Percival Everett (winner of a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction) joins Windham-Campbell Prize administrator Michael Kelleher for the last interview of the season, and it’s a joyful exploration of Ralph Ellison’s seminal novel Invisible Man, Everett’s relationship to the book and its contemporaries, and the enduring power of a novel that makes you think.

For a full episode transcript, click here.

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Reading list: 

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison • Moby Dick by Herman Melville • The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 8 (Ralph Ellison) •  “Box Seat” by Jean Toomer • If He Hollers, Let Him Go by Chester Himes • Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes • Native Son by Richard Wright • “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue” by Louis Armstrong • The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler • Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

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From the episode:

Michael Kelleher: I was reading the Paris Review interview that [Ellison] did. It was like the art of fiction number eight, I can’t remember, I forget who the two writers were — it just says interviewer in the book. I looked it up and it was a white man and a black woman interviewing him and the tone of the questions I thought was fascinating. They kept asking him like, well, how, how can you write something about a minority and then hope for it to be universal? And he was very patient responding to these, most of the time he would just say, well, you know, I, I think there’s a little bit of a misunderstanding of what universality might mean here. You know what I mean?

Percival Everett: Well, you know, the position that black writers were put in is always suspect. Anytime a novelist would, would come out with a work that was, was in any way well received, the blurb on the back of the book would say, one of the greatest African-American novels, or as, as they said about Invisible Man, the first person to review it for the New York Times. This was, is the best novel I’ve ever read by an African-American, and of course the, the implication is, is that, Well, yes, but not as good as anything written by a white American.

It’s that marginalization, that ghettoization of African American letters.

One of the reasons I like the novel is– well, one, I love reading the novel, the writing is, is really engaging. But there’s a pathos in the novel and you, and you get to it when Ellison talks about it that’s fascinating, and that’s his, his desire to not credit his African American influences. It’s very strange and that plays out in the novel. And as far as life and art one imitating the other, I don’t know which way it goes, he is very quick to adopt T.S. Elliot’s Wasteland and Ernest Hemingway as influences, yet he doesn’t look back to, Jean Toomer, who is obviously an influence on the way he approaches these descriptive action scenes if one reads the story “Box Seat.” And he doesn’t credit someone who is quite obviously a huge influence on the novel, and that’s Chester Himes and “If He Hollers, Let Him Go.”

In fact, the battle royal scene is arguably pulled from the Chester Himes novel in the very subtle thing of the woman who accuses the main character of rape, her makeup being painted red, white, and blue. And the note that’s in his briefcase that’s given to him is the same note that Bob Jones reads in his dream in “If He Hollers, Let Him Go.”

And so that influence had to be there At least, and I can’t say that it was even intentional. Maybe it was he was influenced and didn’t remember, you know, the way rock musicians say in, in the courtroom all the time: “Now, I didn’t know. I, I’ve never heard that song.”

Jasmine Lee-Jones (winner of a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama) joins Windham-Campbell Prize administrator Michael Kelleher for a wide-ranging conversation about the incredible power of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, linking the work of Hansberry and Jordan Peele, and the power of dreams.

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Reading list: 

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry • August Wilson’s Century Cycle • Get Out by Jordan Peele • Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson • “A Love Supreme” by John Coltrane • Beneatha’s Place by Kwame Kwei-Armah

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From the episode:

Jasmine Lee-Jones: In truth, when I was rereading it, I was like, she’s an overwriter like me, and I don’t think there’s anything–like, I’m trying to cut down, I’m writing a film now and it’s 170 pages. Magnolia is about that length, but you can’t really send in a film script that’s 170 pages.

I know where it comes from in me and it comes from the same place in her, I think, I’m presuming: this desire for everything to have a purpose, which I think is such a grand desire, such a beautiful desire and the desire of a dreamer as well, that everything has meaning. But the stage direction I was talking about is: “she will be known among her people as a settled woman,” which makes me think, who is she describing this for?

“She will be known”–because if she was writing this to give to her people, she wouldn’t have to say, she will be known among her people, but she’s writing with an awareness and it’s that whole question that I confront and every black artist in the theater confronts (and if they tell you they haven’t, they’re lying): Is this for white people?

And it’s a hard place to be in because you don’t wanna feel like a sellout. You don’t want to feel like you are putting other people before your people. You have to have an awareness, which I think she did, to kind of get the stories about black people and for black people even in motion within the current structure that we have, which I’m sure she had plans and was fighting so hard to change.

Rereading it, the spirit of it is so not “I want to prove our humanity to white people.” I think it is for black people, the play. It is deeply rooted in reclamation of our right to dream, what happens to a dream deferred. You know, I love that poem. And took me years to understand. I understood as a child, but not to the extent I understand it now. And that last line, which is another horror: or does it explode?

I think the job of the artist is, remember, remember, remember, this is not normal. We don’t have to live like this. Which I think is what she’s doing in this play.

Susan Williams (winner of a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction) joins Windham-Campbell Prizes director Michael Kelleher to talk about the majesty and the drudgery of Bleak House, walking through history in the present, and the complicated realities of Charles Dickens the human.

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From the episode:

Michael Kelleher: I don’t know what it is about Bleak House, it’s the book that all of my most literary friends recommend to me by Charles Dickens and I’ve tried twice to read it all the way through and failed. This time I succeeded.

And, I don’t know, my feeling of Charles Dickens is that for me, he’s incredibly interesting to talk about, but he’s horrible to read. Like after I finish reading him, I feel like, God, there’s, there’s so many different ways you could talk about this book and there’s so many interesting things happening, but the pleasure of reading for me is so minimal.

How do you feel about Charles Dickens?

Susan Williams: Well, I do share some of your negative feelings about David Copperfield and also Great Expectations in fact. But I think Bleak House is really quite different. I think it is a great book head and shoulders above all the others, in my view. Having said that though, I found there was a very different experience reading it in the last month than there was of a previous time. I don’t like to say how long.

A very long time ago, when I first read it, I was so excited by what I would call the literary activism of the novel, the spotlight on the, suffering of the poor, of social injustice, the need for sanitary reform. I was just fired up by it and inspired by it too. Reading it this time, I still see that and I appreciate it. However, there are aspects of the book that I don’t feel very comfortable with and I’ve also just read the marvelous biography of Dickens by Claire Tomlin.

And, the Dickens, the person, the man, who emerges from that book is really not much to my taste. I don’t like him because of his behavior towards many people, including his family, you know, so on the one hand, the spotlight he puts on Britain in Bleak House—he rages against the inhumanity, the brutality, the injustice, the tyranny if you like. But in his own domestic life, he was a bit of a tyrant himself.

The fact that after his wife Catherine had had 10 children and additional miscarriages, he decided he’d had enough of her and wanted to remove himself from her because she was growing fat, he said, and languid and that this was also driven by the fact that he’d fallen obsessively in love with a young actress Ellen Turnon.

And by the way, he was 45 and she was 18 at this time, so he wanted to get rid of Catherine. So he installed her in another residence and he insisted on keeping all the 10 children with him. In fact, it appears that there is some evidence to suggest that at that time he tried to have Catherine certified as mad to be put in a mental hospital. The doctor he asked to do that was a friend of his, but he said no and therefore lost the friendship of Dickens.

It’s hard to fit that behavior with his rage against injustice in the novel.

Reading list:
White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa by Susan Williams • David Copperfield by Charles Dickens • Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin • The Invisible Woman by Claire Tomalin • “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” BandAid 1984

The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with the 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize winners about their favorite books. Hosted by Michael Kelleher.

dg nanouk okpik (winner of a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry) joins Windham-Campbell Prizes director Michael Kelleher for a deep-dive into Layli Long Soldier’s 2017 collection Whereas, examining the historical potency of poetry, the depth of an artistic friendship, and an appearance by a cat named Blue.

For a full episode transcript, click here.

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From the episode:

Michael Kelleher: It’s a really interesting move there, poetically to come back to the crystallized image of those grasses. It feels like a moment maybe of a return to homeland as you were talking about, or a return to some life after death.

dg nanouk okpik: Mm-hmm. And you’re eating the grass and then you’re on the grass, but then you’re also kept from the grass—because they put them in, in corrals, the people in corrals and wouldn’t let them out, so they didn’t have access to the grasslands when they were, you know, in bunkers and in prison and, and things happening like that.

They couldn’t get out to the grasses to pray or to have ceremony. And another thing, the ceremony, the grasses… it’s not in the permanent state. I mean, we know that it’s alive and it has birth, life, and then death. Well, when we pick the grasses, we pray for the life to continue through the grasses to us and weave into the community. And these grasses, when you burn them, you actually change the substance of the grass to smoke.

And that smoke then blesses the people or blesses you in ceremony and takes away all of that ill feeling. And so you can then purify yourself. And I think right here in this book, in the middle of it, Layli is jumping out to the grasses as she’s swinging from the platform, she goes out to the grasses, then she’s able to die and jump into the grass and be free.

And so she’s maybe saying in this part that she’s breaking free and that she’s going to go out to the grasses, okay, you’ve already done this to us. Now what can we do? And then she goes right into whereas…

MK: Which rhymes with grass.

dno: Right, exactly! Which is insane. Right? It’s insane. It’s got that s sound to it and, oh, it’s incredible the way she does it.

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Reading list: 

“Eyes of a Blue Dog” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez • Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo • S.J.Res.14 • Blood Snow by dg nanouk okpik

Dominique Morisseau joins Windham-Campbell Prizes director Michael Kelleher to talk about the still-resonant power of Pearl Cleage’s What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, representing Black men on the page and onstage, the AIDS epidemic and COVID, and why the writers of Family Guy seem to hate Meg.

For a full episode transcript, click here.

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From the episode:

Dominique Morisseau: So a friend of mine says this thing about Pearl’s work that made me sort of revisit it and gravitate toward it, which is: Pearl loves us. And I was like, she loves us! She loves us. You can tell when a writer doesn’t love the people that they write about.

For better, for worse, I always laugh because, uh, I don’t know if you ever watched Family Guy but and my husband would watch Family Guy all the time and go, “Whoever the hell the real life Meg is to these people… They hate her.” Like, they do not like Meg. They’re using this little character to act out, you know, sometimes funny, sometimes deeply disturbing misogyny on this character, like really just deeply disturbing misogyny. I can’t wait to find out the truth of what happened to the character Meg on Family Guy. I wanna know who that is inspired by. But funny or not, but you can tell when someone hates the people they’re writing, they don’t write them with dimension.

And what I love about Pearl Cleage and what I have taken on and what I learned in What Looks Like Crazy… is just how much love she has for us and how it teaches me to love differently. That’s what I say. It’s a love story, but it’s a love story more than a romantic love story. It’s a love story of community, you know?

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Reading List: 

Idlewild, Michigan • for colored girls… by Ntozake Shange • The Color Purple by Alice Walker • Family Guy (1999-present) • Flyin’ West and Other Plays by Pearl Cleage

Ling Ma joins Windham-Campbell Prizes director Michael Kelleher to talk about tuning into the same frequency as Rachel Ingalls, crying on airplanes, and what it means to write about human-cryptid romance.

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From the episode:

Michael Kelleher: I was really amazed at like how much sympathy I felt for both of them. I think Ingalls is really good at drawing these like really rich characters, and doing so by like constructing an environment that, you know is familiar and recognizable and yet, not as you would want it to be, right? It’s very particular in drawing upon Dorothy’s grief and on Larry’s suffering in a way that, that doesn’t allow your sense of the place or your familiarity with the place to make you feel comfortable as a reader.

Ling Ma: You get the sense of maybe estrangement that Dorothy has, but also the sense that she has to—feels that she has to pass as whatever societal role she’s been assigned. And I guess they’re similar in that way, her and Larry, and maybe that’s forms, you know, the basis of their connection is that they’re both, well, she has to pass and I guess he can’t even be seen.

I think for Dorothy, she knows, she always knows there’s a distinction between herself and like the fact that she has to pass is always very clear to her and it’s very cumbersome. And I think living each day feeling as if you have to pass for something else is very tiring. And and I think that sense of exhaustion is especially prevalent maybe in the earlier part of the novel.

MK: Hmm. What do you think she’s passing?

LM: Well, she’s passing… as what she is, which a woman. I guess not quite a mother, but yeah. She’s passing as the things that she is.

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Reading list: 

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls • Times Like These by Rachel Ingalls • The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum • The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) • Grumpy Old Men (1993)

In this episode, poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs joins Windham-Campbell Prizes Director Michael Kelleher to talk about the beauty of Audre Lorde’s poetry and why more people should know her as a poet as well as an essayist.

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From the episode:

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Audre Lorde is a cosmic force. Audre Lorde was a science nerd and a science fiction addict. ‘Science fiction addict’ is her own phrase, that she used from a young age and the imagery in her poetry, of sand, of volcanoes, of stones, is not actually purely metaphorical. She really was interested in Earth and our relationship with earth literally.

And she was like, studying stones and all of this geology and reading all of this science literature for her entire life and I don’t think people recognize that. In so many interviews, she talks about us having, yes, to understand the creative power of difference in our relationships with each other. But, she says, if we don’t shift our relationship to this planet, we won’t even be able to have these conversations because we will not be able to exist. And I don’t think that people think about Audre Lorde as an environmentalist or as an eco-feminist or as a science nerd, really.

But she really was her whole life, like from childhood to the moment that she took her last breath, she was thinking about meteors. She was reading up on what caused these rocks to form out of the earth. I really want people to be able to have a conversation, I want people to think about Audre Lorde and that the fact that they should read Audre Lorde’s poetry to think about what to do about our climate crisis, and they should read Audre Lorde’s poetry to think about what it means to be in relationship with this planet at this time.

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Reading list: 

The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde • Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde • The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir • Broadside Press • “A Supermarket in California!” by Allen Ginsberg

For a full episode transcript, click here.

Darran Anderson is our first guest on the show, and he joins Windham-Campbell Prizes Director Michael Kelleher to talk about the ever-shifting magic of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

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Reading list: 

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino • Derry Girls (2018-2022) • The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino • The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino • An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec • Frank Lloyd Wright’s Plan for Greater Baghdad • Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman

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From the episode:

Michael Kelleher: What’s the difference between an invisible city and a visible one?

Darran Anderson: I think it’s almost strange to differentiate the two. And Calvino’s, the way he weaves these things together shows that they’re not even contradictions. The way I would word it would be subjective and objective. I can live in a place and have a completely different experience from a next door neighbor. There will be places that I can go in London where they’re associated for me with heartbreak or elation—you know, places where you lost people, places where you met people.

And it’s almost like there’s a secret level, there’s a secret map that only you know, and it’s the same for every city that you spend time in. You have these resonances, and everybody has them. The idea of there being a singular map is simply not true. So I would put it that there is no differentiation between the visible and the invisible.

And Calvino makes this point. No matter how fantastical those places are in Invisible Cities, he reveals that they’re all Venice. They’re all basically Marco Polo riffing about Venice. It’s his childhood home. Calvino touches on the idea of nostalgia, and I think in the ancient Greek sense of nostalgia—in trying to get home, you go off and you have these adventures. And Calvino always reiterates, you’re always rediscovering the place that you left. He keeps coming back to this point.

So however surreal those cities, the invisible ones that he builds, they have their counterpart in the real. They always have their counterpart in visible cities. And I think that’s why if you’re a sort of magical realist—I use that phrase very reluctantly—but if you’re in any way a magical realist writer, you have to have a very sturdy anchor to stop yourself floating off. Anything is possible, therefore there’s no peril and there’s no tension.

People can just turn into birds and fly away, and everybody’s invincible. Calvino doesn’t do that. It’s very much rooted in the real; there’s always that anchor. He was a guy who spent his youth in the Alps, a part of that fighting Nazis. George Perec lost his mother in the Holocaust. These were real people who’d suffered real things. And I actually think the fact that they’re so imaginative is a great act of kindness, because they could write the most harrowing stories and instead they chose mediums that are very joyful. It’s a kind of gift.