Over the course of his writing career, Jason Reynolds has written more than a dozen books for young people, of various formats, and for his latest, he tries something new: The book contains just three sentences.
Granted, they are long sentences — stretched out over 300 pages, at that. The 38-year-old writer, who was named the Library of Congress’ National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in 2020, today releases “Ain’t Burned All the Bright,” which sets out to create a framework for the year 2020 in America under the guise of taking three deep breaths.
“There’s this idea that, when you’re in a moment of anxiety — and people have differing opinions about this, some say take 10 deep breaths — other people say take three deep breaths,” Reynolds explains over the phone. “And the reason why I’ve built it this way is because during 2020, everything seemed to be attacking our respiratory systems. In 2020, you had the racial uprising, the murder of George Floyd. And he dies by asphyxiation, by being choked, by being suffocated. And then from that comes the outrage. And then you have protesters who then have to suffer tear gas, and the suffocation from tear gas and what that feels like as it attacks the lungs.”
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The second breath is, of course, COVID-19, which attacks the respiratory system, while the third breath asks the question, “where does one find an oxygen mask?” The three breaths are told through the perspective of a young boy watching the news on TV with his family, and by the third breath the boy is wondering where does one find reprieve, with all this going on in the world.
“I think what we all learned in 2020, and 2021 for that matter, is that everything that we need to survive — and continue to need to survive —usually are the things that we’ve been taking for granted for so long,” Reynolds says. “It’s like, ‘Man, I don’t know if I’ve ever looked at my siblings the way that I look at them now. I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about my annoying aunties and my mom,’ you know what I mean? It’s all these small things: having a place to live. Sitting on the couch and telling your loved ones you love them. Very small things are actually the thing that provided us with enough breath to keep moving forward. And we realized that in order for us to continue to breathe, one has to acknowledge the beauty and the mundanity around it.”
The book comes on the heels of “Stuntboy, in the Meantime,” released in November, which was a graphic novel for middle schoolers that explored what it’s like to be a child of divorce. Reynolds has been focused on creating work for kids, specifically Black kids, to see themselves in long before he became a national ambassador for the work.
“I was a kid who thought reading and writing, specifically reading, was something for other people,” he says of his childhood in Washington, D.C. “It didn’t seem like anything that was meant for me. I mean, we’re talking about the ’80s and the early ’90s. And it felt like no one was thinking about how to portray my life in a book. For me, it was like in school, they’re teaching us all of these stories, but all these stories either felt like they were 50 years before I was born or about people that know nothing about what it means to be a Black boy growing up during this time.”
He didn’t start reading for pleasure until he was a late teenager then, but found writing earlier, through rap music, through the lyrics of Queen Latifah inside album notes.
Ever since, he’s felt a responsibility to make sure today’s young Black kids have books that reflect their lives back at them.
“We need to make sure that they know, that we know that they’re in the world. That they have value,” Reynolds says. “I had the opportunity to write all these books, contemporary tales about Black kids, and all kids. But stories ‘about Black kids.’ So that one day when they’re 40, somebody says, ‘What was it like to be a Black kid in America in the early ’00s, 2020s?’ They can say, ‘Here goes 30 books written by the same person.’”
“Ain’t Burned All the Bright,” which is targeted at teens, was originally started years ago, obviously with much different substance. He’d long been wrestling with the idea of writing a book about the boxes we pack things away into that we don’t want to deal with emotionally, working on it with his longtime friend Jason Griffin, who illustrated. For whatever reason, the concept just wasn’t working. And then 2020 hit.
“We were sitting at my house and we were beating our heads against the wall as usual. And I was like, ‘Bro, I can’t even be creative. It’s really hard to even think because of what’s going on,’” Reynolds says. “I’m like, ‘We’ve been working on this book for all these years and I don’t have anything in me. I feel like I’m suffocating, you know what I mean?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I feel the same way.’ And he’s like, ‘And I just, I’m trying to figure out…drawing has always been my oxygen mask.’ And then we kind of got to it.”