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Percival Everett’s new novel comes out in just a couple of days. This goes onto the summer reading list. Seems like everywhere I go, people are saying good things about Everett. At UNCG, he is one popular dude. I’ll jump on that bandwagon, and not just because he chose my book for the first SC First Novel Prize.

In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that my main decision to enter that contest owed to the fact that Percival Everett was judging. (There are good writers and then there are good writers on your wavelength. He voted for DeLillo’s Underworld in the ‘97 National Book Award, although Frazier’s Cold Mountain won.) Sometimes you enter a contest and realize that it’s a dice throw. This time, more than ever, I decided that if the novel didn’t win it had something fundamental to do with the quality and not a conflict of aesthetics. I was already teaching his novel Watershed in my Themes of American Literature class in the fall of ‘07 and would teach it again the next semester. There are, in my view, two or three great Thanksgiving dinner scenes in American Literature and one of them is in that book.

There’s a trend in this blog the past couple of weeks to talk about advice writers have for other writers. So I’ll go ahead and talk about Everett’s. He, too, came to USC one fall – same year as Walcott in fact. He sat on a panel, answering questions about the writing process, etc, and one especially vexed writer stood up and asked: I’ve got about six projects on the stove or in the closet right now between story collections, novels, folk culture projects, and anthologies – and I can’t finish any of them. Some are gathering dust. What do I do? Everett leaned into the microphone and told her, first, to close her eyes. Second, walk into the closet, bend down, and pick up something. Whatever that something was, finish it.