When memoirist, novelist, children’s book author, and musician, Antonio Michael Downing published his 2021 breakout memoir, Saga Boy, My Memoir of Blackness and Becoming, it was nominated for both the Toronto Book Award and the Speaker’s Book Award. His new work is a novel entitled Black Cherokee, just out from Simon & Schuster. Join us as we talk about how to write about identity, and so much more.

 

 

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Antonio Michael: Marion, thank you for having me. It’s an honor.

Marion: Well, it’s a joy and I love your work. And in your memoir, Saga Boy, you magnificently meet the fundamental requirement of all fine memoir by showing us your transcendent change.

You were removed as a child from the lush rainforest of Trinidad and taken to Wabigoon, Ontario. a tiny northern community where you and your brother are the only Black children in the town. It’s wilderness, and you use music and performance to transform yourself, first ending up to be precisely who you do not want to be and then facing down your demons and becoming yourself in full.

So, I want to open with the subject of music. I have to tell you that I know you perform and record music as John Orpheus because I’ve been listening on Spotify and watching on YouTube, and yes, it has resulted in much dancing around in my office. So, I’ve never been able to say that to a writer before, but it’s like, mm-hmm, yeah. So, thank you for that.

Antonio Michael: You’re welcome.

Marion: For the purpose of this interview, let’s just talk about what music, writing it, writing lyrics, performing it, allows for a writer. Because obviously… music provides cadence, syncopation, rhythm. Writing lyrics is its own word puzzle. But give us a sense – it’s all writers listening here – of  what being deeply embedded in making music allows for a writer.

Antonio Michael: Wow. Well, first of all, thank you for that beautiful summary of Saga Boy, which I think you did it better than I could. So thank you for that. You’re welcome. Yeah, in terms of music, you know, I think, To really tell this, I have to go back to, you know, a one road village in the south of Trinidad in the rainforest where I grew up with my grandmother raising me. The two most powerful gifts she gave me were the ability to sing and the ability to read.

She always read her Bible, but her eyes were bad. So she couldn’t do her daily King James Bible reading, and she would read the most poetic parts of the Bible, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the most evocative parts. And so she taught me to read so I could be her eyes.

Marion: Oh, so great.

Antonio Michael: And the other thing she did was she was always singing, right? And of course, Psalms is the word itself means songs, right? So the part of the Bible she liked to read were songs. And so, for me, storytelling and music, melody, like all of that was always one thing. And it always came from the same place. So what does that give to my process? I think that there is a…you know, I think you touched on the big things.

And I recently finished reading Ulysses. And, you know, many people have tried to read James Joyce Ulysses. It’s notoriously difficult to finish. But you know the key, Marion, is that Joyce was a very accomplished musician. And so, what I was told was if you read it out loud… that’s the key to getting it and to making it a more pleasurable experience. And so, I created a reading club where some friends and I read the book out loud to each other. And what it was infused with is an air for the rhythm of language, an air for the musicality of the language, like how certain words ring. How does the sentence sound out loud in the room is really important to him.

And I think that really resonates for me because, you know, when I write that musicality, I think about rhythm. I think about harmony and dissonance. I think about meter. I think about cadence. I think about how the sentence sounds in the room in space. And so, in a lot of ways, it’s written to be read.

And I think that’s the biggest impact music has had on me as a creator.

But there’s also something about the flow, the process, the flow of the process. When you’re creating music, a lot of it is based on you have to be really intimate with the feeling of what the song is doing.

And I find when I’m just in my head intellectualizing a piece of writing, I feel disconnected from that. And so, you know, in my process, ideally, when I step away to think about what I’m writing, I’m either playing a guitar or I’m singing or I’m tapping out a beat or I’m listening to some music. It’s intricately linked into my process.

Marion: That’s the best answer ever. I was taught by my first editor to read everything aloud. And I get it. And you hear internal rhyming. You hear syncopation. And when reading your work, I felt the rhythm underneath it. I felt that the word sat on top of something. And it felt like music. And that’s just lovely. And reading Ulysses aloud to one another, well, that is just a great assignment.

Antonio Michael: You want to hear the best part, Marion? I do. We actually finished it in Glasnevin Cemetery, which features in Ulysses in Dublin, on Bloomsday, the same day of the year that the book happens over a 24-hour period. So, we turned it into a pilgrimage.

Marion: Wow. I love that. I was recently in Dublin and did a whole Joyce thing. So, I am now going to go back and start reading it aloud. That is a beautiful answer. Thank you.

So, let’s stick with Saga Boy for a moment because we learn in it that the very vehicle you use to escape the tyranny of your circumstances where you transform yourself into a series of musical personalities from punk rock, rapper to crooner to pop star. And it’s also what kind of lays you low and makes you become a saga boy, the definition of which is a Trinidadian playboy.

And that is the very escapism you use also brings you down. I suspect that realization in life was hard enough. It’s huge. But when we write memoir, we must come to some understanding of those big moments. That realization that you had become like your father and grandfather before you, a saga boy, was something you lived through. But what about when you have to face that realization again as a writer and look at it with some distance? What was that like?

Antonio Michael: Yeah, well, I love that you think a lot about memoir and you’ve written about memoir. So, I love this question. I always say, as someone who’s approached a lot by would-be memoirists, I don’t believe that the reader reads a memoir to just watch you relive things in your life.

I think why they read it is to watch the wisdom you’ve gained as a result of those things. And so it’s the experienced eye looking back.

Marion: Yes.

Antonio Michael: Which is why sometimes, you know, if a memoir is too much about trying to settle scores or… or if someone is trying to talk about some tough stuff that they haven’t healed from, it’s often, you know, I think writing is great as a way to work that out. But if you’re going to share it with someone, you have to have some perspective.

And so, for me, I came to Saga Boy at a point where I call it the two jackets. It was the period in my life where I was working on Bay Street, which is like Canada’s Wall Street, pretty much.

So, if you see the skyline at Toronto, all the big bank towers, I was frequently in there. And so I wore one blue business blazer. And then at night, I was wearing some sequined jacket to jump on stage and sing my songs.

And then you get to a point in your life where you couldn’t go forward. I didn’t know how to go forward. I didn’t know what, what was I up to? Then it occurred to me, a deep insight came to me, which was that until you make peace with the past, you cannot fully live the future. And so, I had never thought about why was I so much like my father? I had never thought about how my father came to be who he was. And so, for me, the exploration it took to understand that legacy, which, you know, like you said at the beginning of your question, what heals you can also hurt you.

So it was powerful for me to be able to have this escape, but I was also expressing things that were hidden, which is therapeutic. But then, you know, every good thing can become an addiction. And that addiction can be toxic. And I realized in that way, I was following in my father and grandfather’s footsteps. But I must say, it was only after I had spent time healing and had perspective that I could actually write about it in a way that I think others could connect with. And so there’s writing for yourself because you’re trying to do catharsis. And then there’s writing to share a story with another in the hopes that they can connect and see themselves in your experience.

That requires healing, distance, perspective.

Marion: It’s a gorgeous answer. And I would love to have you co-teach something on memoir with me because I agree with you. First of all, memoir is not about what you did. Memoir is about what you did with it. And we get to watch your transcendent change. But you do something… with this memoir that is fundamental to its success, and that is building authority through vulnerability. Because you cannot just be muscular and preach at us or hector us or lecture us. You have to show us the vulnerability. And a lot of people confuse that with a kind of intimacy, like, “Oh, you want some sex scenes?” No, no, no, no. I mean, I want vulnerability.

I want to see what it takes to get the kind of realization that you achieved. And that’s only when we become vulnerable. And writing about that vulnerability, I think, is an essential assignment. And you do it so well, so beautifully in that book. So thank you for that. It’s filled with authority.

And you bring that same authority to your new book, Black Cherokee, just out from Simon & Schuster. In it, we meet the unforgettable Ophelia Blue Rivers, a descendant of Cherokee freedmen, Black people formerly enslaved by wealthy Cherokee in the American South.

This is a remarkable piece of American history. And to understand this is to come in direct contact with history many people are trying right now to take off the shelves since it involves both the history of the indigenous and of slavery.

So just to set this up, I want to remind the listeners that in the 1830s and 40s, when the Five Tribes were forced from their homelands, the people enslaved by the tribes were also removed to what became known as Indian territory. And in the 1860s, this comprised eight to 10,000 black people enslaved throughout Indian territory.

But this novel is contemporary, set in the 1990s, and Ophelia is a mixed-race Black girl fighting for her identity in a South Carolina Cherokee community. Wow. So, all great novels begin with putting the principal character in some form of turmoil and keeping her there. So, talk to me about choosing the identity of Ophelia and what you set out to explore in this turmoil.

Antonio Michael: Well, and another great summary. Thank you for that, Marion.

I love it. I love it. I think often as writers, you know, we’re asked about our intentionality, and I tend to that it’s a lot like asking a person, like, “Why did you fall in love with this other person?” Because… And, you know, the truth is, you have this inspiration, this moment, there’s a throb, is what Martin Amis and Nabokov called it. They say it’s “a throb,” a pull towards something that’s mysterious. And after the fact, you have explanations of how it works and why. And so… I will tell you about the throb in terms of as my quote-unquote choosing of this character.

Marion: Good.

Antonio Michael: I was traveling in the southern United States through the Carolinas.

I was working for BlackBerry at the time, a tech from the past. And I fell in love with the landscape of the South. And… I spent a lot of time in Carolina in particular. And one day it just came to me. And it came to me, the landscape, the river, the reservation, the bend in the river, Ophelia, the little girl with her grandmother. And I knew that they were both Black and Indigenous because I had had experience with Afro-Indigenous people. And that’s how it spoke to me. And in a way, my process of writing this book, which might just be my process of writing, period, was to understand the mystery that had visited me.

To me, it was a visitation of this place and these characters. And my job was to understand their story and why they’re there and what are the consequences of them being there. And it took years to really untangle that. But what you’re reading in Black Cherokee, you’re bearing witness to my discovery of why this visitation came to me and what it meant to me and what is the mystery of it and what is the pull of it.

Marion: It’s lovely. The throb. We’re palpating your throb, and I love that. I think it’s such a good phrase to remember. I had forgotten that phrase by Martin Amis and Vladimir Nabokov. I think that that’s a… a gorgeous reminder.

And in this book, you’re exploring nothing short of the very question at the heart of not only America, but many other places in the world right now, that being the price of belonging. And in one of the most beautiful preludes to a book I’ve ever read that unfortunately appears only in the advanced reader’s copy. A senior editor at Simon & Schuster writes directly to the reader and reminds us that “questions of belonging do not have easy answers, making fiction a necessary tool for us to use to think things through.”

And I just, as I said to you before we went live, I’m going to write to that senior editor and say how much I appreciated that frontispiece. It’s a gorgeous thing, and I wish it was included in all of the editions of your book. But it is fiction that allows us to do this. So, talk to me about pivoting from memoir to fiction and what you hoped fiction would provide you as a writer.

Antonio Michael: Well, yes. I don’t mind calling him by name. That editor is Yadon Israel, a visionary at Simon & Schuster and definitely someone I’m very thankful to have worked with.

Marion: Good. Lovely.

Antonio Michael: You know, the first thing… it gave me was a way to stop talking about myself. Because you know, you know, Marion.

Marion: I do. I do.

Antonio Michael: When you write a memoir, when you write any book, you then spend, if you are lucky enough for the book to take on a life of its own, you will then spend years, possibly the rest of your life, talking about that book.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Antonio Michael: And so I had spent a lot of time talking about Saga Boy and my journey and my life and, you know, my grandmother, you know, it permanently changed me.

I don’t know if you didn’t mention it in my bio, but I host a national radio show for CBC called The Next Chapter, where I talk about authors and books. And I was talking to my executive producer this week and she said, “You know, We have three segments in this week’s episode, and you mention your grandmother in every single one.”

So, it’s a bit of a running joke that I’m contractually obligated to mention her. But that’s a result of writing Saga Boy. It completely transformed me. And I think the thread between these books, there are many, they’re both about belonging, and about placelessness and identity, and how you find a home in your own heart first before you can find it in the physical geography you’re in.

It’s true of both, but also the grandmother dynamic is true of both. And Grandma Blue is Ophelia’s grandmother. And like I said, I got the image of Ophelia and the geography and Grandma Blue simultaneously, like all of it at once, came to me and kept me convicted, so much so that here is this novel, Black Cherokee, as a result of it. But I would say what I wanted to do was go deeper. So really, Saga Boy is about my placelessness and my search for belonging. But I wanted to examine not only Ophelia’s search for belonging, but also…You know, what happens to us when we reject someone that belongs to a community?

Marion: Yeah.

Antonio Michael: Because that’s really her story. She’s Black in Cherokee. The Black people are like, why are you praying to the river? And the Cherokee people are like, why is your hair so curly? And both sides kind of say, “You’re not one of us.” Yeah. And so in Saga Boy, I investigate my story. search for belonging, but what I wanted to do was give a fuller picture. Not only what happens to that person seeking, but what happens to the community when it ostracizes someone that is an integral part of it. So, the metaphor is, if I cut my thumb off, I hurt my thumb, but I also wound myself.

Marion: Yes.

Antonio Michael: And so what happens to those communities. And then probably an even bigger question, how do they heal that rupture? And I couldn’t just do that with, I think Saga Boy had got me thinking about that search, but Black Cherokee allowed me to fully build out all the stakeholders in that kind of rupture.

Marion: Great answer.

Antonio Michael: I’ll also say this, you know, almost all the battles in our society about who is included and who is excluded, like, you know, our trans people, you know, citizens, do they have the same rights? Our Black people, our, you know, Indigenous people, our queer people, like, you know, are immigrants, you know, that’s playing out on our TV screens and on our internet every day.

Are immigrants… included, are they deserving of the same rights that we love and know and enjoy? And so what I saw in Ophelia’s struggle and these stakeholders and this drama of self-wounding and ostracizing and healing is I saw us. I saw every day the news in 2025 and 2026 is really that drama writ large.

Marion: It is. You wrote right into this moment. And it’s extraordinary, as we read your work, to understand how much we need this right now. And I don’t think for a second that everyone who writes believes that writers are under some obligation to the world to explore the difficult terrain of the time in which they live.

But you appear to feel there’s a responsibility, maybe? Is it an obligation? Where are you on this journey?

Antonio Michael: You know, it’s funny. I mean, I think I feel a lot like Ophelia does, right? Like I’m beholden to history that I don’t fully know or understand. But there it is, no matter where I turned. I feel it’s what calls me. So, I think I’ll go back to the throb, really. It is what calls me. You know, Oscar Wilde says ‘The only reason to write something is because we admire it intensely.’ We can’t help it. we are somehow smitten and called to do it. Because really, Marion, after… It’s not even after every work. After I just finished probably the penultimate draft of a new novel.

Marion: Oh, good. Oh, good.

Antonio Michael: And I feel every time I even do an in-depth draft, the person that finishes the draft is different than the person that begun it. And so, I can’t say what I’m going to write next. What I can say is that the work itself seems to be telling me that I am called to write into this history that is actively being erased.

You know, like there’s no other way to put it. When we used to say this stuff 10 years ago, people would be like, “Oh, you know, that’s a bit extreme.” But the people doing the erasing are not pretending they’re not doing erasing anymore. So, I think we can all just call it what it is. I seem to be called to write those people.

But I think also because I am a natural underdog. I have a natural empathy and affinity for the beaten, the broken, and the damned, as the rock band My Chemical Romance says. And so, I seem to, and I say I seem to, which might sound like a cop-out, but it really isn’t.

I honestly do not know what I will be called to write next. And I feel that is exactly as it should be.

Marion: Well, I’m so grateful that you’ve just finished the penultimate draft of the next book. And I will please officially invite you now to come and talk with me about it when it’s published. I can’t thank you enough for your work.

I can’t thank you enough for coming along today and these exquisite answers. Thank you, Antonio Michael. It is a joy to read your work and it is a joy to get to know you. Thank you.

Antonio Michael: Thank you, Marion. It’s been my pleasure.

Marion: The author is Antonio Michael Downing. The new novel is Black Cherokee, just out from Simon & Schuster. See more on the writer at Antonio Michael Downing dot com. Get the book wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir, including classes in writing the personal essay and the op-ed. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow Qwerty wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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