Chatting with Jonathan Mann

Jonathan Mann was born and raised in Michigan. He is currently pursuing his MFA at Butler University, and his work has been featured in Stoneboat Literary Journal, House of Zolo’s Journal of Speculative Literature, and Aphelion. He formerly served as the co-fiction editor of Booth and works as an English teacher. You can find him at jonathanmannwrites.com and on social media @jmannwrites.

Jonathan is the author of “Motor City” from Radon Issue 8.

Q: How did you come across the literary flash fiction “Beach City” by Jaquira Diaz which you were inspired by to create your Radon story, “Motor City”?

I originally came across Diaz’s “Beach City” in one of my MFA courses taught by the phenomenal nonfiction writer Natalie Lima. “Beach City” resonated with me—and still resonates with me—not only because of the beautiful prose but also with how Diaz depicts the relationship between the personal and the environment in a way that feels a bit like a fever dream. Before I began working on “Motor City” and a few other pieces that took place in the Neo Detroit world, “Beach City” held a small part of my mind as a near-perfect piece of writing.

When it came to writing “Motor City,” I knew I wanted to write a fever dream and a place that was simultaneously familiar and bizarre, with the relationship between the narrator and the world being critical. As both a student and a teacher of writing, I’ve always found scaffolding to be an insightful and effective writing technique, and I applied a similar technique when crafting “Motor City”—using “Beach City” as the framework and then building out to something that felt uniquely mine.

Q: As a writer, do you find yourself spending more time crafting the sentence-level prose or the broader narrative arcs and characterizations within the story?

My focus generally goes to the broader narrative arc and characterizations, although I wish I spent more time working on sentence-level prose. The voice of my writing is something I’m always concerned about because I want my stories to read like I’m the only one who could tell them, and I know translating the voice in my head to the page is done when examining my sentence-level prose.

However, I’ve historically struggled with structure and character-work, often caring more about world-building and sentence-level writing. Both of those elements are important and have their place, but I suppose I need to reassure myself that the plot and characters make sense before I make sentence-level adjustments.

Q: Do you have any passionate and biting thoughts on outdoor libraries?

Yes—that we need more of them! Obviously, I think they have benefits like increasing access to books and helping strengthen a local community, but I’ve also found that outdoor libraries provide opportunities to check out books outside what I might otherwise read. I remember a few years ago I came across Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City in an outdoor library, and while it wasn’t science fiction or fantasy, I decided to check it out because I’d heard good things about it. I absolutely devoured that book—enamored by the braided plot and the mood of it—and it’s one of my favorites even though it’s outside my home genre.

You also come across some interesting finds in places you wouldn’t expect. This past August, for example, I was at Oliver Lake in northern Indiana, and the lake itself is a bit of a seasonal destination nestled in Amish country. I came across an outdoor library while there and was surprised to find William Gibson’s Virtual Light among an overwhelming amount of Christian and self-help books. This copy of Virtual Light looked worse for wear—a completely torn cover, water damage, yellowed pages. Not only did I swap my copy of The Old Man and the Sea for it, but I also used this as an excuse to rebind the book, which I’d never done before. I think it turned out alright.

Q: Tell us about your efforts as the co-fiction editor of the literary magazine Booth?

Thank you for this question: Now I can make a shameless plug for Booth.

Working as a member of the Booth team was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. During my time as the co-fiction editor, I worked with Lenae Marsh, another student in the Butler MFA program and fellow speculative fiction writer, to wade through submissions and find pieces that had gravity, levity, and boothiness. Yes, boothiness, which our stellar Editor in Chief Robert Stapleton would sometimes define as “weird shit,” and that’s probably the best way I could explain what we looked for in prospective pieces too.

What was so great about this experience was that Lenae and I didn’t conduct our work in an echo chamber, and neither did the journal itself. At monthly roundtable meetings, editors and readers would discuss the merits of proposed pieces from across the genres and vote on what we wanted to accept for publication. It was a cooperative process, something that allowed each member of the team to voice their perspective. Especially today, where we see so much censorship in the literary world and beyond, I thought this process was critical to putting into practice how we wanted the world to look.

Booth is supported by the MFA program at Butler University, and the staff consists of some of the most thoughtful and hard-working writers I know. It’s a cool magazine to check out, especially if you like your writing a little weird.

Q: You refer to yourself as a “mediocre poet”—why is that?

I refer to myself as a mediocre poet because I don’t think I’m a particularly good poet, which is a bit ironic because writing poetry was how I rediscovered my love for writing. Nothing like heartbreak to get someone in the mood to write shitty sonnets.

Jokes aside, I’ve found that my only good poems are ones I made out of the blue and without much conscious thought. Not to say this doesn’t happen in fiction writing, but there are so many nuances to poetry that, for me at least, I really need the stars to align to create a poem that I don’t want to burn in a trash can. So, I guess this is where the “mediocre” comes in—I think I’ve written a few good poems, and I like writing poetry, but my good poems are too few and far between for me to feel comfortable with labeling myself just “a poet.”

Q: As an English educator, have you learned any insights from either your students or the act of teaching that have applied to your own reading and writing?

I’d guess the biggest insight I’ve learned from teaching is that weird is good, and especially for speculative writing, it’s been helpful to keep this in mind when working on my projects. It’s interesting because my middle school students live in a bit of a dichotomy. On the one end, there’s the desire to fit in, to get good grades, to mimic the success of others. On the other hand, there’s the desire to stand out, to be different, to let creativity roam free. I’ve seen this a lot with my expository writing students, who are overly concerned about their grades, yet respond to the warm-up prompts with some of the most creative and outside-the-box stories I’ve ever seen.

This has proved helpful in my own writing (or at least I think it’s been helpful). I’ve tried to be more cognizant of giving my characters odd names, putting them in odd worlds, having them interact with odd characters. I think we all desire a bit of weirdness in our lives, and I try to reflect that perhaps unspoken sentiment in my writing.

Q: Tell us more about the exciting untitled fantasy and cyberpunk novels you’re working on?

These are two projects that I’m incredibly excited about. I began working on my cyberpunk novel earlier this year, and that world is the same world that my Radon story “Motor City” takes place in. When I began working on this novel, I was feeling a bit homesick, so naturally, I wanted the narrative to take place in Detroit. The story is very much Cyberpunk 2077 meets The Outsiders, albeit with protagonists in their early twenties. This project is where most of my writing time is currently going because this project is also serving as the thesis for my MFA. Andrew Levy, who teaches a speculative fiction course at Butler, has been working with me as an advisor, and speculative fiction author Maurice Broaddus will come in as my thesis reader at some point in spring 2025. I’m incredibly excited and thankful to be working with them both, and hopefully by the time I receive my degree, I’ll have a relatively polished draft of a novel.

On the other hand, my untitled fantasy novel is getting little attention and needs a lot of work. I’ve been working on this since 2021, and its essentially Hyperion set in a traditional sword-and-sorcery world with five POVs. Right now, I have about 1/7 of the second draft done—don’t ask me how I came up with this percentage—but it’s a project I hope to come back to once I finish up the cyberpunk novel.

Q: What are your plans once you’ve completed your Creative Writing MFA?

Honestly, my only plans are to keep doing what I’m currently doing: writing, submitting, teaching, and staying involved in the writing community. Hopefully, I can throw in a novel publication in there somewhere.

Maybe more importantly, I just want to spend more time with my friends, family, girlfriend, Lindsay, and her dog, Einstein (pictured above).