CLIFFORD THOMPSON

Q: Growing up, what were your impressions of your mother’s job? Did you have any childlike
understanding that her position is what gave your family somewhat more income than that

of your neighbors in the housing projects? Were you aware that her stable public-sector
employment made the difference in your living standards?

A: During one period of my boyhood in Washington, DC, I spent a lot of time in the projects,
because that was where my friends lived, but—in that way of kids—I never inquired or thought
too deeply about my friends’ parents or how they got by. What was hard to miss was that, for
various reasons, none of my friends had fathers in their homes. I lived with both of my parents
in our small private home until my father died, when I was eleven. After that, my mother
shouldered the responsibility of keeping us going the way we had been. (That responsibility
included supporting her practically deaf mother, my beloved grandmother, who lived with us.)
And I understood that my mother’s work at the post office made that possible.

How did your early interest in arts and letters develop?

It happened this way: My three siblings were born in the late 1940s and early ’50s, and I came
along in the ’60s—my parents’ youngest child by a long way. For a brief time, before he got his
own place, my brother, who was then in his early twenties, lived in our basement. In that
period, when I was eight, nine years old, the basement was a wonderland for me, not least
because of all of the comic books and collections of Peanuts comic strips my brother kept there.
I could read those for hours, and I soon began writing and drawing my own (pretty terrible)
comic strips. That was the origin of my interest in both writing and drawing.

Did your mother ever encourage you to work at the post office?

She never did, that I recall.

Do you remember any stories she told about her job or co-workers?

Two things come to mind. My mother sorted mail on the night shift, which meant that she slept
during the day, and she told me quite a few times over the years that sleeping in the daytime is
not the same as sleeping at night. Because of that, and because of the repetitive nature of the
job, she would occasionally walk around just to stay awake and to be able to focus. It was hard
work.

The other thing I remember her telling me is that there were many kinds of people, including
lawyers, who did the same work as my mother, and my mother did not go beyond high school.
That suggests to me that the post office was a kind of accidental meeting ground for people of
many different education levels and points of view, which can be hard to find in other areas of
work or life.

You said your mother paid for your college. Please explain.

To put this in context: My father was a postal employee, too—a clerk typist at the post office at
what was then National Airport, outside DC. He had learned to type in the army; he was a staff

sergeant during World War II, stationed in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. (He also drove a
taxi.) He had heart and gastrointestinal problems and retired on disability in the early 1970s,
after which my mother, who had been working at the post office during the day, moved to the
night shift, which paid better. After my father’s death, my mother received an annuity from his
post office job as well as, I believe, money from his military service. Part of that became my
allowance.

My parents both grew up in rural Virginia and made their way to DC in the 1940s, which makes
them part of the Great Migration of blacks from the South to northern and midwestern cities.
(Technically, DC is south of the Mason-Dixon line, but close enough.) And their jobs gave my
family entry into the middle class. Not that it was all confetti and rose petals. Money was tight
sometimes—especially, I’m told, in the years before I was born. And there were other things
going on. My older siblings experienced segregation in a way I did not. One of my sisters, for
example, recalls the family driving past an amusement park, asking to go there, and being told
that the park did not admit black people.

A common occurrence in American life is for one generation of either migrants or immigrants to
give their families a solid footing through blue-collar work, then see their children become
professionals and their grandchildren turn to the arts. In my family, that arc took place within
two generations: my siblings, who are half a generation older than I am, went into
professions—law, mental health services, the ministry. I set out to become a writer.

After I took the SAT, in my junior year of high school, the first college to contact me was
Oberlin, in Ohio. I learned that they had a creative writing major, which greatly interested me. I
applied there and was accepted, but they didn’t offer me much in the way of financial aid, and
tuition at Oberlin was, to understate the matter, not cheap. That’s where my mother came in.
Ma took out loans on her own, and after I graduated and wasn’t making a lot of money, she
even took over my loan payments for a while. In short, I was very lucky to have the mother I
did. Not every parent would have done that for a kid who announced his intention to major in
creative writing!

What I realize in retrospect is that Ma, who did not have much formal education, who made a
decent living by the standards of that time and place but did not have an incredibly high
income, was good with money—and raised practicality almost to the level of genius. Her postal
work, and her skill with managing money, made my life possible.

Did you intentionally choose to pursue a career as a writer? If not, tell us how you fell into it.

At what point did you realize you were pretty much working as a professional writer?
 

To tell Part Two of a story I started above: Until my late teens I loved writing and drawing my
own comics, but eventually I sensed that my drawing was not good enough for me to make it
on a professional level. That realization coincided with a growing interest in reading and writing
straight prose. I picked up books by writers including Ernest Hemingway and Tom Robbins and
was hooked. So when I was eighteen, I stopped doing comics and began calling myself a writer.

​

My wife and I have a niece who majored in marketing in college and then, immediately after
graduation, got a good job in . . . marketing. That is a perfectly logical progression, of course,
but it’s so different from the career arc of a liberal arts major like me. People who major in
creative writing do not graduate and then immediately begin making their living as novelists.
(The one exception I can think of is Bret Easton Ellis.) Most writers, in fact, are never able to
support themselves solely through writing. There are the Stephen Kings and J. K. Rowlings of
the world, of course, but most of us do other things to pay the bills. My twenties looked like
this: after college, I worked for a couple of years as an assistant at a book-publishing house in
Manhattan; then did part-time data entry for a couple of years while spending the remainder of
my time writing fiction; then spent half a year in Spain with my then-girlfriend, now wife,
teaching English and working on a novel; then came back to the States, turned twenty-nine, got
married, and realized I needed to make a grown-up person’s salary.

So I found work that was writing-adjacent. After taking a course at NYU in copyediting, I landed
a job at a company called H.W. Wilson, located in the Bronx, which published reference books. I
started as a copyeditor and rose through the ranks to become editor of one of Wilson’s
publications, Current Biography. I supervised a staff of writers and editors that ranged from
sixteen to twenty people over the years.

Every day, at lunch, I would pull out my notebook and work on my own writing. Somewhere
along the way I became enamored of essays.
 

If my career has anything in common with my mother’s, it’s that we both spent many years
working at the same place to help support our families. The day I turned thirty, my wife and I
learned that we would become parents. Our second child was born when I was thirty-five. My
thirties and forties were spent working full-time, raising children, and writing when I could. My
career as a writer did not begin in any public sense until my early fifties, when I began
publishing books and teaching nonfiction writing at the college and graduate levels.

What led you to this path? What stories lived inside you that you needed to tell? What are
the things that give you ideas and make you want to write about them?

Earlier, I mentioned my love of the comic strip Peanuts, whose main character is the hapless
Charlie Brown. As I grew beyond childhood, I encountered fictional characters who seemed to
me to be Charlie Brown in different guises: Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher
in the Rye, Benjamin Braddock in the movie The Graduate, starring Dustin Hoffman. Together,
those characters got me interested in telling the story of the young man who, for one reason or
another, does not fit into the world around him. My interest also stemmed from the fact that I
was that young man. As a skinny, shy, studious kid in a black neighborhood where I was
sometimes accused of talking “like a white boy,” I felt a kinship with those characters. As much
as anything, watching The Graduate on TV late one night made me want to write.

 

As I’ve gotten older and turned toward nonfiction writing, my themes have come to include
identity—specifically, black American identity—as well as family, childhood, fatherhood, and
the arts.

Tell us how you became a visual artist.

So here is Part Three. As already noted, I gave up comics in my late teens. But the impulse
toward visual art never really left me. Sporadically over the years, I would draw or paint. Then,
in my mid-forties, I suddenly began painting all the time. After eating dinner with my family in
our Brooklyn apartment and washing the dishes, I would take over the dining table with my
tubes of acrylic paint and canvases and the easel I put together with scraps of wood and twine.
One Christmas my wife took pity on me and gave me an honest-to-God easel.

In 2020 I joined Blue Mountain Gallery, a painting collective in Manhattan, where I had solo
shows in 2023 and 2026. (People have described my paintings as having a narrative element.)
Meanwhile, the old itch to make comics came back. In 2022 Other Press published my graphic
novel, Big Man and the Little Men, which I wrote and illustrated, and in 2025 the quarterly
online magazine Cleaver began publishing my graphic narrative series, Connecticus Diggs,
Cultural Detective, whose stories generally range from six to eight pages. Connecticus may be
the most fun I’ve ever had creatively.

Somewhere along the way I became comfortable calling myself a visual artist.

Size up how your mother influenced you – your career, your outlook on life, your ways of
being.

The very last time I saw my mother, who died at eighty-two in 2007, I told her that any
generosity in me had come from her. She was a warm, generous person, which she
demonstrated in big and small ways. I’ve mentioned that she paid for my college education. But
also: when I was a boy of eight or so, because of all the TV I watched, I was fascinated with the
idea of rank, in the military or the police force. One day I drew some army stripes and asked my
mother if I could glue them to my shirt. It would be so easy for a parent to say “no” in that
situation, because what if the glue doesn’t come off in the wash? My mother said yes. That’s
just one small example.

I can think of exactly one occasion when Ma told me that she didn’t think I was capable of
something. That was toward the end of my high school years, when she said she couldn’t see
me succeeding as a comic book artist. You could argue over whether or not that was a good
thing to say, and I disagreed with her—but of course I later reached the same conclusion
myself.
 

My mother liked a good laugh. I do too. (Early on in our relationship, my wife was struck by how
much I laughed when I talked to my mother on the phone.) Ma had an openness to people that
I like to think I have inherited. Over the years I brought home a number of white people,

eventually including my wife, and my mother welcomed them the same way she welcomed my
black friends.
 

I also think I have inherited some of my mother’s practicality. Being a writer, teacher, and visual
artist requires serious and detailed planning, and space cadet though I sometimes am, I manage
my schedule the way my mother managed her money. When it’s time to stop doing one thing
and do another, it’s time.

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Clifford Thompson is a New York-based artist and writer. His books include What It Is: Race,
Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues, which Time magazine called one of the “most
anticipated” books of the season, and Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays, a finalist for the PEN
America award for the Art of the Essay. His essays and reviews have appeared in the
Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Best American Essays 2018, the Times Literary Supplement, the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and more. Thompson teaches creative nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A painter, he is an associate
member of the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York.