Photography by Jameson Baldwin

PERCIVAL EVERETT

Writer

The writer, known for acerbic social zingers like "Erasure" or last year’s NationalBook Award–winning "James," has spent his four-decade career subverting expectations and defying genre.

WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT?
I am kept up at night by thoughts of the world that my kids will be entering as adults. The anti-intellectual right shows little regard for building a better place to think and live. I want my children to live lives of meaningful exploration, not simply survive.

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SURPRISED YOURSELF IN YOUR PRACTICE?
I surprise myself every day, or perhaps every day surprises me. I made a painting last week unlike any of my other works. I keep thinking it is not done, but I cannot see anything else I can do to it. It came from someplace, but I don’t know where. It makes perfect sense to me, but I don’t understand it.

WHAT’S SOMETHING PEOPLE GET WRONG ABOUT YOU?
People think that I am a workaholic.

“I would like to see readers more interested in being confused by texts. ”

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SEE MORE OF IN YOUR INDUSTRY? LESS OF?
I would like to see readers more interested in being confused by texts. I would like some of the meaning that is made to come from an interrogation of the form and the idea of storytelling. I would like the film industry to stop relying on the (rather bogus) claim that anything is based on a real story. All stories are real and true and none of them have happened.

WHAT DO YOU WANT NEXT FOR YOURSELF ABOVE ALL ELSE?
I would like to see my sons grown, safe, and happy. What else is there?

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