After nearly a decade of trying, author Ted Pelton finally found a publisher for his novel, Malcolm & Jack. He will be reading from and signing copies of the book on Wednesday, October 25th at Talking Leaves’ Main St. Store.

When did you write Malcolm & Jack? How long did it take you to get the novel published? I started it in the summer of 1995, a year after winning an NEA grant in fiction writing. I quit my tenure-track job in Wisconsin because of this novel, in 1997. I just couldn’t continue working on it in the summers and then going back to classes in the fall; I did that twice—the third time I just couldn’t. I can’t write long works of fiction without being able to let the characters think and breathe in my mind; I needed a long stretch of time to just write, to get it done. So I finished the first draft in 1998, about a year after moving back to Buffalo. Then I kept rewriting and revising through two more drafts, and finally I cut about 60 pages out of what became the final version of it. It was a process of learning how to write a novel, but also writing a novel that I wanted to be different from other novels. So, from conception to publication, it took 11 years.

The novel is about an imagined meeting between Malcolm X and Jack Kerouac, two iconic figures of postwar America. Where did you get the idea for this novel? I was coming from Wisconsin to spend six weeks in Manhattan, and I decided to go there by train so I could get a lot of reading done en route. And I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X for the first time. The whole thing coalesced for me there, on the train and getting to New York City—reading Malcolm talking about the 1940s, being a train porter for a while, then arriving in Grand Central with that old-time feel. The first line of the book is “New York City is a forties town”—it still has that feel for me, even though a lot of the city has been Disneyfied. The US became the world empire it is today by leading the Allied war effort in the 1940s, and New York City was the capital of the empire.

But I also wanted to examine what was left out of that vision—the movements essentially led, or at least signified, by Malcolm and by Kerouac. I also say in the early pages of the book, “What we now call the sixties was born in the 1940s.” I was struck by the fact that these two icons had both basically sat out the moment of America’s rise to power, either in rebellion or in simple nonparticipation. So much of the authority of the American war machine that created and didn’t learn from Vietnam and lives on to this day owes its start to the happy, hopeful American nationalism of the 1940s. It’s a dream turned nightmare, as we get into bad war after bad war, trying, I would say, to psychologically restage the great moment of American world triumph, when we actually did bring democracy to a part of the world ruled by an evil dictator and were hailed by everyone as liberators.

What was it about these two figures that interested you the most? What was it that paired them together in your mind? Several things, I guess. One was jazz—not just the music but the aesthetic of improvisation and what it has done for all of the arts in the past half-century. I have always been big into improvisation in my own writing. That was Kerouac, though I came to him late, after the improvisational experiments of European writers, the surrealists, Oulipo, etc., which I learned of through Raymond Federman. But different from the Europeans, at least to my reading, Kerouac’s prose is just so lyrically beautiful and moving. I only read On the Road after I was 30 and I thought, How did I miss this book for so long? The Subterraneans and Visions of Gerard are also among my favorites.

Regarding Malcolm, I also have always leaned toward dissent in my own feeling about our national politics, and Malcolm X, the more I found out about him, the more of a hero of mine he became. Improvisation was there for Malcolm too—he writes a lot about the effect of jazz on his early life, and though he wants to paint it as all lost years, it didn’t seem so to me. Malcolm, too, had an improvisational poetic—he always felt free to change in midstream, to adapt, to grow.

What are you working on now? I run a press, see www.starcherone.com. I also cofounded a collaborative blog about new fiction writing, nowwhatblog.blogspot.com. And I teach at Medaille, where I co-coordinate the Write Thing Reading Series with Ethan Paquin. Creatively, I’d like to find a way to write that is satisfying artistically and registers protest politically…I feel like I’ve been teaching peace for roughly 20 years, or more, and now along comes Bush like Bozo the Clown with a hundred million vials of poison purchased by his family and friends…Yet a substantial number of people voted for him…How can I as a writer get on the right side of that, be part of a solution instead of part of the problem? I think beauty is as much an answer to that as a deliberate political program. Beauty is truth, after all, as the poet says. But political truths must also play a part, so that one’s commitment is clear. I write a lot of scattered pieces these days, looking for a way in to this problem. I’m not yet happy with the new work, but I feel like I’m moving toward something.