Hearing from an award-winning author about the art and craft of creative writing is always a treat. Maybe that’s why December’s Humanities on the Mall event was so sweet. Professor Danielle Evans (JHU Writing Seminars) spoke about her works — including reading from her own The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self — and how the process of their formation went.
This event marked the second installment of Humanities on the Mall, an open-to-the-public series situated at JHU’s new building looking out at the illuminated Capitol Building across Pennsylvania Avenue. For Evans, who grew up around the nation’s capital and among many DC public servants, the inception of The Office came largely from that sense of the different ways people feel drawn to do public good even in spite of how institutions require more gradual and even retrograde politics. And, Evans added, that becomes interwoven with the levels of the novella (a collection of interwoven short stories which was originally in third-person) that are fundamentally rooted in grief. To tell the story from the first-person narrator’s sometimes-humorous, sometimes-grim voice meant being able to withhold and even learn from the complex historical dynamics and the “underneath” that resides below the story’s surface—until the final pages.
Evans spoke in conversation with AGHI Director Prof. Bill Egginton, discussing how even the slices of both of her works which she was amazed to find allowed in the final edit could reveal her own feelings back to her. These sections, Evans confessed, started at times as exercises in overcoming writers’ block or working through revisions across drafts, but sometimes just as a joke; only when the later versions unfolded did Evans realized she “had feelings about men’s apologies!” and other similarly loaded, insightful, and pressing additions to public conversations. The Office of Historical Corrections — which won a number of awards and accolades, including the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize (2021) — came about during a charged moment in recent events which forced Evans to reconsider setting the story in the near-present, a too-vexed moment which became impossible to maintain in the years following 2016. Evans underscored to the audience at 555 Penn how the novel may touch on a lively desire, born of these recent years, to have a veritable workforce of fact-checkers who appear around the country to uphold truth and make constant corrections to the public record—and how quickly such an apparatus could become terrifying.
We thank Danielle Evans and everyone who joined us for this great conversation! Join us again beginning in February 2024 for the next Humanities on the Mall gathering.
Danielle Evans’ Recommended Reading List
- Alice Munro, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You [book]
- Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City [book]
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway [book]
- Toni Morrison, Jazz [book]
- Jessie Redmon Fauset, Plum Bun [book]
(and Danielle’s own works) - Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections [book]
- Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self [book]
Thanks to our partners at East City Bookshop for their pop-up at the event—and the links above to purchase Danielle’s recommendations for yourself!