Interviewing author Mick Carlon

Lydia Eno
April 2024

How long have you been writing? What was that beginning for you?

They used to make us do bathroom duty at the high school. You sit with your papers outside of the bathroom and check passes. I always found it degrading for me and degrading for the kids. One day, all my papers for my journalism classes, my English classes, all my papers were graded and I didn’t have anything to do with like 40 minutes left. And I just thought, ‘What about a boy who jumps a train? What about if you did that? You know so much about Duke Ellington, you really wouldn’t have to look up much information.’ I don’t know how many boys that period went into the bathroom without me checking their hall passes. It was like I was possessed. And I wrote the first chapter of Riding on Duke’s Train. It’s such a romantic story, [written] outside the boys’ room at a public high school.

I liked the chapter and lo and behold, I had ideas of where the story would go. Every couple of days I’d sit down and write some more. Some days I’d write for an hour and some days I’d write for 10 minutes. After about a year and a half, I had a novel. When I printed it out and reread the early parts, I barely remembered having written it, and I was really surprised it didn’t suck. I sent it to a couple of agents and one agent loved it, loved it. She was going to approach some major publishing houses, and then she died on me. It was really sad. One of my writing heroes, Nat Hentoff — I sent it to him and he wrote back raving about it. He said, ‘Did you know Duke Ellington?’ And I said, ‘No, I was 15 when he died.’ He said, ‘Well, I knew him for 25 years. He was my mentor. The Duke in your story is the Duke that I knew. How did you do this?’ And then he was helping me.

I read that a small independent publishing house out of New York State, LeapFrog Press, was having a contest. You send them your manuscript, and if they like it, you get published. I read an article about it in the Sunday Boston Globe. Then I got an email at school[that] said ‘Congratulations! Out of 850-something entries from around the world, we feel that yours, Riding on Duke’s Train, was the best and we’re gonna publish you.’ I mean, it was like finding out that you just won the lottery. I couldn’t believe it. So that’s how I got published. I entered a contest.

I did go to some really major publishing companies and came close to getting published with them, but a lot of them said kids today are just not interested in jazz. I get frustrated because the whole idea of writing the stories was to interest some young people in checking out Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, or Billie Holiday. I got published by a small publishing house, and then the book started getting adopted into schools. All these schools started adopting the book, which made LeapFrog ask for another book. At that point, I had the Louis one [Travels with Louis] almost done. Then a couple of years down the road, they asked if I’d write a book for the high school level student using a female protagonist. And that’s how Girl Singer was written. LeapFrog was bought by a bigger publishing house out of London, and they’re gonna be republishing all three of my novels with new covers for the world market, Europe, and the United States.

Wow. Yeah. That’s exciting.

I think I was about 50, 51 when I got published. And it shows ya, if you have some ambition or dream, don’t think ‘I’m 40. It can’t happen.’ It happened to me at 50.

How do you balance making sure that what you’re writing is historically accurate with the fictional storytelling aspect of it?

I’m the kind of person that, when I get into something, I really get into it. And that’s probably the reason why I’ve always avoided drugs. I always thought, you know, Carlon, you’re kind of a pig with cake. You’d probably be a pig with drugs. My dad was playing jazz in the house, [so] I always loved jazz. I loved Louis Armstrong as much as I loved The Beatles. I discovered these jazz artists when I was about 15. That’s when I started reading about them, and it made my dad real happy. And that’s when I began to realize that these musicians that I thought were entertainers are incredible artists. I mean, artists on the level of Beethoven or Mozart, and because of the color of their skin, so many times they were treated like garbage in their own country. Treated like royalty in Europe, but garbage in their own racist country. So I began reading about these people. If you can read, you can teach yourself anything.

I am a walking encyclopedia on these people. I mean, I can tell you what Duke Ellington was doing in April of 1939. The thing is, I didn’t have to do that much research. When I started writing these books, I had 30, 40 years of reading about these people under my belt. I had interviews that I had watched at first on film and then on YouTube. I knew so much about these people. You know in Riding on Duke’s Train, when they [did] a European tour in the spring of 39, did I have to go look up the order of the cities that they went to? Yeah, I didn’t know that. Knowing that Johnny Hodges, Duke Ellington’s saxophone player, was kind of a moody guy; I already knew that. When I created these so-called characters, I was just bringing into their characterization their real-life personas. It’s a little spooky how much I know about certain jazz musicians. So I was writing on a subject that I had 30-40 years of research done for fun, I didn’t think of it as research. Well, not to brag. My daughter said, ‘Dad, humble brag.’

I did a book signing at a bookstore in Harlem. It was a real big deal, and a youth jazz band was there from the New York City Public Schools. I gave a little talk and I signed copies. Who was there, but Duke Ellington’s granddaughter, Mercedes.

Wow.

She became a well-known choreographer and she was probably like in her early 70’s and she looked 45. Just this gorgeous lady. She gave me this big hug — and oh, I don’t know what kind of perfume she was wearing, but it smelled so good — and she said, ‘You totally captured my grandfather, and I didn’t think that was possible because he was a mystery to us as well, but you did.’ So, that was nice to hear, rather than ‘Hey white boy phony who do you think you are!’ She hugged me and said that I had captured him. So that was nice to hear; but again, that was because I’d been listening to Duke Ellington’s music, interviews, reading about him for decades— it was all up there in my little brain.

Yeah, I mean you’re talking a lot about Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Would you say that they’re the particular jazz musicians that have had the biggest impact on you?

I would add Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday as well. They’re just geniuses. And the fact is they were decent, generous, kind, human beings as well. There’s a man — he passed away three years ago — Jack Bradley. Jack knew Louis [Armstrong] for 20-something years. He was Louis’s official photographer. Louis Armstrong had four wives but never had children; the fourth wife though, he was married to for over 30 years. Louis called Jack ‘my white son.’ So I met Jack Bradley. This was back in the early 90s and he became a really close friend. Louis died in 1971. I met Jack in 1991. For decades, I was hanging out with a guy who knew truly what Lewis Armstrong was like as a human being and I would just pepper jack with all these questions. There’s a term, inside baseball, you know, the pros know all the little tricks about baseball inside baseball. Well, I had inside baseball information on Louis Armstrong thanks to my friendship with Jack Bradley, one of Louis’ best, best friends. I never met Duke Ellington, and I didn’t have a close friendship with any of Duke’s friends. It was all through reading. But with Louis, I was dear friends with one of his closest friends.

Can you share any memorable moments from your teaching career that have really influenced your writing?

I sat through so many boring classes when I was a kid, so I always tried not to make it boring. I’m sure there were many days where I failed, I mean, how the heck do you make adverbs exciting? But I always tried to make it halfway interesting and lively [although] my liveliness – a lot of it was artificially induced by massive amounts of coffee. I always taught books that I loved. The thing is, you just can’t go on and teach any book you want. There’s a curriculum for every grade, there might be 20 books that you can choose from and if you get through 15 or 16, that’s good. I always chose books that I felt as a young person I would have really enjoyed.

I knew in writing that I couldn’t spend half a page describing the wallpaper on an apartment wall. You gotta be quick, move it, and [have] dialogue and action, have things happen. That’s why kids love The Outsiders so much. It’s this constant, constant action— and I’m not comparing my books to The Outsiders. I just knew that I couldn’t fart around with a lot of description. I had to get right to the point and keep the story constantly moving if it was going to grab young people. Which makes it fun writing, too– I mean, who wants to spend half a page describing wallpaper? Not me!

How do you see the role of historical fiction in preserving and sharing those stories from the past? Especially related to jazz and jazz history?

Racists and bigots always play dirty, always. A hundred years ago. they’d lynch you, to take over your business, if you were a person of color. What happened to that trans student in Oklahoma? I just can’t get it out of my head. It’s just, no words. Tragic is not strong enough a word. Bigots and racists, same thing. They play dirty, they always have. Now, their new trick is to try to take certain books out of school libraries and out of the curriculum. Parents at a certain school in Florida had to sign a permission form that their students were gonna be listening to an African-American author in their classrooms. I mean, this is the 21st century for God’s sake. So I think historical fiction, when it’s truthfully written, can shine a big mirror on the strengths, but also, the incredible weaknesses of this country.

It might sound corny, but if you’re gonna bury all the shit this country is, are we ever going to improve? I mean, face the crap, face the evil, and then make up your mind that it’s not going to happen again, and it’s going to become a better country. Burying it and saying we don’t want kids to read To Kill a Mockingbird? The ignorance and the evil of that is astounding. So to answer your question: historical fiction, when done truthfully, can show a mirror into the past. And you know, the weird thing is I’m about as white as can be. I’m like Casper the Ghost on the beach. I’ve gone to inner-city schools, [and] I’ve spoken at pretty much an all-Black summer band program in New Jersey. Never once has a Black person said to me, ‘Who do you think you are, white boy, writing about these great black artists?’ I haven’t encountered that once and it never even occurred to me when I was writing the stories. I don’t even know, I just wrote them. But then after they were published, I thought, wait a minute, am I gonna get some pushback from people of color? And it’s never happened. I’ve just been embraced by people.

You write a lot about young protagonists. Is there something in particular that draws you to writing about these coming-of-age experiences?

I am cursed with an excellent memory for my own life, which as I grow older is kind of painful. Grandparents, [who] have now been gone for decades, yet right there in my memory. My parents couldn’t believe it, but in my 20s, I could lay out an apartment we moved out of when I was three. My father said, ‘All right, Mickey, describe it.’ And I did. I have [an] incredible memory for my own life. I can just close my eyes and I’m back in sixth grade, bored in math class, forcing myself to pay attention. That helped me as a teacher, because I never quite felt like, you know, I’m an adult now and they’re a lesser breed. I always felt like, no, they feel pretty much exactly the way I did last week when I was 13 or 14. My memory is so crystal clear for my own life that I do remember exactly what it felt like to be 10, 12, 15, whatever the ages of these characters. So being able to draw back on that, what it was really like to be a kid, at least through a young guy’s point of view. That’s been very valuable. So I think that’s one good thing with my protagonists who are young people, that I haven’t forgotten what it is to be that age, even though I’m an old fart.

Yeah. Well, I wish, I can’t remember anything from last week, so that’s pretty impressive.

And yet my wife will say, you know, remember that meal that I cooked last week?
Like, no. I’m sorry. Should I? I remember, you know, riding a tricycle on the sidewalk when we lived in New York. I mean, I remember the shadows of leaves on the sidewalk in front of me. It’s weird. It’s a weird kind of mind to have.

Mick Carlon’s website→

Lydia Eno is a writer and visual artist from Buffalo, New York. She is currently pursuing her bachelor’s degree in English and Studio Art from Mount Holyoke College. She will be continuing her education at Buffalo State University in the fall. She has an upcoming interview that will be  published in the LA Review of Books in May.

After 38 years as a public school teacher, Mick Carlon’s three novels,  Travels with Louis, Riding on Duke’s Train and Girl Singer  are now in the curriculum of over 130 schools in the U.S., Mexico, Spain, and France. The legendary Nat Hentoff says: “Mick Carlon’s novels are unique in the history of Jazz. Nothing like them has yet been attempted, and they are turning on countless young people to the glories and stories of our music.”