by Bailey Sims
Danielle Evans is a professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the author of two story collections, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and The Office of Historical Corrections. Her writing has won the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright Award for fiction, The Story Prize, The LA Times Book Prize for fiction, and more. Her work has been featured in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, The Sewanee Review, and other journals, and has been anthologized in four years of Best American Short Stories and in New Stories from the South.
Evans is the 2024 Melanie Brown Lecturer here at Chatham University. On May 18, she performed a public reading, and on May 19, I sat down with her before her craft talk “Past Present Future: Using Time and Tense in Fiction” to talk about her publishing journey, creating characters, and more.
The Fourth River: The first story from Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self was published in The Paris Review when you were only 23. How did the success of this story shape the trajectory of your career and your future work?
Danielle Evans: That’s an interesting question. I’m trying to think back that long ago because I was 23, wasn’t I? When I originally signed with my agent, I said that I was going to finish a novel first and we would wait and go out with a collection and a novel, and I ended up spending that year continuing to work on the short stories instead of the novel. I was avoiding my agent at the time because I hadn’t done the thing I said I was going to do (write a novel), but my boss at the time told me I had two options: tell my agent what I actually had and what work I was ready to send out into the world, or get a new agent, since what I had was a short story collection.
So I wrote to her and sent her the revised collection and I said “I don’t know when I’m going to have a novel, but I have this book and it’s ready to go,” and she agreed that the book was ready to be in the world, but she asked for the summer to try to place one of the stories in the collection in a big magazine to help with pitching it to editors. Only one of the stories had been published at the time (shoutout to Phoebe at George Mason), and I didn’t really have a lot of other publications. It was kind of a bold thing for me to be like, “I, a 23-year-old with a short story collection, am ready to sell this book tomorrow, what are you going to do for me?” But it was where I was and I think whatever the timeline was, I needed to be working on that material and not on something that just wasn’t coming together.
My agent spent the summer shopping the story and one of the editors at The Paris Review really took to the work and sold it to the rest of the team. The major transformation was that it was the
first really rigorous editing process I’d gone through. When I drafted the story I thought it should be about 15 pages, and the story I ended up writing was about 30 pages. I couldn’t see how to cut it shorter, but they cut it down to about 17 pages. For such a major cut, it was illuminating to me how much the story stayed intact, and how much extra I put in there because I maybe didn’t trust the reader to understand the characters or the context that I didn’t actually need. That was something that I took with me from that process. And then my agent sent the book to editors with the copy of The Paris Review, which got it more attention and buzz than it otherwise would have gotten. And then that story ended up in Best American Short Stories, and it had been my dream goal as a baby writer to someday be in that anthology, because that’s what you read and you’re like, of course every label is arbitrary, but “oh, these are the best stories, I want to be one of the best.”
TFR: Oh, of course.
DE: So that was an enormous career boost but also sort of a reset of “This was my lifetime writer goal and now I have to adjust because I’ve hit it out the gate, so what else do I want from my writing life?” That was an interesting recalibration. But in terms of things that stayed with me, the main thing I took from that process was a gratitude for being edited and the ability to see how much good editing can help a story. The story was edited by two different people, both of whom were brilliant, and I learned people can ask for different things, and that made me feel confident taking my workshop filter to decide, “okay, that was useful advice,” or, “that was not where I was trying to go with the story,” and to move forward appreciating editorial feedback and also understanding how to navigate it.
TFR: What makes you more drawn to writing shorter fiction as opposed to full-length novels?
DE: I love a short story. A short story feels to me like a puzzle box, like you’re trying to fit as much as possible into a small space. There’s something about the challenge of that that I find really exciting. I also think it’s really interesting to think about a short story as somehow capturing a moment that has a reverberation in someone’s life. Whether that’s a point of no return moment, or a moment that something didn’t happen, or a moment when they could have seen something but they didn’t. I have a lot of fun playing with the structure of a short story—so much of fiction is subtext, and a short story, because you have less space, relies even more heavily on that subtext and where it flickers to the surface. It’s a pleasure writing short stories because it’s a mystery to me; I don’t know what’s going to appear from under the story until I’m about halfway through most of the time. I also really love a story collection because it lets you do lots of things at once. I was particularly anxious about that in my first book because I recognized that as a young, black, female writer that people tend to read fiction as representative of the author in a way that I was uncomfortable with. I was especially anxious because at the time a lot of that collection was written in first person, and I thought if I wrote a novel in first
person people would think I published my diary. Now I think I’m old and I don’t care, but at 24 I was anxious about that sort of thing. I thought having lots of voices in a collection was a way to confuse people. Aside from anxiety and insecurity, though, a short story collection is a way to think in a complex way about the same question. To answer the same question in different ways and sit those answers beside each other and let there be conversation or even dissonance. That was one of the pleasures of the second collection, which was a lot more thematically connected. I could think in a lot of different ways about forgiveness, about grief, about agency or ownership of a story, and I didn’t have to settle on one answer that I was exploring.
TFR: One thing about writing short fiction is that you have to constantly be creating new characters, and all of yours feel so three-dimensional in the short space of time we get to know them—how do you draw inspiration for writing your characters?
DE: There are so many people in the world—that feels like a thing I have an abundance of. I get nervous about setting sometimes because I haven’t lived in the same place for a long time, so I struggle with command of setting. I know a lot of people, so I don’t get anxious about having enough characters, I just get anxious about having the characters do story things. Sometimes that’s the challenge—less how to do characterization and more how to get characters to be in a story as opposed to just taking over the space with their own monologues or performance of self. Some of that is thinking about the tension between what they want and what they’re doing, or what they’re thinking and what they’re saying. The more I can think about where those spaces are in the story, that’s how I get to the intersection of character and story. Where is the action of the story putting pressure on the character to say something they don’t mean or do something that isn’t what they want or present themselves in a way that isn’t honest? I’m really interested in what pushes a character to lie. If I can find where the lie is in a story, I can sometimes find where the story is backwards, even if I just started with a character.
TFR: Do you ever get really attached to a character and have trouble moving on?
DE: You know, not really. My joke is that I have commitment issues. I think that in a satisfying short story you should be able to imagine the future. So even if I’m tempted to say “oh, that character was fun to write,” if I still want to write more about this character, I didn’t do my job. I should be able to get to the end of the page and imagine the rest of that person’s life. Whatever is ambiguous or unresolved wasn’t the point. I would be more inclined to start over and say, “I’m a different writer now, what would I do with that same subject or theme, than I would to start with the same character. I feel like you get them to the end of the story and you have to let them go. I don’t know if this is scientifically true, but my father used to say that your brain stops developing when you’re 25, and if a relative calls to say something about me, he says, “How old is Danielle? I did my job, if you have a problem with Danielle, talk to Danielle.” And that’s sort of how I feel about short stories: you let them go, they’re out in the world, they’re their own thing, I’ve done
the best I can, and if people love them that’s great, and if people don’t like them, that’s between them and the story. I can have my own relationship with the story, but my investment in other people’s relationship with the story ends once it’s published.
TFR: Your presentation is about time and tense in fiction—could you offer a short version of your insights on this topic?
DE: This is probably not a particularly controversial opinion, but the real villain of all fiction is time. That’s really always what’s creating crisis or tension or grief—the passage of time and people’s inability to stop it or freeze it or prevent it from going in places they don’t want to go. In the presentation, we’re going to talk about one of my favorite short stories, Edward P. Jones’s “The First Day,” which is so short, but so much of the story works because it’s haunted by the future. There’s this clause in the first sentence that looms over everything else in the story, and it teaches you how to read it even though you never see that future on the page. We’re going to think about where the future comes in and disrupts or changes something and how writers use that to create an emotional space that asks the reader to think about the passage of time and where the narrator of the story wants to freeze time. I think that’s often what the future is doing, signaling either “I’m telling this story from this tense because this is where I am, this thing is always happening to me,” or “I’m going back to before the thing happened, and I’m telling you the story from here because I never want the thing to happen.” That’s really interesting to pay attention to on the level of choices about point of view and tense and thinking about what they say about a character's relationship to the passage of time.
TFR: Your work focuses a lot on femininity and racial issues—while I was reading “Snakes,” I could physically feel the tension from this combination of Tara and her white grandmother. In your newer work, these social and political issues seem to be at even more of a forefront in stories like “Why Can’t Women Just Say What They Want” and The Office of Historical Corrections. Do you see your work as a potential vehicle for social change, and how does that play into your writing process?
DE: I think in theory, there’s a possibility of transformation every day you go out in the world. I think if I wanted to persuade somebody of something, I would write an essay. I come to fiction with a question and my hope is that it will then generate questions for the readers. Which questions those are going to be and what answers they come up with is out of my control. You’re leaving a lot of the conversation unsaid, so there should be a lot of space for people to come into it from different places. The release of that pressure of, “I’m not trying to convince somebody of something,” is, I think, important for the work to have breathing room. I don’t think someone is going to read my books and be a different, better, smarter person, but I do sometimes think “maybe someone will read the book and it will generate a question in their own life or in the next thing they read that will open up a possibility.” That, I think, is the best one can hope for from a
fictional standpoint. But I am interested in creating a space for conversation and complexity of thinking and being able to inhabit somebody else’s experience, however briefly. I think all of those things are useful, not necessarily as themselves transformative, but for helping people imagine themselves as people who are capable of change.
But a lot of the time those things are in my fiction because that is how I experience and think about the world, so it’s less an attempt to persuade anybody of anything and more of “when I walk down the street I’m aware of space in a particular way and I’m aware of how people may be noticing me.” There are some things that are about embodied experience of the world, and in order to write a complex character you have to give people some awareness of politics or demographics or their identity in the world, because everything else is in some way related to that. When I think about characters I’m often thinking about which character is trying to perform or which character is trying to convince the other of something. Sometimes it’s just about the dynamic between the characters—who cares more, who has more power in this relationship or friendship—but sometimes it’s also about a power dynamic between the characters that they brought into the relationship. Who has more control or more agency over their own lives, who has been trained to think about what people expect from them, and who doesn’t have to pay attention to that? Some of those things are structural, so it doesn’t mean that every woman or every black person in the book behaves the same way, or has the same set of responses to those questions. But I do think that sense of a male gaze or a double consciousness or any of those conceptual framings that help us understand what it means to be aware of yourself as always being seen is useful in thinking about how a character is going to respond to things and where they are going to lean into it or resist it.
Bailey Sims is a writer and editor from Pittsburgh, PA. She is currently finishing her MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University, where she specializes in fiction and is an adjunct English professor and the Head Copy Editor of The Fourth River literary journal. She also runs an editing business called Lena Creative Solutions (lenacreativesolutions.com). Her poetry has been published in Last Leaves Magazine and The Field Guide Magazine and her fiction is forthcoming in Your Impossible Voice.