Kyle Kellams: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Percival Everett will be in conversation tomorrow night at the Fayetteville Public Library. His novels include the Pulitzer winner and National Book Award winner "James," a telling of the events in "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," told from Jim's point of view. Also, the Pulitzer finalist "Telephone," the Booker Prize finalist "The Trees" and more than two dozen more.
Tickets to tomorrow's free discussion went fast. They're all gone. But here's a preview from a brief phone conversation that took place last week with Everett. He says he likes discussing his novels and short stories.
Percival Everett: I answer questions as best I can, given that I often forget what's in them.
Kellams: Right. I mean, some of the novels have decades on them, so I'm sure that sometimes you get questions about a book and it's like, been a while since it might have been a couple of weeks and someone read it, but it's been a while since you've written it.
Everett: Yeah, but I might remember that better than I remember the last one, so you never know.
Kellams: Do you remember distinctly writing each one, like where you might have been? Or what room or what mood?
Everett: No. I probably remember a couple of things about some of the works. And I certainly don't remember a lot of what's in all of them. It's very likely that someone will mention a scene and I'll have no idea what they're talking about. But then it will come back to me eventually.
Kellams: I was rereading "Erasure" this weekend, and there's just this wonderfully written scene between Monk and his brother Bill, when for the first time, they're kind of talking about Bill being gay and Bill asking Monk, did you realize? And I don't know how you do it, but it is this beautiful, sparse and 100% sounds and reads, you know, real dialogue.
And it just is this, I don't know, two and a half pages that along with other scenes just makes up a beautiful book. And I just wonder, how does he do that? Because there are so many other scenes that are seemingly not connected, except that they're connected to Monk. And it's wonderful. Do you realize when you're creating those scenes where they'll go in the book?
Everett: I don't, I don't, I, everything I write is in the order that it's been written.
Kellams: Really?
Everett: Yeah. But I need to talk to you more often.
Kellams: So you write chronologically.
Everett: Yeah. Even in works that jump around in time.
Kellams: So which most of them do. But does that mean, do you know what you're going to write next?
Everett: Pretty much. I'm no good at making it up as I go. And so I have a map in my head when I start. But as you know, anyone who's ever been exploring knows that a map is only excuse to get lost.
Kellams: I find when I read your books that I think there's just a lot of empathy in them. Is that part of your goal or a writer's goal?
Everett: Well, I mean, if anything is missing in our present world, it is empathy. And I think all artists, successful artists anyway, certainly have to have a lot of empathy to make a world that other people will want to inhabit.
My particular art of writing, I believe, is writing. Fiction is where in our culture we typically learn to have empathy or empathy. Stories do that.
Kellams: How old were you when you first heard someone who was a writer or were able to hear or see someone who had written something you'd read?
Everett: That's a really good question. Well, the first writer I knew was Jim Dickey. I was a teenager and I ended up in his backyard somehow while he was shooting arrows at a target. And I knew he was a poet and so I went out and read some of his work, but it was after "Deliverance." And then I read "Deliverance."
So it was Jim Dickey. Though I was always a reader, I didn't seek out readings or anything. I didn't start writing until after college.
Kellams: I don't know, it's great to be able to read, but to occasionally be able to be in the room with someone who's, you know, written something that you've read, I don't know, there's something special about it. And I don't know if...
Everett: And likewise, it's special for writers too, because the circuit is not complete until the reader comes to it.
Kellams: Right.
Everett: And to hear, and I think readers know more about any of my books than I will ever know. And so when I hear what other people say, then that's pretty exciting. I don't know if I would actually continue to do this if I didn't have that experience.
Kellams: Percival Everett will discuss his novels in much more detail tomorrow night at the Fayetteville Public Library. He'll be on stage in discussion with me. All tickets have been claimed for the evening. That begins at 7.
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