Discover Your Perfect Stay

Interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan

By Katie Booth
John Jeremiah Sullivan is the author of Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son, which Publisher’s Weekly called “as remarkable as the finest horses it documents.” He is the winner of a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and a Whiting Writers’ Award. His music writing has been collected in Best American Music Writing, The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing, and Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums that Changed Their Lives. Sullivan contributes regularly to Harper’s Magazine and is currently on contract with GQ. He teaches in the summer writing program at the Sewanee School of Letters.

In February, he came to the University of Pittsburgh to talk with students about the work and art of nonfiction writing. Hot Metal Bridge sat down with him afterwards.


Hot Metal Bridge: Simultaneous with becoming a professional writer, you entered the literary industry as an editor. How has your work as an editor helped or hindered your growth as a writer?
John Jeremiah Sullivan: These days I’m purely on the writing side of things. I miss editing a little. Apart from the fun of doing something collaborative, of not just, you know, being alone at your desk all the time, there was a degree to which it strengthened me as a writer. At least I thought it did. Every day you’re forcing yourself on a microscopic level to be unforgiving with other people’s prose, it can’t help but make you more exacting when it comes to your own stuff. And I tried to learn from the writers I edited, to note their moves, how they went about fixing problems. The danger, of course, is you go too far with that, and you can’t write, because the critical voice is just so powerful from the very beginning, it smothers what you want to say. You’re trying to light matches in a rainstorm of self-doubt. Writing has to believe in itself as it’s happening.
So, the challenge for me has been to keep hold of all that editing taught me, but at the same time insist on myself as a writer and not as somebody who’s working to please an editorial voice. The whole editor/writer relationship has to stay a bit antagonistic, if it’s to be healthy. Some people would say very antagonistic. But I’ve always been lucky to land with editors who became friends too.
HMB: You wrote a fascinating and well-researched piece about Michael Jackson shortly after his death, and as I understand it, you only had about three weeks to report and write it. Can you talk a little bit about getting that assignment and then working through it?
JJS: When Michael died, I had a really strong immediate feeling I wanted to write about him, and I had kind of always wanted to write something about him, but it would have been a non sequitur while he was alive, or gratuitous. His death created an occasion for saying what I’d wanted to say. Writing is often ghoulish like that. I’m from Indiana. We’re not exactly long on heroes there. I named my goldfish MJ, and tried to learn Michael’s dances like everyone. He was our Elvis.
Journalism-wise, there was a purity to the situation, because the magazine was coming to me saying: the cover fell through, we need a cover (which happens all the time in mag world), do you want to do Michael? Okay, cover piece, closes in three weeks. And we hung up. Assignments are rarely that clear, that intelligible, that easy to act on.
Every time I turned on the TV or the internet, he was what people were talking about, and it was a hurricane of horrible glibness and stock phrases being traded around, the same sort of passive aggressive judgmental reporting that characterized his treatment by the media in life. I just felt like: okay, I have to figure out a way to get out from underneath all of that and say something to honor him, I guess. I felt like, this historical American artist has died, and it has to be marked in a way that’s not crass. I’ll either succeed or fail at that.
I was living in the mountains teaching for the summer. I covered my office with MJ paraphernalia. I sent off for a stack of books and articles, in addition to what I had. I started calling people on the phone. I put together a playlist of pretty much every song he ever recorded and set it on shuffle. My daughter danced to Michael Jackson all summer long. She couldn’t understand if he was a boy or a girl. “Is he both? Maybe he’s both!” I wove myself into a little Michael cocoon and hoped something would happen there. I hoped to learn something about him, that could then be reported. This is always the hope, that I will learn something and be able to express it in a way that’s pleasing. Otherwise, what am I doing? Who cares what I think about Michael Jackson, right? I don’t.