My journal is a private affair, but as I cannot know the time of my coming death, and since I am not disposed, however unfortunately, to the serious consideration of self-termination, I am afraid that others will see these pages. Since however I will be dead, it should not much matter to me who sees what or when. My name is Thelonious Ellison. And I am a writer of fiction. This admission pains me only at the thought of my story being found and read, as I have always been severely put off by any story which had as its main character a writer. So, I will claim to be something else, if not instead, then in addition, and that shall be a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker. If for no other reason, I choose this last, callous-building occupation because of the shame it caused my mother, who for years called my pickup truck a station wagon. I am Thelonious Ellison. Call me Monk.

01: 32

I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and so the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race. Though I am fairly athletic, I am no good at basketball. I listen to Mahler, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Parker and Ry Cooder on vinyl records and compact discs. I graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, hating every minute of it. I am good at math. I cannot dance. I did not grow up in any inner city or the rural south. My family owned a bungalow near Annapolis. My grandfather was a doctor. My father was a doctor. My brother and sister were doctors.

While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing. I have heard this mainly about my novels, from editors who have rejected me and reviewers whom I have apparently confused and, on a couple of occasions, on a basketball court when upon missing a shot I muttered Egads.

From a reviewer:

The novel is finely crafted, with fully developed characters, rich language and subtle play with the plot, but one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus' The Persians has to do with the African American experience.

03:18

One night at a party in New York, one of the tedious affairs where people who write mingle with people who want to write and with people who can help either group begin or continue  to write, a tall, thin, rather ugly book agent told me that I could sell many books if I'd forget about writing retellings of Euripides and parodies of French poststructuralists and settle down  to write the true, gritty real stories of black life. I told him that I was living a black life, far blacker than he could ever know, that I had lived one, that I would be living one. He left me to chat with an on-the-rise performance artist/novelist who had recently posed for seventeen straight hours in front of the governor's mansion as a lawn jockey. He familiarly flipped one of her braided extensions and tossed a thumb back in my direction.

04 :12

The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don't believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that's just the way it is.

Percival Everett 05 :30

I don’t even know what’s down there.

Smetana, Beethoven, here is Chopin. Frank Sinatra. Cowboys’ songs from the 50s, the Platters.

This is a resonator guitar. It’s well out of tune.

I bought this maybe 35 years ago. Thinking it was a tenor guitar, a four strings guitar. It was unplayable. An awful instrument. And it’s made by a company famous for making really cheap instruments. But you can see, it’s dusty but the wood is really fantastic. It’s solid wood, it’s not plywood. This is great craftmanship with this cutting here like this. But one day when I started working on instrument, I decided that I would make this playable. So, I replaced the nut and I was lay all the strings of. They were only four tuning pegs up here. I took them of and I found out that it wasn’t a tenor guitar at all. It’s what’s called an octave mandolin. There were four holes in each side. So, for over thirty years this instrument was masquerading into something else. I had no idea what I had. I hang it back here because it reminds me of my work. You start something and you don’t know what you have until you get well into it and sometime not until you’ve been with it for a long time and you take it apart.  But this is where I do most of my writing. Though it’s usually in my notebooks and sitting around by the pool.

What did you find dude ?

No.

Director : 08: 05

Basically how do you work, do you have like a precise schedule?

Percival Everett : 08 : 12

No. If I had a schedule, I’ll shoot myself.

No, I trust that I will work and that I am working. Back when there were theaters if you came to me and said let’s go to a movie, I’ll always say yes. I don’t work every day but sometimes I work fourteen hours.

It’s just books. That’s the thing, there is no point of getting to upset or worried about. And it’s the thinking that matters to me.

I’m always thinking about work. And not about what this character will do or say. But what’s at stake for me in making the meaning. Possible meanings. Whatever is philosophically bothering me at that time.

Director : (09:25)

Last time we’ve met you had just finished a book called Telephone. Can you talk a little bit about the book?

Percival Everett (09:32)

As you know I’m no good at saying what novels are about. But there was an experimental part of this novel where… Come here banjo… There are three versions of the novel, and they’re published identically. But that knowledge was not made available to the public. I’ve always been interested in the fact that people appeal to the author for some kind of knowledge about a text. And that artistic authority is what I wanted to question. Because I think that often the reader knows more about a text than I do. So, I wanted to make something that raises question about the reader’s authority. What if what you’ve read is different from what your classmate read, your neighbor read. The beautiful thing about reading to me is that it’s the most subversing thing we can do. It is the most private thing we can do. Nobody sees what’s going into you. But as soon as you start talking about it then it become a different thing. Interpretations are not private. The experience of reading it, actually is.

11:10

Printer : We can take it to the light booth back here to look to it.

Percival Everett: Ok.

Printer : You can start flipping to check it out.

Percival Everett : Thank you

Printer : You’re welcome.

Percival Everett: What do you think J.C that’s good ?

J.C Gabel: I like how it has the tone of what the magazine looked like.

Percival Everett : Yeah.

Sabrina Che : Maybe the colors are a little dull but I don’t know.

Percival Everett : They’re not dull on this one.

Sabrina Che : I know it’s just on your darker paintings.

Percival Everett : Yeah.

That one came out really nicely.

12:05

J.C Gabel: You just handed me today a copy of The Trees, you know there is a lynching component to it, and the paintings as well. So were you working on those things simultaneously and they grew out of each other? This particular novel and the new work.

Percival Everett : The paintings grew out of the novel. I am not sure I started making them before I finished the novel but most of them were made when I was done writing. The novel is just coming out this month but it’s been done for a year.

J.C Gabel: Last year with the unrest… not just because of George Floyd, but in general and having suffered through 4 years of Donald Trump. It’s very prescient you know. How far we’ve come in hundred years but also looking at that…

Percival Everett : How easy it is to slip back ?

J.C Gabel: Yes.

Percival Everett : And how much of that language… You know people get canceled all the time by referring to the Nazis. But so much of that language… When I’ve be reading about the existentialists and the beginning of the Nazi party, so much of that language was exactly the same, especially regarding immigrants. So, we’ll see if we escape this but…

13:43

Percival Everett:

There are all sorts of damage done by Trump but I think, for me the most profonde one is that it normalizes stupidity and ignorance. There’s success to be had without carrying about being honest or truthful. I don’t know how you undo that damage. I don’t know how you undo the cultural damage done by saying to children, it’s okay to be disingenuous, it’s ok to lie, and it’s okay not to care about studying the world. I don’t know how you get over that.

16:38

Percival Everett:

Everything I think I remember is in a different place now. I do remember a lot of these creeks that I fished. You know these maps used to be with me all the time and I used to know them inside and out. And as I look at them now, it’s like looking back at a novel. I don’t remember them at all. I don’t remember these maps at all. Vaguely. I lived on this corner here around Lander. Just sleeping on people’s sofa actually. I lived with a man named Abraham Spotted Elk. I lived on the reservation, I was teaching at the University of Wyoming. I only agreed to do it when they told me I could live on the reservation. And I don’t know why I asked for that. But it turned out to be a pretty important time in my life and also to my work.

Being black in America, I was more a curiosity to a lot of people in Wyoming. But the racial tension that exist there is between native people and white people.

But you had me open these maps and this is very fascinating and humbling as I think about memory because so much of it is turned around. Places I thought were South of one place are North of those places. Rivers are in different places. And as I am sitting here, a great idea for a story is a map that every time you look at it is different. Which is again a little bit like working on a novel. I always draw a map, maybe not a literal map but a map of understanding about a novel and every time I pull it out it looks different.

For research for a novel, I travelled along with a hydrologist and observed and studied a little hydrology so I could inhabit the space of my character who is a hydrologist. I learned a lot about hydrology, I remember no hydrology. Or geomorphology or anything that might be interesting. As it’s often the case with researching novels, I study intensively only to forget everything once I am done with the book. I wanted this character to know more about a particular place than anyone else. In that way, scientifically. Obviously, there is no place on the planet that I am going to know more than anyone else so what I did was I created a place. I drew maps like this, topographical maps of a place that doesn’t exist in Colorado. And then wrote hydrologic reports about that place. Remember this place doesn’t exist. But the only person who understood this place that I created was my character. So I achieve knowing that by cheating I guess.

Director : So no one can come at you and say that it’s not exactly like this…

Percival Everett : and I can say “have you ever been there ?”.

Director : And how far is it also a moral or ethical point of view. It’s also about cultures.

Percival Everett : Well in that same novel Watershed there is a scene set in a native American church. But I try to be very careful not to approach anything that would have someone think that I understand in great detail that experience, the native American experience. The experience is of my character being around native people. So yeah, I will not assume… and it is the same reason why I won’t write about a place I don’t know. I can’t take that kind of liberty. Not only with people…. People stuff is very important. The thing that makes them them… there’s maybe nothing more important in this world. So, I won’t encroach in that way. But I can write about my experience with different people.

21:43

Percival Everett: But I fished many places here. Deep Creek was very difficult to get to, I remember that. But it was so beautiful that I remember it. There are some great fly fishermen in the West. I am not one of them but there are some people who really know where to go to find fish and they can read a river, that’s what I love. It’s the idea that it’s all surface as you look at it. But there are people who can see it and see the way the water moves, know what’s under the water, they have a sense of the rocks. And I think that’s what attracted me really to the activity. It’s the detective work involved. Looking at these places, imagining what’s under the surface but more than that, studying the insect life. There is so much to learn. Always something more to learn.

22:47

Director : Do you miss sometime the wilderness ?

Percival Everett : All the time. Landscape is very important to me. I think the landscape in which people live, and can’t articulate why or how it does it but I think it shapes the way people think. Weather and landscape which is the same thing really. And one can fall in love with places. I’ve fallen in love with more places than I have people. And those places, they change the way we do.

26:12

Actor :

Dusk came on and the pinacate bugs were out of their holes and trudging along the wash. Ogden Walker pushed his toe into the path of one of the large beetles and watched it stand  on its head. He glanced up at the shriek of a chat-little and noticed the pink in the sky and though it showed no promise of rain he walked up to higher ground to settle in for the night, remembered how quickly desert floods could occur, how his father would not drive across a dip in the road if there was even an inch of water standing in its trough. The chill of evening was already on him. He built a fire, ate the sandwich he had bought some miles back near Las   Cruces, and then rolled out his sleeping bag. He stared up at the new moon and the clouds that threatened to obscure it and tried to recall the last time he had been able to sleep in the desert. The desert he and his father had shared was not like this one. The high desert was not  so severe, was not so frightening, relentless, was harsh only for its lack of water. His father spoke to him, a dead voice telling Ogden that he was a fool, a fool to love the desert, a fool to have left school, a fool to have joined the army, a fool to have no answers, and a fool to  expect answers to questions he was foolish enough to ask. And his father would have called him a fool for working as a deputy in that hick-full, redneck county. His mother would be waiting for him in Plata. She wouldn't call him a fool. He thought about the desert around him,  thought about water and no water, the death that came with too much water, flooding that carried mice and snakes and nests and anything else in its way. To drown in the desert, that was the way to die, sinuses replete with sandy water, dead gaze to dead gaze with rattlers in the flow. Ogden closed his eyes and thanked the desert wind that it was all over.

28 :57

Percival Everett :

I am supposed to be writing a book of poems about Chopin’s Preludes, and I can’t figure it out. I had an idea couple of years ago and I have a contract to write the book but I have no idea what I am doing. I have a fraught relationship with those pieces.

Director (29:27) :

What was the core of the idea to make poems about Chopin?

Percival Everett:

Well, I’ve always been fascinated by them. There often beautiful and it’s often impressive when people play them. But really what are you left with if it’s just beautiful or impressive. After I hear them for a while, I will sing them to myself but they’re so brief there is not development. So, I have a problem with them though there is something I like about them. So, that’s where the book resides but I don’t know what I am doing.

Director:

When do you usually know that an idea will turn into a book?

Percival Everett :

Sometimes you know it right away sometimes I write 200 pages and I realize I have no idea what I am doing and that this is going nowhere. Writing fiction is labor intensive. And it’s not like engineering. You don’t start building a house if you don’t think the household can’t take it.  You can actually plan and look at the material, look at the landscape. It’s not always the case with art.

30:54

Percival Everett :

Mitch can I ask you a question ?

Mitch :

Sure.

Percival Everett :

Cause I really want to help Jianan to get this where she wants it. There’s a lot of characters and it does happen when they come together and we know who everyone is and you feel comfortable. Do you have any idea how she can get there faster ?

Mitch:

How to get there faster…

Percival Everett :

Not to this point in the story, but for the characters.

Mitch : 

I felt like the oncle June character, we’re introduced to him first but his relevance comes a little bit later. So, I felt kind of more interested in jumping in with Big Gu.

Percival Everett :

Ok. Big Gu for you.

Mitch: :
Big Gu for me.

Percival Everett :

Stephany?

Stepany:

Yeah, this is a really expansive project that I was very impressed with. Even though things are kind of living in separate worlds right now there is so much material that you are going to be able to easily tie them together. But you have so much going on. I just loved that this felt like a mini novel project, I guess. So some things that I have questions about, and this is going to be an awkward question but: what does he think about when he masturbates? I definitely want a little bit more interiority, I think, in those moments. Even also when he kind of essentially settles on a life with Fu. Like what is he thinking then?

Percival Everett :

There is a novel here. Z town and Shanghai. Your two parts. You have the relationship with Big Gu, with the family, with Uncle June. It’s all here. It’s taking time to live in it. And it needs a lot of space because there is so much material that you’re explaining. On top of page 29, bottom of 28. You’re explaining: “In our society it’s miserable that so many people have never fallen in love. We are forbidden love and youth and then force to marry someone we do not love.” You don’t need to explain that. That is what the story is telling us. And I say that from my western point of view but obviously in the story people are suffering because they are afraid to be with each other. And that’s an amazing thing in a story. An entire science fiction world could be based on that one premise. So that’s gigantic. How do you control that so it doesn’t take over the story and you control it by not mentioning it very much.

Jianan :

It’s really helpful. I think I have a renewed interest in the story so I think I want to rewrite it.

Percival Everett :

Well, let’s talk about it because I do think that it’s a longer work than this. That’s a scary thing to tell somebody. You know I can have two conversations with someone who comes to my office. The easy conversation is “don’t quit your day job”. It’s much harder for me to say to somebody : “yeah I really think you should spend the majority of your time working on a novel that is not likely to earn you much in the world”.

Mitch :

That’s why I got to poetry.

Percival Everett :

That’s why you got to poetry….Yeah.

So, when I say to somebody I think there is a novel here I don’t say that lying cause that’s a lot of investment and time to do that.

34:41

Director:

And did you always teach creative writing even when you were younger or did you also teach something else?

Percival Everett :

No I have always been hired ostensibly to teach fiction but I teach other things as well. I try not to teach writing as much as possible.

Director :

Why that ?

Percival Everett :

It’s exhausting for one thing. I do enjoy my students but I am somewhat ambivalent about teaching the workshops. I think it’s bad for American letters to tell you the truth. I can go to a book store now and we can pick up a book of short stories, I can look at them for about ten minutes and I can tell you that person went to a workshop. They’re all a certain length. They do certain things. It’s like making art for committee. Trying to satisfy those other 11 people in the workshop. And to me it’s a little against the isolated work that is necessary to make art. And they have to go in knowing that if they don’t take themselves seriously no one else will. A lot of people think that taking your own work seriously is somehow egotistical. It’s not. But it can feel that way.

36:58

Actor:

She pulled me into the room that was paneled with dark hardwood like the door and was washed in yellow lamplight. The severed heads of once-large animals covered the walls. There  was an actual bearskin rug, the head of which nearly tripped me as I stepped fully inside. Leaning on the edge of his oak desk with the window and late afternoon light behind him, Ward Larkin cut a distinctly unimpressive figure.

"Daddy, this is Not Sidney."

"Welcome to our home," Ward said, and though he didn't say it, I heard the word boy.

"Thank you for having me." I shook his hand and paid particular attention to the fact that his grip was overly firm and that he was slow to let go.

"What's your last name?" he asked. "Poitier."

"Like Sidney Poitier." "Just like that," I said. "Any relation?"

"None that I know of." I looked around at all the heads, reminding myself that they were called  trophies. At the leopard, the moose, the lion, the water buffalo, the boar.

I settled on the boar and asked, "Did you kill all of these animals?"

A bit of a hush fell about the room, and Ward cleared his throat before saying, "No, I didn't." He turned and moved around to the other side of the desk.

"Which trophies are yours?" I asked. "Hunting," he said with sort of a laugh.

His laughter put me briefly at ease. "I think hunting is stupid, too," I said. "I just thought since  you had all these heads ... "

"Daddy's not against hunting," Maggie said. I felt ambushed, as no doubt did others in that room. I imagined my head filling the narrow gap between the tiger and the yak.

"No, young man, I believe hunting is a demonstration of man's primacy in the order  of nature."

"It probably is," I said, trying hard to sound just slightly more cowed than sardonic.

Still, Ward cut me an unfavoring glance. "I've never myself been hunting. I have a bad leg. As  well, I have no desire to visit Africa. Do you?"

I'd never thought about it and I certainly didn't see the question coming and so I said, "I've  never thought about it."

"Let me ask you this, do you consider yourself African?"

These were not difficult questions, but they were confusing. However, I was not so young, naïve, and stupid that I could not spot a classic case of self-loathing. "Well, somebody in my family line was from Africa." I made a show of looking at my brown hands.

"Hmmph. Young man, let me just say this, I'm one-sixteenth black, an eighth Irish, two-fifths Choctaw, one-thirty-second Dutch, a quarter English, and a ninth German."

I didn't, nor did I want to, do the math, but it was clear that he was ten-tenths crazy. "Do you know what that means?" he asked.

I said nothing.

"It means that I'm nothing but an American. I'm no needy minority. Do you  understand?"

"I suppose."

40:35

Percival Everett :

For Not Sidney Poitier I watched all of Sidney Poitier’s films maybe 40 times, until I was sick of them. Because I had to own the material. I had to become, not a fan, not a watcher, but they had to be mine so that I could change them. Sidney Poitier is a fascinating character to me. Great actor. Really a great movie star. And that it seems almost unlikely that America would rally toward a tall, dark man giving it’s fear of black masculinity. But it did and the films of his career highlight the racial problems in America but also underscore how America would like to see it’s racial problems.

There are so many examples. One is Guess who’s coming to dinner ?

Interracial relationship. Very uncommon in American cinema.

And a liberal family who finds itself confronted with the fact that their daughter has brought home a black man.

Trailer voice over :

Three academy award winners and a bright young new cover combine their talents in a love story of today.

Char 1:

John Wade Prentice, isn’t that a lovely name?

Char 2:

John Wade…

Char 1:

Joanna Prentice I’ll be.

Percival Everett :

What’s so puzzling, even though you know why it’s there, it’s not trying to figure out why she would be attracted to this man. Sidney Poitier is older than she is, he is accomplished, he is an internationally known doctor, sophisticated and wealthy. And she is a 21 years old idiot. Essentially. The question is why would he be interested in her.

Char 3 :

I love your daughter. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to try to keep her as happy as she was the day I met her. But it seems to me without your approval we would make no sense at all.

Percival Everett :

And the American take on this is that he is interested in her why? Because she is a beautiful white woman. As if that’s enough.

Char 4 :

I appreciate that, Doctor. It’s almost in the form of an ultimatum.

Char 3:

Not quite Mr. Drayton. All you have to say is goodbye.

Percival Everett :

The novel has nothing to do with Sidney Poitier. The films are revisited throughout the text. Partly as my game playing. But the novel is about identity. And where one’s identity resides. Does Sidney Poitier’s identity reside in his films? In some way yes. Logically the whole idea of identity is fascinating to me. And just in American culture the idea of identity obviously comes out. I was just looking at some genealogical stuff about my family last night. I get sent these things and I ended up on some kind of ancestry.com list and they send me all these documents about family. And I see members of my family listed in some places as black or negro, and in other places as mulato. And those identities keep going back and forth. And I don’t think people ever lived with that. But these census takers who were doing this are making decisions about people identities. And that’s fascinating to me as well. Who gets to say who’s who. Finally, to me it doesn’t much matter what I or anyone else is. It’s only staying safe when one moves to the world. How I am seen in this place, what is my identity, has real world consequences.

46:03

Actor :

When my son was quite young, he loved dirt roads. We would be driving through northern Virginia, maybe to visit nurseries looking for roses, maybe just driving to enjoy the autumn foliage, but when he saw a dirt lane, he would sit up and bark, dirt road, dirt road. Often I would take it and he squealed with delight as the ruts and rocks bounced our station wagon wildly. Perhaps my fears were a bit stale, remnants, but I was always worried that we might come upon a Klan rally or some other miscreant activity. One night we did. It was dusk, the hour when things become indistinct. A magic hour in one's yard, but not so when one was black and in America's yard. It didn't even seem like fire at first and the moving figures didn't really appear as men. They didn't make me think of ghosts or even of anything that should  not have been in woods, but they were there and they were men and they were clad in white sheets and they did have pointy heads and bad intentions. Dusk turned abruptly to night and the only lights were from car headlights behind us, car taillights in front of us, and the waving of flashlights and lanterns to our sides. The cross was a fire and I suppose it should have been. The pointy heads were stopping cars, shining lights into faces and peeking into backseats. I know my son did not see me reach under the seat to get it, but he saw it quickly enough, my .32-caliber revolver in my lap, between my legs, what so many black men kept under their seats for such occasions.

When our turn at the checkpoint came, I stepped on the gas and we fishtailed away. We were not chased. The familiar dirt lane led us back to the main highway, I stuck the pistol back in its  home, and we said nothing, father and son, quietly sharing America. But it could have happened differently, leaving you a bit of business to tend to, deal with, sort out.

When I stepped on the gas, I slammed into the baby-blue Chevy pickup that had started across the road. We lurched forward, your ten-year-old arms catching you against the dash, my chest thrown into the steering wheel, sounding the horn, and all of a sudden we were in a world that was like a book with no pictures or conversation. Pointy heads moved into our car, grabbed me, and left you to scramble your way out behind. You were pushed aside and not gently, mind you, by a woman in a sheet, a fat woman who smelled of butter and dusty upholstery. There were voices, many voices, that all sounded alike, but were so distinct that later each one would come to you in turn, in dreams, nightmares. You crawled and then found your feet and followed as the men laughed while they dragged me toward the burning cross, the gasoline fumes apparently reluctant to burn off. You watched while I said nothing but told you with my eyes to run, to run fast away. A white boy, wild eyed and full of madness, came and stood beside you and you studied him like he was from another planet, another species, and you knew even then that you were right. A man burned me with his cigarette around my neck, made a ring around my neck. You tried to find the stench of your father's burning flesh in the air but found only the gasoline and now the sour breath of the boy beside  you, his mouth crazily wide open.

And then there was dead silence as a rope was brought out, a sacred and cherished rope that appeared already stained with blood. A noose was placed over my head and around my neck and you looked at my eyes and I told you again to run, run away fast, but you did not. You stood stunned. You were staring at me. Ain't you gonna say anything, nigger? I did not speak but kept silent. Such silence keeping required that I had something to say.

There was a Young Lady of Parma, I thought, Whose conduct grew calmer and calmer; When they said, Are you dumb? She merely said, Hum! That provoking your Lady of Parma. And I smiled a half smile and you understood then to run and you did. I watched your little legs carry you quickly through the distracted herd. They put the rope in a tree, a tree that sank its roots deep into everywhere, deep into yesterday, deep into my blood and theirs. It was a big sycamore and so I knew there must be water someplace and I hoped it would not impede your progress to the main road; then I remembered the culvert that allowed the stream to pass under the road and I sighed some relief as the rope tightened around my neck and my trousers were pulled down to around my ankles. The main road was just a two-lane blacktop and in later years you would drive past the dirt road that would be visible but not accessible and tell your children that that was where their grandfather had been hanged, not telling them the part about his testicles being cut from his body by a serrated but edgeless hunting knife, a fitting metaphor for the miscreants perpetrating the act. That I then, you then, I now, could imagine such hell was hell enough.