The American debut novelist on the lessons she learned from teaching art, her mixed feelings about Virginia and her experience of white supremacists
Born and raised in Virginia, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson was an art teacher for 20 years before she published her debut novella, My Monticello, aged 50. Set in the near future as American society is unravelling, it tells the story of a young black student and her neighbours fleeing Charlottesville, Virginia, pursued by violent white supremacists and taking refuge in Monticello, home of US president Thomas Jefferson. The book, which the New York Times called “a masterly feat”, is now being turned into a film for Netflix. Johnson lives in Charlottesville with her husband and son.
The apocalyptic scenario you create in the book has clear roots in the American present – there are terrible storms, power failures and racial violence. Was it hard to imagine or unnervingly easy?
It was extremely easy, because it was me nudging forward from the very real fears I had after 12 August 2017. That’s when Charlottesville experienced the deadly Unite the Right rally, where we had a public run-in with a certain type of extremism. All this was combined with worrying about equity, infrastructure and the environment.
