A love letter to his hometown
Bryan Washington’s debut story collection renders the varied neighborhoods of Houston into characters
In “Elgin,” the final short story in Bryan Washington’s debut collection, “Lot,” a young man ref lects on Houston’s East End, the neighborhood he’s called home his whole life. “Between the chop shops and busted laundromats and abuelas like scarecrows on every corner, there’s no reason to stick around unless you’re a kid,” he thinks.
But the recurring narrator, a biracial gay man who goes unnamed through most of the book, sticks around anyway. Home is home, for better or for worse, and that particular slice of Houston is his.
The sprawling Texas city is essentially the main character of “Lot” — the stories take place in various neighborhoods in Space City. Washington, 25, is a Kentucky native who grew up in Texas and was educated at the University of Houston and the University of New Orleans.
Washington spoke to The Times via telephone about his book, Houston and gentrification. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
How old were you when you started writing fiction? Was that something you picked up in college, or have you been doing it for a while?
I picked it up in university. I guess it would be the end of the first or the beginning of the second year of undergrad. It wasn’t really something that I had a habit of doing, but I took a nonfiction class with Mat Johnson. It meant a lot. He’s just such a cool guy, and I wanted to take more classes with him, so I eventually took a fiction class with him.
Was it difficult structuring the book? Or did it come pretty easily to you?
Originally, when I was plotting the book, I thought I wanted to have a collection of stories highlighting each of Houston’s hubs. I thought that just made sense as a through line. In each story, the setting would be a character in and of itself, and each of those settings would be a particular part of the city, and the through line would be the city of Houston. With the recurring narrator, once I’d written a few stories with his voice, the collection started to feel more like a collection than just a series of random standalone stories.
There’s a lot of violence and harshness in the book. Did you find it emotionally hard to write that, or was it more of a cathartic thing for you?
I don’t know that I would call it cathartic. There were some stories that were difficult to condense the weight that I needed for certain scenes and put those on the page.
As I was writing, I was thinking of the events that took place for each character from their perspective, and while for some readers the violence might be deemed abrasive or it might be deemed out of the norm, for other readers that just might be a fact of life, you know? So as I was trying to write it and thinking through it from the perspective of each of those individual characters, some of them may face traumatic incidents, or they may face structural violence put upon them by the city or the state or whatever. For some it might be a transformative, highly traumatic experience, and for others it’s just a fact of life and something they have to negotiate and work around. Volleying between those two spaces was tricky, but while I was actually writing it, I was trying to have each voice be so singular that the reader could approach each of those issues on each character’s own terms.
The main character, the narrator of many of the stories, has such a distinct voice. How did he come to you?
The first two stories that I wrote were “Lockwood” and “Navigation.” I work usually with dialogue first; I usually start with a conversation of some sort or another, because just by merit of one person talking with another, there is some sort of tension or conflict, irrespective of whether they’re agreeing on something or whether they’re disagreeing on something. Because the question becomes “why?” What are they talking about? And I was really preoccupied with the recurring narrator’s concerns.
Your book concentrates a lot on neighborhoods and real estate, and Houston is kind of unique in that it doesn’t really have zoning, and it’s a really sprawling city. Was it difficult for you to evoke the geography of Houston to readers who maybe have never been there before?
It was initially difficult, because I think that with the initial stories and in my initial drafting, I was trying to approach the city’s geography from a very critical apparatus and from a very analytical, comprehensive apparatus. And at some point it just clicked. And I came to the conclusion that your experience of the city, of any city, is very particular, right?
So once I started attempting to give each character a very singular experience of their negotiation of their respective hubs, or their respective movements and constellations throughout the city, then there was less pressure to get this right, to have this book about Houston be comprehensive and be correct in every aspect of Houston. Because there’s really never going to be a singular experience for Houston or any city, but particularly Houston because it’s just so diverse. You’ve got the sprawl, and there’s so many different ways to live here.
Especially toward the end, “Lot” deals with gentrification in Houston. You wrote in an essay about the Third Ward for the Awl, “Those who historically didn’t have a place to call their own could find themselves displaced once again.” In the three years since you wrote that, have you become more or less hopeful about the future of the Third Ward and other neighborhoods that are undergoing some degree of gentrification?
I’m very hopeful. I don’t know that I’m the most optimistic person, but I’m very hopeful about Houston, because there’s just so much possibility here. And I think that what’s been really fascinating over the past few years, by merit of the Astros’ success, by merit of the attention given to the city immediately after Harvey, by merit of the attention given to the city as being an international food hub.
People are trying to figure out how to define the city, or how to give it a cohesive narrative, and no one really seems to be able to agree on any one thing. And I think that that’s really lovely. That you have a place that is so vibrant and so messy, and yet everyone seems to be able to do what they want to do and get along with one another, irrespective of where they’re coming from, because you have people here from all over the world. The fact that they’re able to figure it out here, I think, is cause for optimism.