Five Questions with Tom Piazza
Usually for me a book starts with an image, a situation, dialogue that I can hear, something already in progress. Almost never does anything worthwhile start with a Big Idea. I can’t make a plan, figure out characters in advance, and then just execute the plan. I can’t see the point in writing a book that way. But I know plenty of writers who do — good ones, too.
2. My most recent novel, A FREE STATE, actually did start with a plan, which I had to dismantle completely before the thing came alive. But it really came alive, to the extent that everybody in the book surprised me. I had to let them surprise me, or the book would have been dead on arrival. That book was a very spooky experience to write, but I guess they all are. Maybe without revealing too much I can say that the narrator of the final chapter probably surprised me the most, just by appearing.
3. A FREE STATE is set in Philadelphia, mostly, in 1855, and it deals with the moment when the argument over slavery was coming to a boil at the same time that blackface minstrelsy was the dominant form of popular entertainment. The central character is an escaped slave who is also a very brilliant musician. I had started playing banjo, which is really an African instrument, at its root, and doing a lot of reading about the history of the instrument. In one of those histories I saw an ad reproduced, which had been placed by a slaveowner, offering a reward for the return of his “property,” and in the description the escaped man was described as being “very proficient on the banjar.” I thought — there you have it — a man whose greatest talent is his greatest vulnerability. The story grew from that.
4. Right now I am about a year into work on a brand new novel; I guess it would be fair to say that it is my most ambitious book yet. We’ll see how I feel about it by the end! I’m hoping to have it done by the fall.
5. Who am I reading right now? Glad you asked! Melville, Whitman, Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain, not necessarily in that order. But I’d be lying if I said Melville isn’t my main man.
Tom Piazza is celebrated both as a novelist and as a writer on American music. His twelve books include the novels A Free State and City Of Refuge, the post-Hurricane Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters, and the essay collection Devil Sent The Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America. He was a principal writer for the innovative HBO drama series TREME, and the winner of a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Bookforum, The Oxford American, Columbia Journalism Review, and many other periodicals. He lives in New Orleans.
