Down the Meanest Streets

It took Penman Thornwell about thirty-five years to write his only lengthy novel, Down the Meanest Streets (When it was to have been called Youngblood.) The range of experience or vision in his work is broad or thick, and his diction and style is precise, concise, pure, and resonant; with few but sufficient details, and no wasted words.
Thornwell can capture a character with its contradictions, strata a culture, life and its chaos. So wrought and perfect are his stories and short novels that he has assured himself a high and permanent place among the writers his generation, who includes Donald Goines, Roy Glenn, Teri Woods, and others.
“My life has been mostly pure chaos,” he once said, “jumbled,” Part of the jumble, no doubt, was his two separate bits in Michigan’s Jackson Prison (the first bit was when he was forty-eight.) This was due to the variety of illegal occupations he engaged into keep afloat.
Penman Thornwell began writing while in Jackson Prison, in earnest when multi-published author Vickie Stringer renowned owner and founder of Triple Crown Publication critiqued his work as a writer. After reading the first three chapters of Down the Meanest Streets, Stringer told Thornwell he had an excellent chance of having the manuscript published. After struggling through the head-banging process of learning how to craft a bunch of chapters into a book, Thornwell received the ultimate reward when he was released from prison on February 28, 2008, writing nonfiction as well as essays and autobiographies; but he wrote rather little fiction.
His first novel was published in 2008. His stories are the order he distilled from the jumble and chaos of his experiences.
“My one aim is to tell a straight story and give true testimony,” he says, but “true” did not mean “actual” or “autobiographical.” Though Thornwell admittedly resembles his characters rather closely, the author warns there is a distinction, warned that “the reviewers are much mistaken when they insist on identifying me with any and every man that appears in my stories… I am a considerably more complicated person than they. They were not writers.” Penman Thornwell is currently working on his next novel from Jackson Prison.
Many writers seem to reflect on the aspect of the world when writing. There is no fear or guilt at a fear that causes me to write the novels that I choose. There maybe some inner rebellion.
But there is no sense of helplessness or unworthiness in my stories. Whatever is my cause to tell the story, and however you read it- psychologically, politically, religiously- it will speak to your experience in the world, to reflect how you sometimes see yourself.
I believe the novel the highest form of knowing, dealing with the whole living human being. Me, being a novelist do consider myself superior to the psychologist, sociologist, the philosopher, and poets, who are all great master of different bits of man alive but they never get the whole thing, the total aspect. I feel that novels dealt with particulars, living life at a specific time in specific place. I don’t believe in the “well-made novel,” or rules for writing narrative: “All rules of construction hold good only for novels which are copies of other novels.” My greatest subject is of course, crime in the inner city, not because it makes great novels, but because it was the important human relationship in which I was raised up in, my thoughts the relationship between man and his environment, at the living moment.
Down the Meanest Streets was written not long after Penmen Thornwell went to prison, along with many others of his generation. That experience changed his life forever. It is, characteristically, a true narrative of criminal dealing, a story told like no other.