Wendy S. Walters: There Is No Neutral Body

Wendy S. Walters is a founding director of Essay in Public | A Humanities Project, Senior Nonfiction Editor at The Iowa Review, and author of three books, including two books of poems, Troy, Michigan (Futurepoem, 2014) and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me. She has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry, The Ford Foundation, The Smithsonian Institution, and Bread Loaf.

I was introduced to her work through her prose collection, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal (Sarabande Books, 2015) which was named a best book of the year by Buzzfeed, Flavorwire, Literary Hub, The Root, and Huffington Post. This collection, which contains works of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and reportage, questions genres “seemingly clear as black and white,” as part of a larger reckoning with perception, hard divisive lines, and shades of distinction. The stories we tell ourselves—part fact, part fiction—Walters illustrates in this book, yield real isolation, relationships, complicity, and violence.

When I learned that her current project investigates the history and use of white paint, I reached out to her to know more. In addition to this latest work, we talked about loneliness, anti-blackness, and the need to tell new stories about who we are and what we want to be, as Americans on the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of the first ship carrying enslaved Africans to what white English colonists called the New World.

This exchange took place via email largely in or surrounded by the white-painted academic and cultural institutions Walters questions as being the most conducive for learning and creativity.

For your essay “Lonely in America,” you were moved to research the scattered bones of enslaved Africans when they surfaced during construction at an intersection in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Your title suggests the loneliness of this knowledge, which exposed a front unified in denying and deflecting responsibility for the institution of slavery. I recount this essay to demonstrate that I am listening, as are many others, but I wonder if writing it made you feel less or more alone?