An alum of Mills College, Marc Anthony Richardson, is an accomplished novelist and artist, known especially for his works Messiahs and Year of the Rat. His novels have won an American Book Award and a Creative Capital Award, and he was also the recipient of a PEN America grant and numerous residencies. Prior to his writing career, he worked as a visual artist and a nude model, and briefly studied various art forms at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Currently he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, and is working on his next novel, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast. I had the pleasure to meet Marc Anthony Richardson during a class visit in 2021, and later I was fortunate enough to interview him over Zoom. Down to earth, funny, and deeply introspective, Marc shared many powerful insights throughout our discussion about his writing and inspirations.
When I read Messiahs, I distinctly remember its unorthodox formatting and visceral writing style, and just how bold they were–it was unlike anything I’ve read in another novel before. How did you come to develop those craft decisions in your books?
The form and the style were inspired by several books: the first one was Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner; Yes by Thomas Bernhard; The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez; and “In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka. There’s also two contemporary writers whose works are more recently published: The Last Wolf by László Krasznahorkai and Mathias Énard’s Zone. Those works were very inspirational, especially Absalom, Absalom!, which I read three times while writing Messiahs. The text gave me license to write very long, poetic prose.
I’ve always enjoyed the one-paragraph novel, and I had the idea of the whole novel taking place in the forest inside the cabin. That premise allowed for the long form prose and actually enhanced the reader’s experience of understanding the characters who are going through trauma. I love being left in it. I wanted to leave the reader no paragraph breaks other than for the ten chapters, hence ten paragraphs. I don’t like being lifted out of a moment, even if the moment is over.
It’s almost equivalent to cinema, which I love. I’m subscribed to the Criterion Collection–a beautiful network of world-renowned masterpieces. They’re literary films, and I look at the long paragraph as the “long takes” in a film where the camera doesn’t do anything. It simply stays on whatever is the focus, and if something else happens to walk past this lens, they’ll follow that for a while and potentially return to the original protagonist (should they walk in front of the camera again). So the camera just keeps rolling. It never cuts to anything, it just follows the action and the flow. I really enjoy that with the one paragraph chapters and novels.
There’s several films that do that, notably The Turin Horse by Béla Tarr, which was adapted from László Krasznahorkai’s novel of the same name. I also enjoyed another film called 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days by Cristian Mungiu. They’re all one takes, which are really gorgeous.
From my understanding, you began as an artist before transitioning to writing–would you say your art and writing both influenced each other, and in what ways?
Without a doubt–one hand washes the other. I’m very visual, and I love book arts. I actually wanted to be a part of the book arts program at Mills College. It’s a dying art, and it’s not much appreciated. I just love the woodcuts, wood engravings, everything about that. But the book itself becomes a work of art.
I feel more like a painter when I’m writing. I never feel like a writer at all. If anything, I feel more like a director, or an actor. I’m listening to the voices and the scenes, and I’m listening to where they want to go. I like to focus on the seemingly insignificant things in a scene, and blow them up. Similar to what Bruno Schulz did in The Street of Crocodiles, or the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino; Márquez does that a lot in his books too. I love drawing out things and pontificating on insignificant details, until you realize that they have a symbolic meaning for things you have yet to write about or your themes. It’s so fun to see where it goes, and to not have anything planned at first. To stay messy and curious about every little thing, like a detective.
Would you say that finding that art in the written prose was what drew you to writing originally?
Yeah, I love visuals. I love how words look on the page, which is why I never got into screenplay writing, because I don’t know how the words will look on the page. But I really like how in the one paragraph novel, the words will look like ants–they just cover the page. And most people’s first reaction is to be daunted by all these words.
There was a dream I had, a long time ago, and I fashioned it into a story: a person wakes up in a room with no windows, no doors, no vents–no way in, no way out. They immediately become terrified; they don’t know how long they can sustain themselves. But every time this person would go to sleep, they would dream about food and drink, and when they woke up, it would be there.
And that dream is symbolic of the one paragraph novel for me, where you have a way in and a way out, but that’s it. There’s various pauses–like the comma is the shortest pause, and a longer pause would be the semicolon, and the next would be a colon, and the longest pause would be a period. But then you’d have em dashes–and you start to pay more attention to which punctuation is omitted and what’s not. You start to listen to the musicality, cause I can’t write without reading out loud. I read everything out loud, even the paragraph on food boxes.
I love reading things out loud because I’m always turning things into how I would write it. Everything I’m reading, I’m turning it into a one paragraph novel. Maybe that’ll go away one day, but right now I’m obsessed with it. Once I was walking around the Penn Library, at the University of Pennsylvania where I teach, just looking for one paragraph novels, and I said, “Man, Marc, you’re gonna have to write it yourself.” I tried to make Messiahs one paragraph, but it was crying to have chapters. So, I want to try that with my next novel–it takes place one night during a riot, one 200-page or so riot, so we’ll see how long that will take.
I hope the reader will allow themselves to not always try to parse everything. For example, I was sitting in on a former student’s class–he’s an editor at the Penn Review–and he invited me to come speak to his staff. They were going over the submissions of poetry that people were submitting to the Review, and there was this one particular prose poem that was so beautiful, but the imagery was brutal, but it wasn’t so brutal that it was beautiful at the same time. You couldn’t sit there and parse it or analytically pick it apart, because it defied traditional categorization, even the traditional plot.
Books like that transcend one’s opinions. You may hate it; you’ll definitely have strong reactions to it, whether your mind interprets that as good or bad is up to you, but it definitely defies categorization. They’re not usually planned reactions either–it makes you uncomfortable, however you wanna take that. And those books for me stick around; they require a second reading or investigation–endless investigations. A former Mills professor, Micheline Aharonian Marcom (she was my mentor there), got me involved in crazy shit like that. And my friend made me watch Stalker, that Russian film by Andrei Tarkovsky–once again, another long paragraph novel! It’s one of those films that you fall asleep to and when you wake up, you find out it’s slowly worked into your subconscious mind. And you find yourself thinking about it weeks, months later. I saw it at 17 years old and I’m still thinking about it. That’s what I wanted to do with my novel.
I definitely see that present throughout your writing, submerged in your words.
Just leave a minute and have the reader explore. I hate those books where people are like, “I read it from cover to cover in one night!” It’s good if you did that, but I’m a very slow reader, because I like to mull over a paragraph or a sentence or a word.
When I re-read Absalom, Absalom!, I read three pages a night for over a year. That’s how I learned to write–I didn’t learn how to write the techniques by studying them. I just re-read my favorite books, or books that disturbed me, or books that I didn’t like but kept calling to me so I kept revisiting them. The older I became, the more I understood these books. They’ll keep calling to you at different stages of your existence on this planet; you’ll find you’ll come to a different understanding of these books and yourself. I really encourage anyone who’s reading anything challenging for them to not analyze it, or even label your emotions, but just watch your mind react to it, while you’re reading–not after. Not as an analyst, but as a curious child, who doesn’t have the words or vocabulary to describe a trickle of water that parted from a creek. And they follow that trickle of water to see all the different vegetation and insects–just the wonder of creation, without having to understand what’s happening. Just literally following that deviation of water.
What would you say are surprising things you’ve learned about yourself while writing your novels?
I’ve learned more spiritually, metaphysically, and mystically; I’ve learned more about myself than I ever did when I was practicing an institutional religion, which I left at 17. It’s such an intense process for the reasons I just spoke about. You’re always curious! Never in a superficial way–you’re deeply curious about where this goes, and sometimes you don’t have the vocabulary to describe your sensations. Writers know how ineffective words can be, which is why we love metaphors and similes and allegories. No words can express what you want it to mean, what you need it to represent. So when you’re dealing with the subjective life, you’ll find that’s the case even more so.
I was just saying to a friend: “Man, there should be a word that describes ‘remembering something that you’ve never experienced.’” Not like déjà vu–but something you’ve never experienced, almost as if you’re experiencing someone else’s emotions. Maybe there’s a word for it, but it still wouldn’t touch it.
Also, I always take a nap before I write. I can’t write without it. There’s all these stimuli on this level of reality, and I’d rather be closer to my subconscious mind, my subjective self. So I wake up and read something to put my head into the game of writing. I’ll write on a laptop, but I won’t look at the internet, and I’ll turn my phone off. I don’t look at anything and try to reduce stimuli as much as possible from when I wake up from my nap and just go to a book. I literally roll over in bed and pull up a book, and then that will transition to me sitting down for 45 minutes at my writing desk with some tea next to me, just going into it.
But a lot of the writing process is sitting still and daydreaming–it’s a big part of it. I keep a word on a notecard above me–“Let”–as a reminder to keep it simple. It’s not that difficult, not that tense. It’s going to complicate itself when the emotions come in. The premise of Messiahs is very simple; it’s the emotions that are complex themselves. I don’t have big, complex plots or anything, but if I do, they don’t start off that way.
Messiahs is the first plot driven book I’ve written, so I was curious how it was going to come out. Most of my writing is random stuff I like to write organically. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller was a big influence for Year of the Rat, my debut novel, which was fortunate to win an American Book Award. Art is my religion, my spirituality. It’s not just about the product. The product is a product of the practice–the spiritual practice of listening to what you already know, allowing yourself to understand that you are constantly in the know, in the now, and now is always expansive.
It’s a dance, a rhythmic dance! I’m a freestyle dancer. I was a freestyle dancer at Capoeira–an African-American, Afro-Brazilian, African dance. It’s jazz, it’s bebop. You’re not dancing with one person. You’re dancing with the whole dance floor in this kind of weaving, and I used to dance with everybody as we all weaved in and out. It’s a constant dance of vibration and energy and allowing patterns, a universe of patterns, to happen. It’s just wonderful! I’m a little sad when I’m not in that creative zone, but it also helped me realize that you’re always in that creative zone. It’s just not as intense, but it’s always the same thing. So that high-revelatory experience of whatever you’re experiencing is the same as the so-called mundane life. They’re both the same–not equals–but the same moment, just different levels of intensity and frequency.
By the way, I love the many art forms you’ve listed, like visual art, music, and dance. I love how all these art forms have inspired your writing.
Yeah, it’s indicative of human nature, but also particularly in my subculture and for African Americans. We say “everything is everything.” Truly, everything is everything. Play is huge, the only thing that’s important really, because there is no seriousness in play, but at the same time, there’s a sincerity, like Alan Watts said. There’s a genuine inclusion of everything. Whether you’re dancing, walking down the street, it’s all forms of creativity. And once you take away that illusion of separateness, everything is everything. And you can play. My favorite word is “shapeshift.” You can be a shape-shifter, go in and out of different energies, and play with it. That’s what energy does.
Your writing is also seeped with powerful themes about race, gender, and sexuality. What compelled you to write about them in your books?
How could I not? I remember when I wrote Year of the Rat I was like, “Man, I don’t want to write about race, I don’t want to write about any of that. I just want to write this book.” Before I wrote it though, I thought, “How can you not write about it?” It’s my experience, but at the same time, I knew I wanted the writing to be more expansive, but I needed a ground–my ground. It’s also what’s dear to my heart: the injustices of the death penalty. That was a hard thing to write about, because imagine someone killing my mother or someone I love very dearly and then not wanting that person to die themselves, I could see myself as being an animalistic entity killing that person in retaliation. But it’s one thing if it’s spur of the moment, and another thing entirely if it was premeditated–that’s when it’s insidious, or at least noticeably so.
It was something that I wanted to write about because I always write about my fears. In Messiahs, it was prison, and in Year of the Rat, it was about the fear of my mother’s death. She actually passed away two months ago before Messiahs came out. It was actually appropriate, really. I instantly knew why–I understood. It’s still grief, but I’m only grieving–missing the body and the voice and the touch and all that. But it really is a play on energy. Death is a metaphor. Nothing dies; it just transforms or is transferred.
One of the characters in Messiahs says, “How deep are you willing to let go?” And she’s listening to a voice in her head that she attributes to nature talking to her, and it tells her that she needs to die now, not later, but die now–to learn how to die every day, to be new, to die to all the things that she feels make up who she is, to all the components of her identity, the ego, to die to the ego every day, every moment, to understand the totality of existence.
And that’s something I meditated on both before and after my mother’s death. Every time I talk or think or meditate on her, it just blows my mind away. It blows any temptation to be sorrowful out the window. You are no longer you at that moment. You are–you simply are. This is-ness, this am-ness, this existence–you are. I am not Marc Anthony, I’m not this, I’m not any pronoun that I want. You simply are. There’s no you, there’s no me. There’s just what is. And it’s love. It knows nothing but itself because it’s the only thing that is. And you just understand.
My Zodiac sign is Sagittarius, obviously. And my motto for Sagittarius is, “Oh, I see.” My own motto will probably be, “Oh!” [laughs] I’ll have that on my tombstone one day. Because it is that “oh” or “ahhh” moment when I meditate on that, when I’m being tempted to be sorrowful or sad for myself. Because that’s really what it is, being sad for myself, my ego that wants attention. You should listen to your ego like you would listen to a child because you need it, but it needs to know its function and not try to function in someone else’s job. It should never be in the driver’s seat, but it’s always that passenger trying to be a backseat driver. But when your ego is asleep in the backseat, that’s when you have those moments of, “Oh! There’s no me.”
It’s quite liberating–to die every day. If you ever get the chance, I love reading Jiddu Krishnamurti. He talks about that, and it’s such a beautiful thing–to die every day, so you can be fresh. It’s like when you feel old; it’s the thoughts, the same old thoughts that you keep ruminating and mulling over and over, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. And like, oh my god, I’m sick of it! And you can’t not think, but you can follow a different train of thought–you could jump trains.
And then really understand the law of attraction, that everything that we are experiencing was once thought, was once unseen, was once in the void that we pull things into this dimension from. We all are God, we all are gods. But if you have no divisions, there’s no such things. It’s so hard to talk about the infinite when we’re finite beings. It’s impossible, so we can only hint at it with metaphors. But that ability to just die to all of it–that’s what we’re going to have to do physically anyway! Our bodies are physically taken away from us. We’re going to have to leave everything behind. Can’t take it with you, you know? Denzel Washington said, “You never see a U-Haul following a hearse.” [laughs] That would be funny, though! But yeah, you’re going to have to die to everything anyway, so why not die to it now? If I were to physically pass right now, have I done and said everything I needed to say and do? So, you have to do it.
I love that you put all these emotions, experiences, and vulnerabilities in your writing. Is there ever a moment in your life where you were anxious about sharing this personal part of yourself with the world?
Yeah, right before I read out loud, when I read my writing to everyone! But yes, usually after I’ve written something, long after it’s done. But it never lasts, because I don’t care. There are things I’m embarrassed about, but then I figure I’ll write about them, so I won’t be embarrassed anymore. I’ll go into why I’m embarrassed about it, because that’s interesting. This may be crude to most people, but we all masturbate–but we don’t want to talk about it! We all take a shit, but we don’t want to talk about it.
All these things we do behind closed doors, we don’t want to talk about, but you can talk about it in a narrative. Make your characters do it. I love when people write about these acts that we don’t want to talk about, but they write about it so philosophically and so beautifully. So matter of factly, that they make something that is commonly ugly into something that’s meditative. I really think that the joy for the creator, for the writer, for whatever artist you are, is to make something that’s seemingly ugly and find the beauty in it.
I remember someone was writing about decomposition, and it was like reading a symphony of the decomposition of organic matter. And even when the author was writing about the smells, it was so exquisite. It was like listening to an orchestra. Everything the author talked about, it was like an instrument. Everyone had their part to play. No one tried to play someone else’s part, no one downplayed someone else’s part. The author was the maestro. They were directing it–this beautiful piece about the decomposition of a body. It was gorgeous.
You could take that and apply it to anything that you’re embarrassed about. Have such a level of sincerity and give everything that’s so-called evil or nasty or ugly–give it that level of attention and consideration, as if you’re a therapist and you’re listening to a patient talk. Have the same attentiveness and ability to be non-judgmental as you would have from listening to a murderer, or a bishop, or a civil rights worker. Listen to them equally; no separateness, you’re just a pair of eyes and ears, and I think that’s really important.
So that goes into the whole practice of being a creator. It’s not about the product. It’s about the process. The product will take care of itself. That’s guaranteed, depending on your level of attentiveness.
Earlier you gave some great advice for creatives out there. Do you have any more advice for aspiring writers and artists?
A friend of mine said to me once: “Marc, don’t ever take anyone’s advice.” I said to him, “Well, isn’t that advice?” And he replied, “Stop being an asshole.” [laughs] Don’t take anyone’s advice when it comes to understanding yourself, or when it comes to spiritual means or metaphysical things–you already know. Ask yourself the right questions.
When it comes to technical things, you got to ask advice. So technically, for writing, the advice I would give is that it doesn’t matter how talented you are; if you’re not tenacious, it won’t work. I know a lot of talented people who let their talent just go. There’s just a tenacity that you need because you’re dealing with a world that’s so willingly ready to rip you apart. Our first reaction is to be negative, and writing has a very high frustration rate. You’re constantly second guessing yourself, and you’re constantly disappointed.
I think Neil Gaiman said this: “You have to have the confidence of a prepubescent boy.” [laughs] And I said, why boys? Because they feel like they can do anything. So you want to have the confidence of a prepubescent boy, because by the time the world gets to you, it’ll whittle your confidence down to just the right size. You really do have to have a bombastic sense of self, like over-the-top confidence, and by the time you get through all the editorial stages, you’re like, “Okay, now I’m humbled.”
The humbling process really will come through the writing of the story and in everything else, like finding an agent, going through the editorial process, making the story tighter, making the story sing, that is just going to be a testimony to how badly you want it, how much you still believe in this vision. Because you got to this point where you wrote it, but now how badly do you believe in it? Tenacity trumps talent any day of the week, because I was a horrible writer. I sucked! And you keep on sucking until you get better.
Another piece of advice is pick your favorite book and read it so many times that you memorize it, and you’ll pick up its technique without trying to. Then find a book that you really don’t like, or you have really strong emotions against, but you find yourself drawn to. I feel those are the ones that I find on my bookshelf. Those books–no matter how many years have passed, no matter how old I am–I could pick up any one of these books on my shelf. It’s still fresh. Like touching the raw tissue and veins and ligaments–it’s still pulsating. It’s what I would imagine touching a live heart will feel like. (I’ve never touched one though [laughs]. Don’t think I’m a murderer!)
Just be tenacious and, technically, read books that transcend your opinions. Those are books that changed the world; they’re books that changed you. They’re not just books–they’re experiences. Spiritually? Don’t take any advice. You know what you gotta do, you know who you are and who you aren’t. You are! Period.
