Desiree Evans is a writer from South Louisiana. She is an MFA fiction fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast Journal and The Offing. Evans has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and Kimbilio Fiction. She is currently at work on a short story collection and a novel. She won the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers for a short story titled “Belly.”
Q&A
Why do you write?
I write to understand the world around me. To interrogate it. To try to change it. …. I write to honor those who’ve come before me and who made it possible for me to be here. The writing I do is an opportunity for me to honor a legacy of survival, to remember, and to give voice to stories untold.
What writing most impacts you?
I love all kinds of writing. I was trained as a journalist, and I spent a lot of time reading journalism and nonfiction, and I learned a lot about craft and story from writing about the lives of real people. In a similar vein, I have also done a lot of oral history work, and I’ve learned a lot about storytelling from just listening to people talk about their own lives. I’m also incredibly inspired by the imagery and lyricism of poetry, which is the first kind of writing I ever did. … I also love folklore, folktales, fables, and mythology, and much of my work is inspired by the folk traditions of the African Diaspora.
What are your major literary influences?
Growing up I was a bookworm, obsessed with the written word, with the power it had to educate me about the world. But rarely did I see my community in the books I read in my English classes or at my local library. I remember the first time I saw “myself” in a book — reading Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry — and it shook me to the core to realize stories could also be about people like me. And later as a teenager, reading Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower was life-changing. …
Jean Toomer’s Cane was also pivotal in my early writing life. From Toomer I learned what it meant for the soul of a place to talk and breathe through words. In college I first met my literary mothers: Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, and Gayl Jones. It’s in these women’s writing that I fully saw myself reflected on the page. I saw myself, my sisters, my mother, and grandmothers. I learned what it meant to read a truth that resembled my own — the honesty of living at the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality.
What is your writing process?
Jotting down observations on scraps of paper while riding the bus home. Falling in love with snippets of speech from an overheard conversation. Seeing a person on the street, and thinking, “That’s my character!” And then getting home and trying to bring all of these things into a sentence, a scene, a world. Sometimes I outline, sometimes I don’t — but usually my process starts with a character or a scene or a sense of place/universe. I dive in often not knowing where I will end up, but I try to listen to the characters and let them tell me who they are, what they want, where they want to go, and why they want their story told. After the first draft, I edit and edit until I feel that the story has a clear arc, theme, and a sense of what it wants to do on the page.
What experiences have shaped you most as a writer?
Growing up in the Deep South has shaped my writing. The South is a place where stories hold power—stories of renewal, of resilience, of deep survivalisms in the face of historic injustice. Into this container of turbulent history, I write stories that try to honor my community’s past, as well as our current and future ways of living. In my writing I try to reflect the world and respond to it. I hope to answer a call, and maybe even create a call.
How did these influences impact “Belly?”
“Belly” is a story where 17-year-old Jaima comes to terms not only with the river that threatens to run its banks, but with those who seek to take the land away from her and her family. It’s a story about our history, but also our present. Land and place are critical to understanding the lives of the people in this story, and Jaima’s relationship to this land is as important to her character development as is her relationship to her family. Land and people — we are intricately connected.
Do you have any advice for other student writers?
Write. Just write! I spent a long time not believing in myself and not writing because I thought it was impossible, out of reach for me. It took a long time for me to be okay with the fact that writing has to be a part of my life, because it gives me life. It took me a long time to give myself permission to write. So my advice is simple: give yourself permission, give yourself the entire page.
Interview conducted by Gloria Jirsaraie
Belly
By Desiree Evans
— an excerpt
The river is greedy.
If you listen closely, it will tell you so. The river’s throat hums a siren song down at Chinotuck Falls, makes enough music to send the trees dancing out in the Spooky Marsh. The river’s belly starts rumbling over in the southern hinterlands, where not many folk dare to go anyway because it’s too dark even when the sun’s at its highest point in the sky. The river’s long tongue licks up the sides of Pauper’s Gorge, where the water cascades down into a swimming hole that local boys and girls splash in during the thick, summer heat.
Jaima’s the only person still living who’s been inside the river’s hungry belly. As stories go, this one is her own: when she was five the river swallowed her up, took her deep down into the darkest darkness, spun her around and around and around inside of it. Then spat her out by Old Snook’s place, almost a mile inland from the river’s northern banks. The rising waters left behind a shriveled-up piece of girl, gone cold to the touch. But alive.
No one knows how Jaima survived, especially since the river took Jaima’s parents and their tiny house down into its deep murky bottoms and kept them there like a sacrifice. Leaving Jaima all alone.
Jaima doesn’t remember any of it, outside of dreams of dark and cold. But she knows this one thing to be true: since the age of five, part of the river has lived somewhere inside of her. She feels full with it, weighty like a stuffed bird. It sloshes around in her belly some days, aching to find the rest of itself. Aching for the part that would make it whole — all flowing and twisting and turning and mighty.
Since the flood, Jaima has lived with her grandma, who everyone in Chester Town calls Sweet Ma. Some mornings Jaima heads out with her backpack and a bag lunch to the eastern side of Sweet Ma’s homestead, at the edge of the big pine forest, where the world smells freshest and greenest, and where the ground is soft and boggy under her feet. It’s the place where she goes to feel the most like herself: here she can watch the river wind down into the valley below, feel it bubbling up inside of her, seeking the missing parts of itself. When the summer rains come, as they always do, and when the water inches closer and closer to town, tempted to overrun its banks, Jaima can feel the river reaching out to her, waiting for her.
The river is greedy.