AvT: I couldn't find a lot of biographical information about you on the Internet, so I was wondering how you chose writing as a career?

WM: I never chose writing as a career, I just started writing. I was a computer programmer until the age of thirty-three, and I kept doing that until I was thirty-eight, but I started writing at thirty-three. I started writing, and writing and writing, and networking. I wrote two novels, then I finished another novel, and it got published.

In the world of work and labor, it seems like there's a change, but in the real experience of this, there's no real change. I was a programmers, now I'm a writer. I kind of found writing, and I loved it. It never seemed to be something to make money, I never thought it was going to be a career. It was really a passion for me. Other writers, a lot of people told me I would never make any money out of writing, no matter how good the writing was. So it was just kind of happenstance.

AvT: Your work has a very strong tone, much more than just being entertainment. What would you say is your most important point about the African-American experience?

WM: I can't answer that question. It would be like asking someone what would be the most important point about being a woman. It's beyond me.

I write in the many voices of black America, and the stories from that voice and about those people. It's hard enough to write those stores, I can't explain it. When I talk about it, I think about it in the character's words, not necessarily in terms other writers would use.

AvT: You have a strong use of dialect in your stories. How do you decide how to use the dialect of particular characters?

MW: Where I come from, I speak in the language of the people I encounter. I know people speak in different ways. For example, sometimes with a character with a certain kind of education, they speak in a way you'd never even think about them speaking in dialect. With a character like Paris Minton, he becomes like whoever he's around. He might get off the phone with someone and sound exactly like a white man, so the person talking to him thinks he's white. Where he might be hanging out with people in a bar, or with very educated people, he'd have a very thick black accent.

AvT: Are you concerned that writing so strongly in dialect could be portraying a stereotype? Do you think there is a political aspect to the definition and standards of language?

MW: I've been asked that question before. The thing is that nobody gets mad at Charles Dickens. He has Fagin and Sykes speaking in dialect, so why would anybody get upset about somebody black speaking in dialect, somebody Southern speaking in dialect. Nobody gets upset about Huckleberry Finn.

AvT: You also have an interesting take on literacy and illiteracy, or maybe intelligence versus education as an aspect of characterization. How do you use this in your stories?

MW: It's always different. It so happens that two or three of my big characters are very interested in reading, possibly more than I am. Easy Rawlins, he was certainly interested in reading. But the whole notion of Fearless Jones is that you have Paris who loves reading, so much that he has a bookstore, and his friend Fearless who never really had that kind of intelligence. A twelve-year-old could probably read better than Fearless. But he has an incredible grasp of human nature, and he's very intuitive. It's only when you put these two guys together that you get a real kind of genius. Everyone talks about how important reading is for my main characters, but at the same time they run across people who go against their notion of what intelligence is.

AvT: Your story, Gone Fishin', reminded me a little bit of Steinbeck, maybe it was just the Depression-era setting. Could you talk about which writers have most influenced your writing?

MW: This question is always a moment of caution. Most writers love when someone asks them what the most important writers were to them, because they get to put themselves in relation to other writers that they consider great.

The person I most respected was my father. He was a great storyteller among a whole lineage of storytellers in my family, on my black side and on my Jewish side, all of them storytellers. And when I was a little kid, my father loved to hear me telling him stories to him, no matter how much things didn't make sense, how much I faltered, or how nervous I got, he listened to my stories. It's the love that he showed me that makes my stories and gives me my love of writing today.

AvT: I'm glad I asked that, it wasn't the answer I was expecting.

MW: Really, what were you expecting?

AvT: I thought you'd talk about someone you had studied. Let me ask, who are some of your favorite writers?

MW: Well, there are so many: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot...

AvT: Those aren't the usual answers a mystery writer would give.

MW: Oh right, I'm supposed to say, like, Chandler. <He laughs.>

AvT: Some of your works have been adapted as screenplays. How do you think those stories were done on the screen?

MW: There's only two, or three I guess. There was a Fearless Jones short bit on Showtime a long time ago, and then I did Devil in a Blue Dress, in which Carl Franklin directed and wrote the screenplay, and Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, which Michael Apted directed and I wrote the screenplay for HBO. I liked both of them very much.

AvT: I found a comment on the jacket of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned which very much reminded me of Futureland, except for the main character. It spoke of exploring "questions of morality in a world beset with crime, poverty, and racism." Can you talk about where poverty, racism, and particularly morality intersect, for blacks and for whites today?

MW: I answer that question in my book Workin' on the Chain Gang. It goes into the non-fiction part of my brain. Class has a lot to do with how our society works, our relationship with labor and with the global information state. Black people are the first real members of the modern age, which is to say they worked as slaves and became the property of production, and so we've experienced all the worst part of that, being deeply in the morass of the working class. Maybe we have a great well of bitter experience in that. As the world develops, other people begin to have the same experience, so that in Futureland nobody owns anything but their labor anymore. That's where everybody is kind of equal. There's still racism, but everybody is kind of oppressed in the same way. I think that as time goes on, oppression becomes kind of universal of labor. And so issues of class begin to reflect issues of race.

AvT: That's kind of downbeat. I asked the question because I found some of the choices made by your characters to be very uplifting, choosing not to take the easy way out sometimes.

MW: Well, Socrates Fortlow was kind of an ideal character. I'm pretty sure that most people wouldn't make those decisions, however, he's a philosopher and he strives to do the right thing.

AvT: Okay. Moving into science fiction is a very interesting direction, and I wanted to ask what other literary frontiers you'd like to explore.

MW: There are things that interest me. I'd love to write a black Western, but I'm not sure I'd be capable of doing that, yet.

AvT: Yet.

MW: Maybe one day. I'm writing a play. And I'd like to write literary fiction and short stories. I'd like to write a romance, but I haven't figured out all the restrictions of that and I'd want to make it into something else. What that is, I've never figured out. There are other genres I'm interested in writing for.

AvT: Thanks for taking the time to speak to me.