The key to reversing the brain drain in Mississippi might just be recruiting more writers. Author Tyriek White is living proof.

White, a native New Yorker, moved to Oxford to pursue an advanced degree in creative writing. The thesis he completed for his Master’s of Fine Arts became his first novel “We Are a Haunting,” which was released in April to critical acclaim, including a feature on the cover of Publishers Weekly magazine.

After appearing at the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson last weekend, White is headed to Columbus on Saturday for a reading and signing at Friendly City Books at 2:30 p.m.

“We Are a Haunting” tells the story of a Brooklyn family across three generations: Audrey, the matriarch, her daughter Key and Key’s son Colly. They share a supernatural gift: seeing and talking to the dead.

While magical realism is found in a great deal of southern fiction, it feels fresh and new in the urban setting of “We Are a Haunting.”

White’s rendering of New York is hyper-realistic in its detail, giving the reader a vivid portrait of each character’s world, from the garden Audrey tends that she fears losing as she faces eviction to the department store where Key works before finding her calling as a doula to Colly’s internship behind the scenes of the Museum of Modern Art.

Although White has some new writing projects in the works, he told The Dispatch in an interview that he’s glad to spend more time with “We are a Haunting” as he looks forward to its paperback release next year.

“My hope is that I get to explore more of the world I’ve built with this novel, while also creating something larger,” he said. “I won’t feel bad for continuing to write the lives of working-class people with care and devotion.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Why did you decide to move from New York to Mississippi? Have you gotten any surprising reactions?
I wanted the opportunity to work with Kiese Laymon. He was at the University of Mississippi at the time and I had just read most of “Heavy” in one night. I couldn’t shake the feeling it gave me.

People were shocked when I told them I was moving here. Then folk were concerned. I think Mississippi conjures up a time more than a place. My family’s roots are mostly in North Carolina, but that isn’t the Deep South. Even now, when I tell people I meet where I live now, it’s a bit fun watching them process that info.

What led to the idea of giving the main characters in “We Are a Haunting” the ability to move between the living and the dead?
The idea came from several things, but I think the most important was losing my grandmother and figuring out how to deal with the loss of a loved one. I was asking myself how to keep her with me— how to grieve and still honor her life. I kept picturing this kid who believes he can see his mother’s ghost. Through their gifts, Colly and his mom interject themselves in this multigenerational project of discovery, the story of their lineage wrapped up in the history of a place.

In addition to writing, you’re also a musician. How does music influence your writing, and does your writing or reading practice influence the music you create?
What’s the famous Basquiat quote? “Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.” I think music in particular is such an exercise in movement and improvisation and getting the most meaning out of moments of brevity. I’m constantly reaching for that in my writing.

On the flipside, reading and writing always made me feel a part of something bigger, like I was a part of a larger conversation with literature. For me, sampling the soul music and or the jazz riffs of our predecessors does something very similar. It’s a form of intertextuality I’d like to achieve in my own music.

I read a story that you were supposed to read “Gone with the Wind” for a class but couldn’t get through it. If you got to assign a book in the same class now, what would it be and why?
I would probably assign something like “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston, which captures a similar time in post-Civil War Reconstruction America as Margaret Mitchell’s work. Zora chooses to explore the lives and traditions of communities on the margins of mainstream society. Her devotion to writing about the lives of Black folk — of depicting the most vulnerable in society — for me, is a more honest representation of American life at the time.

What are you hoping readers get out of your novel?
I hope people consider the hauntings in their own lives, the ghosts we all carry with us. Looking back as a way forward can only happen if we are honest about our history.

Emily Liner is the owner of Friendly City Books, an independent bookstore and press in Columbus.

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