Professor Autumn Womack

Speech, sound, conversations, storytelling.

I mean, there's so much dialogue that often feels like you're reading a play in someone, especially in Song of Solomon.

And so like insisting that the novel,

kind of a capacious understanding of the novel as a form that can hold this variety of different kinds of narrative, right?

So I encountered the papers in 2017 when I came to Princeton.

And they had been at Princeton for quite a while before that, but they had just opened to the public in 2016.

So maybe I'll work backwards from 2017.

So 2017 is when ISF fled on Princeton's campus, really for the first time, actually, and then was introduced to the papers, the archives.

They opened to the public one year earlier in 2016.

And the Morrison Papers or the Morrison Archive, and people refer to them interchangeably,

It's a collection of, I think it's like 354 boxes.

And those are like banker boxes, the kind that she files in.

And they are really a record of her writing and working life.

And they contain like drafts, notebooks, correspondence, photographs, editorial notes, contracts, you know, things like that.

Books that she, her books that she taught and teaching notes, all of those things.

Yeah.

And so 354 boxes, which is quite a lot of material.

And they opened to the public in 2016.

Not many writers when they get to the stage of Morrison's career are like, you know, I'm going to put my papers somewhere in some kind of library, some kind of institution.

Around the same time that she was really beginning to think seriously about this, there was a 1993, there was a devastating fire at her house.