Music Credits:

"Melin" from the album When Was That?  Composed by Henry Threadgill, performed by The Henry Threadgill Sextet.

Zooid. "In for a Penny, In for a Pound," from the album In for a Penny, In for a Pound. Composed by Henry Threadgill and performed by Zooid.

“Untitled Tango” from the album Air Song, Composed by Henry Threadgill and performed by Air.

"NY" from the album Soul Sand. Free Music Archive, 2015.

You’re listening to an excerpt from “In for a Penny, In for a Pound” performed by Zooid and composed by 2021 NEA Jazz Master, Henry Threadgill and this is Artworks, the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Henry Threadgill is a groundbreaking composer, musician and band leader on the leading edge of avant-garde jazz since the 1960s. Born on the South Side of Chicago, he came up in a musically varied world where the sounds of gospel, blues and marching bands all blended comfortably together. A multi-instrumentalist who focused on the alto sax, clarinet and later the flute, Threadgill was 19 when he met Muhal Richard Abrams and he played in Abrams’ experimental band which evolved into the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians or AACM, a collective that encouraged musicians to compose and play their own music. Henry Threadgill formed the group Air with Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall releasing albums that explored the edges of improvisation. He then went on to work with ensembles of varying sizes composing new work and experimenting with instrumentation including instruments like cello, tuba and multiple guitars to play his complicated compositions. His groups include but are not limited to the Henry Threadgill Sextett, Very Very Circus, Make a Move and Zooid. Threadgill is a sought after composer whose work is premiered nationally and internationally at venues like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall and the Venice Biennale. He received an NEA Jazz Composition Fellowship in 1974 and went onto to receive any number of awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Doris Duke Artist Award. In 2016, he became only the third jazz artist to receive the Pulitzer Prize for music for his album “In for a Penny, In for a Pound” and now Henry Threadgill has been named a 2021 NEA Jazz master. I have the opportunity recently to speak with Henry via Zoom and I began our conversation by asking him about his earliest musical influences.

Henry Threadgill: Well, there was no television. Radio had all the music that you were going to hear inside the house wherever you lived. The only music that you heard outside was if you went to a church or you were standing at a parade. I can remember the music from the time I was three years old listening to the radio and that music was classical European music of Serbian music because the largest Serbian community is in Chicago and it was Polish music because also that’s the largest Polish community and then you had rhythm and blues and blues and jazz and gospel music on the radio. So that was something that I would listen to on a daily basis. This is before I started grammar school and then I would hear music at my two different grandmother’s churches. One church was a Baptist church and this was a very sophisticated choir that read music and sang a lot of anthems and it was the church that my father’s mother belonged to. My other grandmother, my mother’s mother, that’s where the music I loved the most. This was a Church of God and Christ. They had a singing minister there named Singing Sammy Lewis. He was a minister and he sang and there was something about singing ministers. There was something about them, their ability to deliver words in song was exceptional. So I was influenced and captive by all these things when I was three and four years old.

And when did you begin to play an instrument yourself and what was it?

Henry Threadgill: The first instrument I played was the piano. I started playing the piano when I was about three and a half years old. What happened was this, the music that was famous at that time was Boogie-woogie, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, this was the music that was being played all across America. It was kind of like Scott Joplin’s music, kind of like rags in a way. Boogie-woogie took over and I heard that music on the radio and I didn’t even know that there was a piano in the house <laughs> till that music came on the radio. I discovered this piano in the hallway and I would sit at the piano all day with the radio on waiting for that music to come on. I started to learn how to play that music. I taught myself to play the piano by sitting and waiting every day for Boogie-woogie to be played. My hands were so small at that time, I was very frustrated. I remember I used to be very upset. That was the beginning of my whole musical life. I learned how to play Boogie-woogie when I was about three, three and half years old. Later when I was in grammar school and I began to take lessons, I wasn’t very happy with the music teacher I had at that time. So I really didn’t pay much attention. I would still play at the piano on my own. When I graduated from grammar school, I went to Englewood High School. The first concert, jazz concert, I went to was at the high school. My best friend played trumpet and that I would begin to play to the saxophone and he told me that there was going to be a concert on a Tuesday night and that we should go and hear it. I went to that concert and it was Stan Getz, I think it was Chet Baker, it was about 25 cents to go hear Stan Getz at my high school on a Tuesday night. So by the time I got to my second year, I was playing the tenor saxophone.

You said when you first heard Charlie Parker, he opened a door for you. What did you hear and how did that door open?

Henry Threadgill: When I first heard Charlie Parker, yes a door did open. The door to improvise music. I heard improvised music in a different way. Let me back up before Charlie Parker. My influence in terms of music was blues, Muddy Waters and Harlan Wolff, Jimmy Reed, this is what the music that I grew up on and this was the music that had the most impact in my life. I don’t know of anyone that had more impact on me than Harlan Wolff. <music playing> And then gospel music was born in Chicago. I grew up on this music. Mahalia Jackson is in Chicago. I heard her sing live I don’t know how many times and I heard Clay Evans and James Cleveland and all of these other great singers, but that music was not a improvised music. Of course, they had some variations that they would execute in this music, but Charlie Parker had stretched the boundaries. The music I had heard prior to Charlie Parker, the swing era music, it just had not opened up to that complex degree. That’s why I said when I heard Charlie Parker, a door opened. It opened up your ears as to what can you actually hear and what can you actually do.

When did you meet Muhal Richard Abrams?

Henry Threadgill: Well, I graduated from high school in 1962 and went to Wilson Junior College. This was a liberal arts two year college and they had an incredible music department. All of the art departments were incredible and the school was loaded with artists. I just can’t begin to tell you. Jack DeJohnette, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph John and Melacap [ph?], they was Eddie Harris, Bunky Green. This was just some of the people that were there and we had a music club. We were charged with putting up different concerts. We would have classical concerts and we would have jazz concerts and I don’t know who it was. It could have been Melacap Favors [ph?] that suggested getting Muhal to play, but I didn’t know Muhal at that time. So he came with a quintet and that’s when I met him. We talked after the concert and he invited me to come to the Experimental Band which was rehearsing at that time at a place called C and C’s Lounge. This is where the Experimental Band started. This is the prelude to the AACM, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. So I went there and played for a bit and then he told me I could bring in some music. I brought in some music. It was very short period because it was in 1966 at this point and I had gotten drafted at this point. So I left. Right before I left the ACM had been on its way to being formed.

You were drafted into the Army. Is that what happened?

Henry Threadgill: I wasn’t exactly drafted. I was working at the University of Chicago Hospital trying to make some money so that I could go to the American Conservatory of Music in the fall and I was going to school part-time which was not allowed. If you didn’t have a full course then you didn’t have a deferment. The draft board in my neighborhood called me up, told me to come down and said “Mr. Threadgill, I got good news and bad news.” I said <laughs> “What do you mean by that?” He said “You’ve been caught working and not going <laughs> to school full-time. So they’re about to draft you.” He said “They haven’t, but they’re getting ready to draft you because they discovered that you weren’t in school.” So he said “What you can do is this.” He said “You’re a professional musician.” I said “I guess so.” He said “Well, join the draft as a professional musician just like doctors, all other professional people.” I said “What does that mean?” He said “A doctor can only practice medicine, a musician can only practice music. If you join the draft then that’s the only thing you can do in the service and if they violate that they have to discharge you with an honorable discharge.” I said “Okay.” He said “The only thing is you’ll have to stay one year longer.” The draft was two years. He said “That means that you’ll have to be in there for three years.” He said “But that can be adjusted, too. If any musical organization or institution call for your services, you can do two and a half years,” and that’s when the ACM wrote while I still in the service and said that they wanted me to come and teach at the school. So I was only in the service for two and a half years. <laughs>

I think the AACM is such an important organization in modern music. I’d like if you would talk about the vision that propelled the AACM and the philosophy that knitted all of you together.

Henry Threadgill: It was really Muhal’s singular vision concerning writing your own music and presenting your own music and developing and studying music, not jazz. The agenda was music. He believed deeply in that and we all picked that up. You can’t really say there was such a thing as a AACM school. Each one of us was school in our own. We had our different ideas and different approaches and it required a great deal of discipline in terms of the concept of democracy. Let me tell you what I mean by that. To complete you serve another person and to keep your ideas off the table and not to critique, to be completely at their service regardless of what they ask you to do. The idea is to let those people realize whatever their concepts are without any interference from anyone and interjected any kind of critiques whatsoever. Our job was to serve one another 100 percent. That was the basis of everything.

You know, what I find just so extraordinary about the AACM is that, well, so many things, but originality, personal vision was really stressed, but so was respect for other traditions and having a grounding in so many other musics and that’s really been a constant for your throughout your career.

Henry Threadgill: You’re absolutely right. The idea that all music from humanity is really what we were looking at and one great thing at the time, Chicago was so rich in terms of the blues and gospel music. We had that and the other thing that we had at the same time was the University of Chicago Contemporary Players Orchestra. They played the most advanced and the most difficult contemporary music from America and Europe. This is where I first heard and met The Rez, Paul Hindemith, oh, I can’t say. I met a number of great composers at these. We actually worked two or three blocks apart in the same area of the city. The first time I heard the live recording of Tia Lenore by Shermberg, [ph?] I heard it there. The first electronic music I heard was there that I heard The Rezes’ Electronique. The piece I heard that there and then the Chicago Symphony under Fritz Reiner at that time when I studied conductor. I was studying conducting in college and Fritz Reiner was playing some very interesting music and Mark Danun who followed him had a extremely contemporary repertory and it was on the margin that he actually commissioned Muhal to write a piece for the Symphony and he had something like 10 saxophones in the orchestra.

This period in Chicago was crazy because wasn’t Sun Ra playing then, too?

Henry Threadgill: I started going to Sun Ra’s rehearsal when I was about 15 years old, I guess, something like that. Sun Ra was rehearsing in the neighborhood right where I lived in Englewood. He rehearsed in the back of a meat market which sold wild game. So there was raccoons and bears.

Are you kidding?

Henry Threadgill: And possums hanging from the ceiling. No, I’m not. It was a Greek wild game market and the owner of it liked Sun Ra’s music and so at night in the back of the market he would let Sun Ra rehearse in the back of the market and it was extremely cold back there. That was the only downside. I used to go there with my friend just about two or three nights a week and sit there and listen to him rehearse and try to follow the music.

As we said, AACM, that approach to music, it’s finding your voice and a personal vision and I’m wondering what that process was like for you of finding a voice. I mean, it’s one thing to just say it, but then you have to trust your voice, develop that voice, learn to express it.

Henry Threadgill: Yes, that’s true to find a voice. The Midwest, Chicago, it was not New York. The fast pace of New York and New York is the marketplace. You go to New York with a finished product. It’s hard to go to New York and start putting groups together. That takes a lot of time and energy. So we had time on our hand and it was a cheaper way of living, too. We didn’t pay so much. So we had time and we took advantage of it. I tried different things. I tried all kinds of combinations of groups before I got to Air, the trio Air which everything started by Steve McCall and Fred Hopkins and then my whole life changed. <music playing> Steve had come back from Paris because remember in the ‘60s, Paris was it. New York was not it. The music world was in Paris. Everybody was in Paris. The track back in the ‘70s, there was a change. People started to return from Paris and New York all of a sudden became a new migration center. New York got reenergized. So we came in about ’70, I think, ’74. I think ’75, ’75, Air. We played a concert. It was in January-February and it was really cold and it was a lot of snow. It looked like Chicago. The snow was up to your knees and we play La MaMa, at La MaMa Annex and some people said nobody’s coming to hear you all because nobody ever heard of you people from Chicago named Air. We said “That’s okay. We’re going to play anyway.” It was cold in the place. They didn’t have any heat. We had three nights, Friday, Saturday and Sunday night in this place. The people that came Friday night they went out and spread the word. Saturday night there was a line down the street and Sunday night it was a line down the street. Some of the people kind of like philanthropists type of supporters came in and heard us and the next thing you know we were playing at Carnegie Hall in April. <laughs> That’s how fast they turned around. <laughs>

That’s amazing. I know you had said you don’t like the word jazz and you don’t consider yourself a jazz musician anymore. Can you explain why and what your thinking is about that?

Henry Threadgill: The word jazz had been abused and misused. That’s why I don’t like it. It’s became like a pot that people throw everything and it’s lost its distinction. Just put something or put that over there, soft jazz, hard jazz, this kind of jazz, that jazz. So that’s why I don’t like it and that’s why I don’t use it. I prefer the word creative music. Creative improvised music and would say improvised music.

You’ve also said that live music is the way to hear music and you never made a record with the society’s situation dance band. You only performed live with them.

Henry Threadgill: I never wanted to make a record with that. I grew up going to dances when I was kid, right, and there would be live music, great bands would be playing. We would go to dances and so I didn’t want to record this. This was just for people to react to it and dance. Studios have a way of becoming self-conscious and you don’t have an audience. How do you go into a studio and play dance music if there’s nobody dancing? <laughs> You know what I mean? You can’t even tell if you’re doing a good job. <laughs>

Your work encompasses such a wide range of music with a wide range of compositional techniques and a wide range of groups. In fact, many groups throughout your career.

Henry Threadgill: I’m going to just give a little quick overview history of the groups that I’ve had. The first group I had was Air. Air, the compositional techniques that I was developing were mostly in the major minor world and a chromatic world. Chromatic world sometimes sound like you’re sound like you’re doing something that’s free. I never did play free music. After that I came to Sextett and I was still doing writing music in the same kind of way and I also had a second group that I never recorded which was a great group called the Wind String Ensemble. That was tuba, cello, violin, viola and I played alto and flute. Now, the Sextett which I thought of as a reduced orchestra, it had a wind section, a brass section, a string section and percussion section. That’s how I thought of it. The percussion section had two drummers. I considered it one part. It just had two people playing different things the way you would have in a orchestra. It would be one person on the snare drum, another person be on temp and another person be on tambourine. You could have four people playing and it’s still one part. It’s the percussion part. Then I had the strings which was the cello and base and then the trombone and the trumpet was the brass and then I covered the reeds. <music playing> But the music I was writing at that time was still within the major minor system of music. Major scales, minor scales and combinations thereof. After that group came Very Very Circus. Very Very Circus, again, I was still stretching the boundaries of the major minor system and then when I got to Make a Move, I got as far as I could actually go in terms of this major minor idea and in this period that I made major discoveries about new was to write music and that led to the group Zooid and the system of music that started with Make a Move, but I worked everything out with Zooid. So every group that I had it had something to do with how far I had made it compositionally. I would change groups because the compositional ideas had changed. When I got everything I could out of something then I would change. I would never just change for novelty. I never even thought of doing anything like that. After I completely exhausted the orchestrational and compositional techniques that involved that particular ensemble then I would start to move to the next level and I’ve been fortunate that I could do that that I saw something beyond the horizon to move to.

You mentioned Zooid and how long for, what, 18 years.

Henry Threadgill: At least 15-16 years now.

How did that band start and what were you looking for?

Henry Threadgill: Well, first thing was I was looking for the players because I knew what the instruments I was hearing. So Tyreek Bemberdene, the oud player, who is now in Morocco. He’s a filmmaker, also a great filmmaker. Jose Davila, the trombonist, tuba player. He had been with me in Very Very Circus and other configurations and guitar player Liberty Ellman. Liberty Ellman recommended Elliott Kavee to trombone with us. The first Zooid record where Deaf [ph?] has appeared from Cuba, he was the first drummer with us and then I found Elliott. Dana Leone, the trombone and cello player, great artist. So I had cello, guitar and oud as the string section and tuba, drums and myself. That was the sound I was after. So we rehearsed for one year in New York City before we played. They had to learn a new language because, see, I had come up with another musical language and it wasn’t just you could just come in and read this music. You had to understand the language. We spent a year learning the language and how to work with it because we had to improvise in this language and after a little over a year and something we played our first engagement somewhere. I don’t even remember the first place, but these were special people. I don’t know how many people would have stayed with me for over a year just rehearsing with not the promise of a recording, not the promise of playing a concert or anything.

Again, you’re very deliberate in the way you create your compositions. So you create a composition that has room for the musicians you play with to improvise within that structure, that musical structure that you create. Is that a fair way of saying it?

Henry Threadgill: That’s correct. Yeah. There’s room for improvisation. Yeah. Most of the time the music appears more seamless. A lot of times you can’t tell whether we’re improvising or reading music. It’s a greater ideal is to go for something like that, something that’s more seamless.

When you’re composing, do you find yourself consumed by it as you’re working on it or do you leave it aside for a while, walk away, maybe leave it for a week, a month and then come back to it? I’m curious how that works with you?

Henry Threadgill: Composing is like going back to square one every time. <laughs> You don’t know what it’s going to be. You accomplish something and you say oh, wow. That was a nice step that I pulled back there, that step A and B. I think I’ll try that the next time. Next time there’s no room for A and B. <laughs> No place to execute A and B. So every time there’s a new experience and the music, see, the composition starts to dictate. You, the composer and writer, you have control, but you only have so much control. You ever heard of writer, I’m talking about literary writers, say that like they created this character. Now the character is in charge. You ever heard a writer say that?

Yes. Definitely.

Henry Threadgill: The same thing happens with the music. You have to let the music go where it’s going, stop trying to control it sometimes. I never know quite what it’s going to be. Sometimes like, say, I leave things intentionally so that I can get a fresh look at it because it does get consuming and sometimes you just need to step back.

And I’m assuming you’re hearing this in your head as you’re composing.

Henry Threadgill: Yeah.

When you go and you were actually giving the music to the musicians does it happen that you think oh, that sounded very differently in my head. This isn’t quite working when I’m hearing the musicians do it.

Henry Threadgill: You know, my philosophy is this for one thing. The object for me is to make music. So I write it down, I bring it and somebody make a mistake. I say oh, that’s wonderful. Let me change this and put the mistake in because that’s the object for me. I’m not stuck on what I did. Remember music means nothing until you lift it up off the paper. It has no meaning. That’s what a conductor is doing. When a conductor is standing up there with a score in front of it and the orchestra. I don’t care whose music it is, van Beethoven’s. What the conductor is doing is saying too many violins is playing right there. Let me have less second violins. Trumpets start doubling so and so over there. He basically said a half a teaspoon of salt and two teaspoons of pepper. The composition said a whole teaspoon of salt and three teaspoons of pepper. That’s what’s on the paper, but when you start to lift it up you find out it won’t bake. <laughs>

And is that what you mean when you said artistic process and product are inseparable?

Henry Threadgill: Yes. Yes. It’s exactly. Yeah. The process. You have to find out, you imagine something, you write a script and the writer, he sits in the audience and as actors come on stage and he laughs at this comedic lines. Well, he wrote it, didn’t he, but nobody else is laughing. <laughs> So you have to really look around and see if it’s working. You got to put it up. You have to play it live. That’s the other thing about live music, live art. You have to resurrect it to find out will it stand that it has to be put up and also the impact. I listen to records when a kid, but when I used to stand up as a kid in front Harlan Wolff and Muddy Waters, it was nothing like that. I wouldn’t even be in time anymore. I’d be standing there. It’d be just like I walked through some portal or something.

That’s a nice way of putting it. You’ve spent a lot of time in India, in Caracas and traveling throughout the world and, obviously, all these places have different musical rhythms and I wonder about immersing yourself in those cultures and the influence that has on your work.

Henry Threadgill: You know, it’s almost impossible for me to quantify in any kind of way what I learned from different cultures. When we say music, music is a part of some culture and if you emulate on the surface certain music it becomes obvious that you’re just like pandering to something or doing something that’s so obviously not very serious. Like you said in places like India and stuff, I mean, I listen to music there, but it’s not just listening to the music. It’s the way people walk. It’s the rhythm of the language. It’s the spices in the food. It’s all of those things. All of those things is what inform your creative process, not just the obviousness of like classical music or something. No, it’s far more than that. I think in dance, theater, all of these different mediums, we learn from other parts of humanity on the globe. As you reach out you get a bigger reward the further you reach out. <laughs>

Well, as listeners we get big rewards, too, from the work that comes out of it and you’ve received so many awards I can’t even begin to mentionable of them, but I do want to mention two and one was the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Congratulations. I know you don’t like to call yourself a jazz musician, but you’re the third living jazz musician to receive that and it was for “In for a Penny, In for a Pound” which you recorded with Zooid. <music plays> That had to have been really gratifying for you.

Henry Threadgill: Oh, it was. It certainly was. I mean, I wasn’t expecting it. I remembered that the record company had asked my copyist for the score and a audio file on it, but that had been like a year back and I didn’t think about it. When they called me up, a matter of fact it was the record company called me and was telling me to see you won the Pulitzer Prize, but I said “For what?” <laughs> Did I do something right or did I do something wrong? <laughs> It was really something. It’s a level of recognition for what you do. There’s no words for it. It’s really great, a great honor, a great honor. That honor and the honors of being the Harlem Stage and the Welico [ph?] Arts Center where they have your work perform where the musicians came and played on my work to honor me. That’s another great honor. When people in your time play your music then you figure you must be doing something right. <laughs>

Well, you really must be doing something right because you have been named the 2021 NEA Jazz Master and I wonder if you can say what that means for you.

Henry Threadgill: Well, this honor is the highest honor that the country gives. The honor is not just to me. I didn’t get here on my own. All of these people that’s been in my life, all of the influences, so much I’ve learned, I can’t even articulate and give all the names of all of the teachers, friends, parents and even silent supporters. That’s who’s standing here that sitting here taking this award with me. It’s not just an award to Henry Threadgill, it’s that part of this community and this country that produced and nurtured Henry Threadgill is why I got that award. That’s what that award means. It means that you said something about not just me, but all those people that did something to make this a better place for everybody in this country through art.

And I think that is a great place to leave it. Henry, many congratulations and thank you for years of your beautiful, wonderful work.

Henry Threadgill: Thank you, Jo. My pleasure.

That was 2021 NEA Jazz Master Henry Threadgill. Henry and all the 2021 NEA Jazz Masters will be honored with a virtual tribute concert on April 22, 2021. The Arts Endowment will again collaborate with SF Jazz on this virtual event which will be free with no registrations or tickets required. For further details keep checking arts.gov or follow us on Twitter at NEA Arts. You’ve been listening to Artworks produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Stay safe and thanks for listening.

Jo Reed: I think the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which was begun by NEA Jazz Master Muhal Richard Abrams is such an important organization in modern music. Can you talk about the vision that propelled AACM, the philosophy that knitted you all together?

Henry Threadgill: It was really Muhal's singular vision concerning writing your own music and presenting your own music and developing and studying music, not jazz. The agenda was music. He believed deeply in that, and we all picked that up. You can't really say there was such a thing as AACM school. Each one of us were a school in our own. We had our different ideas and different approaches. It required a great deal of discipline in terms of the concept of democracy. Let me tell you what I mean by that. To completely serve another person and to keep your ideas off the table, not to critique, to be completely at their service, regardless of what they ask you to do. The idea is to let those people realize whatever their concepts are, without any interference from anyone and interjecting any kind of critiques whatsoever. Our job was to serve one another without 100%. That was the basis of everything.

Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Danielle Evans: This is the beginning of a story called "Happily Ever After." “When Lyssa was seven, her mother took her to see the movie where the mermaid wants legs, and when it ended, Lyssa shook her head and squinted to the prince and said, "Why would she leave her family for that," which for years contributed to the prevailing belief that she was sentimental or soft-hearted when in fact she just knew a bad trade when she saw one, the whole ocean for one man.”

Jo Reed: Ten years ago, Danielle Evans award-winning first collection of short stories Before You Suffocate Your Fool Self dealt wittingly and incisively with issues of race, class and coming of age. Critics took note and settled in to wait for the next book…it arrived in November The Office of Historical Corrections which consists of short stories and a novella. Here, race, history, memory, and grief inform these stories. How do you make things right—either personally or collectively? Who gets that second chance? How do you find a past that’s been erased? Those are some of the questions animating Danielle’s writing; and, she comes at these questions with sensitivity and curiosity through different characters and circumstances so the answers multiply throughout the book. Her craft—the artfulness of her writing—is mesmerizing. Each story a fully-realized journey with no easy answers only complicated questions in a beautifully cohesive collection…and that was where I began my conversation with Danielle Evans.

Danielle, your collection The Office of Historical Corrections begins with the mermaid who leaves the sea, and it ends with a novella that deals with passing and returns to that that question, “Why would she leave her family for that?” I'm not sure that the final story answers that question, but, boy, does it bring it back home. It's such a cohesive collection. Was that your intention from the beginning?

Danielle Evans: Thank you so much. I think as a writer that I try to have intention around the middle of the process, so I rarely have any intention for anything at the beginning, and I think that's healthy. I think because if you try too soon to kind of force a theme or a connection, sometimes you kill the work, right? I tell my students like you institute a draft sometimes like you would an infant, right? Like if you see somebody screaming at a baby, it's just incredible depressing, because all you do with a baby is keep it alive, right? And so I think that there's-- like every project has an infancy, right? Every project has a version of itself where your job is just to keep it alive long enough to understand what it is and give it some roles. And so, yeah, I think that I wrote the first drafts of a lot of these stories not in the order they appear in the book, and not with a sense of what I was writing toward. And occasionally, when I'd get a couple of stories, I'd think, "Oh, this is what I'm writing about. This is what this new collection is." And all of those things turned out to be wrong until I was about three-quarters done. And at that point, I had written the story that opens the book. And I wrote something that kind of crystallized for me what I thought were the recurring questions and that made it easier to revise the things I was still working on. It made it easier to decide what the order of the book should be. But there was a lot of intentionality in terms of where the book opened and where it ended, and I do think that in a collection, you want to sort of open with a story that puts front and center as many of the recurring questions of the book as possible, and then all those questions will kind of come up in ways that hopefully give you different answers, or complicate the questions. So, the final story often does circle back to the questions you raised at the opening and I think gives you the experience of having moved through the whole book even as the stories are their own separate experiences.

Jo Reed: Well, what are the recurring questions that come up through the book for you as the author?

Danielle Evans: Well, certainly the question of history, both family history and national history and how we are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves about both. That's a question that comes up in a lot. And relatedly, the question of kind of who history belongs to, who records belong to, what happens when something about the recorder of known history of something feels like an erasure? How do you take ownership of a story that hasn't centered you? But there's also a recurring question of grief and loss of agency. And I think several of the stories are kind of playful about who this story belongs to and kind of start with a narrative that feels familiar and put some pressure on it. I think I'm always in everything I write interested in the gulf between our internal lives and our exterior lives, and so I'm always thinking a lot about interiority and interiority as a question about power, right? Interiority sometimes is the question about if any two people are on the page, which of them has to perform for the other one and why, and sometimes that's a personal answer. Sometimes it's a structural answer. And so I think in this collection that question about interiority is often mapped onto that question about history as a kind of performance. Kind of whose version of history do you have to perform? What version of yourself do you have to perform?

Jo Reed: Yes. And I also think you said this, but the way I also thought about it in my head was who gets to remain unconscious both personally and collectively, and who has to be very conscious of who they are every minute? I think that's a theme that goes through the book too.

Danielle Evans: And I think that's a fundamental question of character. And so sometimes that feels like a really abstract or structural question, but I mean I sometimes do exercises with my students where I just ask them to imagine asking like five different kinds of characters for directions from point A to point B. And who assumes you have a car? Who assumes you're taking the bus? Who assumes you're walking? Who thinks about whether the streets are lit? Who sends you through one neighborhood because it's safer and who sends you through it's a different neighborhood because they think it's safer, right? What kinds of considerations do we make about space that are just about our lived experience and physical embodiment even in things that seem concrete? And so I think that can sound like a really abstract thing to think about, like power relationships between characters, but it's how we experience the world.

Jo Reed: Yeah. Oh, no, I completely agree. And in the first story, "Happily Ever After," we see Lyssa nursed her mother through her final illness, and what she did, dressing very, very well in clothing she really couldn't afford, her hair always done, make up perfect when she was at the hospital so the doctors would see her and by extension her mother as human beings, as people worthy of care.

Danielle Evans: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a very concrete, tangible example of that kind of thing. And I think a think that-- if you're from a class background or a racial background where you expect to be discriminated against in certain spaces, a routine you're really familiar with, and maybe if you expect to walk into a place and be treated nicely, you're not as familiar with what you may do to try to earn that treatment.

Jo Reed: Right. Well, let me just say this on the outset. I am not somebody who gravitates towards short stories. I'm much more of a big novel kind of person, but the short stories I love. Man, do I love them. And I loved yours.

Danielle Evans: Oh, thank you so much.

Jo Reed: They were so vivid, so complete, left me wanting-- just wanting more, and I don't mean, "Oh, they should have been longer," though I really would have loved it, of course, if they had been. But just the curiosity I had about these characters and what happened to them when they weren't on the page with me anymore. I really felt very concerned about all of them and had so many questions, so thank you.

Danielle Evans: Thank you. One of my favorite things that short stories do when they're working, which is I think moved through time in this way that feels really seamless. Like there's some sort of present crisis that you're being directed to that's creating some kind of moment or occasion for the story, but there's also so much history, some nods to the future, and there's just this sort of way that time compresses so you can be in the past, present, future at once. And I think when a story captures that, it feels a lot like being alive feels, and that's when I'm often most in love with short fiction. I don't dislike novels. I think people sometimes get mad at me, because I talk about short stories all the time. I love novels. In fact, I love big, messy novels.

Jo Reed: Me too.

Danielle Evans: And I kind of feel like if a novel isn't like spiraling that I just want to compress it. I either want like 20 characters in a span of several generations, or I want a short story.

Jo Reed: Yes. I completely understand that. And I also like both your books have stories that deal with friendship in a very complicated way. Your first book is, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, and the last story, "Robert E. Lee is Dead." is a wonderful exploration about young friendship in all its messy complexities? And friendship is a subject that always interests me.

Danielle Evans: Yeah, and I think friendship is really interesting from a plot perspective, because friendship is a choice you have to make over and over again, right? Like you can end a friendship without any particular drama. That doesn't mean there can't be drama in the ending of a friendship, but you can end a friendship just by deciding you're not someone's friend anymore in many cases. And so it's interesting to me in that it's a choice we often make over and over again at completely different times of our lives, and so it creates some inherent rhyming action, because like what's the difference between the you that chose somebody as a friend a long time ago and the you that chose to continue that friendship as an adult. What's the sort of difference between the moment that you chose that friendship even as an adult and the moment that you stopped? And it creates, I think, a really rich territory, because it is so much about agency. Kind of once you're in a familial relationship or a romantic relationship there's often some entanglement that requires like an action to get out of, right?

Jo Reed: Absolutely.

Danielle Evans: But for instance, you can get out of through passivity. And so I'm interested in that. I'm interested in what it tells us about characters in terms of who makes the active choice to end a friendship and who makes a passive choice and who continues to choose the same thing in spite of the ways in which people become different over the course of their lifetime.

Jo Reed: We talked earlier about so many of the black women in your stories and indeed the world who have to be very conscious about the way they represent themselves and that's in stark contrast to Claire, a character in the story “Boys Go to Jupiter,” and she’s a white college student who heedlessly wears a confederate flag bikini, which goes online and goes viral.

Danielle Evans: Yeah. I mean, you know, it's funny. A lot of people kept asking like, "Did you write this story to be topical," and it was like, no. I wrote this story because I grew up in Northern Virginia and I've been thinking about this all of my life, about kind of what we do with these symbols that often exist detached for some people from their political reality, but sort of that context is always there to be accessed. And so I think about this story maybe three different ways. One is that I'm interested in writing stories that think about race that are not just kind of performing some version of the trauma of racism. I think that sometimes the access point that those stories create, it's sort of traumatizing readers who recognize the experience and allowing readers who don't recognize themselves as racists to just kind of disassociate, you know, to feel empathy for whoever is being harmed in the story, but to not think about their own role in it. And so I wanted a story that felt like it complicated that. I wanted to write a story where in order for it to work, there had to be moments when you did see this character as somebody-- you see this character as she saw herself, right, not as a villain, as a kind of grieving, confused teenager, but also to see the harm she's doing in the world and also to see the failure to learn from it. And also to, in some ways, play with our instinct for empathy so it starts to feel like a familiar kind of story, but then the juncture is where you sort of want to say, "Oh, this character is complicated. Let me forgive her." If you say that, I think eventually you reach a point in the story where you think maybe I shouldn't have done that. And so I wanted a story where I could write about racism and privilege, but the character wouldn't be such a caricature or even such a committed explicit racist that people could refuse to identify with her. I wanted the murkiness of thinking about that impulse to absolve her if it happened.

Jo Reed: Well, it's so interesting, because she's fueled by grief and loss, which she's running away from and pushing away. And to me it just seemed like such a parallel to her deliberate inability to look at the larger history, our collective history and that same pushing away. She gets to just think about her little self. She doesn't have to think about anybody else. It's quite the opposite of that presentation that most of the other women in that collection have to be very conscious of all the time.

Danielle Evans: Yeah. You know, when I started writing that story, when I got a few pages into the draft, I looked back and I said, "Oh, no, I've made a mistake. I've written the whole thing in present tense." And then I thought, "No, I think that may not be a mistake. Let me go with it and see where it gets me," and it felt like the right choice for both of those reasons, right, that one of the effects of grief can sometimes be to freeze you in the moment of grief. But I also think that the present tense is a way of thinking about her relationship to history, right? Who gets to exist outside of history? Who gets to say like, "Well, only the present is happening, and so it doesn't matter what I've done before. It doesn't matter kind of like what legacy I'm invoking. This is now," and I think that there's a sort of interesting relationship between the present tense of grief, which humanizes her and the present tense of kind of a historical privilege, which is part of what lets her get away with doing harm and reinventing herself.

Jo Reed: Yes. And then, of course, it has this, I don't know, thread of the whole public apology thing and accountability that the story is also interrogating as does the other story in the collection, "Why Won't Women Say What They Want," where you really take the public apology and you go to town with that one.

Danielle Evans: Yeah. You know, I mean, that story--even though in some ways it may feel different than the other work in the book-- it was a story I wrote that sort of clicked into place for me what the collection was about, and I was like, "Oh. Okay. This is what I've written. This is what these stories keep asking in generally more subtle ways than in that story," but, yeah. I mean, it sort of starts with what feels like, I think, a really familiar narrative of somebody who's publicly being kind of called out for being not a great guy and starts to apologize, and it's already a little over the top, and I think it just gets kind of weirder and weirder and puts more pressure on that story as it continues and also allows other people to break in so I think that by the end of the story, it sort of less and less belongs to the man that it centered on. And I think that's what I was most interested in, right? I think an apology narrative is always the story of the person who's done some harm. An apology narrative, even if it's a sincere one, always belongs to the person who like did something bad and grew from it, right? And so that may or may not have the same story shape as the people who knew you before you decided to be a better human, right?

Jo Reed: You got that right.

Danielle Evans: They have their own versions of their lives in which maybe their encounter with you was a non-event and because they just decided you're a terrible person and it didn't bother them, but maybe it was also something traumatic that sort of derailed whatever path they were on and reshaped their whole life. And so your growth or lack thereof in the time after that may or may not have impact on those people. And so part of what I wanted to think about is kind of where you let that story fragment to let the other stories come in and kind of give it loose ends and be messier and less contained. And I also was interested in this question of, which I think I'm interested in throughout the book, competing desires, right, that we often do want to live in a world where we make it possible for people to have second chances and to not be stuck being the worst versions of themselves forever. Who gets those second chances and whose work is it to pay for them if we get it wrong, you know?

Jo Reed: Well, let’s turn to the novella, the title story, "The Office of Historical Corrections.” I love that concept—an agency you created that corrects “the contemporary crisis of truth.” Just call 311, which is kind of fabulous. Where did this idea come from?

Danielle Evans: Yeah, yeah. I think originally it was a joke that I would tell. Years ago I was on Metro-- I can’t-- I wish I remembered. But someone was having some wildly inaccurate conversation on the Metro. I want to say they were talking about the Haitian Revolution, but I can’t remember what they said. I just <laughs> sort of got off the train and I joked and I think I texted somebody and said, you know, “I would pay like five extra tax dollars a year to, like, crowdfund an agency that could just sort of correct people <laughs> on history, on kind of verifiable history. Just like fact check them in real-time,” and of course, like, I wouldn’t actually want that to happen.

<laughter>

Danielle Evans: It would be terrifying if everybody’s just minding their business having a conversation and somebody came up to you and was like, “In fact, <laughs> you’re wrong,” but...

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Danielle Evans: And also, I think, you know, we can see in this climate it would probably be, although there is hostility aimed at them in the novel, I think it would even be kind of more impossible <laughs> than perhaps the novella makes it out to be.

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Danielle Evans: The novella’s imagining a sort of slightly calmer time, I think, than our present, <laughs> but... But I was interested in that sort of question of what we might do with a kind of-- I think at some point it’s described as an NIH for a different kind of public health crisis, right. Like, what we would do as a country to be committed to accuracy, and where the tension points in that decision would be, because inherently in any kind of institution there’re people who have different understandings of the mission, there are people who have different understandings of what it means to be accurate about U.S. history. So I was also interested in sort of thinking through the tensions, and it let me turn my historian into detective, and I’ve always loved a good mystery, and so I said, “Well, what if I just tried to flesh out this agency and think about kind of where the problems and tensions and crises would be and where this character who has kind of noble intentions would run into trouble?”

Jo Reed: And that character is Cassie, and she and her friend/nemesis Genie who she’s known almost her entire life, they end up at the Office of Historical Corrections and they investigate the death of a black man in rural Wisconsin. It does unfold like mystery so I don’t want to talk about the specifics of the plot. But I do want you to tell us about Cassie and Genie… Who are they and how are they tied to each other?

Danielle Evans: Yeah. They meet when Cassie, who is accepted to the private school at which Genie has previously been the only black student in their grade, and so have a kind of fraught relationship in which they can’t really be enemies because their circumstances and their parents kind of insist <laughs> that they not be enemies, but also aren’t really friends, <laughs> right, and so it’s a sort of interesting dynamic and then they keep reappearing in each other’s lives in various ways and when they’re younger Genie is being raised in a house where her parents are kind of wealthier, are more established. She is being raised to embrace respectability politics, and so she is the kind of model student and Cassie is comparatively a little bit kind of wilder or brattier, and so the interesting thing from a character development perspective is that when they sort of arrive at the present action of the novella they’re kind of almost in inverse places, right, that Genie has walked away from or been pushed out of this life that felt completely like what she was being trained for all her life and has become someone who’s very outspoken and doesn’t fit into the institution because she’s so outspoken, whereas Cassie has become this person who’s sort of learned to play the game and convinced herself that it’s in the best interest of the larger work for her to kind of figure out a way to get along even if it’s not exactly what she means or she can’t always do exactly what she wants. That she has enough independence to make a difference, as long as she kind of gets along with everybody. And so I’m interested in this because I do think that those are often the choices you have if you’re a marginalized person in a system that isn’t set up for you, <laughs> and I’m interested in thinking about not just that these choices exist in opposition in different characters, but they often exist in opposition in the same person, right.

Jo Reed: We touched on this earlier… I know you’re working on a novel, so I’m not trying to pigeon-hole you but I’d like you to talk a bit more about short stories—and what they allow you to do as a writer that perhaps a novel doesn’t…or what they require from you as you write.

Danielle Evans: Yeah. I love the short story in part because of-- I talked a little bit about timing compression earlier, but I also think that the short story lets you tell lots of different stories. You know, I think especially with my first book when I was an unknown debut writer, who wrote a lot in first-person, which I think was more true in my first book than this book, although there is still some first-person in it. I was worried about being penned down. You know, I was worried about the way that people tend to read sometimes debut work in general, I think especially work by women or writers of color, right, they tend to read it for sociological value sometimes, <laughs> or sometimes they’re taught it as a sociological value instead of sort of from a craft perspective, and so I think one of the things that’s great about a story collection is that you see a writer doing lots of different things and it makes it harder to read it like an essay and say, “Oh, this is a book that has an argument that we should do--” XYZ thing or, “This is a book in which this character is clearly a stand-in for the writer, although I am very much a writer who believes that everything you write is somewhat autobiographical, right, that there is some version of ourselves in every character we write. I think when you have enough characters who are not the same people, it makes it harder for somebody to sort of aggressively read it that way, and so I like the conversation that forces. I like being able to answer the same question in different ways. I like being able to, I feel like, sometimes escape the trap of being read as a sociologist or even a historian and not a fiction writer, <laughs> which is what I am.

Jo Reed: Yeah. It was interesting, because when I was reading your most recent collection, The Office of Historical Corrections, at a certain point I was just thinking about the short story and my relationship with it, and I was really appreciating the recurring questions, for example, that you had mentioned that go through the collection, the threads, and it was very interesting seeing these questions from being examined in different time frames from different perspectives with different people and different circumstances, and there was a lot I valued about that.

Danielle Evans: Yeah. Thank you. It’s one of my favorite things about story collections, as a reader, is just to kind of see a theme shapeshift.

Jo Reed: Now, it was 10 years between your first collection and your second, and I’m just wondering as we’re looking at structural inequity and racial inequality throughout American life including the arts, maybe even especially the arts. What have you seen change in publishing? Have you seen change and what do you see on the road ahead?

Danielle Evans: Yeah. I’ve said before <laughs> that I think the problem of the 21^st Century is that like the gates are opening as the building’s collapsing, <laughs> so, like...I think sometimes my question about all of our initiatives <laughs> is like, “But what are we going to do with the actual systems we’re bringing people into that are not sustainable?” I do think, yes, things have gotten better. I think when my first book came out we were still at the end of the period where there’d be sort of like everyone would put, like, one writer of color in the list a year and if you talk to people who worked publishing, then they’ll say that. That was explicit, right. The idea was like you couldn’t sell more than kind of one big book by a writer of color every season, and certainly that’s not true in the same way that it was now in that, you know, you have the delight of putting lots of writers in conversation, of having multiple books in the same cycle getting attention, and that, again, takes some pressure off of the idea that, like, this is the one story or this is the one voice. At the same time, I mean, I think even having said that, you know, there was a recent article about publishing that said, you know, I think they stopped in 2018, but said that 95 percent or something-- something astonishingly high. I think it really was 95 percent of the books being published are still by white writers, so...

Jo Reed: Yes, according to an article in the New York Times, in 2018 alone 89% of the people published were in white. The 95% figure comes from writers published between 1950 and 2018…so….

Danielle Evans: So, I mean, you know, take progress with a grain of salt. <laughs> I do think there’s progress in the way that’s been meaningful to me as a writer, because I didn’t feel as much like I would be the only writer someone was reading or the only writer on somebody’s syllabus, and so I think there are some weird or more experimental things in this collection that I felt more at liberty to do without feeling like there was going to be some way in which they were taken as representative. So I think that it’s a better moment but not one that sort of feels so solid that it’s fixed the problem, both because sort of we haven’t made enough progress on the diversity and because we’re diversifying an industry that hasn’t figured out how to sustain itself <laughs> long-term necessarily, so... A lot of industries, I should say. It’s not just publishing, but it’s also reviewing and, you know, the arts in general and-- and I do think that for as much as people fuss about MFA programs, and I do understand, like, some of that, but I do think that some of that pressure to diversify started in those programs, which diversified before publishing did. I mean, not much before. I don’t want to give places too much credit, but <laughs> I think that, you know, if you look at some of the major workshops right now, there are not any more spaces where you have one writer of color going through the program alone and then coming out and publishing alone, <laughs> right. They’re places where people are in conversation. Sometimes in argument, you know, doing very different things as young writers of color, and I think that’s healthy. I also, you know, is academia more sustainable than publishing? Who can say at this point? Like, <laughs> who can say what will collapse first? I have not turned into Pollyanna, but I am grateful to be publishing and writing and reading in a time where I can think of, you know, five or six great story collections by just-- even just black writers in last couple of years that got a lot of attention, and I think that’s healthy.

Jo Reed: You were also an NEA Literature Fellow. What did that allow you do?

Danielle Evans: I was. Well, right before everything shut down I was able to take a research trip to L.A., which was supposed to be one of two, <laughs> but of course-- hopefully will eventually be one of two when we can get on planes again, to do some research for the thing that I’m working on now. I’ve decided the one lesson I’ve learned as a writer is to talk a little bit less about your work in progress. So I’m keeping it kind of close to the vest, but part of it happens in L.A. and I’d never been, so I was able to go and kind of do some research and also think some about the sort of landscape of the book. I think that so much of writing is about physical space, and so it’s hard to write a place you haven’t seen, <laughs> and it also just gave me some time to kind of focus on that new project without the pressure to finish it quickly, and so I’ve had some time to sort of sit with it, which has been very helpful, especially this year, which has had so much disruption in it, to kind of feel that I could work at the pace the work needed. Hopefully not another 10 years, but <laughs> slow enough that what I-- when I finish with it it will feel like what I meant to finish.

Jo Reed: Well, I’m going to leave it there because, of course, my last question was going to be, “What are you working on?”

Danielle Evans: <laughs> Right.

Jo Reed: You’ve just answered it as much as you want to, and that’s fine.

<laughter>

Danielle Evans: I cheated.

Jo Reed: Danielle, thank you. It was really such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for giving me your time, and thank you for writing those two books.

Danielle Evans: Thank you. Thank you so much for reading them and for talking to me.

Jo Reed: That was writer and NEA Literature Fellow Danielle Evans—Her latest collection is The Office of Historical Corrections. You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscribe to Art Works and then please leave us a rating on Apple because it will make us happy because it helps people to find us. Keep up the arts endowment by following us on twitter @neaarts or by checking out our website at arts.gov. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Stay safe, and thanks for listening.

Jo Reed: Well, what are the recurring questions that come up throughout the book The Office of Historical Corrections for you as the author?

Danielle Evans: Well, certainly the question of history, both family history and national history and how we are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves about both. That's a question that comes up in a lot. And relatedly, the question of kind of who history belongs to, who records belong to, what happens when something about the recorder of known history of something feels like an erasure? How do you take ownership of a story that hasn't centered you? But there's also a recurring question of grief and loss of agency. And I think several of the stories are kind of playful about who this story belongs to and kind of start with a narrative that feels familiar and put some pressure on it.