My Reading Life: Ibis author Justin Haynes prefers reading scripts to watching movies

Justin Haynes, the author of the debut novel Ibis, is originally from Trinidad and Tobago and earned his MFA from Notre Dame. He currently lives Atlanta and teaches English at Oglethorpe University. His debut was recently published by Overlook Press and is about a coastal village cursed by the death of a witch, where superstitious fishermen are haunted by her vengeful mother and an uncanny flood of scarlet ibis birds. As an American journalist stirs tensions and the government cracks down on migrants, the villagers’ fears entangle with the journey of Milagros, a young refugee searching for her mother across the Americas.

Below, the author answered our My Reading Life questionnaire for you to learn about the books he was obsessed with, what helped him through puberty, and what he’s reading next.

What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?

Back then Funk and Wagnalls produced a series of Sesame Street Library books. They ran the length of the alphabet, and each issue would feature letters and numbers just like the television show. Sesame Street was the gateway drug, and their books were what helped tide you over until that next episode’s fix. I was also enamored with Anansi the trickster spider stories. Caribbean folklore infuses my writing. 

What book helped you through puberty?

I was much more of a STEM student at that time, and I had these little pocket Collins Gem Books for Physics, Chemistry, and Biology that I always kept handy. My sisters were much bigger fiction readers. I would read mostly remora-style and consume their discarded literary conquests. So a lot of teenage romances whose titles I conveniently cannot remember were often on the menu. Parody magazines like Cracked, Mad, and Sick also had a cache back then, and they were currency in school like prison cigs (Foucault’s Discipline and Punish shows us the clear overlap between schools and prisons). These mags would compress movies and television shows into 10 or so pages. I read the original Star Wars trilogy in those pages long before I saw the movies. To this day, I prefer reading scripts to watching films, and I keep trying to shoehorn images into my writing, but my editors wisely keep rejecting this move.

What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?

Blank journals like Moleskines or Field Note,s preferably with koans sprinkled throughout to encourage mindfulness. Teenagers should be encouraged to gaze into their minds’ abyss and reckon with what gazes back. Also, The Monster at the End of this Book featuring Your Lovable Furry Old Pal Grover. Everyone should have their minds blown by this postmodern amuse bouche. Graduate school will fill one’s head with grandiose notions of Tristram Shandy’s narrative hijinks, but Grover knocks it out in much fewer pages. 

If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?

Probably no craft books and very few novels. I would love to include quality daily newspapers or good weekly magazines to demonstrate concision. When I moved to Brooklyn as a teenager, the Village Voice was essential reading although I had to go into the City to land a copy. If novels are a must, one cannot go wrong with the impressive scope and ambition of Morrison’s Song of Solomon, as well as discussing the shift of Bulkagov’s The Master and Margarita from samizdat to umpteen translations. 

What books helped guide you while writing your book?

Periodicals played much more of a role than books, particularly Trinidad and Tobago’s daily newspapers and their impressive coverage of the Venezuelans refugee crisis. One collection of novels that I returned to was Wilson Harris’s The Guyana Quartet in which Harris deploys a dreamy magical realism that requires a careful reader to be alert at all times. 

What books are on your nightstand now?

I read like a magpie lines its nest, and there are always a few books going. I am what the kids call a mood reader especially before I drift off. Two books that I have been dipping into are How Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers Changed the Civil Rights Movement and  Zora Neale Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great.