An interview with Desiree S. Evans
Desiree S. Evans wanted to be Lois Lane when she was a young girl growing up in St. Martinville, and in a way, that’s exactly who she has become—curious, fearless, and drawn to stories that matter.
Her recent anthology, The Black Girl Survives in This One, which she co-edited, recently received the Locus Award for Best Anthology, one of the most respected honors in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The recognition reflects both the anthology’s imaginative power and its resonance with readers across the genre.
Evans earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at University of Texas at Austin, one of the country’s most selective creative writing programs. She also holds degrees from Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
Her path as a writer has been varied and winding, circling back again and again to themes that were present from an early age. I talked with Evans about growing up in St. Martinville, her love of horror, her journey as a writer, the power of place, and ultimately what it means to survive.
I’m struck by the range of writing that you’ve done—fiction, journalism, communications, advocacy work. Take me back to growing up in St. Martinville. Is writing something you always knew you wanted to do?
Yeah, that was my first love. I think I wanted to be Lois Lane when I was little. I always loved writing and reading. So that was, like, my thing. When I think back to St. Martinville, it was me in the library.
Back when the library was on the bayou by the bridge?
No, this was the new one they built in the 90s. It was right near where we were living. Maybe a 10-minute walk from there. And so that was my home base that was not my home. Reading was always something I loved to do, and I just really wanted an opportunity to actually write towards that as well. We didn’t have a school paper at St. Martinville High School, but when I went to Louisiana School, we had a school paper, and so that’s how I got involved with writing. I started writing for the paper, and I was the editor of the paper my senior year.
I went to Medill School at Northwestern, which was one of the top journalism programs at the time. I learned a lot. I loved it. But I was also studying journalism at a time when journalism was rapidly shifting. Newspapers weren’t quite obsolete then, but within two years of me graduating, all the massive layoffs were happening. So I freelanced for a few years. And then I just kind of was like, “You know what? I think I want to do something that has aspects of journalism, but not necessarily working in the newsroom.” And that’s how I got into communications work, doing work for nonprofits and NGOs, particularly around human rights.
You mentioned Lois Lane. What other kind of things were you reading back then?
When I was a kid I voraciously read everything. I liked reading the encyclopedia. I loved going into those research holes, which is something I’m really bad at now still. I don’t want to leave the research hole! I would just pick a subject any week. I wanted to learn about Greek gods. I wanted to learn about the rivers of the world.
Did you have an interest in reading about St. Martinville, or about Louisiana back then as a kid?
I came to that much later and found it interesting the older I became. I don’t think I knew at the time how to access those books and histories. It wasn’t until many years later that I was like, “Oh, is there anything written about where I come from?” And that actually began another kind of research hole much later in life, once I left Louisiana. But really the place that I always found most interesting to write about was home.
Do you feel like St. Martin Parish specifically, or Louisiana more broadly, is a place that draws out a certain type of storytelling?
I think for me it does. I remember thinking, “I don’t want to have to move to New York to write.” That’s the thing you do, right? As a young writer, that just was in my head. You know, I lived in New York for several years. I could not write a word. It’s a very vibrant, beautiful city, but it was not where my inspiration came from. And I often felt like I could not find the brain space or . . . whatever centered me in writing was not something that I found there. But when I came back home, I found that I flourished. And so I guess maybe just being here, closer to the soil, to the ancestors, or the stories that I’ve been hearing. I don’t know. I love being here. I love being near our waterways. I love driving on back roads. The stories come to me.
I wanted to ask you about the anthology you co-edited last year, The Black Girl Survives in This One. How did that come about?
A few years ago I was talking to my agent about what we might want to do. I had this idea for an anthology. The horror genre was getting talked about. We were having a bit of a renaissance in the genre overall and in the movies. Jordan Peele had just come out with Get Out. And people were talking about, “Oh, Black people like horror, too.” And I was like, “Yes, we love horror!” And so there was this renewal in the media. And I wanted to put together an anthology, particularly in the young adult space, because horror hadn’t really made a big comeback in that space yet. When I grew up I was reading everything, but I used to really, really love teen horror. I don’t know if you remember these books, but writers like R. L. Stine and Christopher Pike were really big back then. That was our gateway into horror. So we wanted to do that but for a modern era. We never saw any Black people in any of those books, and we thought it would be really great to talk back to the larger horror moment that was happening. So we decided to do this Black horror anthology, to invite a curiosity around horror and Black horror into the young adult space and to hopefully encourage more Black writers.
When I was growing up, we definitely didn’t have anything, and in this whole boom of the market from the early 2000s up until I would say even five years ago, there were just not many Black writers in that space. I can count them on one hand. Definitely none of them had major series or major books, even though it became a huge market. It began to feel like Black people, or people of color, or any marginalized group, just couldn’t imagine themselves into other places and times. They couldn’t go to Narnia. They couldn’t go ride a dragon. I mean, the biggest joke about science fiction is that you wrote about these amazing, futuristic universes, but channel that into a space which I would love for people in my community to read, to take action and fight against the monsters?” So all that was in my head when I was thinking about this anthology.
What do you think about when you look back at you time growing up in St. Martinville?
I remember how much joy we found, even when life wasn’t easy. We spent so much time outside with family, sitting around, talking, catching up on everything. Holidays meant Easter fish fries and big spring crawfish boils where everyone showed up. My mama always made crawfish étouffée when I came home from college. It was my favorite, served up with a side of her potato salad. Zydeco was the music of my whole childhood. It played at every birthday party, every family reunion, every trail ride, every holiday. I didn’t realize until I left home that most people outside of Louisiana had never heard of it!
My sister and I were talking the other day about how we used to walk all over town when we were kids, trek miles and miles across the town, whether going to the candy lady, the snowball stand, or the video rental store. The trail rides are another thing that stays with me. They showed what Afro-Creole cowboy culture looked like long before we knew its lineage. I grew up thinking it was normal where were the people of color? The majority of the planet just disappears in the future?
Another aspect of that title, The Black Girl Survives in This One, is the relationship between storytelling and survival in a more literal way.
I want to say it was a spoiler—the Black girl survives in this one—but there’s a comfort to knowing that ending, too. A lot of horror is just dark and depressing, but, you know, ironically, in a lot of this trendy genre horror, you know there’s going to always be a survivor. One of the most interesting developments out of that period was this idea of The Final Girl, which is like the last girl left at the end of a horror movie, usually a slasher movie, where all of her friends have been killed, and she survived this onslaught, and she’s the last one standing. She’s the last one left to tell the story. But also, there’s a kind of morality tale about her. She was usually a virginal, pristine character. She had to be a very good girl, you know. All the ones who got killed were the bad girls. And there have been a lot of books writing back to that idea of what makes a Final Girl, who deserves to be a Final Girl. You don’t see a lot of Black Final Girls. Because in order to be the Final Girl you have to be this ideal Americana ingenue, a pristine character, and Black women and Black girls are always written outside of that norm, right?
At the time when I was writing, I was dealing with a lot of health stuff. I was just seeing a lot of Black women in my family and communities. I’m looking around and seeing that women are fighting and going ride-or-die for their communities. I was like, “You’re fighting against the biggest monsters I know!” And so for me, it was like, “How do I
to ride in a hay wagon in the middle of a big field while people on horseback circled around and Zydeco blasted from a speaker. Those rides started in South Louisiana and then spread across the South, but to me they were always just part of the texture of home.
And Mardi Gras! Nothing beat the parade in St. Martinville. It was run for more than 50 years by the Newcomers Club, one of the oldest Black mutualaid groups in southwest Louisiana. I loved seeing the St. Martinville High band and majorettes, along with performances from other local schools. It was our whole community coming out to celebrate ourselves. It still makes me sad that the city doesn’t have the parade anymore. It really was something special.
Festival season meant heading to neighboring towns for the Sugarcane Festival, the Crawfish Festival, etc. Years later I tried to explain to a friend who was not from Louisiana about how our culture celebrated all the foods we ate! I remember taking graduation photos under the Evangeline Oak, and just recently saw my niece get married there. All those small traditions linger. St. Martinville definitely shaped me in those everyday moments, in family gatherings, in the music and food and the hot summer days that lingered.
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