At the tail end of 2017, The Believer went to Wordstock, Portland, Oregon’s literary festival. This was a year the U.S. president called the press “the enemy of the people”; his administration forbade the Centers for Disease Control from using the words evidence-based and science-based (alongside transgender and vulnerable); and fake news became popular for despots worldwide. (“There is no such thing as Rohingya,” said a Burmese security officer in relation to the people there who are undergoing genocide. “It is fake news.”) This got us thinking about facts and truth and the literary imagination. This can be an exhausting topic, one that tips quickly into maddening vagaries. So we thought we’d get super specific. We asked a variety of writers—two poets, a songwriter, a literary journalist, an essayist, and a novelist—to discuss a fact that appears in their work. We took it from there.

—Joshua Wolf Shenk

MORGAN PARKER

MORGAN PARKER: A fact? I have many facts.

THE BELIEVER: Yeah, we want to identify a fact from your work to begin the conversation and we’ll take it off from there.

MP: A fact. Like, a conclusion? Like, a statistic?

BLVR: I could tell you more about what I mean. But I’m curious—what is a fact to you?

MP: OK, it’s poems, so all the facts are also not. A fact is: I came up with the title of my book [There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé] in the bathtub. That’s a fact—a true fact. A fact is: I wrote this book with Beyoncé’s name in it and no poems are about Beyoncé. That’s a true thing. I don’t know. Like an objective fact? I don’t know, man. Facts almost don’t even enter the realm of poems.

BLVR: It’s not a category you think about very much.

MP: Not really, and honestly, when I teach, I tell students—I talk a lot about emotional truth, so often the thing that feels most true isn’t the fact of what happened. I almost distrust fact and these long-held, I don’t know, structures and institutions, I guess. Part of my project is to make my own myths. It’s a lot of rewriting and reimagining. Because I always say the craziest thing about the transatlantic slave trade is that so much history was lost. Names, birthdays, every/any kind of fact—I was never afforded that, you know, historically. Facts are white. It almost feels like facts don’t belong to me. So people of color created their own myths. We don’t have facts, so we’re making it up. Also, because nothing is true, because nothing has been written down, then everything is true. If I say it, then it becomes a...