E. Dolores Johnson is the author of Say I’m Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love. She was born in Buffalo, New York and has earned degrees from Howard University and Harvard Graduate School of Business. After a career in tech, Johnson studied creative writing at Boston’s GrubStreet in their MFA-equivalent Memoir Incubator program. In addition to her book, Johnson is a published essayist focused on inter-racialism. Johnson lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To learn more about her and her work, follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

EB: Having read your memoir, Say I’m Dead, I know that you made your career in the business world. So, how did you begin writing in general and what drew you to personal nonfiction specifically?

EDJ: In my business career, concise analytical problem solving is the goal of communications. No extra words, details or sidebars are needed or wanted. It’s very fast-paced, all due immediately with accuracy an essential. After thirty years of sharpening that style, I had few narrative or creative writing skills. With years of advocating for social justice, my goal became writing about race. When a writing teacher said I didn’t know how to write scenes, description, dialogue, story arcs and the like, I started taking classes. Then the essence of my memoir, Say I’m Dead began to take shape. I tried to write fiction but was uncomfortable making things up. It was my experience with research andboiling down disparate information into clear messages that made nonfiction appealing.

EB: I totally get feeling uncomfortable about making things up! When did the idea for Say I’m Dead come about? The heart of the plot of your memoir centers on your 1979 search for your mother’s white family. Did it take you forty years to figure out you wanted to write the book? Did you feel you had to wait to write it until a certain point in your life? I know that sometimes writers feel they can’t write the most truthful, honest memoir they can until certain people have passed away. Was that a factor at all in writing Say I’m Dead?

EDJ: Writing the memoir grew out of a constant hunger to know more about my family. When I had a job with investigative journalists, they taught me how to dig out the facts from public records, interviews, site visits, etc. And I took classes with them to learn the craft of narrative journalism, where a story is built around the facts. Only then did I decided to write my book. My mom was in her nineties then, when we had had years of talking about the issues Say I’m Dead raises. She and all of the family got on board with the project, though none of my immediate family lived to read the manuscript.

EB: So much of your book is about the research you did on your family—but what research did you do on yourself and your own life to write this book? I know you mention in the acknowledgments that you relied on your family to help you recreate scenes and remember things that had happened. How else did you research yourself and memories of things that had happened 40+ years ago?

EDJ: It became important to reflect deeply on the meaning and emotional weight of what happened in my life, not just the and-then, and-then.

EB: Yes! I tell my writing students this all the time. A good memoir needs the perspective of the then-you and the now-you, not just a list of memories or events.

EDJ: The scenes of important events required channeling my feelings as well as analyzing my own behaviors, trying to be objective about the consequences. For example, to depict the influence that Howard University had on my identity, I examined college year books, classmates who were there with me and my lifelong commitment to social justice. Or, to realize the impact of the boogeyman who said white people didn’t mean Blacks any good meant coming to terms with my own prejudices, and a look at the white relationships I’ve had over the years.

EB: Sometimes memoirists have to deal with explosive repercussions from their families after the publications of their memoirs. (For example, Helen Fremont wrote her memoir The Escape Artist all about the blow-back she got from her family after publishing her first memoir, After Long Silence.) I know that searching for your white family members was a point of tension between you and your family, as you write about that directly in Say I’m Dead. But what about writing the book itself? Was that another point of tension?

EDJ: It was fortunate that there was no major blowback about writing Say I’m Dead. Everyone in my family knew I was writing this book, because I interviewed them and said, “That’s going in the book.”

EB: I appreciate how direct you were about it! No beating around the bush.

EDJ: White and Black family members have read it and commented favorably. My biggest worry about damaged relationships was the Clique Club family whose white mother led a double life. [EDITOR’S NOTE: The Clique Club was a group of Johnson’s mother’s friends who were also in interracial relationships.] One of them expressed significant reluctance about telling that during our interviews but went along with her brother’s decision to include their story. So, their names and faces were disguised at their request. And though the impact of her mother’s denial of her Black family to her white relatives was written in pain, after the book was published, the concerned person called, applauding Say I’m Dead. She felt it was a truthful account and the themes of the book were important.

EB: I know that you are involved in the GrubStreet/Boston-area writing community. Can you speak a bit about who you turn to for support when you are writing in general, or when you were specifically working on Say I’m Dead? What does your artistic and writing community look like?

EDJ: The writing community is everything to producing my best work. I completed the Memoir Incubator at GrubStreet and have depended on the generous feedback and ideas of my classmates and other writing group members since. I belong to the Writers of Color group, sponsored by GrubStreet, and the people there who understand issues of the “other” and can provide authentic grounding through the truth of their own work and community spirit. And, from the residencies done at artists colonies and summer writing conferences, I have a cadre of artists from across America and across disciplines who have broadened the possibilities for my work.

EB: What do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction?

EDJ: In creative nonfiction, it can be challenging to blend the craft techniques of fiction with factual data. But scenes, character development, emotional arcs and the like are crucial to delivering an intriguing, meaningful, universally human true story.

EB: What do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

EDJ: I love the research aspect of nonfiction. Using hard facts is the heart of the form, so finding surprising, enlightening, shocking facts cements the work in truth, while grabbing the readers’ interest. It can be exciting to find just the photograph to illustrate a point, or the court ruling that changed everything for the main character.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man”?

EDJ: In Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns she describes the extent of segregation under Jim Crow laws in the South:

There was a colored window at the Post Office in Florida and white and colored phone booths in Oklahoma. White and colored went to different windows to get their license plates in Mississippi and to make their deposits at the First National Bank of Atlanta. There were taxicabs for colored people and taxicabs for white people in Jacksonville, Birmingham, Atlanta and the entire state of Mississippi. Colored people had to be off the streets and out of the city limits at 8 p.m. in Palm Beach and Miami Beach…. It was against the law for a colored person and a white person to play checkers together in Birmingham…. There were colored parking spaces and white parking spaces in Calhoun City, Mississippi. In one North Carolina courthouse, there was a white Bible and a Black Bible to swear to tell the truth on.