It was a request for an interview, and it initially struck Mathis as an onerous task, especially on the first clear day of her vacation after a solid week of rain. Her agent, Ellen Levine, advised her to prepare for a call at two in the afternoon. Although the thirty-nine-year-old Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate from 2011 knew that an interview with O, The Oprah Magazine might expose her new novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, to a large number of readers, she asked if it could wait, especially if the editor only “needed a quote” that might take “fifteen minutes.”3 She had not considered that the popular magazine was the most successful startup ever in the industry, turning a $140 million profit in just the first two years of its existence.4 Her attention, instead, was fixed on sightseeing with her partner under the bright Parisian sky. But the magazine’s editor insisted. By two o’clock, Mathis had hurried back inside, but “the phone didn’t ring.” She opened her laptop and glanced at the time. At 2:12, the phone rang. “Can I speak to Ayana Mathis?” the voice inquired. “Yeah,” she blurted out, unable to mask her impatience. Then, in a calm measured tone, the voice replied, “This is Oprah Winfrey.”5
Mathis immediately took it as a ruse, flatly replying, “No, it isn’t.” The voice insisted, “No, no it is, it’s Oprah Winfrey.”6 The request for a short interview with an editor for O, The Oprah Magazine had been a setup to enable Winfrey to break the life-changing news herself. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie had been selected for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, Winfrey’s revamped multimedia reading group that launched in 2012, following the cancellation of The Oprah Winfrey Show along with its associated book discussion club after a fifteen-year run from 1996 to 2011. Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, which adopted as its first title Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, operates as a joint venture of the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) and O, The Oprah Magazine, leveraging social media platforms and producing special e-reader editions of its adopted texts. Through early 2013, Mathis was treated to a book launch unmatched by any faculty or graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one propelled by the twenty-first century’s most powerful amplifier of literary talent. But what remained to be seen was whether the packaging and branding of Mathis for mass consumption—which she found at times “overwhelming and destabilizing and bizarre”—would distort or somehow compromise the voice she had developed at the Workshop in 2009–2011.7 Also at issue was whether Winfrey’s endorsement would undermine the loyalty of Marilynne Robinson, her mentor, who was a notoriously sharp critic of commercial media.
Winfrey informed Mathis that she could not utter a word of her selection for two months, until December, at which time the press release and publicity strategy would be in place. Until then, Winfrey said, celebrate. That she did. She and her partner “decided to be splashy and absurd,” Mathis fondly remembered of the night she toasted the birth of her new career over champagne—“a bottle I couldn’t afford”—and oysters. They “stumbled home,” delirious in the moment, when the chaos of fame and fortune still stood at a safe distance in the future. Oprah had said she “could tell my nearest and dearest,” which included her mother, her partner, and her best friend and fellow MFA from the Workshop, Justin Torres.8
Voice Lessons
When Mathis’s close friend Torres first visited Iowa City in 2008, he had underestimated the xenophobia of the rural Midwest. A gay New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent who applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in his late twenties, Torres was not prepared for the lack of diversity in the program. The majority of the programs he applied to had accepted him. But Iowa, through the work of Director Lan Samantha Chang, pursued him most aggressively. On his campus visit, he experienced immediate culture shock. In particular, when he visited classes, he was stunned by what Matthew Salesses calls “the loss of voices of color to the white straight male default of the writing workshops.”9 These were still very much Paul Engle’s workshops, where competition and criticism prevailed over cooperation and collaboration. When minority students tried to defend their writing, Torres observed, these often turned into defenses of themselves and their own ethnic identities. During his visit, Torres’s “reservations and hesitations were mainly about the diversity of the program and the diversity of the town.” He explained, “I was coming from Brooklyn as a queer Puerto Rican, and I was nervous about what it would be like to come to Iowa City.” Much of his concern centered on the energy he would have to pour into surviving in this campus culture. “Sometimes it’s just exhausting going into a class of middle-class, straight, white people,” he confessed, an environment in which he felt “just automatically that ‘other.’ ”10 His discomfort was acute enough that he resolved to attend only under the condition that his best friend, Ayana Mathis, attend the program with him. In the absence of any support system he could find at Iowa, he would bring his own with him from New York.
Mathis—who had been dabbling in poetry, freelance journalism, copy editing, fact checking, public relations, and translation projects—found the opportunity irresistible. During her itinerant childhood, she moved frequently with her mother. Raised in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, Mathis lived in New Jersey and other locations following the estrangement of her mother from her father and the rest of the extended family. Unlike Torres, Mathis did not fear the prospect of living in an alien culture, especially one where she stood out as an ethnic other. Indeed, she had lived in Florence for two and a half years before moving south toward Siena to Barbarino Val d’Elsa, a small, picturesque, medieval walled city with a thousand residents in the hills of Tuscany. While in Southern Italy contemplating a magazine career as a travel writer, Mathis continued to write poetry and struggled to learn the language to maintain her position as a server at a cocktail bar. But after bringing the wrong drinks to exasperated patrons too many times—especially those not interested in translating their orders for a server whose Italian was “nonexistent”—she abandoned “this tragic waitressing job” and returned to the United States. She had attended NYU, Temple, and the New School but dropped out without a degree; freelance writing and fact checking for magazines, she had hoped, might lead to a more secure position as an editor.11
Once Mathis returned from Europe to New York, she began writing nonfiction, mainly autobiographical creative vignettes, representing her first real foray into prose, which laid the foundation for her fiction. She began crafting the narratives with the notion that she “would shape them into something like a memoir.”12 That memoir took shape at a New York friend’s art studio in West Chelsea where Jackson Taylor, author of The Blue Orchard and associate director of the New School’s Graduate Writing Program, led an informal class. Arranged by word of mouth, this group consisted of Taylor insiders looking to develop their writing independent of a formalized program. Taylor found much in Mathis’s memoir to admire, and imbued her with the courage to persist in fulfilling its promise. The sessions were held in the studio of a woman named Ultra Violet, a former member of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Mickey Mouse figurines, artifacts, and dolls occupied every square inch of wall and counter space, making for a surreal environment. The ubiquity of reproduced pop culture in these surroundings paradoxically put the writers at a critical distance to mainstream consumerism and entertainment media. Mickey Mouse in so many forms was no longer Mickey Mouse, but an abstraction functioning like Warhol’s famous repetition of the Campbell’s Soup label and Marilyn Monroe’s image, all casting a critical eye on mass production and consumer culture.
Before the Workshop, Ultra Violet’s studio was Mathis’s workshop. Taylor, “an amazing teacher,” fostered eclecticism, tolerance, and diversity in an open environment that encouraged risk taking and creative experimentation. Mathis recalled “people working in different genres,” with a wide spectrum of verse, creative nonfiction, and fiction. The writers themselves, who included Torres, seemed an embodiment of “one of those ‘dreams of New York,’ ” a vibrant array of diverse tastes “with just completely different backgrounds—racially dif
ferent, economically different, different professions—engaging in impassioned and interesting conversations about writing.” Free from the polarizing constraints of formal education in traditional MFA programs that pitted students in competition with one another for fellowships, grades, and even publications, the group thrived creatively in the “funny and bizarre, but kind of wonderful” setting of Ultra Violet’s Mickey Mouse–bedecked latter-day Warhol art studio.13
The “language-reliant poetry/prose hybrids” Mathis developed in Jackson’s studio constituted the writing sample she submitted for admission to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.14 Buoyed by Taylor’s and Torres’s encouragement, she resolved to fictionalize her memoir and send it with her application. Unlike the complete novels and short story collections—many published—among the samples of the more than one thousand applicants she was competing against for admission, her fictionalized memoir was a meager thirty-two pages, just two over the minimum requirement. Yet the admissions committee heard the voice of a young writer with a powerful future in the world of letters. The piece proved instrumental in her acceptance to the Workshop, along with Torres’s persistence in urging Chang to accept her.
From copy editing English translations of publicity materials for small businesses and wineries in Tuscany, Mathis found herself accepted to the most competitive creative writing program in the world. Admission to the Workshop has become widely recognized in popular culture as a life-changing event. The concluding episode of the third season of the HBO television series Girls, in March 2014, dramatized the euphoric experience of being accepted to Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The scene depicting the character Hannah Horvath clutching her acceptance letter could not overemphasize the triumph of the moment. A form rejection letter from the Workshop dated February 27, 2015, which went viral on the internet because of a verb tense error in the first sentence, illustrates the extraordinarily remote chances of being accepted; signed by Director Lan Samantha Chang, it informed the recipient, Julie Mannell, that “this year, one-thousand and twenty-six people applied for twenty-five spaces.”15 This staggering ratio distinguishes the Workshop as the world’s second most selective graduate program in any field, far more difficult to enter than the schools of law or medicine at Harvard and Stanford, and behind only the teaching arm of the Mayo Medical Clinic.16 Mathis’s promising writing samples, along with the strong endorsement of Taylor and Torres, combined to earn her admission to this elite program.
Once enrolled at the Workshop, Mathis and Torres both encountered tension. They had been working on their memoirs, which put them in the perplexing situation of offering themselves as subjects for the scrutiny of their straight, white, mostly male peers. Although the Chang era brought a sharp increase in opportunities for people of color like Mathis and Torres, the climate was not yet entirely accommodating. The exhaustion of attending classes as “other” set in for both of them. Mathis described one particular incident involving a workshop session for a story that later became part of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. “One of the characters” in the story “is referred to as having something like almond skin, something that would identify the character as black,” she explained. As her peers bore down on that detail, “there was a person in the workshop who said they had been reading happily up to that point, but then felt they were reading a story about race—which somehow invalidated what they’d been reading up to that point.” The author, the student argued, was gratuitously foregrounding race to cover for a lack of aesthetic merit. When Mathis pointed out that “things like that certainly happened,” Torres reported that such moments “make you want to pull your hair out.”17
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, which Mathis wrote entirely at Iowa against such untoward resistance, centers on Hattie Shepherd, a beautiful “high yellow” woman who moves from Georgia to Philadelphia in the early 1900s after her father was murdered by a group of white men. Hattie marries August, a dockworker who turns out to be a drinker, gambler, and womanizer. They have eleven children, nine of whom survive. Over time, Hattie’s once vibrant and hopeful spirit becomes embittered and worn down from the burden of losing two babies, raising nine more, and dealing with an undependable husband. At one point she takes her youngest daughter and runs away with a young lover, but then realizes he too is unfaithful, so she returns to her husband.
This narrative did not come without a struggle. Mathis divulged how she was crushed by her mentor Marilynne Robinson’s critique of her first attempt at writing a fictionalized memoir. Robinson chided her for creating characters that “aren’t sufficiently in the situations in which she placed them,” urging her to abandon the project and start over. Although she felt her fictionalized autobiographical vignettes expressed a deep part of her experience, she succumbed to the overwhelming pressure from both peers and mentor to adopt an altogether new narrative voice and locus of subjectivity through “the primacy of invented character.” She began to internalize the insistence that the voice of her fictionalized memoir “was stilted, and wrong, and ridiculous,” hurtful allegations that Robinson reinforced. The pressure to conform to the conventional standard of the workshop short story was squarely upon her, a predicament Sandra Cisneros had experienced during the Jack Leggett era of the 1970s. “Of course,” Mathis recalled of this baptism by fire, “I was completely devastated.”18
The final judgment on the narrative voice of Mathis’s autobiographical memoir carried disturbing racial implications. The logic of the class’s consensus on her work in effect condemned and rejected her racial identity, particularly as the voice of her well-traveled life. She remembered returning for Thanksgiving break in the fall of 2009 to her partner’s apartment feeling emotionally violated. She headed for the shower, weeping profusely. Submitting herself to such abuse for another month seemed impossible to endure. The crying lasted for a full day, leaving her partner helpless to find a way of consoling her. If the thirty-two-page fictionalized memoir was strong enough to gain her admission to the program, she thought, surely it could pass muster at a workshop session. By this point, Hattie Shepherd had yet to arrive in the story, and there was no clear sign “that she would, at all.” Stunned by how savagely and swiftly her writing was “beaten up” by her peers, she sunk into “a crisis.” Friends consoled her by attempting to normalize her experience as one shared by most new Workshop students. This expected hazing ritual, they assured her, was common. The crisis that followed, the rationalization went, “happens to a lot of people in their first semester at Iowa, especially after you get a little beaten up.” Thoughts of self-doubt plagued her: “What am I doing here? I am not really a writer! Oh my God!” The desperation was almost indescribable. “I am making it sound really light, but at the time” it was a weight she could not bear, a “huge crisis of faith.”19
After “twenty-four hours in tears,” Mathis poured a drink and pulled herself together. She remembered thinking, “Well, what are you going to do? You’re here. You have to do something. You can’t just spend the next two years weeping” and assuming the MFA would magically appear. The prevailing culture of the program drove her away from her creative instincts. “I do not consider myself a short story writer,” she said. But pressure to specialize in short story writing was overwhelming; mastering it was the only option for survival. “I’ll try to write some stories anyway,” she resolved. Before leaving the program, “I’d try.”20
Her first foray into the short story involved a teenage mother whose infant died, precisely the scenario with which The Twelve Tribes of Hattie begins. That story “was a kind of strange hybrid of the first and last chapters” of the novel. Each of her subsequent stories built on the one before, so that they “became a prism through which” Hattie, the matriarch at the heart of the novel, “could be refracted.” Although each of her characters could be construed as a window into the Great Migration, her intent was not to write a historical novel. The title’s reference to the Twelve Tribes of Israel became “a metaphor of nation building and leaving a situation
of bondage and coming to a situation of freedom,” which is finally disillusioning, a place that “is not what folks thought it would be.”21 Mathis’s turn to the short story drew on her Pentecostal background for biblical themes of mass exodus. The novel’s organizing theme depicts African Americans fleeing oppression in the South only to encounter different kinds of racism in the North. It draws on the Bible’s rendition of the Israelites’ emergence from the wilderness of Egypt only to encounter the Babylonians, theological patterns actively encouraged by Robinson.
New Inflections
The fingerprints of Marilynne Robinson are readily apparent on Mathis’s Iowa MFA thesis from 2011. Robinson made a career of fashioning narratives out of the complex interiority of preachers’ lives that form the subjects of her world-famous trilogy of novels, Gilead, Home, and Lila. The first of three stories Mathis submitted as her thesis explores the inner world of Six, a teenage preacher who heard his calling after a terrible accident left him physically and emotionally scarred for life. As depicted in her published novel, the accident occurred when his sisters, Cassie and Bell, were rolling their hair in curlers in their home in early 1940s Philadelphia. Ordering their brother about, they asked for more bobby pins, sending him to “tell mother we need the hot comb in twenty minutes.” He played along, assuming the role of their butler. Bell lit the hot water heater and opened the faucet valve. Water rushed “into the tub in a torrent,” billowing steam “hot enough to cook an egg.” When they requested a clean towel, he was “just about to stand for an exaggerated pretend bow when he lost his balance and fell into the tub.” His sisters screamed and pulled him from the tub, horrified as “he convulsed on the tile.” “Feeling as though his flesh was sliding off of his bones, he blacked out” the moment his mother Hattie entered the room.22
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