For any reader: Crepuscule W/ Nellie is a novel of many subjects: a marriage, the artist’s lot, jazz as both American history and American aesthetic. But it is also a novel about race, and was always conceived of as such. As I learned more and more about what it means to be a novelist by putting hours in the book’s woodshed, I was surprised to discover that one of the ways in which Crepuscule W/ Nellie was most about race was by virtue of the authorial choices (and assumptions) exercised in its composition. “Problematic” is one of those terms that suffers from being as widely circulated as it is, but it is still the best bit of vocabulary I have at my disposal in terms of thinking about the whys and hows of my own position with regard to the African-American lives on which Crepuscule W/ Nellie ’s improvisations are based. The book is open to suspicion, and those suspicions aren’t alone, nor are they unhealthy – as I trust the afterword my editor, Janice Lee, asked me to write for the book attests. Because some readers may benefit from encountering this content before reading the novel itself, I’ve decided to go ahead and make a PDF of the afterword freely available via my website. As noted in those pages: “Maybe my last and therefore most abundant hope is that this novel may lend an ear to what could have been, some ‘new past’ therefore more apt to inspire a reinvention of our present. In short, that this novel may listen as much as it babbles, warbles, and squalls out of its multiple mouthinesses.”
[http://jrmilazzo.tumblr.com/post/144197098402/crepuscule-w-nellie-is-a-novel-of-many-subjects]