The Pen as an Extension of The Heart: A conversation with Matthew R. Morris
Matthew R. Morris discusses how storytelling became his tool for self-expression and resilience in his decade-long journey towards his bestselling debut memoir, Black Boys Like Me: Confrontations with Race, Identity, and Belonging.
Interview by Louie Simonin
Photo of Matthew R. Morris by Anthony Gebrehiwot
Black Boys Like Me (Viking, 2024)
Matthew R. Morris is an educator, anti-racism advocate, and writer based out of Toronto. He is the author of the instant national best seller, Black Boys Like Me: Confrontations with Race, Identity, and Belonging. He earned an honours bachelor degree and a Master of Arts in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto. In addition to teaching, his work and public speaking on the deconstruction of Black masculinity, hip-hop culture, and schooling has taken him across North America to consult on and learn about the challenges facing students and educators in the current education system. He has written articles for TVO, Huffington Post, ETFO Voice, and Education Canada, and has been featured in the Toronto Star and the Toronto Sun, and on CBC Radio and CityNews.
SIMONIN: I found Black Boys Like Me in my local library and was amazed by the intimate honesty of the essays. After reading them, I felt like I knew you, and I would like to commend you for sharing these experiences so viscerally, it takes real courage to put stories like these on paper.
MORRIS: It's a lot. And to be honest, my dad was alive at the time, but he wasn’t a big reader, so I knew he wasn’t going to object to anything in the book. My mom unfortunately passed away, and some of the stuff I wrote about my brother, he was okay with because he’s doing well now. But that type of stuff, when you’re kind of exploring your own past, is tricky territory to write about. But it’s also important because a lot of people go through things, and sometimes there’s politics involved, in which we only hear particular stories from particular people, so I just felt like it was important to share.
SIMONIN: You speak to this within the introductory essay of the book. You write about how perception drives feeling and how limited perception leads to very real feelings. How has your breadth of experience as a teacher, writer, and speaker helped you maintain objectivity? When you’re writing about these intense experiences, do you have to check your feelings and move behind them before you put them on the page?
MORRIS: Absolutely. It’s a multi-layered process. When you go through an experience, you establish it as truth; you’re informed by the reality of the experience. But once you begin to reflect on it, whether it’s through the written word, venting to your friends, or meditating on it, thinking about it is gonna give you a different outlook because now you’re one level detached from it, right?
I've always loved and been fascinated with writing as a creative form because it’s provided me with a personal form of therapy. That’s the third level of finding somewhat of an objective truth. Because not only are you reflecting, but you're reflecting in a way that requires you to be creative—not just thinking about it but trying to articulate it out from your experience onto the page. So, I think those processes move it from a completely subjective experience to somewhat of an experience that's a little bit more grounded in objectivity or rationality.
Although I would argue that nothing really is completely objective, right? Particularly when we're talking about self-directed experiences. Within creative nonfiction, there's always going to be an entry point of subjectivity. And I think that is important, especially when you consider that the book that I wrote is centred on identity through race and blackness and masculinity. When writing about those things, I think it is important to position myself as someone who's affected by these things, right? It's just another story to add to the continuum of stories about identity and about belonging.
SIMONIN: Of course, and that's why your name is on the cover in the first place. What’s significant is that the human, that Matthew, is telling these stories. On that note, are you shocked by the success of your book? You stated multiple times in Black Boys Like Me that your original career goal was to play in the NFL. Does the notoriety you’ve gained over this past year feel the same as you imagined it would feel to play in the league?
MORRIS: So let me answer the first part of that question. Am I surprised? I am a little bit because I'm fully aware of the amount of information that people receive on a daily basis. My book touches on topics that, in one way, we've unfortunately had to deal with and reckon with over the last couple of years. Since George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, there's been an emphasis on how anti-blackness operates in settings. And to be honest, I didn't really have an expectation of how it would be received, so for everything that has happened in regards to the book this year, I'm just incredibly grateful to my team at Penguin, who, from day one, supported this book. They were the people who put all the groundwork in to make sure that there was a platform out there for the book to reach people. So, yeah, I'm grateful for what it has achieved, but I never compare my deferred dreams of becoming a professional football player and making it to the NFL. Is it the same thing? I don't think so.
I would have been grateful if I had been blessed and had the freakish athletic ability to be one of these people who becomes an elite professional athlete. But I also think it's pretty dope that me, being in my late thirties, a black dude who made it out from Markham and Lawrence area of Scarborough, has been able to put something into the world that's important, but also important in a way that marks how we consider intelligence and critical thought. And, you know, it's a different version of how a black man can exist. So, I'm honoured and happy to be out in the world as a writer and an author.
SIMONIN: So, you talked about your team at Penguin, and you said they helped you a lot throughout the process of getting the book published and onto shelves. What technical skills did they teach you that were most beneficial to your craft?
MORRIS: It was eye-opening to see how the book-making process works, to see behind the mechanisms moving behind the curtain. There's only so much you can read on the internet about what goes into publishing, but to actually be connected with such a prominent book publisher was for me, such a blessing.
Yeah, my name's on the front of that book, but there are so many people who had such an important hand in the making of it. My editor, Meredith Powell, is just phenomenal. So, for the book to come out as polished as it is, it wasn't like a one-take type of freestyle thing, right? It took many iterations, many passes, many revisions. It took many conversations about specific topics—things to keep in, things to elaborate on, and things that could have been problematic that I had a bias or blind spot for. So, yeah, that was the biggest benefit of just working with a publisher like Penguin. It was just really amazing to see all the different parts that result in a book being on a library or a bookstore shelf.
SIMONIN: So, what would you say to our readers who hope to be published one day? Did you pitch the idea, were you approached, and how did that part of the process work?
MORRIS: What I would say to young writers is to just keep writing, keep putting that work in. For me, technically I started working on this book in 2020, but I’ve been writing seriously for over a decade, right? As soon as I started teaching back in 2011, I gave myself the goal of writing a book. Since then, I’ve been consistent, I made a blog, made sure that I posted two times a week and made sure that I continued to just work on my pen game, and work on my craft to get to that point where my writing was at least approachable from a publishable lens.
As for the second part of the question, no, I didn’t approach them. It worked in a cascading type of way. I had a friend who met somebody in the publishing industry, and when I connected with them, I was already trying to get a book out there. So when I met him, I was already far along in the writing process, it wasn't publishable yet, but I had been working on a proposal, I had a couple of chapters drafted already, and one thing led to another.
I queried agents, went on the internet, created a Google Sheet. I went through my bookshelves and flipped to the back of every book to the acknowledgements, looked at all the people they thanked, saw the agents, Googled, and figured out where they were from. Luckily, I pitched to one of the many agents, and he was down. Then, he just took it from there. I was just writing. He was doing the other side of the work.
SIMONIN: Dang, so persistence, preparation… was your TEDx talk already out by then?
MORRIS: Yeah, I had done a TEDx talk, right? I guess, another piece of advice—I know what is important to me and what I want to write about. I’m not just going to write something because it's the hot trend or whatever. I have a deep passion for issues of equity, and education, and how black masculinity is taken up in the world. So for me, I'm not going to move too far off of my passions when it comes to the craft of writing.
SIMONIN: I actually wanted to bring this up—your passion. You have such a strong conviction to stick with the same message, but in looking at it in different ways, all at the same time trying to inspire people. What would you say to the student or the person who is seeking that passion but can’t necessarily ignite that fire?
MORRIS: I would tell that person to write through it, to be honest, to continuously seek out experiences, and to live. Experience the world and go outside and find what it is that truly inspires you, right? What is your why? For me, it started a long time ago. It was a snowball effect. At first, when I realized that my hopes and dreams of becoming an NFL player were not likely, I asked myself: if money wasn't an option, what would I do with my life? That led me to the idea of going back to my high school and coaching the football team, which led me to apply to teachers college. This led me to start to reflect on the fact that, oh shoot, I'm here, I made it, but all of my boys, all of my black friends didn't make it. Like, my own brother didn't graduate from high school—what happened?
That was the spark of “now I know what my passion is.” Education and writing, right? So, to that young writer, I would just encourage them to continuously explore the reasons that they move and get up and out of bed in the morning, right? If it's a class, then what about the class? What topics in the class are interesting to them? What do they do that moves them continuously towards an ethos that isn't driven by money or by some type of clout or some type of notoriety? Move towards something that you would be willing to do if you didn't get paid for it.
SIMONIN: That's one thing I think we lose, is that we don’t realize how beautiful life is and how it'll take care of you if you decide to embrace it and live with it. And that's something I see. People embrace the hermit culture and the hustle culture and get up and grind, which is important, but if you're going to be courageous enough to pick up that pen, you need to be able to offer something that only you can see, and your passion is where it is.
MORRIS: You're right. You know, the thing about writing is it has a built-in BS detector. When people pick that pen up, if what they're writing about isn't pure and is fugazi, is not authentic, people aren't going to resonate with it. Now there's an art and a craft. I'm not just saying, you know, you gotta pour your heart out and be the most shocking in one way or the other. There’s a balance between authenticity within the art of writing and the thing that drives you. Like, I'm not going to write a book about cars. I don't necessarily care too much about cars. I've been asked to go talk about politics and that doesn't drive me. I'm not going to do it for the paycheck. I'm about education and I'm about belonging and identity and culture. Those drive me.
SIMONIN: On the topic of passion, in the final essay of your book, you write about a particular lecture during the time you were working towards your master's. You're in this lecture hall, you're in a black racism graduate course (comprised of mainly white people), and you have this outburst that captivates all the other students because you're speaking about your experience. You then say that this moment was referenced repeatedly for the rest of the lecture. Can you speak to me about the difference between study and experience and how intellectualization hinders the general public's understanding of these difficult topics, such as the black experience? For instance, how would I benefit from learning from you as a human rather than as the subject of a research paper?
MORRIS: Man, that's something I've been grappling with for a while. I just started my PhD this fall, and it's resurfaced, this idea between what does resistance look like, and what does action look like? Where is the line drawn between theory and practice, right? I don't believe nor am I saying that you have to have lived an experience to know or write about it. But there needs to be somewhat of a like, quote-unquote, triangulation of experience. You can't just derive knowledge from essays and papers, there needs to be an actual, tangible, humanistic element to it. Similar to what we are doing right now, we're having a conversation. If I want to know about the immigrant experience, I am only going to know a fraction of that experience by reading scholarly articles, I need to actually speak with people who have had that experience, and vice versa.
And for me, I think there's a problem. There's this fetishization, this overtly intellectual ethnographic lens, particularly when it's directed at the Black Experience, and it's discussed in a way that doesn't resonate or connect. So, that’s part of the reason why I tried to write the book in the way I did. Because I wanted to make it accessible to as many people as possible. The problem with over-intellectualizing is you're going to lose an audience. If you have an important message to share, then you should say it in the simplest terms possible.
Like when it comes to writing, there are different trains of thought, like Hemingway’s approach was to write the simplest sentence possible. We fall into these traps of over-intellectualizing important issues, and when you do that, you're taking out the humanity of these situations. So, it's important to connect that humanistic element with the lived reality and try to stay away from that intellectualization of these real-world problems. In that case, you're only speaking to a particular set of people.
SIMONIN: So, you publish your first book in your late thirties, and in it, you wrote about moving back to your parent's house at twenty-five. Can you enlighten our readers about the virtue of patience and how it's beneficial, especially in this field—you spoke about it earlier, how you were writing for eleven years straight before you got your first deal. How has this virtue helped you in your life?
MORRIS: I’m a glass-half-full type of person. I’ve always believed that timing is everything. If I was quote-unquote fortunate enough to get the green light on some of those early manuscripts that I sent out when I was first trying to write, when I was trying to write an educational book about the life of a black male teacher, my writing wasn't at the point of probably another book after that, right?
It’s important to understand the magnitude of what we go through. What I mean by that is we live in a society right now where everything is like a microwave. We're just looking to rush through things. Like, people listen to podcasts on 1.8 speed, like everything is about getting to the next thing—and with writing, you can't do that. You have to be patient and it’s tough. Writing is such a subjective art, right? It's not like football, where if you run a 40-yard dash in 4.3 seconds, bench press 300 pounds, and you're six foot five, your chances are higher for success.
I think that in order to be a skilled writer, you need to write a lot, and you need to read a lot. There's no way around that. You need to be able to read different sentences, see different art and understand how words work together, right? If it happens that you get a deal and something gets published when, you know, when you're 25, then kudos to you, right? But if you truly believe that the writing life is a life you want to pursue, then it's something that is going to take some patience. You need to establish a byline, you need to begin to write small things, submit things for magazines, submit things to other places and continue to move forward in that writing life in order to get to the point where you're blessed and lucky enough to get a book deal by somebody, and then you just keep it moving from there.
SIMONIN: And the thing with writing is that it’s so time-consuming. So, when you work for ten years on a book like you did, if it doesn't do well, I’d imagine you would feel hopeless. You put your whole family out there in a beautiful way, and in a weird way, it’s what you’re banking your success on. It’s a very courageous thing, and it's intimidating, but it's what you sign up for when you decide to pick up that pen.
MORRIS: That's what you're signing up for, right? It is time-consuming. When I really started to elevate was during COVID because I was at home. I wasn’t going to work as a teacher every day because the schools were closed, so I had more time to devote to writing. But I heard this quote from Imani Perry, who's a prolific writer, and she's like, listen, man, whatever you write in the day, if you have two minutes to write, write for two minutes. If you have two hours, write for two hours. If you're lucky enough to be able to support yourself and write eight hours a day every day, then that's great. But just find the time to continuously push through every day. To me, if you're devoted to writing, it's almost like eating. Like you're not going to not eat for a day, right? Like you're going to find time to eat something.
SIMONIN: So the theme of this issue is growth, and as you transparently explore in your book, you've gone through a lot of growing pains. Can you speak to your persistence and how these trials formed you into the man you are today?
MORRIS: I think every time you're faced with some type of trial or traumatic experience, you're faced with the decision to crumble or the decision to continue on. To continue on, I believe that you have to learn from your experience. Unfortunately, I've dealt with a lot of loss in my life. But what comes with loss is an appreciation for family and the time that you spend with your loved ones and an understanding of what love truly means. So, it is what it is, right? You can't control the pain you experience, but I think to a small extent, you can control how you respond to it. Especially when you're dealing with loss or tragedy, I believe it's important to reflect on it and not just push it down. Reflecting on these things allows you to grow. Back to the sports analogies, if you lift weights and build muscles and grow, it's because your muscle fibres are actually tearing, and they grow back bigger. So for growth, you have to experience tough things. That's the only way to grow.
“Write through it, continuously seek out experiences, and live. Experience the world and go outside and find what it is that truly inspires you, right? What is your why?”