“I write to intensify reality and at the same time to undermine it.”

“Philosophy isn’t the only way to understand things, but it’s an awfully good way.”

I hate when I feel the construction of a joke. It makes me sad.

“I think the novel has to stay attached to life somehow. It has to share the terrain of life.”

“I told myself, Thank goodness those poets proclaimed Black is beautiful, because now I can talk about how Black is everything.”

“I think that if humans are still walking around in fifty years, and still reading fiction, my work will last that long. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

“What I really believe is that there are no minor characters in life or in art.”

 

I wish you could just say, This is a book—­not have to call it anything. Underlying the famously big gap between fiction and nonfiction there’s a rather naive belief that fiction is invented—­that it’s pulled out of thin air. 

 

“Jefferson had helped create his own country. But he wanted black people to leave it. All of that made me think about the idea of a nation—what does it mean to be a nation of people? How do you create one?”

“It takes one durable person to believe that fantasy is as potent as reality. Seeing too far into others’ lives can make you cynical.”

“The foregrounding of artifice—dwelling on the making of the poem, in a poem—seems to go to the core of what poetry is, doesn’t it? That it offers a place in language where we don’t forget that we’re using language?”

As long as I have music, I don’t ever feel like I’m solitary. It changes the air in the room. It’s the most consistent thing in my life. 

 

“It’s part of your job, as a poet, to write out of experience. To name what matters to you. You’ve only got one life to draw on.”

“I was desperate to write a novel, but I didn’t have a story. Whenever I tried to write fiction it was all about my own inner bullshit.”

"You have to be humble enough to accept that you’re secondary to the author, and yet have enough chutzpah to take that other language and transform it into your own.”

“By making breath more evident, more material, more dwelled-upon, they make black breath matter, implicitly insist that black lives matter.”

 

Part of the process is living with a poem for some time before you know what it is. It’s best to recognize that you’re not going to write many brilliant poems. If just one stands the test of time, that’s something that justifies your existence.

This is a hard thing to say, but it’s absolutely true—when I think of the men I’ve been with, every one of them stood between me and my writing.

 

There are few living writers—and fewer playwrights—as celebrated, cited, and studied as Suzan-Lori Parks. In three decades, Parks has become a staple of both the American theater and university syllabi, with a body of work that includes nineteen works for the stage— including a reboot of Porgy and Bess and a cycle of 365 short plays—widely read essays on style and form, three films, a novel, and a TV series inspired by the life of Aretha Franklin. She has received any number of honors and recognitions, including the MacArthur Fellowship and the Windham Campbell Prize. In 2002, she was the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for her play Topdog/Underdog (2001).

Parks was born in 1963 in Fort Knox, Kentucky, the second of three children. Her family, guided by her father’s military career, moved frequently, perhaps most consequentially to West Germany, where she spent four formative years and became fluent in the language. This bilingualism may be why she’s always lived at such an innovative and interesting remove from language itself, and perhaps also why she had a difficult time with spelling, which led a high school English teacher to dismiss her early dreams of becoming a writer. But Parks found the affirmation she needed at Mount Holyoke College, where she abandoned a major in chemistry for a life in letters at the encouragement of English scholar and critic Leah B. Glasser. Initially insecure and uncertain about the right form for her—fiction, poetry, songwriting—she was nudged toward the theater by none other than James Baldwin.

From essentially the outset of her career, Parks has been feted as a genius of the form. After a brief but interesting apprenticeship fashioning short works in “the bars and the basements” of late-eighties downtown New York, she broke onto the scene with Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989). A wild, epic, genre-scrambling fantasia on themes of Blackness, Americanness, history, surveillance, language, and family, her first full-length play went on to win an Obie Award (she has now received four). This work, coupled with her next play, Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), heralded the arrival of a critical new voice in theater and cleared the ground for new themes and modes of expression on the stage. Parks’s innovative deployments of dramatic techniques find inspiration in the Modernism of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, the jazz of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, and the experiments of the off-off-Broadway pioneers Sam Shepard, María Irene Fornés, and Adrienne Kennedy; with these eclectic forebears she has staked new claims for artists of all colors and shapes to embrace multiple aesthetic legacies of radical work regardless of so-called gender, racial, and ethnic boundaries.

This interview, much like a Suzan-Lori Parks play, moved through many forms across the span of years: a jovial breakfast at a French bistro near her home, only a table over from her husband, Christian, and their young son, Durham; a more formal back-and-forth at a palatial studio in the Park Avenue Armory; and finally, in the throes of the pandemic, a couple of dishy gabs over “the Zooms.” Throughout it all, her generosity never waned.

A Broadway director once described Parks to me as “kind of our version of a rock star,” and in person she comes across as just that—ageless, wise, confident in her gifts, and strikingly free in her sense of self. Our conversations moved pleasantly between stretches of excited playfulness and wistful revelation, when it seemed that even she was cracking open some long-neglected chest of memories for the first time in a while. Parks claims that her creative process has always been more about listening than speaking, but more often than not this interviewer found himself struck by the ease with which she could toss off a casually elaborate metaphor in the moment or the speed at which she could turn a thought or idea into a better version of itself. Her mind is ever open but always, it seems, at work.

—Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

INTERVIEWER

What’s your relationship to the finished “product” when you’re working? Is it—the play or whatever—a thing you’re building in real time, or do you feel that the thing is already in there and your job is clearing away dirt?

SUZAN-LORI PARKS

It’s like what “Michelangelo” said, right? He’s working with the marble and taking away everything that’s not the sculpture.

INTERVIEWER

Everything that’s not David.

PARKS

Right. And let’s put Michelangelo in quotes, ’cause was he really the one who actually said that? But, anyway, the idea still holds. I feel that whatever I’m writing exists already. Maybe that’s because of a glitch in the space-time continuum and when I write I’m actually putting my living self behind the present moment in time. Like I’m following something through the woods. Eyes open. Ears open. Heart open. And I’m following a path that is sometimes behind me. Now I’m sounding like one of my characters. That’s what the Foundling Father as Abraham Lincoln in The America Play (1993) is talking about. He’s following in the footsteps of someone who is behind him. There is a strange relationship between writing and history and time, and I don’t think it is what we think it is. Or how we perceive it. There’s more to it.

I love immersing myself in the universe of a novel for years. There is never a time when I am more alive. Some writers suffer through that process, but I enjoy it. Being in that universe, that imperfect universe, is like being in prayer.

The thing about writing novels is that it must be a form of self-suppression. You don’t matter. The page is not a mirror. 

“Just as after you give birth you rapidly forget the pain involved, you easily overlook the effort that’s gone into composing a novel once it’s complete.”

“Literature is a mirror with the capacity, like some clocks, to run ahead of time.”

Gĩkũyũ is the language I feel more. English is just what I’m used to now.