Brian Evenson

At the Academy, Evenson will continue work on “Handbook for a Future Revolution,” a novel about the collision of Mormon ideas and ideals with European culture, about schizophrenia, violence, and notions of personal and cultural responsibility. Expanding on the themes of his 2005 novel The Open Curtain, Evenson’s project grapples with the following questions: “How do we as humans negotiate a gap between reality and our perception of it?”, “How does religion sometimes encourage us to ignore or mistreat mental illness?”, and “What do we do when our various cultural models of what the world should be and our perception of the way the world actually is come into collision?” Evenson first traveled to Berlin in his teens to visit his grandparents, who were Mormon genealogical missionaries assigned to help people investigate their ancestry (his grandfather had learned German in the 1930s, when he was a missionary, and experienced the rise of the Third Reich). While in Berlin, Evenson plans to explore a similarly formative experience in his main character’s past. “Interactions with other artists and scholars have been incredibly important for my work,” he writes, “from a poet’s mention of a Norwegian word (which led to Windeye) to a historian’s reference to an obscure early twentieth-century murder (which prompted The Open Curtain), to a musician introducing me to the one-handed piano pieces Paul Wittgenstein commissioned from Hindemith (which figure in Last Days).”