Clifford Thompson and the Irreducible Human Experience
Second edition of the incredibly popular ongoing mini-interview situation that everybody's talking about, MY NEXT GHOST
My Next Ghost features a few succinct, scattered questions customized for people we like — less “what’s your creative process?” and more, “have you ever seen a man slip on a banana peel?”
Clifford Thompson
Current location: In Park Slope. And in my head.
Eight-word memoir: Shy black boy, secretly gregarious, loves to create.
What’s your favorite song they play in Key Food?
I think I heard Stevie Wonder’s “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” there once. Hard to beat that.
[Clifford Thompson is a neighbor, and we often run into each other at the Key Food grocery store.—Ed.]1
Without context, what’s something you wish you’d said?
“I don’t like that.” Applicable to so many situations. I wish someone had pointed this out to me decades ago.
Who was your first crush?
June Smith. She was in ninth grade when I was in eighth. She played the violin. Needless to say, I’ve written about her.
When you were a kid, what’s one thing everyone else had that you really wanted?
One of those big cars you could sit in and pedal. My cousins, who lived next door to me for years, had one that they kept in the basement. One day when I was maybe five, I walked into the basement via their backyard and tried to get it. My uncle caught me. I cried.
What is today’s report?
Hooo, boy. You may be sorry you asked. It adds up to one fat cliché, I’m afraid. But: How do we, how do I, find meaning in human experience that counteracts time and transcends the oblivion awaiting my loved ones and myself, and how do we, how do I, reconcile the horrors of life — particularly in this era — with the joy I feel (when I’m not just feeling sad) in creating and simply living? What is the irreducible human experience, and how do we capture it? This sounds abstract, maybe pretentious, but I struggle with it daily. That is today’s report. I should really, to quote Chrissie Hynde, just stop sobbing.
Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays
By Clifford Thompson
Self-reflection and an examination in essays of what it means to be human
Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays traces a life, not by recounting its major events but by going deep into its representative moments: the moments of wonder, hope, fear, uncertainty, humor, love, and epiphany that make up human experience. Along the way, as a son of a widowed mother, as a young man in the big city, as a husband and father, as an aging empty nester, and as an artist, the author discovers, with each new role, more of who he is. A lover of the arts, he offers creative reflections on literature, music, and film; a Black American whose life is informed but not defined by race, he embraces Black culture while remaining defiantly himself.
“Clifford Thompson has skillfully captured in words a distinct era of American history, the specific feel over time of two major cities (Washington and New York), an intimate glimpse of the complexity of race and masculinity, and the small details of family, love, ambition, fear, fatherhood, and aging that make up a life. It is a charming, quiet but powerful, well-crafted collection.” —Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire
“Clifford Thompson is an essayist of the finest order.” —Jerald Walker, author of How to Make a Slave and Other Essays
Clifford Thompson is the author of What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues; Love for Sale and Other Essays; a novel Signifying Nothing; a memoir, Twin of Blackness, and Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays. He is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men. His essays on books, film, jazz, and American identity have appeared in Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Essays, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, Film Quarterly, Cineaste, Oxford American, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He has taught creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Bennington Writing Seminar, New York University, Columbia University, Queens College, and Gotham Writers. Thompson is a painter and a member of Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City. He has been a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities since 2015.
PREVIOUSLY, ON MY NEXT GHOST
I once made a mix called “Songs They Play at Key Food.” I never listened to it. Because I’m always at Key Food. Running into Cliff Thompson.
I had Thompson as my creative writing professor at NYU back in 2021. This was so nice to stumble upon! Feels like running into an old friend at the grocery store (which is briefly described in here, funnily enough).