.

A Mother's Legacy: The Gift of Laughter

It had always been there, but I never saw it. Or perhaps I was too close. Although I can’t see why. No, a better answer is that I was focused so much on Preston’s talents as a writer and teacher, and it took a funeral for me to notice.

On Sunday, March 18, 2007, the funeral for Iris Eleanor Gale Allen, Preston’s mother (or Aunty Iris as her family called her) was held at Mount Pisgah Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Although she had been ailing for some time, her death came as a shock, for no one’s ever prepared for a parent’s death. It was especially hard on Preston’s son, Quinn, who had grown into a fine young man from the Yugio trading boy who had attended my twentieth wedding anniversary four years ago. Yet here he was, standing beside his father and three uncles, and when the time came for his reflection, a poem Preston had written, Quinn read with poise and eloquence beyond his twelve years. Although I never met her, I can say Aunty Iris (I am claiming this intimacy) would have been proud. For in a way, I did know her. She reminded me in many ways of my mother.

One of the main reasons for my friendship with Preston has been the remarkable similarities in our lives. Besides growing up in the Caribbean and trying to figure out our place in the diaspora, Preston and I were brought up by matriarchs who were grounded in fundamentalist religions. We both went to colleges in Florida, met our wives at Miami-Dade College, and we’ve both lived and worked as writers/teachers in Miami for the past twenty years. Sometimes when I stroll over to the English department, my former colleagues remind me of the afternoons when they’d eavesdrop on the conversations that Preston and I would have about O’Connor, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Pushkin, and the Miami Dolphins.

We’d open the doors to our offices that faced each other, our brains still on fire from writing all morning, and grade papers, trade manuscripts, and crack jokes. In fact, that’s what I remember most about those conversations. Our laughter. Preston has a great sense of humor. He once told me about his starving student days (he still has to write about them) and how he “volunteered” to become a patient for some dentist interns on the condition that he would release the university from all indemnity. He signed the forms, got eighty dollars, and he’s been in pain ever since. Although he was describing a horrible experience, the way he told the story (I’m laughing even as I write this) was so funny, I had tears in my eyes from the laughter. We spent many evenings like this: telling jokes, trading stories, and laughing.

Late in the evening after the din and clamor, we’d settle into a pattern of quietly talking about our deepest fears and desires. Would we make it as writers? After so many rejections, should we try self publishing? Would we get a review in the Herald? Would we get promoted this year? Would we turn out like our fathers? For we wanted to be better than our fathers. We wanted to be generative, supportive, protective men for everyone in our lives.

Yet when I got the e-mail about the funeral at a Seventh-Day Adventist church, I was a bit hesitant. It had been a long time since I’d been to an Adventist meeting, and my wife, good Catholic that she is, had never ventured inside those Protestant doors. We sat in the pews and waited as the family and extended family filed in, and once the invocation was given, it seemed as if we were in a regular American church with readings from the Old and New Testaments. However, once the reflections began, it was clear that we were at a Caribbean/Honduran funeral with the requisite singing of every single verse of hymns such as “as “In Times Like These (You Need a Savior)” and sermon by fiery preacher--Jonathan Edwards with a West Indian accent.

As we sweated through the sermon that ended the service, what struck me more than the preacher’s exhortations was the deep sincerity and appreciation that the speakers and the audience had for Aunty Iris. Many had come from all parts of the world to honor a woman who had given assistance in any way that she could—sometimes opening her door to strangers who stayed days, weeks, months, or years in her home (another thing Preston and I have in common). Speaker after speaker commented on her kindness, and I couldn’t help but think, how many of us, as sophisticated as we are and locked away in the hermetic cells of academia, have touched lives in such as profound was as this simple woman from Roatan? How many people are going to show up at our funerals, not to talk about how our books, or ideas influenced their lives, but how we provided, food clothing, or shelter without thinking about the IRS deduction? And Aunty Iris went beyond that. The “fatherless boys" testified about how she drove around in her station wagon and took them to church on Sabbath. Many were thankful that Aunty Iris, despite the fact that they had sometimes fallen by the wayside, always loved them and stood by them in times of need: “Whenever she was in the room, we knew everything would be all right”.

And when the time came for Preston and his brothers to speak, in the midst of the congregation and although he was the shortest (“We got the height and he got the brains,” Cameron explained), Preston was slowly, before my eyes, assuming a gravitas that I had never seen before, and his wife, brothers, son, mother-in law, the entire congregation watched the transformation in awe. Preston spoke about his mother's legacy and her sense of humor. He reaffirmed the bond that a mother and son share, especially when a father is not present. He knew he could call her up at any time and talk to her about anything and she would listen. Even though she was a Christian woman, Aunty Iris would listen to everything because she, too, had lived. She knew about this world that breaks the heart of its lovers, and still she laughed. Whether she was in pain or nearly comatose, she taught him always “to be of good cheer.” It felt good to be in the midst of the congregation and to listen to Preston speak about the value of a life lived in the service of others and delivered with a gentle wit and compassion. Preston's homily had more of an impact on me than the preacher’s rant.

And when we came outside into the midday sun where the hearse waited to take his mother’s body to its final resting place, we could hear the laughter of Aunty Iris in the voices of her sons, grandsons and all the fatherless boys of Miami. Aunty Iris was probably smiling and laughing as we cried and laughed during the service. I know she was. I heard your laughter, Aunty Iris. I also saw your son transform into the man he always wanted to be--the man you knew he always was—that I and the host of witnesses now saw. And I knew you (and all the saints who were smiling and laughing) were proud.

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Tags: Caribbean Caribbean writers South Florida writers African American writers family personal

Podcast of Preston Allen's "Full Metal Sonrisa"

The story, "Full Metal Sonrisa," is from a collection entitled "Full Metal Jitney." I am also toying with the idea of calling it "Terror Gang," but I am afraid of what the word "terror" might imply these days to the American reader. My Terror Gang is not a foreign threat appearing suddenly on homeland soil, but a home-grown throwback to the wild and roaring desperados of the late 20s--in fact, the Dillinger Gang called itself the Terror Gang, and that is my model. My guys, the protagonists of the various pieces, become this neo-Terror Gang, and they are within the plot, actual blood descendents of the original desperados of the 20s and 30s. For example, the group recruits the protagonist of “Full Metal Sonrisa,” Clyde Saxony, (later to be called Killer Clyde Saxony, great-grand nephew of Clyde Barrow) when he has nowhere else to turn. It works like that. Despite the implication, the Terror Gang, however, is not a mere repository for outcasts, but a gathering of those whom the violence of North American culture (Miami, to be specific) has transformed, and Clyde Saxony represents a truly atavistic American kind of hero: the self-made man, the rugged individualist, the anti-hero, the badman--the kind of hero that inspires in us equal doses of admiration and fear.

Schoolteacher Clyde Saxony is important because he begins the "plot" of the collection (if a collection of variously themed stories can be said to have a plot) with his crime and he ends it with his death. Note also, that he is African American, though of the Barrow (white) bloodline. While there is no story in the collection that focuses on race, blacks and whites in the book seem always to be appearing "related" to each other, by actual blood or through thematic action; and well they should, since this is subtlety a book about history and the history of America is certainly written in black and white blood. So, although the un-named white protagonist in "Strong," (another story from the collection) makes it clear that he is not black, he speaks in Ebonics, walks with a swagger that originates in the black community, and has religious southern-born parents who sing black gospel hymns. I think that I'm trying to say that for good or ill, we're all in this together, or something like that.


Preston L. Allen is the author of the novels Hoochie Mama, Bounce, Come with Me, Sheba, and the short story collection Churchboys and Other Sinners. His stories have also appeared in several of the Brown Sugar series. Preston is the winner of the Sonja H. Stone Prize in Literature and a recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Fiction. He lives in Miami, Florida.

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Pictures from “An Evening with Preston Allen.”
In order to protect myself, this story comes with a parental advisory because it contains realistic depictions of adult life that may be disturbing to some people.

http://media22a.libsyn.com/podcasts/c3f1730887521c677e80d3814ef17883/4558926e/geoffreyphilp/podcast_of_preston_allen_sonrisa.mp3

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Fiction, books, African American writers, South Florida writers, Authors

Five Questions With Preston Allen

Preston L. Allen is the author of the novels Hoochie Mama, Bounce, Come with Me, Sheba, and the short story collection Churchboys and Other Sinners. His stories have also appeared in several of the Brown Sugar series. Preston is the winner of the Sonja H. Stone Prize in Literature and a recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Fiction. He lives in Miami, Florida.


1. The main character in your novel, Hoochie Mama, is anything but a hoochie. Why the name?

One of the things I was going for in that book (as well as in most of what I write) is to explore the idea that we have two identities—an outward one defined by those who know us because of our profession or avocation, and an inward one defined people who know us more intimately. Thus, appearances can be deceiving. We see an African American woman, who is a police officer, and she has platinum blond hair, gold teeth, she wears flashy jewelry and tight fitting clothing. If we are on the outside, we guess at how this came to be. We say, aha, she is a hoochie mama playing at being a cop. On the other hand, if we are on the inside, we do not guess at how it came to be; we see its development from the beginning and, rather, we guess at where it will all end. We say, aha, here is M, a smart, tough girl, perhaps struggling with her sexuality—now she is dressing like that woman she used to have the crush on, now she is trying to be a cop, are these two aims compatible? Where will it all end? The captain, too, and Lambert, are also drawn in such a way that we can see them from both the outside and the inside and compare how these two views clash—but they are the more traditional types of this model we often find in thrillers, the average man on the surface with the perverted secret life, whereas M has no secret life, or is at least not trying to keep something a secret—you simply do not know the real M because, well, you do not know her. All you can do is judge her by her conspicuous dress. And the fact that it is the hyper-masculine world of cops, and you are male and she is female, and you are white and she is black—all these factors are going to play into how you judge that platinum blonde hair and big booty of hers, never mind that she is pretty good at solving murders.

2. Many of your characters struggle with religion and faith. Why do these subjects interest you so much?

I am going to have to attack your question at its core because in attempting to answer it I just now realized that there is something interesting implied in it, something implied in many questions of this sort, that I simply do not hold to be true—the struggle with religion and faith.

I have read many books in which characters struggle with religion and faith. These characters are no longer sure what they believe, and thus you get your tension. Yeah, I know books like this. And I think it is the sheer prevalence of books and stories of this sort (The Thorn Birds, the classic, rip-roaringly humorous Lutheran kid’s rebellion episode written almost exclusively in footnotes in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days, even Langston Hughes’ Salvation) that have created a kind of genre of struggle against religion (if you will) which my works are then thrust into and/or judged against. But now that I think about it, my characters do not struggle with religion or faith. My characters do just the opposite. They have almost absolute faith. My characters are true believers. Their struggle is in seeing the world as it is without losing their faith. Elwyn, my classic true believer, a born again Christian, never doubts his faith; in all of his stories, Elwyn struggles to reshape the world to make it fit with his Christian beliefs. Perhaps that’s where the humor comes from. The cynicism. I don’t know . . . when I read sections of the Elwyn stories to church folk, they enjoyed it immensely. They do not read it as cynical at all. Hmmmmm.

I am reminded of the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, and how the little bush man, exposed more and more to the modern world, remained yet a bush man by simply expanding his old ideas to include these new experiences. Never once did he think, “Gee, the things I used to believe are wrong. I must now start to believe in this new way.” No, as far as he was concerned, his Bush was still the center of the universe and all of these experiences were simply a sort of mystical journey that the Gods had sent him on to rid his people of the evil thing that had fallen into it (the evil thing being a Coca-Cola bottle dropped by a pilot from a plane passing overhead).

I understand that little bush man perfectly. I am a churchboy. I know of these things. I have childhood friends who hold Ph. D’s in chemistry, physics, and biology. They are still churchboys (and a churchgirl, too) despite all of their higher education. Can you dig it?

3. Your work also has many lost boys and weak men. Is there a common thread that binds these characters?

The boys will be lost if the men are weak. Are the men weak? Well, they are selfish, ineffectual, childish, okay weak. In my thrillers, such men give birth to psychopaths. In my romance novels, such men give birth to the bad boyfriends or bad husbands. My good men, on the other hand, give birth to the heroes and heroines in all of my novels. You know how it goes—the fathers have eaten the sour grapes and the children’s teeth are on edge.

4. Unlike many of your stories, your recent story, “The Lucky Kiss,” seems to suggest that sex can almost have a redemptive value. Why the change?

That story is actually a chapter from my novel, I Am a Lucky Gambler, in which the woman Missy first meets the gambler P. Can sex redeem you? Well, gambling certainly puts you in bondage. So it’s like this, it’s a fairytale, you are kind of a princess, the evil gambling ogre has imprisoned you, along comes a prince who gives you a magic kiss (and a magic roll in the hay) which frees you from the ogre. You live happily ever after. The end.

Sex does redeem. Couples fight and then make love. Teenage angst is often cured by the loss of one’s sexual virginity. A large number of psychos in literature also have sexual problems—it almost seems that the books are saying, if he could only get laid, then he wouldn’t have to kill people. Hitler, they say, died a virgin. I don’t know . . . in Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, the Tooth Fairy killer changes for the better (at least for a while) when he falls in love and has sex with that blind woman). One of the things I do a lot of in my romance fiction is try to pair people up with their perfect sexual match. I think this changes them for the better. At any rate, the book usually ends right after that.

5. How do you juggle the roles of son, father, brother, uncle, and teacher and yet remain so productive?

You mean productive as a writer? Well, it’s like this, I remember being in graduate school on one of those typical South Florida evenings in the fall. It was some sort of tropical storm—driving rain, crashing thunder, wind strong enough to shake the little Mazda I was driving to campus that night. The trip usually took a half hour, but that night because of the storm, it took like an hour and a half. When I got to campus, finally, the place was shut down. Classes were cancelled because of the storm. I was pissed. How dare these people cancel class for a tropical storm! What’s a little wind and rain when I have a story to workshop? I stayed there for another half hour hoping a few people in the class would show up and we could maybe huddle somewhere that was dry and talk about our stories. On another occasion I heard some of my classmates talking about which professors they would register for next term—who was hard, who was easy, and so on. I remember thinking, what difference does it make. Hard? How can it be hard? It’s just what we do. We’re writers.

I guess what I’m saying is that I have a passion for this thing. It is the thing that I do. So I make time to write in my schedule of things to be done—kinda like those guys who make time for the gym—one hour a day, everyday, come rain, come shine. But writing is also my default mode. In other words, when I’m not doing anything else, I am writing, or thinking about writing. So when you see me between classes and it seems like I’m doing nothing but walking to my office, trust me—I’m thinking about a story. When you see me stuck in traffic . . . .

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Next week: Malachi Smith

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Caribbean, Caribbean writers, Fiction, books, African American writers, South Florida writers, Authors

One Vote for Barack Obama

Quinn Allen, the precocious child of the writer Preston Allen, was recently confronted by some of his classmates who accused him of being a geek.

Quinn responded to them by saying, “Don’t worry about me. In ten years, I’ll be writing your checks,” and “Your role model is Snoop Dogg. Mine is Barack Obama”

Word.

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Barack Obama