Q&A with Danielle Evans, author of ‘The Office of Historical Corrections’

In the novel “The Office of Historical Corrections,” Danielle Evans tackles topics that permeate the national conversation in the United States, such as racial identity, cancel culture, and grief. In this collection of six short stories and a novella, she delivers pieces that are as timely as social media posts but with searing insights that are conveyed in exquisite prose. She answered questions from Monitor correspondent Joan Gaylord.  

Q: What do you think is the role of fiction in addressing topical issues such as race, or is that asking too much of literature?

I don’t approach fiction with the idea that the right story can lead to some specific real-life outcome or immediate transformation, but I do think the goal of all literature is to ask questions about how it feels to be alive and what it means to be a person, and a lot of what that means might also feel topical, especially if you’re reading about a character who is used to asking questions or taking steps that you don’t have to. If you are a Black person and someone you love is sick, and you know your family’s lived experience, medical racism isn’t topical, it’s your life. ... So a story about grief and illness engages [race] along with everything else. 

In my stories, I explore that space between what we think and what we say out loud, between what we actually want and how we behave. Those tensions and contradictions create complex characters and the capacity for surprise. Everyone has reasons to conceal things; everyone has pressure to pretend or perform, but an awareness of misogyny, or racism, or classism, or other kinds of inequality and privilege is part of how people decide when and how to conceal their honest reactions or desires and perform a role. I can’t imagine writing characters complex enough to be literary without an awareness of that structural reality. 

Q: You are a master of the short story. What do you find so compelling about the genre?

I like the intensity of compression, the way it asks us to look at moments or events that have a long reverberation in a person’s life. I think the passage of time often works differently in a story than in a novel because of that compression, and so my favorite short stories frequently ask the reader to look at the past, present, and future at almost the same time. I love a story collection because I think it allows a writer to consider the same question from different perspectives, or allows the reader to ask the same questions but wrestle with different answers.

Q: What was your inspiration for the agency you call the Office of Historical Corrections?

I invented [it] after overhearing a public conversation in which people had their facts wildly wrong. But of course, although the joke was that we needed this office, the potential for such an agency to be sinister or problematic was also always present. 

In actually writing about the agency, I was also thinking about all the civil servants I knew growing up in Washington, D.C. – how many people are drawn to the work for noble reasons, and then have to confront both hostile external attacks and their internal frustration with bureaucracy, or the failure to prioritize the work they went into government to do, or being the face of an agency when it’s doing something with which you fundamentally disagree. So, the larger questions of what it means, especially as a Black person, to want to work for the public good, and what obstacles are involved, were part of my inspiration for thinking about how that agency might actually look and how its work might play out.

Q: Is there one character in your stories with whom you most identify?

I think it’s dangerous to overidentify with a fictional character, because either you start to protect them from consequences on the page, or you start failing to protect yourself from consequences in your real life. One of the blessings of being a writer is that you are often protected by your own obliviousness from knowing when you’ve gotten closest to your own pain, and since that seems like the only way the writing gets done, it’s best not to mess with it. 

Q: Your book takes a stark but honest look at America’s past and present. Do you see ways that readers can find in these stories a sense of hope for our future?

A few years ago, I was talking to a friend who has written fiction and nonfiction about the environmental crisis. She said she would often give a talk or reading, and be asked afterward if she could provide any hopeful information, and she often wanted to ask, “But what have you done to deserve hope?” 

And I think if there is any hope on this other looming question for our country, that’s the question to ask – what have we done, whether it’s looking honestly at the historical record, or standing up for truth or accountability, even if it costs something, even if it means giving something up, even if it means sometimes holding ourselves accountable?

I don’t know that the stories can themselves provide hope, but perhaps some of the answers to the questions the stories prompt can.