Broken Pencils by J.R. Rice

This week I had the privilege of doing a video interview with J.R. Rice, author of BROKEN PENCILS. We met at a local author fair and the title and theme of his book was so intriguing I had to feature it.

Jonah Tarver, a troubled Oakland teenager grappling with his parents’ troubled marriage, his own mental disorder, and the weight of his best friend’s death, embarks on a desperate quest to find meaning in life. On his eighteenth birthday, coinciding with his Senior prom, Jonah, along with his girlfriend Taniesha, his best friend Trevon, and a group of peers, spirals into a night of reckless indulgence in drugs and alcohol in the vibrant city of San Francisco. As tensions escalate and emotions run high, Jonah finds himself thrust into a gripping twelve-hour journey through the dark underbelly of San Francisco’s nightlife, forever altering his perception of the world. Will Jonah uncover the purpose he so desperately seeks, or will he discover that life, like broken pencils, may have no point?

Here is our video conversation:

And here is a written version of his answers to my interview questions:

According to your website, you “traveled abroad to Greece, where you had the honor of being mentored by the renowned author George Crane.” What was the most rewarding part of this experience?

I was incredibly blessed to live and study in Paros, Greece, where I was mentored by George Crane, author of Bones of the Master. I used to call him “Yoda” because he spoke so poetically and wisely almost all the time, as if I were his Black Jedi in training. One of the most rewarding parts of that experience was learning how to see writing with more discipline and intention.

George taught me about minimalism, precision, and removing anything unnecessary from the page. Every sentence, every word, every image needed to earn its place. If it did not serve a purpose, he would simply say, “Cut it.” He also challenged me to use vague words like “it” less often and replace them with more specific nouns. At the time, those may have seemed like small craft lessons, but they had a major impact on how I developed my voice as a writer.

Beyond the writing itself, living abroad opened my world. For so long, I had lived inside a small bubble in Oakland, while still yearning to see what else existed beyond it. Traveling through Europe, living in Greece and Spain, and meeting people from different cultures helped me imagine new possibilities for myself and my work. That experience became one of the major influences behind my poetry collection, I Was, Am, Will Be.

Your coming-of-age YA novel, Broken Pencils, earned the 2024 Literary Titan Gold Book Award, 2024 Pencraft Summer Best Book Award for Young Adult Coming of Age Fiction, and was a 2024 Hawthorne Prize Finalist for Best Fiction. What do you hope readers take away from Jonah’s story?

At the heart of Broken Pencils is the question of purpose. If you take a pencil and break off the end, the tool can feel pointless. That idea became the central metaphor for my debut novel. Broken Pencils follows Jonah Tarver, a troubled Black teenager from Oakland who believes all lives are like broken pencils and that life itself may be pointless. On the night of his senior prom, which also marks the anniversary of his best friend’s death, Jonah sets out on a chaotic journey to discover whether he has a point after all.

Jonah is deeply personal to me. I have dealt with depression and manic episodes since my teenage years, and even with therapy and medication, I know what it feels like to carry the weight of being misunderstood, isolated, and unsure of your place in the world. Writing Jonah’s story allowed me to transform some of that pain into something meaningful.

What I hope readers take away is that brokenness does not mean uselessness. I want readers to better understand the challenges of living with Bipolar Disorder, especially through the eyes of a young Black teen trying to survive grief, trauma, and adolescence. But more than anything, I hope they recognize the beauty, courage, and resilience that can still exist inside a person who feels broken. Jonah’s journey is dark, but his journey, like everyone’s else’s, is a search for light.

I love how you have the poem “Teacher” by Langston Hughes at the beginning of Broken Pencils. How does this relate to the book’s main themes?

Langston Hughes’ poem “Teacher” connects directly to the central themes of Broken Pencils, especially the search for purpose, identity, and understanding. The inspiration for the novel came partly from two works I deeply admire: J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Hughes’ “Teacher.” Both explore what it means to feel lost in the world while still trying to make sense of your life.

Langston Hughes has always been one of my biggest and greatest literary influences because he was able to create powerful work across so many genres, poetry, fiction, plays, essays, and beyond. Because of his connection to the Harlem Renaissance and jazz, Hughes brought rhythm, music, and movement into his writing. His words do not just sit on the page; they breathe, swing, and speak to the Black experience with honesty and soul.

That influence shaped how I approached Broken Pencils. Just like Hughes incorporated jazz into his work, I try to bring the rhythm of hip-hop, rap, and Bay Area culture into mine. Jonah’s voice is full of emotion as well as contradiction, humor as well as anger, and silence as well as music. Placing “Teacher” at the beginning of the novel felt like a way to honor Hughes while also preparing readers for a story about a young man trying to learn from pain, loss, and survival.

What are some of your current projects?

One of my biggest current projects is my upcoming poetry collection, I Was, Am, Will Be, which continues the journey of Jonah Tarver from Broken Pencils. In this collection, Jonah is no longer a teenager in Oakland. He is now a twenty-five-year-old Black American traveling alone for three months through Spain, Greece, France, and Amsterdam.

The collection explores determination, destiny, death, identity, grief, love, and becoming. In many ways, it expands the world of Broken Pencils while showing Jonah at a different stage in his life. He is older, still Black and American, but he is also still wrestling with the question of who he was, who he is, and who he might become.

I plan on continuing to develop Broken Pencils beyond the page. I plan to create an audiobook narrated by yours truly, along with a student reader’s guide that teachers can use in the classroom. As both an author and educator, I want the book to reach young people not only as a story, but as a tool for conversation, reflection, and healing.

Order BROKEN PENCILS

Bio:

J.R. Rice is a Black man, award-winning author, English teacher, event organizer, and professional spoken word artist, born and raised in Oakland, California. His debut Coming-Of-Age novel, Broken Pencils earned the 2024 Literary Titan Gold Book Award, 2024 Pencraft Summer Best Book Award winner for Young Adult Coming of Age Fiction, and the 2024 Hawthorne Prize Finalist for Best Fiction. His poetry collection, I WAS, AM, WILL BE was a Semi-Finalist for the 2023 St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press. He is the host and curator of the bi-weekly Get-Hype Open-Mic series in Oakland, CA.

For more about J.R. Rice and his books, go to https://jrrice.com/