Danielle Evans is funny. And not just on the page. The new assistant professor’s short fiction often features laugh-out-loud dialogue from characters morosely making the best of a bad situation. But in person, Evans is soft-spoken and sharply-dressed, so it’s hilariously unexpected when she admits she gave the first draft of her new novel what she calls “the Kanye West edit.”
“First I cut out all the stuff that seemed self-indulgent. Then the Kanye side kicks in, yelling, ‘why won’t you let me be great?’ And half the stuff is allowed back in.”
Evans, who joins the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s English department this fall as an assistant professor of creative writing (she will start teaching next spring), is the author of the short story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. The book won numerous awards and landed her on the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” list in 2011, when she was just 27. The New York Times called the stories “whip-smart” and said reading Evans’ work evokes “the thrill of an all-night conversation with your hip, frank, funny college roommate.”
No doubt Evans will bring laughter to the classroom. When asked about her teaching style, she extends a peach, patent-leather sandal.
“My style is—fashionable,” she says. “My students tell me I really upped their shoe game.”
But then she switches gears—fast—delivering a crystal-clear vision for what she wants undergraduates to get out of her workshops.
“I want you to come in wanting to fall in love with others’ work,” she says. “At the same time, most things aren’t lovable. And you don’t do anyone any favors by pretending they are. We’re always having two conversations. One is, what was this work doing? And the other is, what did I want it to do? A lot of what we are doing is defining our own aesthetic sensibilities.”
Caroline Levine, chair of the English department, calls Evans “the perfect hire” for the creative writing program.
“She's not only an incredibly gifted young writer, but also an inspired, and inspiring, teacher,” says Levine.
Evans is hard at work on a new novel about education and politics in Washington, D.C., and she plans to share with her students her own struggle as a young artist seeking to balance passion and humility.
“You can’t be a totally humble person and still think that the world really needs to hear what you have to say,” she says. “And you can’t be an ego-maniac and think everything you do is brilliant because no one will help you get better. That balance is very important.”
Evans is known for handling themes of gender and race with deceptively easy grace, locating the story first and letting the theme dawn gradually. Often, she says, younger writers will want to start from the other end—with the “important thing” they have to say.
“I tell my students that a story should have a smaller question and a larger question,” she says. “The thing that keeps us reading is often the smaller question, and the thing that makes it worth reading is the larger question.”
In Evans’ acclaimed story, “Virgins,” which launched her literary star when it appeared in The Paris Review in 2007, the question of whether two friends will get home safely rocks uneasily on the theme of sexual agency, and the mixed messages we send teenage girls, particularly those of color. Most of Evans’ characters, according to the New York Times, are “girls and women who are intelligent, gutsy, and black.”
“I do start with character,” she says. “Sometimes it is a really clear voice, sometimes it is a scenario that I am trying to unspool. There is quite an interesting moment that happens when it goes from ‘that might be good to write about someday’ to ‘I need to sit down and write it now.’ That is the moment when I see the connection between two points, and there’s a clear journey to write about.”
Evans’ own journey took her from the D.C. area (where she grew up), to the University of Iowa (where she earned her M.F.A.), to UW-Madison in 2006-2007, where she was the Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Creative Writing Institute. After that, she returned to D.C., where she taught in American University’s creative writing program. Now she’s back in Madison as a member of one of the most selective creative writing programs in the country.
“I am really excited to be back here,” she says. “Undergraduates and MFA students are supported in every way here. The faculty are available for open conversations about writing, and what it means to live as a writer.”
How might an undergraduate know whether the writing life is right for him or her?
“Everybody comes to their path differently,” says Evans. “But I think creative writing is, and more broadly, the humanities are, a way of practicing being intuitive, and learning a kind of intelligent empathy. The first thing creative writing asks you to do is to get out of your own head and see your work from someone else’s perspective. And then it asks you, over and over again, to see the world from someone else’s perspective. And those are really valuable life skills, wherever you are going.”