In the Spotlight: Vivian Nixon on Language as Oppressor, Distasteful True Crime, and Prison Life in Art
No stranger to the literary world, Vivian Nixon has been writing in various capacities for decades. She’s published book chapters, essays, and poetry, and was co-editor of What We Know: Solutions from Our Experiences in the Justice System. She was a 2019-2020 PEN America Writing for Justice fellow, and back in June wrote an essay as part of Harper Bazaar’s Essays on Freedom. Vivian is currently writing a memoir.
I sat down with Vivian Nixon, a colleague and mentor, to gain some insight into her prolific writing process.
The interview transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Evie Lopoo: So, I'm going to give you a really, really broad question and take it wherever you want to. But why do you write?
Vivian Nixon: I write because communication is very important to me. I grew up spending a lot of years - the ones most prominent in my mind are the younger years - where I always felt - not misunderstood, that is the wrong word. Because to feel misunderstood, that means you felt people heard you and didn't understand you. I felt unheard. And that just stuck with me in a way that never ever left.
And so, I'm always trying to somehow articulate what's going on in my mind, the way I feel about social issues, what's going on with me, personally, so that it is communicated to people whose opinions I care about. I guess also so other people who feel they're not listened to or heard, or even some who may be heard and misunderstood, can see language as a way to at least be sure within yourself that you've done the best possible job you can do of communicating your truth, your position, your rationale - whatever it is you're trying to communicate at the time, that you've done the best possible job doing it. And how it's received, that is no longer your responsibility. I just feel like until I do that, then I haven't lived up to my part of the bargain. Otherwise, I would have no right to expect that people see me as I want to be seen, or represent me in the way I want to be represented, because I haven't adequately demonstrated who I really am.
EL: So, I have a follow up for that. You were saying that you feel an obligation to communicate your truth. And then once it's out in the open, it’s open to interpretations. It’s not up to you, you've done your part. In that vein, would you describe your commitment to writing as a kind of public obligation, something that you find to be part of your “contractual agreement” to fully participate in society and culture? Or do you do it for more personal reasons, as if it's something that you feel deep within you and need to get out? Or maybe it's both. Is writing an obligation and to whom?
VN: I think it's an obligation. I've learned to feel this way over time because I didn't realize how much of a gift language is until much later in my life. And I'm still evolving in terms of how I feel about it.
It’s complex that we categorize language in hierarchical terms, like we act as if some languages are better than others. I have a serious problem with that. But on the other hand, I am extremely privileged to have been educated in a system that taught me the language of the dominant culture. I went to an all-white high school where Standard English was what you learned. And I didn't always get it right, I still don't always get it right. I'm not the best person with grammar and syntax and all of the technical things about writing, I'm really bad at it, I have to work at it, I have to correct things over and over and over again. But I know that as hard as it is for me, I know that it is excruciating for people who did not have access to the kind of education I had access to, and my heart bleeds for them, because their thoughts are no less complex than mine. Their brilliance is no less brilliant. Their thoughts are no less important, but because they don't have the ability to communicate them in proper American Standard English - in writing and often not even verbally - they're not taken seriously, and that eats away at me. I mean, I spent years actually believing that the right thing to do was to follow the rules and learn American Standard English - imposing that value onto other people and making judgments about them based on that. I didn't learn to stop doing that until I spent three years in a prison, where hardly anybody could write English in the way I was taught. And I became a tutor. It changed my entire worldview about language and what it means and to whom.
EL: Thanks for sharing that. Do you think that writing is a liberalizing tool in terms of its power to educate? You speak a lot about this and your work, but I'd love for you to touch on it here in our discussion. And if you want to talk a little bit more about what it was like being a tutor for your fellow people that were incarcerated. Did you feel privileged? Did you feel empowered? Did you feel humbled?
VN: Yeah, I think I'll start there and then I'll go to the liberation theme. So, I felt all the above - I felt privileged, I felt honored, I felt empowered. I felt one word you didn't say: I felt tremendous guilt. I felt tremendous remorse for the judgments I had made about people for many, many years. I felt pride.
I went to prison in 1998 and New York state was still incarcerating 16- and 17-year-olds in adult prisons. And many of my students, actually, I was assigned as a teacher's aide in the GED class. In some prisons, the teacher is a civilian not employed by the Department of Corrections. A lot of outside teachers would come in, sit down, set up their desk, and just whatever happened, happened. But I took it very seriously. And there was a very maternal relationship because I was older when I went to prison. I was 38. And these were 16- and 17-year-old kids. So, there was a lot of bonding that happened in the educational process. And what I quickly learned is that the students had never felt like the classroom was a place where there's an adult person here who really cares about me and cares about my future. And to have that experience for the first time in a prison says something about our culture.
EL: Yeah. I know we still have to discuss the second part of that question, but would you say that that experience was kind of a catalyst for your approaches to writing, mentorship and scholarship? Was it a catalyst for your scholarship on education and the power of writing and its ability to democratize learning?
VN: Yeah, I think it did. I think I knew then that my skill of using language - both verbally and the written word - that was going to be the reason that I was going to be okay. And I couldn't say that about the students I was tutoring, I couldn't say that they were going to be okay, because they were still going to struggle communicating. They were going to struggle in every conversation, they were going to struggle filling out every job application, they were really going to struggle in any type of assessment that involved writing an essay of any kind. And people were going to judge them by that and it was going to inhibit them in moving forward with their lives. And in a way, it was a prison, that inability in a society that is very much dependent upon assessing people skills in this way. It is its own prison. And I learned even more about this from my friend, Max Cutler, the founder of the Bard Prison initiative. In American society, we have students take standardized exams as the measurement, whether or not they're fit for college, for instance.
On every college application, generally, there's the you know, the infamous essay question, write your personal statement, your essay. And, you know, if people who are used to writing and speaking Standard English are nervous about writing that essay, imagine someone who struggles with it the way many inner-city kids, rural kids, kids who just, you know, didn't have that kind of instruction. The schools didn't have the resources, they were already struggling with a barrier: a person who grew up speaking a different language, literally. And whether that language was - whether they were an immigrant and literally spoke a foreign language or it was a non-standard version of English, it was still a different language. And if the only way to assess whether or not someone's capable of understanding the classics, or understanding the humanities, and all the things that make history and culture, things that can shape the rest of your life, if you're going to measure someone's ability to understand those things by the language they speak, it is such a disservice.
So Bard starts from scratch, they put people in a room and they're like, “we do not care if you can't spell, we don't care if you don't use any punctuation. We don't care about your sentence structure. We just want you to think about this topic, and write whatever you want to write.” And it frees them from the prison of syntax and grammar and spelling. And once they're free from that, they begin to talk or write. And the brilliance, the analysis that comes out of their mind - It's just unbelievable. And so, if we could do more of that in this country, I think we would be liberating people to think differently about their relationship to the rest of society, the value of their thoughts, their contributions.
When people feel valued as members of a society, they behave differently. But it's not just that they behave differently, because this is not all about the individual's behavior. If society would stop viewing people as other based on things that are truly insignificant, that dynamic that we set up, which is to put certain people on the fringes of our society, would not create the antagonistic atmosphere that allows for violence, that allows for hatred, that allows for poverty and mistreatment, all of those things that help to drive the things that we fear in our society. So, it is a very liberating process to understand what education really is and what it isn't. And then to provide real education.
EL: Yeah, I really love the analogy of the personal statement. Translation matters a lot when you're thinking of classic literature – Dostoevsky, all of the classics have largely been translated from other languages. And there's all of this academic literature around the importance of a good translator, the loss of meaning that comes when you're translating, and how it changes the interpretation and thematic importance of the work. That is just totally discounted when you consider that a lot of young people are literally having to translate their story - which, you know, that's a lot of pressure on a young person, to tell their whole story in 400 words - into a foreign language. They’re acting both as author and translator. In that way, it really is just this huge imposition that’s not acknowledged. And I've never thought about that before, so I really appreciate you saying that.
I do want to get a little bit more into the weeds about how you envision your writing functioning right now. You recently wrote something for Harper's Bazaar. Are you currently using your writing as a mechanism to reflect, or to help you think to the future? To be fair, I know that those things happen in tandem to one another. But is there any way you feel like you're leaning right now, as you're doing your writing routines? I mean, for me, a lot of writing is just thinking - as you're thinking about what you want to write about, how are you orienting yourself?
VN: It’s funny you should mention the Harper's Bazaar piece, because it's a perfect example. Everything I write starts out as a reflection, as a look back, as a real examination of what I remember, then compared with the facts, and then the current situation. But I always go back to it. I literally just went back to the Harper’s piece last week, and it's already rewritten into something else, it's going to evolve into a chapter in my memoir, but it won't look anything like what you saw in Harper's, because it will have come full circle from a reflection to a real analysis of all of the different things that had to converge in that moment to create whatever that reaction was, that it wasn't just about me and a fifth-grade teacher, it was about so many more things. And breaking that out is a process, but it starts with reflection. And, you know, so now I'm at the point where I've kind of picked it apart even more. And there's so many levels of depth to it. And this, there's so much more visibility of everybody's struggle in that moment. Everybody's pain, everybody's story, not just mine. And so how do you take your story, your reflections, and your life, and push them out so that others can see in it some of their own experiences, then learn to do the same thing, which is reflect, learn from, and then push out that learning to the rest of the world. I think that is the human story. And whether you're doing it through any particular discipline - science or something in the arts - however you are pushing your story out into the world, you're pushing it out there. But it has to be done in a method that understands that it starts with you, but it can't end with you.
EL: I very much relate to that. I don't even remember where I read this recently, but someone was making an argument that people find any kind of art or form of communication, whether that be visual art or poetry or prose, is compelling or “good,” which is a very relative and subjective term in the first place, if they find some sort of deep resonance or emotional connection to the work. In many ways, it creates this line of communication, that's not even based in language, it's based in feeling and the kind of sentiment it creates in the reader or the viewer or what have you.
VN: Yeah, defining art is difficult to do.
EL: So perhaps we'll rewind: how would you define art or art making?
VN: Yeah, so this is an age-old question, right? So many people think that art is all about aesthetics and beauty and skill, technique. Precision. But, for me, it doesn't make sense to even think that way when you can look throughout the annals of time. If you just take the visual arts, for example, you have the extraordinary, realistic detail of an Italian Renaissance period, you have the Sistine Chapel, you have Michelangelo, you have David, and then you have all the way to the 20th century and the Campbell soup can guy. So, you go from Michelangelo to Warhol. And you're like, “Okay, this is not the same thing.” Right? These are very different things. But they're both considered art. And I think art is created by a moment. And is often made to, and can't help but represent, the actual, human and living energy. The energy of the earth, the energy of the atmosphere, the energy of the people of the moment in time. Andy Warhol could not have existed in Michelangelo's world. I think it's important for us to understand that art reflects the times. And sometimes the times are not about beauty, aesthetics, or even creating. Emotion - sometimes the times are about urgency and passion and survival. And art reflects that. And if you look at art throughout history, you'll see that when there are crises, the art begins to reflect the crisis.
EL: So, would you say that this is a time of urgent art making?
VN: Yes. The proliferation of writing and art that is coming out of prisons right now is just amazing. The justice-involved poets and actors are creating all over the place. Even the world of philanthropy is embracing that community, trying to elevate that work. Even in the art of film, more and more multidimensional depictions [of incarceration]. During the rise to mass incarceration, we saw depictions of law and order, right?
EL: Yeah, it’s a very one-sided viewpoint.
VN: And then you respond with The Wire. Like, this is not a one-sided story, right?
EL: I saw this really great documentary on Amazon recently about the life of an ordinary family and the husband is incarcerated. And the wife is a motivational speaker, and she talks about her life. Yeah, it's just profound in a lot of ways. I get a little cringe-y when I think about how often “true crime” is the standalone when you're talking about violence and intergenerational trauma. It’s this deeply macabre outlook on humanity, it almost rips the humanity out of the people that are being discussed. It's all propaganda. And I always get appalled when Netflix is putting out 20 different true crime documentaries in one season, then there just happens to be this one single more holistic viewpoint [of crime]. [Crime is] not one serial “criminal;” it’s a lived reality of people who have been both victims and perpetrators of crime, who have experienced harm or done harm onto others. Like, it's such a more nuanced conversation that wants to be had in film, and I'm hoping we're getting closer to that point.
VN: I think that this is why for me, education is so liberating. Because when education is allowed to happen, your mind is trained to not be fooled by things like true crime documentaries, because your mind knows that it's neither true nor is it necessarily all about crime. Because there's so much else happening within those stories if you look deeply enough.
This is why I love Cornel West’s analysis [of deep education] and the difference between memorizing facts and figures and speeches and deep education called, in the Greek idea, padea - the deep, deep knowledge of a thing. And you just look at things with a different eye. True crime might fascinate you for a minute - I get fooled by it sometimes because the story sounds so dramatic –
EL: That’s their goal, to just reel you in.
VN: A thinking person can get reeled in, but at some point, we'll ask the question that these phony documentaries aren't asking. What is the backstory? Not only the people who were harmed, because our heart goes out to them, but whoever did this horrific thing, is there something happening here? And so, what we've seen is on the flip side of that. This is what I call art, because I don't think those are art, art is - and you would have to have seen the whole series to believe this, because I get pushback on this all the time - art is the story of Hannibal Lecter.
EL: He is very multi-dimensional.
VN: Yes!
EL: And that gets back to an earlier point that I was bringing into our conversation. The idea that art not only can make you connect to someone, but also it can repulse you. And you have this shared humanity moment where everyone watching Hannibal Lecter is like, why do we like this person? Or why can we relate to this person who's done horrific things, and it's scary on so many levels? Like what makes them human? It’s truly a better representation of art than a linear story - dynamics are really vital.
Okay, so you mentioned a lot of really great artists who are currently or formerly incarcerated doing amazing work right now. Can we shout out a few people?
VN: Mitchell Jackson. Dwayne Betts. Randall Horton. Wow, there's so many now.
Liza Jesse Peterson, who's writing and performing about stories of incarceration, though she was never incarcerated. She taught classes in a jail and put together a one woman show, the Peculiar Patriot, which I believe is going to end up on Broadway one day. She's been touring around the country with it. Even though the one-woman show takes place in a prison visiting room - she's the visitor - all the stories that are told are about people who are outside the prison, but they're all intimately involved in the life of the person that she's visiting. So, it's such an outside view of the prison. It’s so brilliant because she's in this concealed space in a prison in the visiting room. No transparency - people from the outside don't know what's going on in the prison. People from the inside don't know what's going on outside the prison. But she brings all of those experiences together in this one play.
EL: It’s immediately bringing to mind questions about transparency and access, misinformation spread, and voyeurism, all of those things. It seems fascinating.
I have two more questions for you. The first being: what is inspiring you right now?
VN: In this very moment - it would have been different a week ago -I am inspired by the talent and the commitment to craft of Michael K. Williams. I didn't know a lot about him as an actor. I met him a couple of times at Drug Policy Alliance events. He was so personable, so down to earth, just regular people. I didn't know his backstory. And then when he died recently, I did a little research. And to see the evolution of when he began to take his craft seriously and understand how art can change people's lives. What he put into it and sacrificed for it and the vulnerability brought to it. And the risk he was willing to take to play the characters he played. It frightens me and inspires me at the same time.
EL: Yeah, I think artmaking should always feel a little frightening, right? It should scare you a little bit because then you're experiencing the full power. That's art that is enabling.
Last question. What is your standard writing routine right now? And I know this is a hard question for you, because I'm pretty sure you're writing at all hours of the day.
VN: I tend to wait for moments where I know I'm going to have a long stretch of time because I obsess when I start. Once the first thing comes up, I have to come to a resting point and I will - I can - write for 24 hours straight, literally. And then, of course, the editing process is a whole other thing. But getting that first iteration out, I just need the space. What I've done is I've taken to keeping post-its, and I've actually learned how to do post-its on my computer desktop. Whenever I have a thought, I put it on a post-it and then the trick is finding it when I go to write. I'm now better organized with the post-it trick. But I'm writing things down as they come to me in just one sentence, because I find that once a core idea comes through, I don't need to write the whole thing, I just need to write the idea, because the rest will come when I'm reminded of the idea. So, that's my process. Now I'm making many little post-it notes about things I want to make sure to mention in the memoir I'm writing. For me, [finishing] that memoir is going to free up what I imagine to be some really wild fiction that I've always wanted to write since I was young. But first I have to free my brain of my life [story] so I can write fiction.
Reverend Vivian Nixon is Writer-in-Residence for the Square One Project, housed at Columbia University’s Justice Lab. As part of her role, she is currently conceptualizing a framework for national reckoning practices, as well as contributing to the Racial Justice and Abolition Democracy project, a joint endeavor with Square One and the Institute for a Just Society. Prior to joining Square One, Vivian was the Executive Director of College & Community Fellowship, a nonprofit dedicated to helping women with criminal convictions earn college degrees, for 20 years. She has been awarded the John Jay Medal for Justice, as well as fellowships from Aspen Institute, Soros Foundation, and PEN America. Vivian has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University.
About the Interviewer
Evie (Evangeline) Lopoo is a social science researcher, criminal justice advocate, and writer. She is a Project Manager for the Square One Project, housed at the Columbia University Justice Lab, in which capacity she works on international justice efforts and racial justice educational curricula. She is also working on a book manuscript about the history and current manifestations of probation and parole in the United States correctional system. You can find her policy publications at https://justicelab.columbia.edu/ and https://squareonejustice.org/ and her random thoughts at @EvieLopoo on Twitter. Evie is based in New York City.
