It’s 7:28 p.m. at the Weis Center.
Conversations of how days went and greetings blend together, creating an almost white noise.
The podium stands tall on the stage with its decorated words that read “Janet Weis Fellow In Contemporary Letters” in bold.
“Bucknell University” in big, white letters is projected onto the screen in the front, contrasting with the blue curtain swags above.
President Bravman walks across the stage at an admirable pace and stands behind the podium.
And the night begins.
Colson Whitehead walks out to the podium in such a natural fashion that one would expect he’s been here before. President Bravman places a medal around his neck and names him the 14th Janet Weis Fellow in Contemporary Letters. Beaming, Whitehead takes his rightful place behind the podium and brings the audience on a journey of laughter, failure and the artist DNA.
He opens his speech with immediate humor, by telling us he would begin by talking on critical race theory, a serious topic he holds dear to his heart. The audience goes silent, ready for whatever enlightenment he wants to give. He says “I’m just kidding,” and the crowd bursts into laughter. This comedy is maintained throughout his speech and keeps the audience engaged. His jokes are matter-of-fact in a way that mimics his novels. Make no mistake, “The Underground Railroad” is not a joke but a work of historical fiction that presents facts through fantasy. What if the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad? A question he’s thought of since he was a kid, he says. That is Colson Whitehead’s method of creation, exploring “what ifs.” He recounts the premise of one of his first novels, “The Intuitionist,” which was devised after a viewing of an NBC “Dateline” episode on the dangers of escalators. Next, he asked himself, “What if an elevator inspector had to solve a case?” He adds to this question his experience of run-ins with elevator inspectors while living in New York. Finally, he’d find himself in a library researching transferable skills of an elevator inspector to the role of a detective. And thus “The Intuitionist” was born.
For a writer, finishing a book is only the beginning; the next step is what Whitehead describes as leaving cake out in the rain. He begins to reminisce on a song that would play on the radio’s top-40 segment in the 1970s: Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park.” I, a member of Gen Z and somewhat uncultured, had never heard of it. He was more than eager to share it with the crowd. He lifts his iPad to the microphone and hits play. A sultry feminine voice suddenly echoes throughout the auditorium, singing tunes of a cake that was left out in the rain and asking, pleading for an answer as to why it was left out. Whitehead hums along, and the people around me sway their heads. The song is a reflection of his internal state after submitting his first books to publishing agencies. He sings, “Why did [publishing groups] leave my books out in the rain?” and the crowd laughs again. Anyone who submits their work for publication almost always encounters rejection. How did Colson Whitehead navigate it?
After being rejected, he sat with himself and wondered if he could do anything else. He shows his fingers to the audience and emphasizes how frail and dainty they are. “My hands say pianist, hand model, surgeon. Those are the things I may be cut out for.” He runs through the list of potential careers and the very unserious reasons why he couldn’t pursue them. He continues, joking about the first Neanderthals to draw on the cave walls or write on stone, and how they would probably show each other what they had created and none of them would care. Nonetheless, they would continue creating. Whitehead calls this “the artist DNA.” “It didn’t matter if no one liked what I was doing, I had no choice.” The artist DNA undeniably lives through him and is a driving force in all of his creations, published or not. The internal drive to continue is what will keep a writer, for the most part, satiated. It’s the writer’s choice to pick up the pen even when nobody else gets it, and I would say it worked out pretty remarkably for Colson Whitehead.