Nonsense, absurdity and irony in the novels of Percival Everett

Percival Everett has made a career out of exploring the nature of absurdity. You may have become aware of Everett in the last few years when his novel “Erasure” was adapted into the movie “American Fiction” in 2023, or when his book “James” won the Pulitzer prize last year. But Everett has written 24 novels since 1983 along with several books of poetry and short story collections, each of them tackling a different genre of writing and a different angle on nonsense, absurdity or irony. As he says, “to accept the absurdity of a situation is to accept the humanness of it.” We talk to Percival Everett in front of an audience of students at McDaniel High School in Portland.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you today in front of an audience at McDaniel High School in Northeast Portland. We’re spending the hour with the writer Percival Everett.

[Audience applause]

Percival Everett has written more than 30 books of fiction and poetry including “Telephone,” “The Trees,” “Erasure,” “Dr. No” and “James.” There is an enormous gulf between the way Percival Everett talks about his work and the way basically the rest of the world does. Over the years, he has won a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize and a closet’s worth of other awards and honors. He’s been praised by critics as a literary master, a literary giant, one of the most original voices in American literature. But Everett seems allergic to this kind of talk. He has said, “I’m just a cowboy. I sit on top of the horse and ride.” He’s also described himself as a famously difficult interview.

Percival Everett, it is my pleasure to sit down with you to welcome you to Think Out Loud.

Percival Everett: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Miller: Since we are out of high school right now, I was wondering what you were like in high school?

Everett: I was quiet. I’m sorry to say this, but I cut school a lot. That was not a good thing to do.

Miller: Why?

Everett: Well, this is embarrassing to admit, but let’s go for it. I joined a Marxist reading group at the University of South Carolina to meet girls.

Miller: When you were in high school?

Everett: When I was in high school, because the high school girls had no interest in me at all. It didn’t work there either, so …

Miller: So you joined a Marxist reading group, not out of any political conviction, or like a little bit of political conviction, and mostly as a way to meet girls?

Everett: Well, there was political conviction there. But I had already sort of dismissed Marx thinking that he had not taken into account human greed. I was a nerd, I might as well go ahead and admit it now. So it was not purely politics that had me going to the campus.

Miller: The first word you used to describe yourself was “quiet,” meaning you didn’t talk much? But there was a lot going on inside your mind?

Everett: One hopes, but I don’t know if that’s true either. No, I’m basically an introvert, didn’t talk much. I just met your librarian. My librarians at my high school got me. I wouldn’t be a writer today if it hadn’t been for them.

Miller: So what do you think they saw in you?

Everett: Oh God, I’m afraid to even think. Just that I was a quiet, wiseass. I always had something snarky to say.

Miller: And they would feed you books?

Everett: They would feed me books.

Miller: What did you read?

Everett: Well, first of all, when I would go to the university, I sneaked into the university on the South Carolina campus, the McKissick Library, and I wasn’t supposed to be in there. I started going in when I was 13, and the librarian there broke the rules and let me sneak into the stacks whenever I wanted to go.

Miller: Knowing that you were just a kid?

Everett: Well, I would ride my bicycle up to the door. [Laughter]

And that was great. It was in these giant, musty stacks that I found Kierkegaard and Locke and other philosophers. And when I expressed that interest to my high school librarians, they gave me Hume and other people. Then it went to logic and that really seduced me into an area of study – which is the only reason I got into college probably was because I mentioned that I wanted to study with particular philosophers in a particular program, because my grades really sucked.

Miller: You came from a family of doctors, right? I’ve read that your father and your grandfather were doctors.

Everett: And my uncles.

Miller: So just all the men in your family?

Everett: My sister.

Miller: Women too?

Everett: Yeah.

Miller: Was there pressure for you to follow in those footsteps?

Everett: No, not at all. I was very lucky. My parents were supportive of whatever I wanted to do. And it was clear that I was not going to be a doctor because, you know, you have to treat people.

Miller: And you had to be with people, be around people, and they realized that was not what you were interested in?

Everett: I was not interested in that at all.

Miller: Why did you head west after growing up in South Carolina?

Everett: When I was 17 or 18, right after I’d started college, I made my way west without a car, riding buses and doing what you should never do. But back then it seemed somewhat different, I’m really old. We would hitchhike. When I saw the western landscape, it just seemed familiar to me, and I was really upset that I had ever seen photographs of it. When I saw arches in Utah, I thought, “I wish I had just seen this cold,” just coming up on it and “wow.” But instead, I was comparing it to photographs. And one of the things I love about the Grand Canyon is that you can’t prepare yourself for it. You can see picture after picture of the Grand Canyon, but when you come up to it, it’s always a shock.

Miller: There’s something about two dimensions that flattens it.

Everett: Yes.

Miller: You resented the lack of surprise and discovery that these iconic places, you’d already seen representations of them, and that in some way that lack of discovery made the actual things feel less exciting to you?

Everett: They felt exciting. But in my mind, I thought they might be more exciting the other way. And I don’t know if that’s true. That’s just probably being a romantic.

Miller: Was the West itself part of being a romantic? I’m curious what the West meant to you when you were growing up in the South?

Everett: I never really compared the places. I just know that now when I go back, say to South Carolina, it feels claustrophobic. All that green. You have that up here. I’m a desert rat. I like brown and flammable. [Laughter] And when I saw this landscape, I fell in love with it.

Miller: You attended graduate school at the University of Oregon for a couple years, studying the philosophy of language. What does it mean to say that, the philosophy of language?

Everett: Well, how language works, what we do to construct meaning. There was a particular orientation of that department toward a philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein. And his notion was that philosophers had, for a long time, created their own problems because they were unable to speak their given languages, that they made up the problems because they made up jargon. It became clear to me, maybe only to me that time, that Wittgenstein wasn’t practicing what he preached, and that there was nothing ordinary about the way he was speaking about it. I lost interest in philosophers and in that kind of philosophy, and went back to what I did as an undergraduate, which was logic.

Miller: Am I right that you also decided that writing itself was a better way for you to explore these ideas?

Everett: Certainly. I’d always been a reader of fiction. I love fiction, that’s the way to address the world. I don’t even know why I write. I just have to. It’s my way of exploring.

Miller: Exploring what?

Everett: My place in the scheme of things. I know about one thing in this world. I know about horses. That’s where I have some knowledge. Everything else is always a discovery to me. So when I study things so I can write novels, I write novels so I can study things.

Miller: When did you learn about horses?

Everett: I grew up with them on my mother’s father’s farm. But then I worked some ranches in Southern Idaho. And as the only Black person in a 1,000-mile radius, they would give me the bad horses. And it turned out that I kind of liked being with them.

Miller: I’ve read that you worked in ranches in Oregon after the U of O. Is that true?

Everett: Not in Oregon; it was in Idaho, a couple in Montana. I lived on a small sheep farm when I was in school here, outside of the town of Junction City. And at stock auctions, I met some cattle ranchers, and they introduced me to other people, and that’s how I ended up with those jobs.

Miller: What do you remember about that time in the ranch in Idaho? You said, for example, they gave you the hardest horses.

Everett: Just the sheer amazement of people that a Black person would be there. I became known as the “Black guy” by driving through Idaho. In fact, I once delivered cows to someone in Baker, Oregon. And I had a truck full of cattle and parked it. I had to find the feedlot where I was to take the cows, but I had this fellow’s home address. So I parked the truck and I walked into town with the address, and stopped a woman on the street and asked her where this address was. And she had the best Freudian slip I’ve ever heard. She says “Yes, it’s three Blacks that way.” And I said, “It can’t be nearly that far.” [Laughter]

Miller: Let’s take a question from our student audience.

Student 1: Hello. Mr. Everett, do you believe that reading and furthermore analyzing “Huckleberry Finn” is imperative to fully understanding the themes within “James?”

Everett: No, I don’t think so. I think it’s great if someone chooses to read any extra text, it’s never hurt anybody to read more than one book.

[School bell chimes] Excuse me, I have to go to my next class. [Laughter]

I don’t think it’s necessary to understand the themes nor the story. But they are connected.

Miller: And we have another question from our audience here. Go ahead.

Student 2: Hello, Mr. Everett. How have readers’ reactions differed between those familiar with Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” and those encountering the story for the first time through “James?”

Everett: Well, I really don’t know. I’ve gotten a lot of mail with people thanking me for writing it, former English teachers and current English teachers who say they can now teach “Huck Finn” again. It’s a problematic text for a lot of people. And I think that’s cool. But I’m done with the book. I wrote it and I don’t think about it. I don’t remember a lot that’s in it. People ask me about scenes and I just stare at them. And people have great ideas about what I might have meant. And if it’s a good idea, I take credit for it. But I’ve never thought of any of this stuff. I just make up stories.

Miller: I have seen you say that before, that when people come to you with their interpretations of parts of your books or even grander theories about what you’re trying to do, you’ll often say, “if you say so” or, “I’m not smart enough to know if that’s right or not, but that sounds good.” What’s the role of the writer in a book, and what’s the role of the reader in terms of making meaning?

Everett: I view myself as more a facilitator. The book exists because I’ve made it. What I mean by any of this, nobody cares. And you shouldn’t.

Miller: Those to me are different things though. The fact that we shouldn’t care is one thing. But I think a lot of us, as readers, do care.

Everett: OK, imagine I’m dead. You can’t ask me. So you’ll never know. And it shouldn’t matter. And in fact, it doesn’t.

Miller: Do you feel the same way as a reader yourself? Do you apply the same practice as a reader? Are you curious what some of your favorite authors had in mind at times? Or do you think the same – they’re dead or they’re alive, but it’s up to me as the reader to make my own meaning, and the writer, they’re purely a facilitator?

Everett: Depends on how I’m reading. If I’m reading as a writer, trying to figure out what someone has done that will inform the way I make the next work, then I might think what were they up to at that point?

Miller: But it may be more about craft in that sense?

Everett: Yeah, that word …

Miller: But you don’t like that word?

Everett: No, we can talk about that.

Miller: Yeah, let’s talk about that later.

Everett: But reading as a reader, where all the fun happens, it’s what the book tells me, what the story tells me. If you came across a painting in a museum – what I hate in museums is those plaques that tell you something about the artist. But what if you just came across this painting 100 years from now and the plaque was out? The painting would speak to you. It will tell you what’s going on and it will tell each of you something different because you come to it with different stuff, with different lives, with different memories, with different knowledges about the world. And that’s what’s exciting about any book is that the meaning is really in you. You complete the circuit. You’re doing your job in making art.

[School bell chimes]

Miller: Well, now you really have to be in your next period.

Everett: Yeah, now I’m late. Thanks.

Miller: If you don’t mind skipping this next class we can keep talking. Can you read us a portion of the book? This is from about a third of the way through. This is when James and Huck … We haven’t even actually said what this book is about.

Everett: Calvinist dog training.

Miller: You’re not gonna help me?

Everett: I’m not.

Miller: It is not a retelling of “Huckleberry Finn,” but it is a reimagining where James, who is not fully a human character in Mark Twain’s telling, is very much a full human being and the narrator of this new novel. There are some plot similarities, a ton of divergences. At this point, a little bit of the way in, James and Huck, who are both on the run for different reasons … James has gotten some books that were stolen by some robbers, it’s evening, and this is what’s now gonna happen.

Everett [Reading an excerpt from “James”]: “The boy and I fell silent. We lay back on the wet carpet of leaves. I could sense exhaustion overtaking Huck. He was snoring softly in a short time. I stared up through the canopy of sycamore branches. I’d always liked how the bark of the tree curled and peeled away.

“I really wanted to read. Though Huck was asleep, I could not chance his waking and discovering me with my face in an open book. Then I thought, how could he know I was actually reading? I could simply claim to be staring dumbly at the letters and words wondering what in the world they meant. How could he know?

“At that moment, the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I were merely merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair, and completely free, and therefore completely subversive.

“I pulled my sack of books closer, reached in and touched one. I let my hand linger there, a flirtation of sorts. The small thick book I’d wrapped my fingers around was the novel. I had never read a novel, though I understood the concept of fiction. It wasn’t so unlike religion or history for that matter. I pulled the book from the bag. I checked to see if Huck was still sleeping soundly, and I opened it. The smell of the pages was glorious.

“‘In the country of Westphalia.’

“I was somewhere else. I was not on one side of that damn river or the other. I was not in Mississippi. I was not in Missouri.”

Miller: You just told us 10 minutes ago that you have a kind of book amnesia, that after you’re done with the book you don’t really remember not just parts of writing it, but even some of the parts themselves. So maybe you’ve answered this question, but I’ll try to ask it anyway. What was that act of imagination like, to put yourself into James’s head in that scene and to imagine reading a novel for the first time?

Everett: I had to go back to when I actually did read my first real novel. I think I was 9 and I took it from my grandfather’s shelf. The novel was called “Of Human Bondage” by Somerset Maugham. I thought I wasn’t supposed to be reading it, and that was a great feeling. It felt naughty to be reading it, and there was a prostitute in the novel, and I didn’t know what a prostitute was. And I thought “oh, this is really bad.” So I looked up prostitute in the OED, a big dictionary, had the magnifying glass and everything. I read what a prostitute was and I still didn’t know what a prostitute was. But I knew this was covert, so I read it secretly.

And now I know that my grandfather and my father knew I was reading it – but they never said anything. They respected the fact that for me it was this private affair. And that was a thrill. And that’s what reading has continued to be for me.

Miller: You’ve been able to hold on to that kind of a thrill, that there’s something secret or illicit, not exactly allowed, but in this case, tacitly allowed. You can still tap into that feeling?

Everett: Well, I did here, I hadn’t thought about it in a while. I don’t know if you know the photographer Diane Arbus, she made photographs of a lot of circus people.

Miller: “Freaks.”

Everett: Yeah, freaks. I think that might have been the title of one of her books. They were what people would then call “oddities.” And what she was able to see in them, in these photographs, was the person and not the oddity. Those photographs have this wonderful power. I use a quote from her in the beginning of “So Much Blue” and it’s from this photographer Diane Arbus: “A photograph is a secret about a secret.” I just love that. And to me, that’s what all art really should be. It’s something really private that we’re experiencing.

Miller: Do you mind reading one more section that ties in a lot of ways I think to what we just heard? In addition to getting a book from some thieves, James also acquires a pencil and he writes with it. This is the first thing he writes.

Everett [Reading an excerpt from “James”]: “My name is James. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry. I was sold when I was born and then sold again. My mother’s mother was from some place in the continent of Africa, I had been told, or perhaps simply assumed. I cannot claim any knowledge of that world or those people, whether my people were kings or beggars. I admire those who at the age of 5, like Venture Smith, can remember the clans of their ancestors, their names and the movements of their families through the wrinkles, trenches and chasms of the slave trade.

“I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family. A man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related but self-written. With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.”

Miller: What does it mean to write oneself into being?

Everett: I have no idea. That’s what James says. And though we look a lot alike, I’m not James. And what that means is going to be different for every reader.

Miller: So I take your point, you’re not James. I didn’t know you look a lot like him. Is that something you have ever felt though yourself, as Percival Everett, that you are writing yourself into being?

Everett: I don’t think about me so much. That’s probably true. But I don’t think I’ve ever thought that way. I have appeared in a couple of books – at least one – as a character. And since I was making fun of everybody else, I decided to make fun of myself too. Turned out it was really easy and it upset me.

When I first started working on James, I thought, “oh great, I have an opportunity to supply this character with agency, with a place in the world.” And then I realized, well, no, he already had agency. The only thing I was supplying for Jim, James, was a vehicle for the expression of that agency. I already had that. But I had to imagine it for him.

Miller: Let’s take some more questions from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?

Student 3: My name is Cayden. I know many different readers and writers had interpreted the relationship between Jim and Huck very differently, and you had written it as a familial bond. I was just curious if the relationship between you and your own kids had influenced at all your writing of the relationship and interactions of Jim and Huck in your book, “James.”

Everett: Well that’s a great question. Having kids has changed the way I think about everything. Not always in good ways. I never wanted to kill anybody before. [Laughter]

I have two teenage sons, and because of them, I know I don’t know very much. But I love our relationship. So of course, without thinking about it a lot, they have influenced the way I think about that. I was very fortunate to be very close to my own father, that informs it too.

And I had kids sort of late in life; I was 49 when I had my first son. And ever since then, I could watch any movie, listen to any music or anything, and I could love it. Now, I tear up. I cry so much, it’s ridiculous. The worst movie in the world, something sentimental, “oh wow,” I started doing that. And that’s from having kids. I don’t really understand it. Should probably think about it more and write a novel about it. So thanks a lot, Cayden.

Miller: Let’s take another question. What’s your name? What’s your question?

Student 4: Hi, I’m Sloan. I noticed that “James” had a theme of fishing throughout the whole book, and I’ve heard that you like to fish. So I was wondering what your favorite fish was?

Everett: I fish for trout on little streams, so it’s nothing like the fishing they’re doing on the Mississippi. In fact, most of the fishing that they’re doing there is running a trout line, which just means laying out of line with hooks and bait on it, coming back and checking it the next day.

Miller: You haven’t stuck your forearm into murky water and waited for a catfish to swallow it?

Everett: I have not. It’s called noodling and I have not done that. And the idea of doing it scares me to death.

Miller: That comes across in the novel. I’ve always thought that’s such a gentle word for a disgusting habit or pastime: noodling.

Let’s take another question from our audience.

Student 5: Hi, I’m Avery. Mr. Everett, I’m wondering, was there anything that you took from your personal experiences that influenced your writing process?

Everett: You know, some people write fiction based on their lives, and I don’t really. But everything I write about is from my experience. I say this a lot and I mean it, but people never really believe I mean it: everything I know, I learned from animals. I’ve never had a dog lie to me, and that means something.

So yeah, all of my experiences feed my work, but I don’t write specifically about those experiences.

Miller: I don’t want to be one of the everybody who doesn’t believe you when you say this, but it’s more like I don’t feel like I understand what you mean when you say that everything you know you’ve learned from animals. Because I feel like you’ve already mentioned a ton of books you’ve read that were influential and that were important to you ...

Everett: I’ve never had a horse talk to me about Spinoza, it’s true.

Miller: Is it more that you think the most important things have come from animals?

Everett: The ideas of interaction and trust, things that move us through the world, the things that are important, how to be in the world. Working with 1,200-pound animals, I’m a buck-80 at best. I can’t make a horse do anything. It’s an agreement that we come to. The horse allows me to believe that I’m in control. I appreciate that. It’s at once humbling, and a great feeling of some kind of power in the world, knowing that I really don’t have any. It’s all about trust.

Miller: Let’s take another question. What’s your name and what’s your question?

Student 6: Hi, my name is Sophia. And I was wondering what’s the biggest fish you have caught, if you remember?

Everett: One of the few times I was on the ocean, I caught a 4.5 foot barracuda. Lots of people have caught fish much larger than that, but for me that might as well have been Moby Dick.

Miller: Is there a picture of that somewhere in your house?

Everett: Oh, no. First of all, me and photographs. As much as I love them, I’ve been to the bottom of the Grand Canyon probably 10 times, every time I left the camera in my truck. I forget. That was before we had cell phones and always have cameras with us.

Miller: What’s your name and what’s your question?

Student 7: I’m Cosette, and I was wondering, did you start writing the book James with the idea that Huck was James’s son? Or was that something you discovered as well through writing the book?

Everett: I knew from the beginning that that would be the case, even though it’s not insinuated at all in “Adventures of Huck Finn.”

Miller: What’s your name? What’s your question?

Student 8: My name is Jayda, and I know your wife is also an author and race seems to be a central focus of her work. I was wondering if you ever considered co-writing a book together and if not, why?

Everett: Because I want to continue to be married to her. [Laughter] If you’re writing a detective novel, maybe you could work with someone on it, but a literary novel is such a personal expression. I have toyed with the idea. In fact, at the University of Oregon, Ken Kesey did this some 40 years ago – he with a bunch of graduate students, they wrote a novel together. It’s terrible, but still, they did it, and probably it was quite instructive for them. So I’ve toyed with the idea of doing it with a class, but I would never do it with someone I want to spend any more time with.

Miller: Let’s take another question.

Student 9: Hi, my name is Kenny. How old are you?

Everett: OK, Kenny, I’ll see you out back after this. [Laughter]

Miller: Let me ask you first, Kenny, why do you care? Depending on the number he gives – and he can answer if he wants to or not – but why does it matter to you?

Student 9: Because you look so young.

Everett: Oh, he’s very sweet. I am almost 69.

Student 9: You’re like pretty young.

Everett: Well, thank you. I blame it on tennis. [Laughter]

Miller: One of the hallmarks of your writing, even when you are exploring the worst things that human beings do to each other, is your books can be laugh-out-loud funny. There are tons of funny parts of “James” as well, but “The Trees” is a book all about lynching, about white supremacist violence against African Americans. And every other page, there is a moment that makes me laugh out loud. How do you think about the juxtaposition of humor and terror?

Everett: Well, laughter is kind of an amazing thing. As soon as you guys start laughing, you relax.

Miller: We all felt that with Kenny’s question.

Everett: It’s just natural. You don’t walk out into the world and get approached by somebody with a gun who wants to rob you and share a jovial moment, like “did you hear the one about …” But as soon as humor enters, guard is let down. And as an artist that’s great for me, because if I get you to relax, then I can do all sorts of stuff to you. And that’s why I’m doing this. I want you to think. And if I can do that, then you’re open to think. Once you open up a little, it’s just a matter of prying that that opening wider.

Miller: Does it feel that conscious for you, that this is a very effective tool that you know how to wield and you plan to wield it in particular times to get a message across? I ask because as the reader, it doesn’t feel that way. And even just sitting next to you, 3 feet away for 40 minutes, it feels like there’s something deeper inside you – an ironic, wry approach to the world – that humor is a deep part of you, and it comes out in your writing, even if it’s not to have the medicine go down.

Everett: Well, I’m pathologically ironic. I can’t help that. I’m very earnest about my irony. But I never think I’m being funny. I never try to write something funny. I do not write jokes. Everything that ends up being funny comes out of human interaction. And it might be the way someone says something.

I learned this from a television show that I don’t even like. It’s fine. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a very old television show from the ‘60s called “The Andy Griffith Show.” Every bit of humor – and it’s because of the comic Andy Griffith who ran the show – is generated by story. There’s not a single joke in it. And I always liked that idea.

Miller: You’ve said over the years that you have an artistic goal of making an abstract novel, and that at a few points – you said it in a talk a couple of years ago – you thought you’d achieve that, and then you realized you were deluded. What would be an abstract novel?

Everett: If I could tell you that, I probably would have done it by now. I’ve tried. I love abstract art, paintings. I like experimental music. The constituent parts of my writing are representational, they connect to something in the world. A flower is a flower, tree is a tree, sofa sofa. They exist as these things. But I really believe I should be able to do the equivalent of an abstract painting, of a Jackson Pollock painting, say, with words, that still works as a novel, tells a story, but somehow does it in an abstract way.

And I can’t tell you what it looks like. I don’t know what it looks like. I’ve never seen it, which makes it hard to make it. But I’ve convinced myself that this is what I want to do.

Miller: Do you know why you want to do it?

Everett: Well, mental illness kind of comes to mind.

But no, it’s just that I love what abstract work does. When I was 13, my father and I went to the National Gallery in Washington. And there was a great, big Pollock on the wall, rectangular. And my father, knowing me better than anyone else – as soon as I saw it, I froze, I just stood there – he said “I’ll be back.” And he left. And I must have been there for 30 or 40 minutes in front of this one painting, moving up and down.

I wasn’t a writer yet, but I learned a lesson that stayed with me, not only about art, but about story. And that is, you can’t take it in all at once. As I moved up and down the canvases, there were spots that allowed me entry into the world of that painting. And that’s fascinating to me. That’s what I’m trying to do with … every other novel or so, I write something that people might call “strange.” And I think “I’ve gotten there,” and I stepped back and realized, “No, I didn’t. I failed again.” I’m kind of interested in those failures. It doesn’t mean that it’s a failed work of art, but I didn’t do what I set out to do.

Miller: I can’t get past the loveliness of that moment of your father seeing you and saying, “I’ll be back.” It’s a lovely parenting moment.

Everett: Yeah. Now I feel bad for never having given him credit for it.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?

Student 10: My name is Don, and I was wondering if you want to create art or do you need to create art? Like it’s something in your brain that’s like eating away at you?

Everett: Well, I suppose I must need to do it, because every time I finish a book, I said, “I’m never gonna do that again.” It’s a horrible thing, it takes so much time, I alienate the people who live with me, it gives me headaches. But then I do it. So I must have a need to do it. And I don’t think it’s purely masochistic. I’m not doing it to harm myself, though look at me.

There’s a need to do it though. I can’t explain it.

Miller: What’s your name and what’s your question?

Student 11: My name is Maya, and earlier when you were talking about animals and how you feel that trust in them, I found myself identifying with that. And I was wondering if that’s something you think you’ve felt your whole life, or if it feels like something you’ve learned over time?

Everett: I think to some extent I felt that. I’ve always had dogs and always felt really close to them, closer than anyone else in my family would have felt to them. When I was maybe 7 or 8, my dog had just been spayed and I was playing basketball in the backyard. I looked over and apparently the stitches had come undone and her entrails were hanging out. In 8-year-old fashion, I panicked and went and got my father. And another parenting moment, we tried to clean her up. It was a Sunday, and in those days we didn’t have an emergency vet hospital. That day I learned to suture. He let me sew my dog up. And the feeling of her body under my hands while I did that, while my father held her, I can still feel that.

Then the next day we took her to the vet. They opened her up and cleaned her up. But that whole experience of sewing her made me even closer to her.

Miller: We have another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?

Student 12: My name’s Parker. I was wondering, do you ever come back to books that have been published and read them again? Or when you’re done reading, is it just over and you move on?

Miller: Do you mean books that he has written or other books?

Student 12: Books that he’s written.

Miller: Do you reread your own work?

Everett: Oh, no. I read my first novel maybe some 12 years after I wrote it. And I thought, “well, 12 years have gone by, I hope I’m a better writer,” and I saw things that I would do differently. And then it hit me that, yeah, I could make it different. But I wouldn’t really make it a better work of art. Arts exist in the moment. They’re expressions of that time. And I could no more imagine going back and fixing something than I could imagine … well, I mentioned Jackson Pollock, going back and adding some more drips to something.

But with everything else, I’m done with them. I call it the mama bear school of art. When I finish with a book, I push it out into the world. And if it can eat and survive, that’s great. But it cannot come back to the den.

Miller: Let’s take another question.

Student 13: I’m Mira, and I was wondering how much of “James” was planned out after you read “Huckleberry Finn,” and how much came to you in the moment?

Everett: As was mentioned, I read the novel way too many times. But I did it to blur “Huck Finn.” Have you ever said a word over and over to yourself and it just sounds like nonsense? Well, that’s what I was trying to do. I read it over and over. And I became confused by the story, but I had the world in my head. And so when I set to work on my novel, I was relying on memory of a world, and not on the text. I never looked back at Twain once I started writing.

I will never read that novel again. I am so sick of “Huck Finn.” And I can’t tell you what’s in one and not in the other because it’s just such a blur.

Miller: Let’s take another question from all the way in the back.

Student 14: My name is Gabriel, I had a question about the book. We all know “James” is an award-winning book. Did you ever believe after publishing or writing the book that it would become an award-winning book? What was going through your mind?

Everett: I never think about awards. Really, to tell the truth, I have a real problem with awards. Invidious comparisons of works of art, it’s a bad idea. I don’t like the idea of art competing with art. Also, when you get a room full of a committee, they never make the right choice. It’s always a compromise.

It’s nice to win an award. It would be nice to win an award every week. I wouldn’t complain. But does it make the work any better? No. Does it make it any worse? No. It gives me some more readers, which is great, but really, it’s a lottery. If the committee had met on a Wednesday instead of a Thursday, someone else would have won the award. So don’t put too much stock in that stuff.

Miller: You have been very clear that you don’t have particular hopes for what your books will mean to people – that’s the job of the readers themselves to figure it out. Do you have hopes for how meaningful they will be to people?

Everett: Well, I want art to be meaningful to people. And I would love to live in a culture where instead of people seeing that a work might be “difficult to read” – I don’t even like saying that, I think – and viewing that as something that would stop them, I would rather live in a culture where people say that as something exciting. “Boy, this is difficult to read,” and then want to get into it. Why not take some time and work through something hard? And even then I say “hard,” it’s not the right word. Challenging. Different.

The other thing is I would like to live in a culture where people consume – and I don’t mean in a commercial sense – but where they read something more than once. You listen to songs that you like over and over again. Why wouldn’t you do that with a book? When I was your age, I read Kurt Vonnegut all the time. In fact, I got moved from the outfield to third base because of Kurt Vonnegut. Back then, they used to make paperbacks pretty small and I had Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions” in my mitt. The ball landed right beside me [because] I was reading. And they moved me to third base where if you do that, you get a concussion.

I read these books, and then when I was 20, I said, “Oh, this is kid stuff. I’m not going to read any more Vonnegut.” Fifteen years later, 35, teaching at a university – I said, “I’m going to read Vonnegut again.” And it was every bit as good as I remembered, and better. Because what was I? A different person. I knew more, so I could get more out of what Vonnegut was saying and what his book was saying.

So when we read, we’re always different. And you can always get something new and different from a work.

Miller: Percival Everett, it was an honor and a pleasure talking with you. Thanks very much.

Everett: Thank you for having me. This has been great.

Miller: Percival Everett.

[Audience applause]

Thank you so much to all our fantastic students here at McDaniel High School. Thanks as well to the McDaniel librarian, Nancy Sullivan, to teachers Gene Brunak and Maurice Cowley, and to Olivia Jones-Hall from Literary Arts.

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