INTERVIEW: Miah Jeffra by Lauren C. Johnson
American Gospel
Miah Jeffra
Black Lawrence Press
Interview by
Lauren C. Johnson
Miah Jeffra’s first novel, American Gospel (Black Lawrence Press, March 2023), is more than a love letter to Baltimore. It is a 500-page map of the author’s hometown and a searing lament on gentrification, racialized and gender-based violence.
Jeffra’s fast-paced, immersive prose cuts through the Inner Harbor, where tourists gorge on Chesapeake blue crabs seasoned with Old Bay, past the dive bars that house the city’s DIY music scene, and into Ellwood Park, a predominantly Black, working-class neighborhood.
In Ellwood Park, readers meet alternating first-person narrators: Peter Cryer, a queer, mixed-race teenager with eyes on Columbia University (and his brooding classmate, Jude); Peter’s mother, Ruth Anne Cryer, who fights to liberate herself from an abusive ex-husband; and Thomas, a cleric at the Catholic school Peter attends. These three stories converge when a developer plans to demolish the neighborhood and replace the homes with an absurd Baltimore-themed amusement park called Crabtown.
While American Gospel is firmly rooted in one East Coast city, this novel speaks to how systemic racism affects communities nationwide. And through depicting the unbridled power of organizing, Jeffra argues that we can fight displacement. Our cities and neighborhoods belong to the people who love them.
No stranger to activism, Jeffra is the author of four books and is a co-founder of the Whiting Award-winning queer and trans literary collaborative, Foglifter Press. They studied in the MFA Critical Studies program at the California Institute of the Arts and the MA program in English at San Francisco State University. In addition, they teach writing and decolonial studies at Santa Clara University and Sonoma State University.
I met Jeffra to discuss American Gospel on a sunny day in San Francisco. We strolled through the Panhandle and chatted about chosen family, how to find a character’s voice, writing sex and desire, redemption, and so much more. Here are the best parts from our conversation, edited lightly for brevity and clarity.
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Lauren C. Johnson: Talk to me about Baltimore. I spent most of my twenties and early thirties living in D.C. and Maryland, so I was excited to read a novel set in this region. I’m also a reader who relishes place-based details, and you write about Baltimore with razor precision.
Can you walk me through your process for writing about this city? For example, did you post maps of Baltimore up on your wall as you wrote? Did you read other books that take place in Baltimore? Did you travel to Maryland? In other words, what was your research process like?
Miah Jeffra: It’s funny because I went to high school in Baltimore and lived in the urban core, but you never really know much about your hometown while you’re living there. It wasn't until I moved to Los Angeles for my MFA in the Critical Studies program at CalArts that I became fascinated with Baltimore and its struggles as an American city. If I hadn't lived in Los Angeles, where they erase so much of their history and character through constant urban renewal and the capitalistic process of tearing down buildings to build something new, I would never have written anything about Baltimore.
I went back to Baltimore before my mom moved away, and I took photographs and did some ethnographic fieldwork. Then I created a map of the Ellwood Park neighborhood, where American Gospel takes place.
LCJ: Yes! With so much specificity, I figured you were working with some kind of map.
MJ: I'm obsessed with maps and cartography, and mapping was part of my process when I was more focused on creating visual art. I definitely turned to mapping again to write this novel. I even made an illustrative map of the amusement park and its location within Ellwood Park.
LCJ: Peter, one of the novel’s first-person narrators, reflects on the fact that Maryland straddles the North and the South:
That’s the great distinction between Ma and me. She is southern to the bone, and me, I’m a northerner…That’s Baltimore: a city confused, a long pit stop in the middle of some journey for both of us. Mine a straight line up north to New York, hers an ellipsis right back to the South.
Tell me more about that. Why do you think this dynamic is crucial to explore through fiction? Going a step further, what do believe Baltimore’s history says about other American cities? This novel is called American Gospel after all.
MJ: Baltimore is fascinating because it's the most northern city south of the Mason-Dixon line. So, Maryland was a slave state, but Maryland was also part of the Union; it was a slave state that joined the Union during the Civil War.
We all know that vestiges of slavery and the Civil War are still very present in our American culture, and you can really, really see that in Maryland. Baltimore is a majority Black city, one of the major stops in the Great Migration—the easiest and cheapest to get to—and it was an industrial city. But you go outside of Baltimore, and it's a southern state; I mean, you're driving on the Eastern shore and seeing dilapidated plantations and ‘Don't Tread on Me’ bumper stickers. It’s where the North and the South really do meet. It's the seam of America.
Exploring this dichotomy in the book was pivotal, and I used Peter and Ruth Anne to embody these archetypes.
LCJ: Speaking of which, let’s talk about your characters. Peter, Ruth Ann, and Thomas are all written in the first person, but their voices and perspectives are so distinct, I never got tripped up on who’s telling which story at any given time. So which character was the most challenging to write?
MJ: Thomas. Thomas was the most challenging because I didn't know what I wanted from him when I first wrote him. I thought he would only represent Baltimore's history, but then I realized I wanted him to be the activist and embody an almost redemption for the Catholic church. I wanted the Catholic church to do something right for a change, and Thomas represented that.
I like finding redemption in characters, I really do, and maybe that's just the optimist in me. The Catholic Church has created many problems in Baltimore with its rigidity and inability to progress, and it has so much power. So, I wanted to create an individual who takes on the real responsibility that I think a church or religious organization should take on: working towards equity and protecting its people. I like that this person was Thomas.
It took a lot of discovery to figure out what he wanted and who he would become. When I first drew him, he was one-dimensional, and that's what made him difficult.
LCJ: Why was important to have a character represent redemption? Why did you make that choice?
MJ: Right now, in our culture, we focus so much on villainizing, and I think we're creating literature that is not very complex in the vein of social justice, and I think that's bullshit. I really do. I think that we need to move back to complexity; we’re all villains and angels.
Characterizing people as wicked doesn't do anything for our ability to understand ourselves, especially as complex humans. So, I didn't want to make any villains. We learn more about ourselves as readers when there's a redemptive quality to characters that we might not like very much or characters that represent something we find villainous.
LCJ: I think Ruth Anne’s voice is pitch perfect. She is an economically underserved single mother from the Deep South. What steps did you take to flesh out such a well-rounded character and avoid stereotypes?
MJ: Yeah, I love her. My mom's side of the family is from the Deep South— they're from Tennessee. So, I pulled a lot of that background and voice from my own life. Even though I didn't get to interact with that side of the family a lot, when I did, it left an impression on me…their phrasings and their rationale.
I moved to the South for college—I went to college in Atlanta—and then I moved to Asheville, North Carolina. So, I started using my ethnographic training to document some of the voice stylings, which I find to be so rich. The dialect is some of the richest in the country, and I documented a lot of it. I summoned that when I was creating Ruth Anne, and it was a lot of fun.
LCJ: Which character do you connect with the most?
MJ: Peter is my fantasy. He's the character I wish I was in some ways; he's so precocious! I wish I had his confidence in his sexuality. I wanted to create a young character who did not struggle with coming out and who was sexually confident, because that was not me. So, I connect with him on that level.
I connect with Ruth Anne’s survivor mechanisms. The autobiographical part of the novel comes out through Ruth Anne’s struggle with her husband. So, I connect with her because it's like I gave my mom the kind of ending that she would've wanted.
And I connect with Thomas as well because he's an activist. I think of him as being the right kind of activist, not just someone who lip services, but someone who actually does the work.
LCJ: Speaking of Thomas, there’s a particular passage that I believe truly captures the experience of grief. It’s the moment when Thomas visits his mother in the hospital:
The front desk informs me that my mother is in the Critical Care Unit. I pass by the gift shop on the way to the elevators. Should I get flowers? A balloon? I realize as I’m scoping the shelves that I have no idea what types of flowers she prefers, or if she likes them at all. I settle on a card with a soft-focus rose—her name is Rosa—and storybook gold cursive that opens to the message “Get well soon.” And then I realize how ridiculous the gift is, how ridiculous this all is.
I teared up here because I think grief is the accumulation of these little moments. This passage also underscores how it’s possible to grieve a relationship with someone that will never come to pass. Can you talk to me about writing this scene?
MJ: I think you touched on it. Grief is absence, right? So how do you grieve someone who was never there? How do you mourn someone that you didn't know? What does that look like? What does that feel like?
I had Thomas in this unsentimental place where he inherited a home in a very traditional, familial way, even though his mother was estranged from him. So, he's doing a dual grief: the grief of losing this person he really didn't know, but also the loss of knowing how to be a son to her, too.
LCJ: Let’s talk about desire and sexual tension. There were so many gorgeous moments between Peter and Jude that made me hold my breath—especially when Peter shaves Jude in that steamy-post shower bathroom.
Teach me your ways. How do you set up a sex scene? How do you choose the right setting to turn up the heat? And when you’re drafting sex and desire, how do you know that what you’ve written is effective?
MJ: I do not know. I feel like I'm terrible at writing sex scenes, but I do know that desire really happens in the most vulnerable of moments. I know that vulnerability is the way to access that feeling. I mean, turning up the heat. It's when we can peek at something that we normally never get to see. And shaving is such an autonomous action. So, to have that in the hands of someone else—that is some vulnerability.
LCJ: Home, family, and forgiveness are such important themes in this novel. I love when Peter asks:
Why does one love their family so much, even when they don’t deserve it? How much is it the animal in us? How much is evolutionary, some kind of tribal fitness? And how much is the opiate of culture, the brainwashing of well, that's how it is, something like that? How could I love someone who scarred my left ass cheek for life?
MJ: Wow that’s such a loaded question and an important question. Aside from my mother, I have never been able to rely on my family, and it's not a place of pain for me as much as it's a place of disappointment.
I think it's important for me to process my own feelings in the work that I write. I'm always trying to figure out how I feel about the world. And I use writing to process those questions for me, rather than to try to provide insight for others.
LCJ: I think you handle each character with so much empathy—even the ones we’re not supposed to like, like the developer MacAllister. They all feel like complete people and that’s a testament to the time and effort you poured into this novel. How long did it take you to write American Gospel?
MJ: Well, I conceived of this novel in 2004, but that was before I had the tools to write it. I was teaching Art History and Visual Culture in LA and I had a sabbatical, so I went back to Baltimore and thought, ‘I wanna write a novel’ but I just didn't have the tools for it.
When I moved to San Francisco and enrolled in the MA program at State, I learned more about craft and thought, “maybe I'll go back to this book.” Then it started to take shape. I developed the three characters and got to know their voices and how they navigated the geography of Baltimore, but I didn’t really know what their desires were yet. So, I finished a version of the novel in 2014 and then put it on the back burner because I didn't feel confident about it.
When The Violence Almanac was accepted by Black Lawrence Press, the executive publisher asked, ‘What else do you have?’ and I said, ‘Well I have a novel but it's completely under baked.’ So, I just overhauled the hell out of it; I gutted everything extraneous, and I foregrounded the amusement park idea. I wanted that project to loom without being central to any of the characters’ stories—because that's the way urban renewal works, right?
