Jason Mott on Struggling with Home

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Jason Mott about his new novel, People Like Us.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: I think one of the strongest themes that spoke to me, I mean, there’s a lot about many things in here, was this sense of home, especially the character in Europe, but even the author that was in Minnesota to speak. They were both very unmoored. In the novel you have this billionaire offering this award-winning author this chance to say, you can never go home, but if you stay here, you’re going to be released from so much of what America has become. I’m just really curious about this sense of home. And in some ways, I think imagination might be a home, or maybe it sometimes takes you away from a sense of home. And I’m just curious what you have to say about that?

Jason Mott: Yeah, I think home is something that I personally struggle with a lot, and so my characters, by proxy, are struggling with that. Writing this book was very much an exploration of what I define as home and how I engage with the idea of home. For instance, I live in Columbus County, North Carolina, on a property that my family has owned for literally close to around 100 years. I think my great grandfather actually purchased it around 100 years ago. My family’s always been there. My dad grew up there, and so on and so forth, and so for me, this is a very clear-cut definition of home. You know, it is the place that I grew up on. I still live there. I’m actually building a new house on the same property. And yet, I did do some touring in Europe and was able to see America from the outside looking in for a while. And there comes a point where you have to ask yourself, at some point, does your home love you back? I think that’s the core of it. You know, I love America. I love my slice of America, America as a whole, yes, I love that as a question mark. But my particular slice of America I love very much, and yet my country as a whole, I feel does not so much love me back. I’m not sure a country can love anyone back. And I think that’s an idea that everyone needs to ponder sometimes, is the idea of, can an abstract idea like country actually love you back, and what do you do with that? So, for me, I am very much in a place where I’m trying to figure out what home means and where home is. I think home is very much defined by people, more so than it is by dirt and geography. And yet it is still an anchor. It is still very much something that pulls me back and keeps me here. And I’m constantly wondering, am I making the right decision sometimes?

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Jason Mott is the author of two poetry collections, including We Call This Thing Between Us Love and five novels including The Returned, which was a New York Times bestseller and was made into a TV series that ran for two seasons. His novel Hell of a Book was named the winner of the National Book Award for fiction.  He has a BFA in fiction and an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.  His new novel is called People Like Us.