Danielle Evans's The Office of Historical Corrections

In The Office of Historical Corrections, stories take place in the America we know, which is defined by characters, burdened with the grief of personal and social history (which are inseparable), who struggle to remember and simply exist amidst everything that has happened to and around them. For Evans, History is an expansive lens through which to make sense of our world. In the title novella, the narrator considers “the daily trauma of the historical record, the sometimes brutality and sometimes banality of anti-Blackness, the loop of history that was always a noose if you looked at it long enough.”

Evans sums up how time and personal/collective history function in her work in an Interview with Sarah Moroz in Elle: “I tend now to think of the geography of a story in terms of time and memory […] that echoes what it feels like to be in the center of any emotionally intense experience—drawn to memory or previous understanding, confronted with the concrete reality of the present, trying to recalibrate the future.” Along with all this history comes a “sense of peril [that] is in the structure,” in “something fixed or looming at the emotional core of the story.” We noticed related unities at play in nearly every story in the collection, including:

• Blackness in relation to class and color (mixed black people, biracial)

• Veil of sadness; layers of grief (personal and collective)

• Processing grief with sarcasm/humor/distance

• The Individual as inseparable from collective experience

• Movement and travel (gas stations, highway stops)

• Water!

• Memory (Remembering, not remembering, actively forgetting); Archives/records

• Exhaustion at social justice, work, protest

• Finances (House taxes)

• Women relationships (Mother/Daughter co-workers, friends); non-nuclear families

The America Evans creates, though, seems a bit off kilter- or dug deep into the odd kilter we create through History and create History through. This is the strange America of liminal space— we are always on buses, in airports, stuck in quarantine, eating the first bit of junk food we can find nearby. We are between jobs and internships documenting or educating people in women’s prisons, after school programs, refugee camps, universities, and centers and government agencies that pursue some form of crucial yet incomplete justice. In the Elle interview, Evans said she ‘think[s] a lot about physical space in terms of our embodied experience of it. […] [W]hat feels like it could be intended as neutral information […] is revealing of the calibrations people learn to make based on living in the world in their own particular bodies or identities.”

Though I wish I had kept track of every character’s job histories, and all of the times characters put on a fancy dress to go somewhere just to be made to feel out of place, and every time someone was given candy in an attempt to mitigate a looming crisis, I had to focus, somehow, my scavenger hunt for the fragments of the collection’s universe that burst into too-vivid colors in the middle of literal or metaphorical nowhere. Travel/vacation and archives/records appear in or help define every story, but I have included them in the diagram below because I think they are closely tied, materially, to the other categories.

So here is a diagram showing the frequency with which the following appeared in the collection: (tins of) mints, bikinis, gift shops/rest stops, travel/vacation, souvenirs, archives/records and minor wounds:

references:

minor wounds archives/records bikinis

2) desire for hickey 1) music video 2) photograph 2) from the waterworld gift shop

3) cut foot at party 3) newspapers, receipts, death records 3) central to the plot

4) bottle cap pressed into palm 4) obituaries, military records, etc. 4) Sarah on the boat to Alcatraz

6) delivery boys’ “scrapes and 5) accounts reflected in apologies

scratches” p. 148 6) a noted lack of record; fake IDs

7) you get it

giftshops/rest stops travel/vacation souvenirs

1) Titanic 1) not approved for PTO 1) in the gift shop, many!

2) stop on the way to Waterworld 2) quarantine; wedding; Waterworld 2) the photo from the ride

3) where the fling got the bikini 3) to Florida and back 3) the bikini itself

4) on Alcatraz 4) boat to Alcatraz 4) bottle cap; stolen key

6) bus stop 6) bus to NY

& here is a more elaborate collection of references to tins of mints (and other breath fresheners, for posterity):

(1) “[…] the hotel’s romance kit, which consisted of a single condom and a package of after-dinner mints in a tin adorned with a rose sticker.” p. 5

(2) “Michael tastes like gin and breath mints” p. 29

(3) “one of the photography campers has a water bottle full of vodka and someone else has a tic tac case full of pills […]” p. 64

“ […] he makes her what his mother always made when they were kids, peppermint hot chocolate […]” p. 66

(4) “She fished through her shoulder bag and emerged with a tin of mints” p. 104

“Sarah pulled the mints out of her purse again and offered me one. She kept snapping the container open and shut…” p. 111

(6) “She splashed water on her face, then pulled a small bottle of mouthwash from the duffel bag she’d carried in with her and swirled a capful around in her mouth before spitting into the sink.” p. 135

& here is a collection of interviews in which Danielle Evans offers razor-sharp insights into her process & how she conceptualizes stories:

In an Interview with Sarah Moroz in Elle, Evans on how the title novella was shaped by and shapes the whole collection:

“By the time I was working on the novella, I knew it belonged to this book, and was in some way the thematic anchor of this book, so I wasn’t worried about how long it was in any practical way—I didn’t need it to be short enough for a journal or long enough to be a novel on its own. I gave it just the room I thought it needed. I knew the novella needed more space than the others in part because of the amount of world-building I needed to do and in part because as the narrative voice developed, I knew it had to have a slow build, and an almost noir feel—that this was not a narrator who was going to, or could, get to the point right away. The unwinding and uncovering were part of the story too.”

In an interview with Jared Jackson for The PEN Ten, Evans on how the short story creates possibilities for handling character complexity, esp. w/r/t race and power:

“Characterization and narrative tension come from the tension between a character’s inner life and their exterior life, and I’m acutely aware—because being a Black woman compels me to pay attention to power dynamics—that this tension is always not just a reflection of an individual character’s desire, but of the story’s structural world. I need to be aware not just of what any given character wants, but of which characters have the capacity to make other characters perform for them. And I think I love the short story form in part because I am always wary of being boxed in or reduced to a stereotype, and it’s a form that allows me to shapeshift or layer voices or answer the same question in contradictory ways.”

In an interview with Lily Meyer in The Believer, Evans on how research informed her writing practice:

“For the title novella, I did do some research, just to get a better sense of time and place for the parts of the story that take place in the past. I went through twenty years of the microfiche records of the Milwaukee NAACP. I looked up the Black papers in the state at the time. I read Edna Ferber novels. I read the one comprehensive book about Black life in Milwaukee that covers that time period. I read a book of oral histories of how Black families arrived in Wisconsin. The NAACP records skip around wildly and only include some of the meeting minutes and some correspondence. The paper couldn’t afford to print some years, and not all of its issues were archived at the time. The oral histories are contemporary, and for the time period I wanted to think about, rely on people remembering and repeating the stories they were told. The novels don’t focus on Black characters. So, those absences are as interesting to me as what gets documented. And I suppose there is a kind of writer who would fill them in, or do deeper work in oral history and archives, and I don’t know why I’m the other kind, exactly, but I’m often most interested in what we don’t know, or what we’ve been told, or what we think we know but can’t prove.”