“One of the first things I tell my classes is, If you want to write, keep a low overhead.”

“If you believe in its literary and moral seriousness ... it becomes a literary statement.”

“Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, ‘You’re all a lost generation.’ That got around to certain people and we all said, ‘Whee! We’re lost.’”

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.

“[With Dr. Zhivago] it seemed to me that it was my duty to make a statement about our epoch. I wanted to record the past and to honor the beautiful and sensitive aspects of the Russia of those years.”

“I didn't set out to be a troublesome writer, but if that's what I've been, I am totally unrepentant.”

“I reincarnated [Thomas Moore] again in my new novel and I'm sorry to say he has fallen upon hard times; he is a far cry from the saint, drinks too much, and watches reruns of M*A*S*H on TV.”

“Writers who pontificate about their own use of language drive me right up the wall. In what spare time I have, I read the expert opinions of V. S. Pritchett and Edmund Wilson, who are to my mind the best-qualified authorities on the written English language.”

“I just want to see whether it’s possible to entertain Freud’s fantasy of a realistic biography. It may not be a possible thing to do.”

“I feel as if I start in a kind of wilderness, and I’m sort of making a way, a crossable path through it. Eventually I can realize where a poem came from—but that’s rarely what the poem is about.”

“Advice and instruction have always fascinated me, partly because of their pathos—so little is transmitted in any given instance of advice or pedagogy.”

“The other night I watched some politicians on television talking about Vietnam. I wanted very much to burst through the screen with a flamethrower and burn their eyes out and their balls off and then inquire from them how they would assess this action from a political point of view.”

“There is an immense abyss between the very few who have money and the vast number who are poor.”

“Even Saint Teresa said, ‘I can pray better when I’m comfortable.’ I don’t think living in cellars and starving is any better for an artist than it is for anybody else.”

“It is doubtful whether the individual soul is going to be allowed to survive at all. Now you get a Buddhist movement with everything except Confucius taken into it.”

On seeing a sexually suggestive billboard: “ . . . I'm not sure that I really particularly want to see [the actor] having her. I think my own imagination would be better about that than him doing it.”

On how music is an intimation of death: “You start the song. . . and you know, even as you round the corner of the first verse, that it’s only going to last for four and a half minutes. All you can do is keep moving to it.”

Imagining Emma Bovary in bed: “[She’d be] rather stunned and frantic, I would think. And I don't say it to be comic. I suspect stunned and frantic, breathless and shockingly cold to the touch.”

On the dangers of researching his books in the field: “I could never be left alone. I had to run when they ran. It can be pretty scary to get lost in a building. You're with the cops. Everybody hates the cops.”

“I was having tea with [Yeats] one day, and I remember he picked up a pot of tea and, finding that it was already full of old tea, he opened the window of his Georgian house and flung the contents into the square! Rhetoric poured out of him all the while.”

“The reason I put out-of-the-ordinary names on characters is because the John Smiths of the literary world make me sick.”

“Writers had better not be too cocksure that they’ve got inspiration on their side.”

“Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed. In Latin America there's the illusion that a writer can change something; of course, it's not that simple.”

“I think of America as my audience, and inside that space are white people as well as people of color.”

“I worked at a library and that’s where I first read James Baldwin. I think it was Notes of a Native Son. It stopped me cold.”

“One day in the snow I felt so tired. I thought, ‘Damn it, I'll sit down. I can't go on’ . . . So I sat down on the ground. But it was so cold I got up. Oh yes, I used to try to imagine death, but I always come up against a wall.”

On the difference between eroticism and poetry: “When the crudity of the sexual act goes through the imagination it becomes eroticism, and when it doesn't, it is pornography.”

“I write novels quickly, which is not my reputation.”

“All art is a lie, insofar as truth is defined by the Supreme Court. After all, Picasso's goat isn't a goat. Is the artist a liar, or simply one for whom even a fact is not a fact?”

“[The idea of] ‘free love’ . . . was implicit in communism, because Lenin said ‘Sex should be like having a glass of water.’”

“The idea is to turn flesh and blood into literary characters and literary characters into flesh and blood.”

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.

“I must love big novels, because that’s what I’ve written. It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe.”

“A story doesn’t have to be simple, it doesn’t have to be one-dimensional but, especially if it’s multidimensional, you need to find the clearest, most engaging way of telling it.”

“What’s recombinant rhyme? It’s like how they add a snip of the jellyfish’s glow-in-the-dark gene to bunnies and make them glow green; by snipping up pieces of sound and redistributing them throughout a poem I found I could get the poem to go a little bit luminescent.”