The Writing Community Chat Show · Christopher Aggett

Masterclass Writing Tips from Antonio Michael Downing. The Writing Community Chat Show.

April 1, 2026·1 hr 5 min·4 clips

Downing cites Nabokov's 'there is no reading, only rereading' and Hemingway's Farewell to Arms to explain how writers find their own voice.

1. The Writing Community Chat Show hosts Chris Hooley interview Antonio Michael Downing, Trinidad-born Canadian author of the memoir Saga Boy and debut novel Black Cherokee, about craft, identity, and the intersection of music and literature. 2. Antonio Michael Downing is a writer, journalist at CBC (described as 'the BBC of Canada'), and musician performing under the name John Orpheus, blending Afro-Caribbean rhythms and soul. 3. The episode's thesis is that musical craft — economy, hooks, thematic repetition — directly transfers to prose writing, and that writers should study songs as rigorously as novels. 4. Downing traces his origin story to rural Trinidad, where his grandmother taught him to read the King James Bible because her eyesight was failing, describing the discovery of literacy as 'being transported to another place and another time.' 5. He argues that all humans are natural storytellers by age five and that the main value of craft study is acquiring language for techniques already intuitively understood. 6. Downing uses Notorious B.I.G.'s verse about 'Arizona Ron from Tucson' to demonstrate how four lines — 'Ron vanished, came back speaking Spanish, lavish habits, two rings, fifty carats' — create a complete character and five unanswered questions simultaneously. 7. He draws a direct parallel between lyric economy and the opening-line imperative in fiction, citing the Arctic Monkeys' 'I bet that you'd look good on a dance floor' as a one-line delivery of a point of view, sexual tension, and two characters. 8. James Joyce, described as an exceptional musician, is cited as a writer whose prose is best understood by reading aloud, because the sound architecture is inseparable from the meaning. 9. Downing describes writing all first drafts by hand after a student in a University of Toronto Zoom class reminded him of the practice mid-pandemic, at which point he immediately switched back to handwriting Black Cherokee. 10. His writing ritual involves a dedicated leather-bound notebook, a fountain pen used only for that manuscript, a fixed time and place, and no other use of those objects — creating what he calls a hypnotic trigger. 11. After a week of this ritual, he says his body wakes up 'already writing' because the conditioned sensory cues auto-activate the mental state needed for deep immersion in the book's world. 12. Downing cites Vladimir Nabokov's dictum 'there's no reading, there's only rereading' and describes spending six chapters of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms convinced nothing was happening, then breaking into tears in chapter seven. 13. He re-read those seven chapters repeatedly to understand how Hemingway produced such emotional impact through surface inaction, arguing this obsessive re-engagement is how technique seeps into a writer's DNA. 14. On finding one's own voice, Downing quotes Miles Davis — 'it takes a long time to sound like yourself' — and says the key is writing the book only you could write, not mimicking how admired writers write. 15. He distinguishes between inadvertently copying a writer's topic (easy, dangerous) versus copying their style (nearly impossible), arguing original voice comes from subject matter, not technique. 16. Black Cherokee follows Ophelia Blue Rivers, a girl in the 1990s American South who is both Black and Cherokee but is rejected by both communities as insufficiently belonging to either. 17. The novel is set in a town based on Rock Hill, South Carolina, where Downing discovered a plaque on the White House commemorating Confederate soldiers who convalesced there — placed in a town that still had racially zoned schools. 18. Downing argues he could tell this story precisely because he was an outsider: attending Black clubs, doing business with white executives, and maintaining Cherokee friendships during his time working for Blackberry. 19. Writers interested in craft technique, identity in fiction, and the overlap between musical and literary structure will find the most value here. 20. Listeners seeking plot-driven storytelling, genre fiction discussion, or publishing industry business advice are unlikely to find this episode directly useful.

As heard by us

A grounded craft chat about handwritten drafts, daily discipline, and the habits that keep the work going.

This episode stays close to the work: longhand drafting, journaling, and the small routines that help a page get moving. The guest is specific about handwriting first drafts and using the same time and place to settle in, which gives the conversation a practical feel.

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Why you'd press play

If you draft by hand, this conversation will feel close to home.

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