Conversation with Danielle Evans, Fall 2009
Where did you grow up? How would you describe your relationship with this place and the ways in which it affected your imagination?
I grew up in the DC area, mostly in Northern Virginia, though we lived in Southwest for a while, and also lived briefly in New York and Ohio. My parents are from New York, and my father lived there when I was young, so I spent some time there. When I was growing up I used to say that nobody could actually be from Northern Virginia, because it felt to me like a place defined by what it wasn’t—not D.C., not what people think of as Virginia, not quite suburban, not home for most of the people who actually lived there. My mother has lived in Northern Virginia since before I was born, and when people ask her where she’s from, she still says New York. It’s a fairly common phenomenon with people in this area—no matter how long they’ve been here and how many roots they’ve put down, you ask somebody where are you from, and the answer you get is New York or California or Chicago or Wisconsin, or wherever they lived before, as if D.C. is a place they’ve just been passing through for 20 years.
In some ways I’m jealous of writers whose work is grounded in place, because mine feels more grounded in transience. Years ago I turned in an early draft of what would eventually become my short story collection, and my thesis adviser noted that more than half of the stories involved characters taking some kind of road trip– a perhaps more literal than intended interpretation of the writing maxim there are only two possible plots: someone comes to town, or someone leaves town, or maybe just a reflection of my anxiety over never having learned to drive. I think more than geography, what had an effect on my imagination was the fact that we moved frequently—by the time I went to college, I’d lived in 16 houses or apartments. I never attended the same school for more than two years. I think it gave me a lot of room for reinvention—every few years the world started over again, with an entirely new cast of characters. When I reached the limits of my own reinvention, it felt natural to work with fictional characters. My characters tend to wander a lot, and to be a geographically scattered bunch. A year ago I would have said that they were like me in that sense, never quite knowing where to say home was, but I recently moved back to Arlington after having lived in five states in the last five years, and I do feel like I’ve come home, and that I’m finally willing to acknowledge that wherever I go, this is the place I will always be from.
On a less abstract note, the first story I wrote for my forthcoming collection, which was also the first story I ever wrote and felt satisfied with after finishing, was very much tied to my experience of this area. Though it took many geographic and plot departures from my actual life, the tensions at the center of the story— the strangeness of having one of the most diverse communities in the country nestled in this landscape where every other street or school is named after a hero of the confederacy, the way that immigration creates new history on top of that old history, the way some schools or communities try to use educational tracking and rezoning and reframing, not realizing the world they’re trying to avoid or constrain in so doing is the only world there is anymore–were very much rooted in the years I went to high school in Bailey’s Crossroads.
When did you first begin to write stories? Do you remember a specific story that you wrote when you were a child that you could tell us about?
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t write stories. One of the interesting things about moving back home is that I am being gradually reunited with all of the childhood things I left in my parents’ houses before I moved away, so I’ve actually just been sorting through a box of schoolwork from the first grade, which includes a lot of illustrated stories.
Recurring themes include princesses, reading, and princesses who escape dire circumstances through reading. The first thing I ever had published was actually a poem, in the county school system’s literary magazine, when I was five. It was a terrible poem, but I got to go to an awards ceremony when it was published. I distinctly remember insisting to my mother that I needed a pair of white lace gloves, because I had it in my head that this was what one wore to receive an award.
What writers have made the greatest impact on you as a person and a writer?
However I answer this question, I always end up feeling like I’ve left out someone crucial, but I will do my best. On an artistic level, I am always awed by James Baldwin’s work. The first time I read The Fire Next Time, I was blown away by how beautiful and angry and complicated and precise the book was all at the same time. I’m similarly awed by Ralph Ellison— every time I reread Invisible Man, I feel the same breathless wonder I felt the first time I read it. One of the things I love about both Baldwin and Ellison is that their work serves as a reminder that any rules you apply to writing will only get you so far. I think workshops are invaluable in giving writers time and perspective, but at times they can run the risk of making writers rely too heavily on jargon or a set of rules about How To Do Things or What Not to Do. Reading writers whose work breaks rules is a much needed reminder that sometimes the problem is not that you cannot, say, break point of view, but that you are not James Baldwin.
I also find F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, and Toni Morrison instructive as a writer. When reading their books, I always feel aware of how expertly constructed they are. It’s easy to appreciate language, plot, and character, but one of the first things I had to learn as a writer was how to appreciate and understand narrative structure, and all three of those writers take complicated narratives and assemble them so that they feel flawless. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Eudora Welty, and I admire tremendously how succinctly she is able to develop character, and how she is able to incorporate humor into works of serious fiction.
On a more personal level, there were authors I needed to read to give myself permission to write in the first place. Two that stand out are the poet Audre Lorde and Junot Diaz. Lorde’s work emphasizes the ways in which the personal and political intersect, without ever sacrificing art or language. She demonstrates in her work a complicated understanding of “blackness”— both a sense of a collective history and struggle, and a sense of the ways in which that experience can work to marginalize the experience of individual black people, especially women, or those who find themselves in one way or another marked as outsiders. I needed to see that that could be done, before I felt brave enough to try it
It’s a bit of a cliché for young writers of color to say they were inspired by Junot Diaz, but sometimes a cliché becomes a cliché because it’s true for many different people. When I went to college, I had a very limited knowledge of contemporary fiction, and a very divided sense of what writing was. There was “literary” writing, and then there was mass market writing, often about people whose lives more closely resembled mine. Of the books of literary fiction I’d been exposed to, few featured people of color, and those that did were almost inevitably set in a previous historical period, and were presented and analyzed more as historical texts than literary texts. I had this idea in my head that if I wanted to write about black characters and have it taken seriously, it would have to be set during slavery. Reading Junot Diaz alerted me to the fact that I could write about the world as I knew it, and do so in a literary way—that is a way that took seriously the questions of not just what was happening, but how it was happening and why, a way that respected language and paid careful attention to it, without erasing the vernacular, or ignoring the range of voices that make up this country.
What project are you working on right now? Can you tell us a little bit about it?
I have a short story collection coming out in the fall of next year, which is in the copyediting stage, so I’m in the process of waiting for copyedits and reviews and such. The big project I’m working on right now is my novel, which I’m trying to have a draft of completed by this spring. The novel, The Empire Has No Clothes, centers around Cora, a young woman who is newly employed as a U.S history textbook editor, and is charged with producing a custom text for a progressive charter school in Washington, D.C. While working on the project, she comes across information about her own family’s civil rights era trauma, and struggles with how to handle the revelation. It’s in a part a book about how we talk about U.S history. It also involves a bit of historical photoshop—right now I’m writing a section of the book that is set in the late 50’s, and involves a riot, but the riot I’m inventing did not actually happen, so I’m trying to be historically accurate without borrowing too much from actual events. I’m also working on a few new short stories.
What advice do you have to current students and AU alum who are experiencing "writer's block"? How do you get the creative juices flowing after a long day or week of work?
My best advice is to know yourself. There are writers who if they stare at a blank screen for six hours, will write something brilliant the seventh. I am not one of them. On days when the work just isn’t happening, I need to give up, and get out in the world to remember why I’m writing and what I was trying to do in the first place. If you are the sort of writer who needs to sit at your desk, sit there. If you are the sort of writer who needs to walk away, walk away. If you are in the latter group, my best advice is to carry a small notebook and pen at all times—writers block tends to unblock at the least convenient times, and sometimes if you don’t write a sentence as it comes to you, it’s gone forever.
