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Alison Stewart: This year is the 30th anniversary of Toni Morrison receiving the Nobel Prize in literature, the first Black woman to win the award. Here's a short clip of her acceptance speech from 1993.

Toni Morrison: Fiction has never been entertainment for me. It has been the work I have done for most of my adult life. I believe that one of the principal ways in which we acquire, hold and digest information is via narrative. I hope you will understand when the remarks I make begin with what I believe to be the first sentence of our childhood that we all remember, the phrase "Once upon a time."

Alison Stewart: On this anniversary year, there's a new exhibition at Princeton University where Morrison taught for 17 years, featuring more than 100 objects for Morrison's archives. There are drafts of The Bluest Eye, sketches of the house and beloved, letters Morrison wrote about Black feminism, and much more. Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory is on view at Princeton's Firestone Library, Milberg Gallery until June 4th. With me now is lead curator, Autumn Womack, who is also a Princeton Associate Professor in the Department of English and African American Studies. Autumn, nice to meet you.

Autumn Womack: Nice to meet you. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: The title of the expert exhibition is inspired by an essay Toni Morrison wrote in 1986, The Site of Memory. What of this essay did you use as a guide for how you thought about presenting the archives?

Autumn Womack: There's this really beautiful moment early on in the essay where she's talking about her desire to create books and stories and narratives that really get into the interior lives of Black people. This is an interior life that was not accessible for many years in writing, and it was really not something that literature was given access to. She talks about the way that there was slave narratives and texts that were always positioned as particularly political or sociological or fact-based.

She wanted to get into the interior life and excavate this territory. This idea of excavating a hidden territory that was so crucial to Black life seemed really, really important to me. That's really what I understand her archives and her collection to be about and to be activating. They are this space that gives us the interior life of these books and these characters and these worlds that we know so well.

Alison Stewart: The exhibition is organized by sections starting with beginnings, writing time, [unintelligible 00:03:07] wonderings and wandering, genealogies of Black feminism speculative futures. Why did you decide to present the exhibition with these themes?

Autumn Womack: These are the themes that emerged during the curatorial work for the collection. Rather than moving chronologically, which seemed to be antithetical to how Morrison writes and thinks herself, we were like, "Okay, what are the ideas, what are the concepts, what are the preoccupations that we can suss out from our curatorial work?" One of the things that was really apparent from the beginning is that Morrison was deeply, deeply invested in geography. Not just geography for the sake of having a plot point in the tax, but for her space and place were always as much about feeling, as much about attachment, as much about history, as they were about a precise location.

We found all of these moments where she's thinking through and with geography, whether that be drawing maps of places in the text or calculating precise distances between two locations in her work. We also really wanted to think about the way that she was understanding writing itself. That became really clear in our curatorial work that she was always writing in and across time. The section that you noted writing time really thinks about how, when, and where she wrote. What is the time that she used to write? In the 1970s, that was often times in between doing editorial meetings, she was an editor at Random House at the time. These are really themes and sites that speak to each other, but that also emerge in the collection itself and from the collection.

Alison Stewart: There's just some fascinating things we learn about her process. There's her day planners, she started to write in day planners. I understand including the only surviving drafts of Song of Solomon.

Autumn Womack: That's right, yes.

Alison Stewart: Why was this her preferred method at this point in her life? This is 1973-ish.

Autumn Womack: Yes. This was a moment as I said, where she was juggling multiple careers. She was an editor and she was a novelist. These are two domains that we often don't think about as coexisting, how was an editor also a novelist? She was going to meetings and meeting clients and reading lots of books, she also had two children, and she was commuting into Manhattan from Queens. We found these day planners, which are really like date books where she kept her schedule of editorial meetings, and she also wrote in the margins. There's a beautiful 1993 Paris review of a book's essay or interview where she says, "I wrote when and where I could." Sometimes that was on scraps of paper and in this case, it was in these day planners.

We see that writing happens when it happens. It's something that we can carve out time and we can go on writing retreats, but also you write when and where you can. When the idea comes, you're moved by it and moved with it. These day planners really show that process and that practice on the page and this beautiful, beautiful materiality of writing time as we describe it.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Autumn Womack, she's lead curator and associate professor in the Department of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. We're talking about the new exhibit at Princeton, Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory. It is open until June 4th. There were a few archival items associated with Morrison's first book, The Bluest Eye from 1970, which she began to sketch out when she was actually at Howard, correct?

Autumn Womack: That's right, yes.

Alison Stewart: What is the context of where she was in her life around the time that she wrote this?

Autumn Womack: Yes. She was teaching at Howard, she was invited into a writing group that was happening at Howard. Some members of that were Claude Brown, the novelist, May Miller who was a poet and a playwright. She began sketching a short story that as she describes it, later survived in The Bluest Eye. In the mid-1960s at the urgency of Claude Brown, she started sending out queries to different editors saying, "Okay, do you think this could be a viable novel? It might still be better as a short story, it might be better as a novella. I've got other things, let me know what you think." Ultimately, it emerged as The Bluest Eye in 1970 which launched her into a different phase of her career.

We were really interested and I was really interested in showing these different iterations of this book that we all know so well, has become so important to us and thinking about the process and the practice, and really the short story as a rehearsal space for this thing that becomes The Bluest Eye. Really exploring her and letting people see her as this multidisciplinary artists, not somebody who only worked in the novel, but who was always interested in other kinds of forms and genres and using them as a training ground for practicing the character sketches, ideas and turns of phrase that were so crucial to the novels that we read them get in published form.

Alison Stewart: We've talked so much about Toni Morrison as the writer. What do we learn about Toni Morrison as the researcher?

Autumn Womack: Yes, I love that question. Thank you so much because this collection really exposes her as somebody who was deeply, deeply, deeply invested in archival research and study for each of the texts. There are almost what we might think of as individual collections for each novel. For a novel like Paradise, she's looking at slave ledgers, maps, details about the flora and fauna, and different kinds of places, looking at maps of the Ohio River. There's all of these archival research documents that she needed in order to create these fictional worlds from what her characters would spring.

We think about her as somebody who was creative, also research was a crucial part of that creative process. I just love thinking of her as somebody who was looking over these encyclopedic entries and looking at artwork and really figuring out what do I need. What does this book demand? What are the conditions from which these characters can surface?

Alison Stewart: We also get a window into her personal thoughts about feminism, Black women and feminism, and the feminist movement. What do we get from these letters?

Autumn Womack: What's so interesting about the letters in the collection at Princeton is that we have letters that people wrote to Morrison. We don't have her outgoing correspondence. We have this asymmetry that's really really telling.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Autumn Womack: It's interesting. Has much about how people are related to Morrison as she wrote and we have all of these letters from women like Tony Cape Ibarra, Angela Davis. There's a letter we put on display by Nina Simone. What we wanted to think through is how these women were speaking to each other and really speaking to Tony Morrison at this crucial moment when feminism in general and black feminism, in particular, were emerging as key terms in concepts but also movements.

The Black feminism that we pulled out here is not one that gets staged publicly in protests or in opinion editorials but privately around questions of work editorial practice and friendship. That to me seems like a really crucial distinction and a really textured and nuanced way to think about the sites and spaces where Black feminism gets forged. It's not always public and outward facing, but it often occurs around questions of editorial work and deep friendship. That's the narrative that we've put on display there.

Alison Stewart: My guess is Autumn Womack, lead Curator of Tony Morrison: Sites of Memory which is an exhibit at Princeton currently it's open until June 4th. You are a professor of English and African American Studies and you've taught a course Tony Morrison and the Ethics of Reading. I'll be getting the syllabus please later. How did you want to approach teaching Morrison?

Autumn Womack: I wanted to approach teaching Morrison as a reader. We think of her as a writer but she was also a deep, deep reader and her texts also theorized reading for us and they also position us in relationship to the text in a very particular way. I really wanted my students to think about Morrison and her work on those three axes. Morrison as reader, reading in the text and how we are being compelled to read these works and there's this beautiful moment in the opening lines of her 2008 novel A Mercy where the character presents us with this ethical question. She says what does it mean to read responsibly and so we move out from that.

One of the responsible reading practices that we practice is reading in relationship to the archive. We have access to the collection here, so the students think about how reading drafts of beloved in relationship to the published text of beloved shift how we understand the text. Why did Morrison decide to change a particular turn of phrase in the published version from a late draft? Those kinds of questions open up really important avenues for thinking about how we read this text and also how Morrison read her own work, how she read other work, how she read history, how she read the archive. It's a really fun adventure.

Alison Stewart: Is there a Tony Morrison book you think people might read differently or maybe you've read differently given the last four years? Given the pandemic and given 2020, reckoning on racial justice.

Autumn Womack: I love this question, so I have two. The first I would say is Home which is one of her later novels, and that's a book that follows a Korean War veteran. That text is so much about reentering a world that the protagonist thought he knew and now it's so deeply unfamiliar. There seems to be something really, really relatable about that right now, returning to a world that you thought you knew, and for him, it looks visually different.

We have these fractured scenes where he's trying to figure out where he is in space and time and what it means to live in this modern world, among so many other things in the book. The book that I began to read differently and it's the Morrison book that I'd never read, I read it for the first time a few months ago is Love. I think it's deeply underappreciated and it's a book about loss and intimacy.

Like solar, it orbits around female friendship and family, but it really is about what happens when our relation to one another and to friends and to family is predicated around loss and desire, and a lost object in this case it's a man. That to me also seems really, really powerful in this moment that we're in and from the last four years. Of course, Beloved always helps us rethink that relationship from the past to the present. We always need to be doing that and we especially need to be doing that after 2020. I think those Home and Love, I think are underappreciated and we might reread them with new appreciation given where we are now.

Alison Stewart: Autumn you're the lead curator of all the events and programming Princeton is putting on. Our next guest is Alison Saar. I can see her. She's going to talk to her in a moment about her work in conjunction with this whole exhibit and this whole program. Why did you want Alison Saar's work to be involved as part of the project and yes she can hear you.

Autumn Womack: Wonderful. Alison came via a collaboration with Mitra Abbaspour at the Princeton University Art Museum. What I love about both Alison and Tony Morrison's work is that they're both thinking about questions of work and labor and geography and how gender intersects with all of that and historical memory, and interior lives of Black people in different mediums and different genres.

There's a really wonderful, and across generations and there's wonderful way that we can see how the kinds of questions that Morrison was always asking, get answered and asked differently by an artist and by a visual artist like Alison Saar who's thinking about these things all the time.

Alison Stewart: Autumn Womack is an associate professor in the Department of English and African American Studies at Princeton and the lead curator on the exhibit Tony Morrison: Sites of Memory go down to Princeton hang around with [inaudible 00:16:11] It's very pretty. Get the little tiny cupcakes of that cool bakery.

Autumn Womack: There's so many bakeries but it's not far from Philly New York all the places come down.

Alison Stewart: Autumn, thanks so much.

Autumn Womack: Thank you.

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