Arriel Vinson is a Tin House YA Scholar, Highlights Foundation scholarship recipient, and 2020 Walter Grant recipient. Her first YA book, Under the Neon Lights, is a novel-in-verse about young Black love and coming of age in Indianapolis. We asked Vinson to discuss her debut with her friend Leah Johnson, a fellow author and Indiana University alumna, and Vinson’s mentor through the Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellow program.
Leah Johnson: It’s been a long time coming. We’ve been waiting for this day since probably the day we met.
Arriel Vinson: We’ve watched each other’s journeys as journalists first and then creative writers second, and that’s where we landed. I really can’t even believe that we thought we would be reporting on the news for years for a career.
Johnson: We were prepared to do hard news for a living, and now we write kissing books. Where would you say your training as a journalist fits into the writing you do now?
Vinson: The two of us went to Indiana University, a predominantly white institution, and most of the students in our journalism program were white. So, once I started working for the Indiana Daily Student, I was like, “Well, I want to write stories about the Black students here,” because we didn’t have that. I was able to look and say, we’re missing something here. That has trained me to see what’s missing in fiction and to figure out how my childhood can fit into stories for readers now.
Johnson: I think as a driving ethos for storytelling my goal is always to shift the frame just slightly left or right of center to figure out who is the person or the people who don’t have the camera pointed at them. Because that for me, and for you too, is where we’ve always lived. We’re from the same hometown. We went to college together. And so, both of us understand what it’s like to come from a city that people don’t care about, and communities that people don’t write about, and to try to reflect the beauty and the complexity of those spaces and those people in our work.
Vinson: Right. And so maybe that is what journalism taught us to do. Because in journalism it was always, “Well, go talk to this source and see what they have to say.” But we have made it our business and our job, our career, to say, “Okay, well, we’re going to write about the people no one else wants to write about. We’re going to write about Indianapolis.” And I think it’s funny because I was talking to someone yesterday and they were like, “Yeah, you’re the first author from Indianapolis I’ve ever read." And I was like, “Well, you should read Leah Johnson.” She didn’t say that she didn’t know Black people were in Indiana, but that’s what she meant.
Johnson: It’s a common misconception. When I would bring my work into the classroom in our MFA program, people wouldn’t know how to read it because they didn’t quite understand how you square the Midwestern identity with a rich Black experience. But, in Under the Neon Lights, you specifically zoom in on the west side of Indianapolis, and to a skating rink that’s fictionalized in your book, but was a major part of your upbringing. What drew you to starting your career by talking about this particular space?
Vinson: You and I were sitting in the car after eating Taco Bell, and I was complaining to you about the fact that there weren’t any, at that time, Black roller-skating stories. And you were like, “Okay, well, that’s your novel. Just write it.” I grew up going to the skating rink. I still go. And it has always been a place for me where Black people can unleash. It’s also an intergenerational space. You have your oldheads, you have teens, you have families.
History-wise, we couldn’t even skate until the Civil Rights Movement. So, learning that made me be like: you know what? Let’s talk about what the skating rink means to a lot of Black families.
Johnson: What is it you hope your readers see in this book?
Vinson: I want them to see that building community looks different for everyone. Jaelyn [the novel’s protagonist] figured it out for her skating rink community, but it can look different for everybody. We have to build community. We have to take care of each other, because oftentimes no one else is taking care of us. So, I want people to see that we all have a part to play in community. We can’t just sit back, especially during this administration. We have to show up when we don’t feel like it. We have to show up when it’s hard. We have to show up when we feel like there’s a roadblock.
Under the Neon Lights by Arriel Vinson. Putnam, $19.99 June 3 ISBN 978-0-593-85859-2
