Professor Autumn Womack

And I build that story out from these archival objects.

So the same way that that kind of joy to or hate to joy, like those kind of moments become an opportunity to meditate on a question of perspective or voice that I think she's trying to figure out or think through.

It's such a good question.

And the Morrison that I'm trying to bring to life is really a working writer.

Mm-hmm.

that meets the demands of what you're thinking.

And so it's illuminating her as a working, practicing writer who's running into roadblocks, who is trying to figure out writerly tangles, who cannot figure out whether it is free and direct discourse or third person omniscient and why that matters, actually.

And it's also putting her in the company of other working writers, which is not

something that I think we normally do.

So we'll think about her historically, right, as somebody who wrote alongside Alice Walker and Tony K. Bambara.

But who was she reading?

Who was informing the way she thought about character and voice and plot?

Who were her interlocutors in terms of craft?

So it really is a book about the writing process.

This is something that I'm always looking for and that I'm always kind of surprised or excited when I find her actually say, like, you know, this is somebody who's writing I'm really loving at this moment, which she didn't do often at all.

I think as like a responsible public writer, she's like, I'm not going to start naming names because and then everybody's going to be like, well, what about this person?

But there is a moment in the late 90s where she's really interested in Jean Toomer, who is the author of the 1923 kind of experimental novel play poem, Cane.

And so that was a really interesting moment for me where I went back to Keane and I said, okay, what is it about this?

And then there's other writers who she publicly talks about that she really loves and admires.

And of course, there are people like Tony Cade Bambara and James Baldwin, but also like Michael Ondaatje and...