The Spark | John Jeremiah Sullivan
Behind The Spark
First of all, “That article,” is Rhiannon Giddens and What Folk Music Means by John Jeremiah Sullivan for the New Yorker.
I was really nervous to interview John Jeremiah Sullivan. Our mutual friend Gary Hawkins told me John would be a really tough interview because he can talk in depth and at length about any subject on earth, more than any other human on earth. How many versions of These Days have been recorded and by whom, strange animals, rare botany, Ann-Margret trivia, unearthed archival records no one else believed existed and what they mean now, and pretty much anything that had ever happened in Kentucky. His writing makes clear that his intellectual virtuosity consumes galaxies the rest of us walk on by asleep. I’d have to bring my tap shoes and a lot of caffeine to keep up with him. What I found, and what I am so deeply reminded of listening back to this interview, is the unguarded, funny and kind person who never pretended to have answers and became my friend. He texted me recently as if he were Cormac McCarthy waiting outside on a sidewalk for a store to open. I haven’t laughed so hard since.
What I’m holding closest from his insight is the fierce sense of instinct that he brings to his work. As he says, we tell ourselves so many stories — theories about what we are making and how we are making it and what it will add up to – mostly of which are badly used energy and blatantly untrue. He declares dedication to what ties one to the questions in the beginning — the impulse to follow writing — not navigating whether a question is or isn’t practical. Not that something is going to come of the question once you’ve written about it that equates to ticking a neat box and putting the issue to rest for the world at last. A hypothesis is somewhat belittling to the forces which compel forward. Perhaps a deeper kind of trust in the process is not demanding it have a name or an outcome, but simply living in it, spending time with it as a tie to a very basic kind of love. I know if John were here he’d say this was the disease talking, but there is some virtue in the writing life, the repetitive motion and the sound of someone desiring to be less full of shit.
I also take a lot of comfort in John’s research process and his chosen word, compulsion. I’ve spent the past few words doing “research” on a handful of projects, or what I call the most fascinating form of procrastination I’ve ever found. The worst part, as a storyteller rather than a scientist, is I often can’t put into words why I’m attracted to an object or an archive beyond something granular, charged and a little unearthly. My friend professor Bernie Herman taught me words like creative intervention and lyrical presences, which are more legitimate ways of saying I feel the itch, that thing has a story to tell. But the conversation between a writer and an object or a chapter of history (like the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, which John and Rhiannon are excavating) can go on intensely and personally without an audience for a long time. The question does not ever end. At what point does one turn to the audience with some humble discovery, a handful of dirt to say, “I want to show you this.” Research, it seems, is a willingness to enter a funny kind of limbo. I wish I had asked John more about navigating the public and private spaces of ruminating on a thread and when to turn forward.
Speaking of limbo, I should say that one of the reasons you’re hearing The Spark right now is that we didn’t want these episodes to age out while we chart our course. I’d really like to thank Charlie Shelton-Ormond at WUNC – a fabulous producer, editor and partner in crime – for all the work he has put into crafting these episodes.
Lastly, now that we all know how to pronounce his name thanks to John, the poem from Czesław Miłosz referenced in the interview is To Raja Rao. May you not be well-mediated, and may your research culminate in due time.
