Kerry James Marshall: "The Paintings Nobody Else Is Making"

 

[Every so often, a work of art emerges that raises controversy because it depicts a subject that is significant to a particular group of people, but does so in a way that causes consternation or even anger.  Often the artist is from a part of the population that’s different from the engaged group.  

[Kerry James Marshall is African American and a painter.  He paints history—the history of his people in America, from slavery to today, and of the Africans from which he and they descended. 

[But Marshall’s art is not always celebratory.  There’s no Washington Crossing the Delaware (Emanuel Leutze, 1851) or Declaration of Independence (John Trumbull. 1818).

[As my subtitle above states, in a quotation from the artist himself, he paints what no one else will.  (I suspect very strongly that his is the very kind of art that would exercise Donald Trump and his guardians of the image of America the Good.)

[Fortunately for America and the world, the current exhibition of Marshall’s work that’s the center of the report below isn’t in a gallery over which 45/47 has any say.  (It’s at London’s Royal Academy of Art.) For it’s just the kind of art Americans and people around the world should—indeed, must—see from time to time.  It tells the truth.

[I quote a statement made by none other than George Bernard Shaw:

The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but it is absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.]

“FACT, FICTION AND FANTASY IN PAINTING BLACK HISTORY”
by Aruna D’Souza

[The article below ran in the New York Times on 27 September 2025 (section C (“Arts”).  It was posted to the Times website as “Kerry James Marshall on Making ‘the Paintings Nobody Else Is Making’” on 25 September and updated on 26 September.]

The day before his survey exhibition “The Histories” opened to the public — his largest presentation of work in Europe, with more than 70 works made over four and a half decades — Kerry James Marshall sat in one of the soaring picture galleries of the Royal Academy of Art [London, 20 September 2025-18 January 2026].

On the walls were his newest paintings, from the series “Africa Revisited” [created over the past two years], several of which focus on the considerable role African elites played in capturing and selling other Africans to European slave traders. It is a subject that has been widely written about by historians, but has rarely, if ever, been broached in the visual arts.

After days of showing collectors and V.I.P.s through the show — “doing the necessaries,” as he put it — Marshall, 69, was feeling good. “This body of work really represents a high-water mark,” he told me. “I’m pouring everything — the accumulated knowledge, the ability, all of that stuff — into these pictures.”

He created the new series over the past two years. “Abduction of Olaudah and His Sister” [2023] shows figures in a forest — not, as one might expect, heroically self-emancipating, but rather being kidnapped by an African man to be sold to Europeans. It is based on a 1789 account by Olaudah Equiano [ca. 1745-97; The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published by the author, 1789], who after years of enslavement, played a key role in the British abolition movement.

“Six for One” [2024] depicts a village celebrating after closing a deal — a half dozen human beings for a horse that sits, stiff and wooden, like a Trojan gift. A triptych — “Outbound” [2023], “Haul” [2024] and “Cove” [2025] — shows Black figures in boats, rowing to and from unseen European vessels waiting offshore. In “Outbound,” a totem of figures — bound male captive, child and sea gull — teeters precariously. In “Haul,” an ebony-skinned woman lounges on a bag of cowrie shells, surrounded by luxury objects — an ornate clock, some porcelain, an empty, gilded picture frame, a blond wig with a gold tiara.

[A cowrie is a sea snail, the durable, glossy, and egg-shaped shells of which have held profound cultural, economic, and spiritual significance for centuries in societies across Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The shells are used in rituals such as divination, as adornment, and as currency. In modern contexts, particularly for the Black community, cowries symbolize a connection to African heritage, resilience, and cultural memory.]

The series also includes two pictures of Africa’s “white queens,” the European women who married independence leaders — Colette Hubert [1925-2019], who wed the first president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor [1906-2001; President of Senegal: 1960-80], and Ruth Williams [Ruth Williams Khama; 1923-2002], who wed the man who would become the first president of Botswana, Seretse Khama [1921-80; President of Botswana: 1966-80]. They are two of only a handful of non-Black figures that Marshall has depicted in his career, and their presence here suggests that African sovereignty from colonization was never as complete as some would like to think [White Queens of Africa: Colette (2025) and White Queens of Africa: Ruth (2024)].

The series is pure Kerry James Marshall, a painter who has spent his career depicting all facets of history, with little regard for mythologizing or uplift. “I’m not a romanticist about anything — I’ve seen too much for those fantasies about any kind of perfect Edenic past to be relevant to me,” he said.

“These paintings are not unique just because they’re about Africans, but because there’s complexity in the way we are being asked to think about and understand that history,” he added. “I am always trying to make the pictures that nobody else is making.”

In opening remarks at the exhibition, the curator Mark Godfrey [b. 1973] commented, “They are complex. I think they’ll be controversial.”

Marshall disagreed with Godfrey’s characterization, however. “If you start thinking that they’ll be controversial ahead of time then you’ve already shut off a part of your attention to what’s really going on in the work,” he said. “I don’t understand why anybody would think these would be hard to digest or hard to encounter. The history is what it is.”

I asked, “Are there risks in presenting these events, which have long been used as ammunition by those wanting to play down or even absolve European and American culpability in the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, at this historical juncture?”

He responded, “Only if I was telling a lie.”

The artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer Arthur Jafa [b. 1960] has been one of Marshall’s longtime interlocutors — the two met in their 20s. When Jafa did cinematography for the film “Daughters of the Dust” (Kino International, 1991), directed by Julie Dash [b. 1952], who was then his wife [m. 1983-93], he brought in Marshall as production designer. (Marshall’s wife, the actor Cheryl Lynn Bruce [b. ca. 1949?; m. 1989], played one of the lead roles.) “I always like to say that one of the superpowers of Black people is our ability to see the thing as it is, not as we wish it to be,” Jafa said in a recent interview. “Kerry knows this fundamentally.”

Marshall has been recognized as a generational talent. Born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1955, he moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was 8 years old, eventually studying art at the Otis Art Institute [1918-77] (renamed the Otis College of Art and Design [in 1993]). He received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1997, participated in the Venice Biennale (2003 and 2015), and in 2016 broke a record at auction for a living African American artist when his painting “Past Times” [1997] was purchased by Sean Combs [b. 1969] for $21 million [worth $28.4 million in 2025]. (The piece, which was sold by the scandal-plagued music mogul to a private collector recently, according to Marshall’s longtime gallerist Jack Shainman [Jack Shainman Gallery; Manhattan locations: TriBeCa and Chelsea], is included in “The Histories.”)

The New York Times’s chief art critic Holland Cotter [b. 1947; NYT staff since 1998], in his review of Marshall’s 2016 retrospective [on tour from April 2016 through July 2017], “Mastry,” called the artist “one of the great history painters of our time [“The Listings: Art,” New York Times 4 Nov. 2016, Section C:15].” Tackling the genre — considered the most important form of painting by the European art institutions that held sway until the later 19th century — was always his goal ever since his first visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when he was 10, Marshall said.

That ambition — along with his pursuit of figurative painting at a time when the mainstream art world was insisting on conceptualism, photography and video — put Marshall out of sync with many of his white peers and art critics in the 1980s and 1990s. His continuing engagement with Western art was also at odds with the Black Arts Movement, whose adherents were turning to African traditions to make overtly political paintings that sought to celebrate and inspire their communities.

[The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was a Black nationalist cultural movement active from approximately 1965 to 1975. Often described as the “aesthetic and spiritual sister” of the Black Power movement and an expansion of the accomplishments of artists of the Harlem Renaissance (1918 - mid-1930s), its participants used art to promote Black self-determination and create work that was for, by, and about Black people. BAM encompassed a wide variety of arts, including poetry, drama, visual art, and music.]

But as Marshall explained it, he has always seen his purpose as to make paintings centering Black subjects that could compete with the best that the art in museums has to offer, so good that viewers couldn’t look away. “If I’m going to be a self-styled, so-called history painter, then I want to do all the things that history painters had always set themselves to do,” he said during our conversation.

At the museum, the “Africa Revisited” series is shown alongside works that focus on Black life. But Marshall draws on that same canon for his compositions, poses, and techniques — and folds in much else besides, including Kongo [people of the Central African coast in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Angola, and Gabon] nkisi nkondi (power figures), Haitian Voodoo and Yoruba [inhabitants of parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo] religious symbols, street signs, record album covers, Disney cartoons and all manner of pop cultural references. He paints on PVC sheets whose smoothness mimics the wooden panels of early Renaissance painting, or on unstretched linen canvases hung from grommets. He uses acrylic paint instead of oil, though, and incorporates craft-store glitter as a stand-in for the gilding found in medieval and Byzantine religious icons.

According to Jafa, Marshall’s work is not a critique of what the canon leaves out. “It’s not a protest,” he said. “He’s engaged with short-circuiting ideas of who Black people are, and what we’re capable of, and what we’re thinking.”

In the Royal Academy’s galleries, we see Marshall tackle such topics as the Middle Passage; the rebels, artists and activists who fought for freedom from enslavement; the civil rights movement; the history of American public housing projects like the one he grew up in; the Black Power movement; and more besides. But he approaches his subjects obliquely, and without ever making spectacle out of suffering.

[The Middle Passage was the second leg of the Atlantic slave trade in which millions of Africans sold for enslavement were forcibly transported from Africa to the Americas as part of the Triangular Trade of slavery. The first leg was from Europe to Africa: European countries sent manufactured goods, such as textiles, rum, and firearms, to Africa to be traded for enslaved Africans. The third leg was the Americas to Europe: The Americas provided raw materials like sugar, cotton, tobacco, and molasses to Europe.]

“In almost all the pictures I do, you have to reckon with the fact that the figures have agency,” he said. “That’s a foundational principle that I work with.”

Harriet Tubman [1822?-1913; born into slavery; escaped in 1849; abolitionist and social activist; conductor on the Underground Railroad] is shown not as a fierce abolitionist but as a woman in love, embraced by her husband [John Tubman, free man; ca. 1820-67; m. 1844; div. 1851] in “Still-life With Wedding Portrait,” from 2015. In a 2011 picture, Nat Turner [1800-31; enslaved carpenter and preacher; led  four-day rebellion in Virginia in August 1831; hanged, 11 November], celebrated for his short-lived 1831 slave rebellion, is shown with bloody ax in hand, the head of the man who claimed to own him [Joseph Travis, ca. 1790-1831] lying on a bed in the background, leaving the viewer to decide if he’s as heroic as Caravaggio’s [1571-1610] David dangling the head of Goliath, or [Artemisia] Gentileschi’s [(1563-1639] Judith decapitating Holofernes, or a mere murderer.

[David with the Head of Goliath (1610?); Judith Slaying Holofernes  (1610)]

He approached the Middle Passage in a series of works that allude to the horrors that Black people experienced on or in water. “Gulf Stream” (2003), a seemingly breezy scene of people out on a pleasure cruise, is based on a Winslow Homer [1836-1910] painting of a Black man whose sinking boat is being circled by sharks [The Gulf Stream, 1899]. In “Great America” (1994), four Black figures squeeze into a boat about to enter a carnival ride: another figure bobs in the water nearby. But this is no Tunnel of Love: The composition suggests John Singleton Copley’s [American; 1738-1815] “Watson and the Shark” (1778) — an episode in the life of an English teenager, Brook Watson [1735-1807], whose leg was bitten off in Havana Bay [14 July 1749] and would go on to become a banker, politician and staunch defender of Britain’s role in the slave trade.

All of Marshall’s pictures are the result of his research into the historical record mixed up with other, often anachronistic, details, like Easter eggs hidden in the plot.

“My view of how history works is that it’s always part fact, part fiction, part fantasy,” he said. “If you look through these paintings, there’s a little bit of the discrepancy between what could have been real and actual, and the way it could be imagined.”

Marshall shies away from interviews these days. “The work should always precede the artist,” he explained. “If one spends the time and looks at the work closely enough, there’s nothing that’s not available.”

He has never made looking easy, though. Throughout his career, Marshall has used different devices, including layering of imagery, a multiplicity of details, and the use of monochrome to make his paintings hard to see without sustained attention. “Black Painting” (2003) is a prime example. Only after your eyes adjust to the subtle variations of tone can you discern figures in a bedroom, recalling the moment before the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton [1948-69] was killed by the police in 1969 [4 December], when he was just 21.

[The Black Panther Party was a revolutionary Black Power political organization founded in 1966 in Oakland, California. Drawing on Marxist ideology, the BPP advocated for class struggle and its practices involved armed self-defense against police brutality, paired with extensive community service programs. The BPP disbanded in 1982.

[Fred Hampton was shot in his bed by Chicago police working under the auspices of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office during a pre-dawn raid on his apartment on 4 December 1969. Fellow Black Panther Mark Clark (1947-69) was also killed, and four others were wounded. The raid was conducted in coordination with the FBI, which had identified Hampton as a radical threat. In January 1970, the Cook County Coroner held an inquest; the coroner’s jury concluded that Hampton’s and Clark’s deaths were justifiable homicides.]

The “Africa Revisited” series of works departs from his earlier work dramatically — instead of layered or dark, these are bright, vivid and almost crystalline. “I’m distilling the image to what I think are the most necessary elements of the picture,” he said. “I’m looking to not have any loose ends anywhere in there, not only loose ends relative to the subject matter, but loose ends relative to the construction of the space that they are occupying.”

Marshall’s commitment to getting it right is precisely what allows him to tackle the subjects he does, the Chicago-based artist Amanda Williams [b. 1974] said. “Only Kerry can bring this conversation — this confrontation with our own past — to us Black diasporic people,” she wrote in an email. “I will receive it from him in a way I might resist it from others. I know he’s done his homework — he always has.”

[Aruna D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art, intersectional feminisms, and diasporic aesthetics.  Her work appears regularly in the New York Times, 4Columns, Art in America, the Wall Street Journal, Art News, Bookforum, CNN.com, and in numerous artist’s monographs and exhibition catalogues.  She’s recognized for her incisive commentary on how art institutions and exhibitions address—or fail to address—systemic issues.

[D'Souza is the author of several books, including: Imperfect Solidarities (Columbia University Press, 2024), which critiques empathy in art and advocates for radical solidarity through engagement with contemporary art; Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited, 2018), which was named one of the best art books of the year by the New York Times; and Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint (Penn State University Press, 2008).

[D'Souza holds a Ph.D. in art history from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.  She has held academic positions at institutions like the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at George Washington University, both in Washington, D.C.]

'The Life of a Book'

by Jessica Luck and Laura Lemon 

From the initial concept to the bound volume, a book’s journey is shaped by many hands.

[This article was published in W&L: The Washington and Lee Magazine v. 101, no. 1 (Spring 2025) and posted on the magazine’s website on 22 July 2025.  (W&L is the alumni magazine of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia—my undergraduate alma mater.  The university is 276 years old—older than the United States itself [249 years]—and it happens that my first semester there began 60 years ago this month.)

[Readers will note that this is not a process description of the publication of one specific book, but a collection of the profiles of six of the professionals who guide a typical book through that process from conception to delivery to bookstores. 

[Since this is the publication for W&L grads, it may not surprise ROTters to find that each of the specialists in the process is an alumna/us of the university (all of them from long after I left Lexington!).  Obviously, every book goes through different versions of the steps limned here, but they all navigate a path like this prototype.

[I’m not intending to spotlight my own college’s accomplishments—though that may be the effect.  I just thought that the system outlined below would be interesting to readers of Rick On Theater.]

Every book begins the same way: from a flash of inspiration. As it moves through the world of imagination, a team of creatives brings the final idea into existence. Once it takes shape, readers are allowed windows into other worlds that offer new perspectives – and leave an indelible mark on their lives.

THE WRITER – REBECCA MAKKAI ’99

Author of five novels [The Borrower (Penguin Books, 2011); The Hundred-Year House (Penguin Books, 2014); The Great Believers (Penguin Books, 2018); I Have Some Questions for You (Viking, 2023)] and numerous short stories [Music for Wartime: Stories (Penguin Books, 2015)]; teacher of graduate fiction at Middlebury College, Northwestern University and the Bennington College Writing Seminars; artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago.

[nb: Makkai’s published only four novels (not five), plus one collection of short stories. There are also additional stories in anthologies of the work of several artists, and Makkai stories published in magazines and other outlets.]

One of the things Rebecca Makkai ’99 enjoys most about being a fiction writer is the freedom of invention. She gets the opportunity to travel to any time and place and to experience them through her characters. And the required research is part of the fun. She recently ordered a slew of Vogue magazines from 1938 on eBay to ensure the outfits she chose for a character in her current novel are historically accurate.

“I get to live in whatever world I choose,” Makkai says. “When you write a short story, it’s a place you’re visiting for a little while. But when you write a novel, you’re going to live in this world for years.”

Five years, in Makkai’s case. The first year is spent marinating on the concept and turning over ideas in her head. That way, she’s mentally worked through things before she commits anything to paper. After she’s about one-third of the way done with the book, she’ll write an outline to make sure she has a roadmap as she finishes writing, which takes about three years total. Surprisingly, she says her favorite part of the process is editing. She spends around a year copyediting what she’s written and focusing on structure.

“As a writer, you get to ask yourself: ‘What do I want to have happen? Do I want it to be funny? Do I want it to be sad? What do I feel today?’” she says. “It’s a lot of pure freedom and invention.”

Makkai says many of her works are preoccupied with the passage — and layering — of time. Her 2018 novel, “The Great Believers,” which was named one of The New York Times’ Best Books of the 21st Century and was a finalist for both the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the 2018 National Book Award, jumps back and forth between contemporary Paris and 1980s and ’90s Chicago, portraying love and loss during the AIDS epidemic.

“I think that if I ever wrote a book that could not get you in a fight in your book club, I would have failed in some way,” she says.

One of the great things about writing is its interiority, Makkai says — the ability to understand what another person is thinking.

“We see again and again the failure of empathy in our society, in politics, in policy and in the world,” she says. “Fiction is one of the only things that can really take you at great length into the thought process of someone else.”

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THE EDITOR – PRANAB MAN SINGH ’05 

Co-founder of Quixote’s Cove bookshop and Satori Centre for the Arts [Patan, Nepal]; assistant editor and translator with La.Lit literary magazine; visiting professor at Kathmandu University Department of Art + Design [Patan].

An accounting and philosophy double major from Kathmandu, Nepal, Pranab Man Singh ’05 says his view of the United States had largely been shaped by Hollywood before he came to Washington and Lee University. He started college the same year as 9/11, and conversations in and out of the classroom after the event helped him appreciate the rich and complex history of the U.S.

“It really made me realize how much our present lives are tied to the histories and past lives of other people and generations and how important it is for these stories to be shared,” he says.

After graduating, Singh knew he wanted to return to Kathmandu to start his own business, just as the country was coming out of a decade-long civil insurgency and was in the process of writing a new constitution. He opened an independent bookstore, Quixote’s Cove, and through the store he founded a literary magazine, La.Lit, which started publishing books from the community of writers with whom the store worked.

[Known as the Maoist insurgency, the conflict between the Communist Party of Nepal and the monarchy lasted from 1996 to 2006.  It ended with the abolition of the Nepalese monarchy and the establishment of a democratic republic.] 

“We had a young population and educational levels were increasing, and there was a lot of curiosity among people to learn about the world and our role in it,” Singh says. “The bookshop was an opportunity to engage in those conversations.”

Quixote’s Cove worked with the U.S. State Department during the Barack Obama administration to bring American artists, writers and poets to Nepal to share ideas and facilitate engagement through the arts. This resulted in the establishment of the nonprofit Satori Centre for the Arts, which managed the U.S. Embassy’s Book Bus program until 2023, and ran mobile libraries across Nepal.

Safu, which means “books” in Nepal Bhasa, is the publishing imprint for Quixote’s Cove. As a small independent publisher, it works with writers, poets, illustrators, artists, editors and translators to produce books in multiple languages that capture diverse voices and experiences.

Singh works as both an editor and translator and sees them as relationship-building opportunities. He’s edited everything from reports to fiction novels to memoirs.

“Normally, as an editor, you get to know the writer through the editorial process and can build trust and familiarity with them,” he says.

“It is necessary for you to put on their shoes and see the world as they do and understand what they are trying to say. A good editor can help a writer come to clarity of thought. On the other hand, the act of translating something is to dwell in the mind of the writer — it requires empathy and an attempt to embody the writer. Since Nepal is a multilingual country — we have over 128 different languages — we have always been keen on bringing out the richness of ideas that this offers and placing them in conversation with the world.”

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THE AGENT – CHANDLER WICKERS ’18

Associate agent at the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency Inc. [New York City]; works with more than 100 authors in all stages of the publishing journey; freelance copywriter and marketing content writer; former freelance film and TV critic.

By happenstance, Chandler Wickers ’18 assumed the role of literary agent during her final group simulation project for the Columbia Publishing Course [Columbia School of Journalism program to prepare students for entry-level jobs in publishing]. As a newly minted W&L grad hoping to pursue a writing career in New York City, she had enrolled in the six-week intensive course covering all aspects of book, magazine and digital media publishing. Through a random assignment in her group of 10, where each person played a different part in the industry, she found the job that captured the relationship to writing she wanted.

“In editorial, you’re reading and copyediting; you’re really deep in the material all day. I wanted to be a little bit more zoomed out,” she says.

“That’s why an agency appealed to me; it’s really the business side of publishing. You’re not only working editorially with authors and helping them get their proposals ready for submission, but you’re also handling their contracts. You’re working on their film deals and publishing deals. I wanted something that’s a little bit more business-oriented and less just editorial-minded.”

She achieved her hope of working with words in 2021 when she landed a gig at Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency Inc., after first getting a job in marketing at an advertising agency and then a financial planning startup. She immediately felt a connection to the Krichevsky agency because it represented one of her heroes, New York Times bestselling author Sebastian Junger and filmmaker, who also directed her favorite documentaries, “Restrepo” [National Geographic Entertainment, 2010] and “Korengal” [Gold Crest Films and Outpost Films, 2014].

Based in San Fransisco, Wickers works with more than 100 authors, such as Ashlee Vance — who wrote “When the Heavens Went on Sale” [Ecco, 2023] and is currently writing a book on OpenAI [no title yet; expected in 2026; UK publisher is Headline Publishing Group, but U.S. publisher has not been announced] — and Leander Schaerlaeckens, a sports reporter who’s writing a book about the history of U.S. men’s soccer [The Long Game; Viking, due on 12 May 2026]. All the authors on her long list dwell in various stages of the literary journey — from manuscripts and proposals, to drafts in editors’ hands, to published works, to screen adaptations, to new ideas haphazardly jotted down on paper. And as the life cycle of the book continues to evolve, Wickers’ role as the agent remains steadfast.

“You’re advocating for the author at every stage,” she explains, “and making sure that their work is valued. . . . I really like that — I like being the first touch point.

“Books and reading offer a powerful way to exercise our imagination and critical thinking, which I believe are precious resources for understanding and connecting with each other. These skills feel more essential than ever in an age where technology risks eroding them. I was fortunate to study under incredible professors at W&L who instilled in me a deep love for storytelling, and I’m truly grateful to work in an industry that preserves and celebrates the written word.”

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THE PUBLICIST – CRAIG BURKE ’93

Vice president and associate publisher at Berkley/Penguin Random House; oversees publicity campaigns for the entire Berkley list, including bestselling author Emily Henry [writer of books containing elements of the rom-com and chick lit genres; all Henry's adult romance books—she also writes young adult novels—have been optioned for screen adaptations], among others.

Craig Burke ’93 had a clear idea of his career path until he fell in love — with book publishing. As a journalism and French double major, he thought his next step would likely be in broadcast journalism once he moved to New York City. But after someone at W&L’s Career and Professional Development Office suggested Burke submit his resume to a job fair in New York that included book publishers, Burke realized what a perfect fit that field was. At W&L, he served as the publicity chair of the Generals Activities Board and helped bring bands like Blues Traveler to campus while also promoting events among the W&L community.

Six weeks before graduation, a recruiter from the job fair told Burke he was perfect for a publicity assistant role at Random House and that there were two openings at different imprints: one at Ballantine and the other at Knopf. He ultimately chose Knopf, which had published one of his favorite books — Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” [Alfred A. Knopf, 1992].

Burke worked his way up the publicity ladder and joined Berkley as an associate publicist after a few years at Knopf. Now serving as vice president and associate publisher at Berkley/Penguin Random House, Burke oversees publicity campaigns for the company’s entire roster, including bestselling authors Emily Henry, William Gibson, Grady Hendrix and Carley Fortune. Berkley’s expertise centers on women’s fiction, romance, science fiction/fantasy and mystery/suspense.

“What’s not to love about a job that lets me read books and then spend most of my time trying to convince other people why they should read the books that I love or discover the authors that I really admire?” Burke says.

“What makes my job so fabulous is the people I interact with, from the authors, to their agents, to the media folks that I’m pitching, to my colleagues. I work with intelligent, witty, sharp, fascinating people who are up for talking about books and pop culture and what’s going on in the world.”

Depending on the book, Burke will get involved as early as the editing stage to start planning the publicity campaign. Sometimes he can tell from the title alone what the promotional hook will be, as with Henry’s “Beach Read” [Berkley, 2020]. Beyond pitches and press releases, Burke has accompanied authors on press tours, including traveling with musician Ricky Martin for his appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

When not reading for work, Burke is often drawn to commercial fiction, whether that means romance, thrillers or fantasy.

“It’s the best escape money can buy,” he says. “I firmly believe that reading any kind of fiction, whether it’s commercial or literary, improves your ability to be empathetic and understand where people are coming from.”

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THE LAWYER – GRAY COLEMAN ’79

Partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP [headquartered in Seattle, Washington]; named one of The Hollywood Reporter’s 25 Most Powerful Entertainment Lawyers in New York; represents estates and heirs of Harper Lee, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lindsay and Crouse, Thomas Meehan and Agatha Christie, among others.

Traditional artistic channels never unveiled hidden talent within Gray Coleman ’79, so, he jokes, he set his sights on law school. After double majoring in history and English at Washington and Lee University, he arrived at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1980, hoping to benefit from the field’s reputation of versatility. To his delight, he did.

“Lawyers are the ultimate chameleons,” says Coleman. “They take their color from the rocks you put them on, and I was looking for this real colorful rock to sit on.”

As a lifelong theater-lover, he moved to the artistic hotbed of New York City, and after working for Wall Street firm White & Case LLP for a couple years, Coleman found his colorful geode in entertainment law. As a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, he represents producers for theatrical productions such as “Tootsie” [2018; Broadway: 2019] “Mean Girls” [2017; Broadway: 2018] and “The Color Purple” [2004; Broadway: 2005]; he serves as outside general counsel for institutional theaters such as the Public Theater (New York), the Goodman Theatre (Chicago) and the National Theatre of Great Britain; and he works with authors and owners of literary and intellectual properties.

“We lawyers are the historical memory,” Coleman says. “We keep the agreements; we keep the history.”

For close to 10 years, he’s represented the estate of Harper Lee, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of “To Kill a Mockingbird” [Lippincott, 1960]. He has served as outside general counsel for the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate for over two decades and has worked on behalf of Agatha Christie’s heirs. He also acts as trustee for the estates of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, one of American theater’s most durable partnerships (the pair wrote the libretto for “Anything Goes” in 1934 and then “The Sound of Music” 25 years later [1959]), and Thomas Meehan, book writer for “Annie” [1976; Broadway: 1977] and co-book writer of “The Producers” [2001] and “Hairspray” [2002; Broadway: 2003]

“The star of the show in my world is the property itself,” Coleman says. “I’m acting for clients, or, if I’m the trustee, my job is to look after the property and try to maximize income and avoid tarnishment for the benefit of the beneficiaries. But, in a way, I think of ‘The Sound of Music’ as my client. I think of ‘Annie’ as my client. When I make decisions, I make them for the welfare of those children.”

From working on the legalities of turning literary works into stage productions to handling the licensing of famed properties to representing theater houses, Coleman has relished a life in the arts.

“If I had had some creative talent, maybe I would have taken a different path,” Coleman says. “But I wanted proximity to the creative arts, and I found a way into it.”

---

THE TEACHER – MARSHALL BOSWELL ’88

Professor of English at Rhodes College [Memphis, Tennessee] teaching 20th- and 21st-century American literature and fiction writing; author of literary studies [Understanding David Foster Wallace (University of South Carolina Press, 2009); John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy (University of Missouri Press, 2001)], articles and two works of fiction [Trouble with Girls: Stories (Delta, 2004); Alternative Atlanta (Delacorte Press, 2005)]; 2002 winner of the Clarence Day Award for Outstanding Teaching [for full-time Rhodes faculty members who have taught at least three years at the college].

When Marshall Boswell ’88 was considering colleges, his father, James M. Boswell Sr. ’57, tried to nudge him toward W&L. But the university’s all-male student body made it a no-go. Once his dad showed him a Ring-Tum Phi article that reported the W&L Board of Trustees had voted to admit women, Boswell did an about-face.

“I went to W&L and had a life-changing experience,” he says. “They are still the four years of my life I would relive if I had a time machine.”

Boswell found a litany of mentors in the English Department, but it was professor of English Jim Boatwright who made one of the earliest impacts. In Boatwright’s Introduction to Fiction Writing class, they read “A&P,” a short story by John Updike [1961, New Yorker; Pigeon Feathers, Alfred A. Knopf, 1961] about a young man working at a grocery store. Boswell’s father worked his entire career for Kroger [national supermarket and department store chain], and Boswell spent the summers delivering Pepsi to grocery stores and other shops.

[When I was in Lexington in the second half of the 1960s, Kroger was the one and only supermarket in town; I don’t know if that was still true twenty years later. ~Rick]

“The fact that a famous writer from New York would write so eloquently about the grocery store, which was a place of such significance to me, was a revelation,” Boswell says. “It felt like my brain had been hacked in a really wonderful way.”

After getting his bachelor’s degree in English with a concentration in creative writing, he went on to get his master’s in English from Washington University [St. Louis, Missouri] and his Ph.D. in 20th-century American literature from Emory University [Atlanta, Georgia]. A professor of English at Rhodes since 1996, he teaches courses in 20th- and 21st-century American literature and fiction writing. He encourages his students to “get under the hood” of a story, to really understand what the writer is trying to do.

“There’s a kind of playful creativity to the way I approach teaching literature and a scholarly expertise that I bring to creative writing,” he says. Although his path ultimately led to teaching, Boswell is an author in his own right; he’s published full-length studies of Updike and David Foster Wallace, as well as short stories and a novel. And he still remembers the moment he realized he was a first-time published author — in a short story collection. He was so proud he didn’t want to put the book down and laid it on the passenger seat of his 1988 green Saab 900 and drove to the grocery store. After shopping, there was his book, waiting for him.

“Writing is the best way that we can take the mess in our brains and give it shape and form,” Boswell says. “It’s not a reflection of what we think, it’s the product of thinking. When you’re writing something down, you’re discovering what it is that was there. Writing brings it into existence.”

[Below is a list of some of the prominent and successful writers who studied at Washington and Lee University.  I’ve only included the prose writers of fiction and non-fiction, not the several poets and numerous journalists who came out of the school, and I’ve also restricted myself to students (W&L was a men’s college until 1985), not listing the faculty who had writing careers.

 •   William Alexander Caruthers (Washington College, 1817-20; did not graduate): A 19th-century novelist known for works like The Kentuckian in New York (Harper and Brothers, 1834). 

•   Harvey Fergusson (1911): An early 20th-century author, he is noted for his autobiography, Home in the West (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1945). 

•   Tom Robbins (1950-52): A novelist known for works like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Houghton Mifflin, 1976; adapted as a film in 1993), Robbins attended Washington and Lee for two years before moving to New York to pursue writing.

•   Tom Wolfe (’51): An author and journalist, Wolfe was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement.  His famous works include The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968) and The Bonfire of the Vanities (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987).

•   Philippe Labro (1954-55): A French writer, journalist, and film director who spent his freshman year at Washington and Lee.  He wrote about his year there in his novel The Foreign Student (Random House, 1988; L’Étudiant étranger [Gallimard, 1986]).  He received the Prix Interallié, an annual French literary award for a novel written by a journalist, for the autobiographical novel.  (The Foreign Student was filmed in 1994.)

•   Jerry Hopkins (’57): A journalist and author, Hopkins worked for Rolling Stone magazine and wrote biographies of figures such as Jim Morrison (No One Here Gets Out Alive [with Danny Sugerman; Warner Books, 1980]) and Elvis Presley (Elvis: A Biography [Simon and Schuster, 1971]).

•   Terry Brooks (’69 Law): A best-selling fantasy author, Brooks is known for his Shannara series (Original Shannara Trilogy: The Sword of Shannara [Random House, 1977], The Elfstones of Shannara [Ballantine Books, 1982], The Wishsong of Shannara [Ballantine Books, 1985]; there are 33 follow-up novels and 8 related books).  He attended the university's law school.

•   Mark Richard (’86): An author who won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award.

•   Rebecca Makkai (’99): The author of novels and short stories (see partial list above), Makkai's work The Great Believers was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. 

[Readers will notice that the first name on the list graduated from Washington College rather than W&LU.  The school was established in 1749 as Augusta Academy and then in 1776, changed its name to Liberty Hall Academy.  In 1796, in gratitude for the $20,000 endowment, at the time one of the largest gifts ever given to an educational institution in the United States, made by George Washington, the trustees changed the school’s name to Washington Academy, and in 1813 it was chartered as Washington College.

[After the Civil War, in the fall of 1865, Robert E. Lee accepted an offer to become president of Washington College.  Lee died in 1870 and the college’s name was again changed, to Washington and Lee University in his honor.]

'Rebel With a Clause'

 

[As readers can see from the headline below, this post is about—wait for it—grammar.  (Actually, it’s about a grammarian and a documentary film about her.) 

[ROTters will know that I have been a writing teacher and that in this blog, I have posted many articles about writing and writing mavens.  I haven’t posted much about grammar per se, but that’s part and parcel of writing—knowing and properly using grammar.

[I first taught writing in the mid-1980s.  I was a doctoral student hired to teach a required undergraduate writing course.  When I grew up, in the Eisenhower ’50s, we still learned grammar, syntax, the parts of speech, and spelling and how to parse a sentence and diagram it.

[I was chagrined to find that none of my students knew English grammar.  Clearly, learning grammar had been deemed old-fashioned in the decades between my high school graduation in 1965 and the years my undergrads finished their secondary education. 

[I wasn’t so much disturbed because my writing students didn’t know the grammatical conventions I’d had to learn.  I discovered, though, that I couldn’t discuss with the tyro writers what the problems they were having communicating in writing were without using the grammatical terms that were the jargon of writers and writing.  I had to start teaching grammar (sort of surreptitiously) so my students and I would have a common language when we talked about their writing.] 

“GRAMMARIANS GATHER TO CELEBRATE AN AMBASSADOR”
by Katherine Rosman 

[This report ran in the New York Times on 9 March 2025, in the “Metropolitan” section.  It was posted on the Times website as “Grammar Fans Flock to a Film About Participles and Gerunds” on 6 March and updated on 8 March.]

At the New York premiere of “Rebel With a Clause,” there was a shared love of language.

Jennifer Griffin stood outside a movie theater on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, waving to a friend.

“I’m here with all the other dorks!” she called out, using a prepositional phrase to get the attention of Lisa Kuklinski. Soon, they were joined by Miranda Schwartz, a copy editor [a person who revises or corrects a manuscript, text, etc., for publication, especially to find and correct errors in style, punctuation, and grammar] who was wearing a shirt that read “I’m Silently Correcting Your Grammar.” Notably, the message lacked a punctuation mark at the end.

The women are members of a group chat in which they text each other about the words they find in the New York Times Spelling Bee game. This was their girls’ night out. “When you find someone as nerdy as you are about the Oxford comma,” said Ms. Kuklinski, an actuary, “you find you have plenty of other things in common.”

They were attending the first New York screening of “Rebel With a Clause,” a new documentary about a woman who set up a “grammar table” in all 50 states for passers-by to stop and ask her about punctuation and past participles.

The film’s star, Ellen Jovin, schleps her table from Maine to Hawaii and each state in between, dispensing lessons that are precise but not pedantic, engaging in the sort of face-to-face conversations with strangers that are so absent from quotidian contemporary life.

At the screening this week, more than 450 grammar aficionados (the median age hovered in the early-AARP-membership range) came to celebrate “Rebel With a Clause,” which was directed by Ms. Jovin’s husband, Brandt Johnson.

[AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, is a U.S. interest group that focuses on issues affecting Americans 50 years old and older.

[Rebel With a Clause was produced by Syntaxis Productions (a communication skills training firm, cofounded in 2007 by Johnson and Jovin) and released in the United States on 8 February 2025. It runs 1:26 (86 minutes).]

Before and after the screening, filmgoers bantered about whether to place a comma after the penultimate item in a list [i.e., the Oxford comma], discussed the appropriate usage of “lie” and “lay” and united in a shared reverence for language, ideas and the grammatical rules designed to give clarity to free expression.

[The decision whether to use the Oxford comma (also called the ‘serial comma’ or the ‘Harvard comma’) and the difference between ‘lie’ and ‘lay’ aren't matters of grammar, strictly speaking.

[Using or omitting the Oxford comma and resolving the ambiguities both choices can engender is a question of rhetorical style, which is concerned with the clarity, logic, and precision of effective communication.

[The ‘lie’/’lay’ confusion is a matter of diction, the selection of precise, appropriate, and effective words to convey a message, influence tone, and suit a specific audience.

[Style, diction, grammar, and other elements of good writing (and speaking) are coequal, but separate.  Though Jovin and the others in this article, as well as the one posted below, have been labeled ‘grammarians,’ but they clearly arbitrate questions in all areas of good writing and speaking.]

Ms. Jovin greeted the audience members and directed them to stacks of worksheets with the “Nonmandatory Grammar Quiz” she had created. (Sample question: “What is the square root of the number of letters in the part of speech that ‘punctiliousness’ is?”)

[‘Punctiliousness’ is a noun, which has four letters. The square root of 4 is 2.  (That is, 4 is the product of 2 multiplied by itself, i.e., 2 x 2 = 4.)

[Curiously, if you answered that ‘punctiliousness’ is a substantive (11 letters) or a nominal (7 letters), you’d be correct.  The math, however, would be complicated, since neither 11 nor 7 has a whole-number square root. In fact, neither is even a rational number, since the decimal fraction that results never ends!]

She was wearing a shirt with rhinestones that spelled out “Grammar Is Groovy,” which she had ordered online at the last minute. “All of my other grammar clothes are not dressy enough,” she said.

A writer and writing instructor who has studied about 25 languages, Ms. Jovin first set out her grammar table on the streets of New York in 2018. Since then, she has written a book, also called “Rebel With a Clause,” which was published in 2022 [Mariner Books].

Mr. Johnson, a 6-foot-6 former pro basketball player and communication skills consultant, loomed amid the crowd. He said that as he witnessed the “humor and humanity” at the grammar table, he was moved to capture it on film. “I saw the fun and the connections,” he said. “It felt like just a beautiful thing that I wanted to share with the world.”

The theater filled up with strangers and friends. Lloyd Rotker and his wife, Judith, had once seen Ms. Jovin speak at a library. “I’m very concerned about grammar,” Mr. Rotker said. “As we lose interest and skills in grammar, we lose clarity in language and eventually in thought.”

Ms. Rotker said she was not as grammatically attuned as her husband, but that he did not often correct her. “That’s why we’re still married,” he said. She nodded. (Their 51st anniversary is later this month.)

Sitting near the front of the theater were Janice and Korey Klostermeier, former neighbors of Ms. Jovin and Mr. Johnson. They had flown in from Miami Beach.

“I love good ol’ grammar,” said Ms. Klostermeier, who quickly added, “That’s O-L-apostrophe.”

The joy among the grammar lovers was occasionally tempered by worry over word choice.

“Can I sneak by?” Taylor Mali, a poet, asked the people sitting on an aisle as he slid past them toward a seat in the center of their row.

“You may,” one of them answered.

[‘Can’/’may’ is a matter of diction again.]

Mr. Mali sighed as he recounted the exchange. “Of all the places,” he said, his head hung low.

The movie opens with an animated discussion in Decatur, Ala., between Ms. Jovin and two men who may or may not have spent a few hours in a bar before sidling up to her grammar table. They wanted her to weigh in on the proper placement of the apostrophe in “y’all.”

The film then takes viewers on Ms. Jovin’s road trip to Detroit; Salt Lake City; Little Rock, Ark.; and beyond. She and Mr. Johnson set up a table covered with dictionaries and usage manuals, and wait for questions.

The action is breezy and lighthearted. At several moments, the audience burst into laughter. When Ms. Jovin professed her love for diagraming sentences, the crowd erupted in applause.

The film also offers instances of surprise, even for some who consider themselves grammatically sharp. On several occasions, Ms. Jovin clarifies a misconception about ending a sentence with a preposition.

To do so is actually perfectly correct, Ms. Jovin explains. “It is a grammatical myth that made its way into English via Latin, but English is a Germanic language,” she tells one table visitor who responds with a delighted “Shut up!”

[I started studying Latin in 8th grade and then learned German some years later. I decided that English grammar had so many exceptions because the Latin grammar system that was being applied to English was being forced on a Germanic language just didn’t quite fit. There were bits left over—so . . . exceptions.]

Audience members filtered into the lobby afterward, checking for news on their phones. While they were watching a film centered on language and civil discussion, President Trump was delivering a sometimes inflaming speech to Congress, during which he faced politicians protesting silently with signs, others groaning and booing, and a heckler, Representative Al Green [D-Texas], who was tossed out.

[Representative Green was removed from the House of Representatives chamber for heckling Trump during his address to a joint session of Congress on 4 March 2025 (the day of the screening). He was later formally censured by the House on 6 March.]

The timeliness of the film’s message was not lost on Kathryn Szoka, who co-owns Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

“She is talking to people, including many who probably have very different views from her own,” Ms. Szoka said of Ms. Jovin. “These are respectful and engaging conversations around our shared values and serve as an illustration of how art and language bring us together.”

[Katherine Rosman covers newsmakers, power players, and individuals making an imprint on New York City for the New York Times.  She joined the Times in 2014 and spent years writing for the Styles section, as well as for the Business pages and Culture desk.  She has also helped cover behind-the-scenes dynamics at the N.F.L.

[In the past year, Rosman has helped report on the tensions playing out in New York City, as they connect to the Israel-Hamas war.  She’s written about James Dolan, owner of Madison Square Garden and the Knicks and one of the most vilified people in New York, and has chronicled free-speech issues at universities.  Rosman has recounted a fight between billionaire Ray Dalio, a hedge fund founder, and millionaire Federico Pignatelli, an Italian prince and owner of Pier59 Studios, over a SoHo pergola and has detailed the end of Geraldo Rivera’s career at Fox News as she tagged along on a boat trip he and his brother took on the Erie Canal.

[Before moving to the Times, Rosman was a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal for a decade.  She’s the author of a memoir about her mother, If You Knew Suzy (Harper, 2010).]

*  *  *  *
“FILMMAKER BRANDT JOHNSON AND
GRAMMAR GURU ELLEN JOVIN
CHAT ABOUT REBEL WITH A CLAUSE, A NEW DOCU-COMEDY
ABOUT ELLEN’S POP-UP GRAMMAR ADVICE STAND
ON A ROAD TRIP ACROSS AMERICA”
by Russell Harper

[The transcript of the conversation below was posted on CMOS Shop Talk (a website of The Chicago Manual of Style, one of the U.S.’s most widely used-style guides) on 25 February 2025.]

Brandt Johnson and Ellen Jovin are cofounders of Syntaxis, a communication skills training firm based in New York City. Ellen, an internationally acclaimed grammar and language expert, is the itinerant grammarian behind the Grammar Table, an informal pop-up advice stand that she launched in 2018 in Manhattan and has since taken to every state in the US. Brandt is the director of the new documentary film Rebel with a Clause. Before this project, he wrote and produced several plays and was the writer, director, and star of Brad Advice, a comedy web series.

Rebel with a Clause follows the adventures of Ellen’s Grammar Table and will have its New York City premiere on March 4 at the SVA [School of Visual Arts] Theatre in Manhattan. A book with the same title was published in 2022. The film is the subject of this exclusive interview with Shop Talk editor Russell Harper.

[The world premiere of the documentary Rebel With a Clause was on 10 January 2025 in Washington, D.C. at the Planet Word Museum, a language arts museum. Following that, the film had a New York City premiere on 4 March 2025, for National Grammar Day.]

Russell: Thank you, Ellen and Brandt, for making a pit stop to talk about this new documentary. Ellen, when CMOS interviewed you in 2022 about your book—which is also called Rebel with a Clause—the film was in postproduction. Or is it a movie?

Ellen: We are glad to be here, Russell—thank you. Either “film” or “movie” is fine. But the film is all Brandt’s doing; I stuck to conjugating things.

Brandt: It’s great to talk to you again, Russell! You can also call it a docu-comedy. It is, above all, meant to entertain.

Russell: Great to talk to both of you again—and to get an opportunity to learn more about your docu-comedy film/movie, which takes us on the road with the Grammar Table. You’ve now been to all fifty states with your grammar advice stand. Do you ever get tired, Ellen, of talking to strangers about grammar?

Ellen: Never. I’d already been talking about grammar for decades when the Grammar Table came into being. I will talk about grammar anytime, anywhere. I guess one thing I might get slightly tired of is people monologuing to me about how no one cares about grammar while I am literally sitting at a grammar advice stand that thousands of people have come up to of their own free will.

Russell: What about you, Brandt? Are you a grammar person also, or is that all Ellen?

Brandt: Ellen put me in the index [to her Grammar Table book] under apostrophes. That’s all I’m going to say.

Ellen: Yeah! The entry is “apostrophes, husband who knows how to use.” Brandt is totally grammarous. He even won the English award in his high school. He is also the one who more than thirty years ago taught me that not everyone pronounces “stalk” and “stock” the same way, which was total news to me. I didn’t believe him and had to go look it up.

Russell: I’ll remember that the next time I need celery stalks for my soup stock. So, which came first, the movie or the book? And did you have an idea of either one the first time you walked out the door and set up the Grammar Table?

Ellen: Absolutely not. I was in search of hedonistic grammar fun. I wanted to spend less time on the computer talking about grammar and more time in the open air talking about grammar. Even though I’d been trying to think of a good angle for a grammar book, for some reason the table didn’t occur to me as a book topic. It wasn’t until table visitors started saying “You should write a book about this!” that it bonked me in the head.

Brandt: When Ellen started out with the Grammar Table, I definitely wasn’t thinking of a movie. But after many hours observing what was happening at the table, just outside our building in New York, I really wanted to share it with a larger audience. I began filming less than three months after the start of the Grammar Table.

Ellen: And then I actually put Brandt’s plan to make a movie in my book proposal.

Russell: How did you pick the locations for the Grammar Table?

Ellen: In New York there are good locations everywhere. Above all, the Grammar Table needs foot traffic. The express subway stop at 72nd and Broadway was perfect, so that’s where I usually went at the beginning.

Brandt: Outside New York, we had to work harder to find pedestrians.

Ellen: The first task was to pick cities. Sometimes weather determined the city. For example, in Ohio we were planning to go to Cleveland, but it was raining, so we went to Toledo instead.

Brandt: In cities we didn’t know, we’d sometimes expect a spot was going to be just right for filming and then arrive and discover it wasn’t great after all. And we were also expelled from a few places. So then I’d maybe have to go off and look for another spot while Ellen stayed with the equipment, table, grammar books, and so on.

Ellen: Preferably in a nice café with excellent cappuccino.

Russell: Once you were set up and ready to film, did the presence of cameras—not to mention of Brandt himself (you played basketball against the Harlem Globetrotters, and you’re about six and a half feet tall, right?)—make it harder to get people to engage and be themselves?

Brandt: I think I look very friendly.

Ellen: Usually that’s true.

Brandt: And I don’t think people minded the camera, or me, very much. The volume of visitors didn’t change after I started filming. It stayed just as high. I had been worried about that—that having cameras would scare people off or alter the conversations—but mostly people seemed just as happy to talk about grammar with cameras as without.

Ellen: Yeah, and you might even have given me an air of professional legitimacy. I looked official with cameras around.

Russell: You’re certainly both Grammar Table pros by now. By the way, thank you for sharing a preview of your movie with me. The book may have the advantage when it comes to all the typographic details, but nothing beats watching it play out in real life. All those spontaneous conversations in the public square about apostrophes and spaces and past participles (not to mention Dutch and French and Tagalog [a language spoken in the Philippines; pronounced tuh-GAH-log]) are often funny and even moving. And the scenery—mountains, haystacks, beaches—also plays a big role. Did you intend from the beginning to make a portrait of America and not just a movie about grammar?

Brandt: It was important to me to let the story emerge as we experienced this road trip and as I edited the film. My intentions at the beginning of all of this were flexible. The US landscape made itself a central part of the story.

Ellen: Brandt is really observant about physical space. He spent hours getting B-roll of things I never noticed. I like seeing beautiful places too, but I’m not observant and can easily get lost just finding my way back from the bathroom.

[B-roll is supplemental or secondary video footage that’s used to enrich the main video (A-roll). It’s what viewers see when the narrator or character keeps speaking, but the visuals cut away to something else—like scenery, hands at work, product close-ups, or contextual action.]

Russell: I remember Brandt running out to get B-roll way back in Providence [in 2019, when I met Brandt and Ellen at the ACES [American Copy Editors Society] conference for copyeditors [sic], where CMOS also had a table]. Is this it for the Grammar Table, or will you be returning to the road at some point?

Ellen: I still go out with the Grammar Table! I love going out with the Grammar Table. My new dream is to get a grammarmobile, just to make roaming around the country a bit easier. We’re car-free Manhattanites.

Brandt: I plan to keep filming as we go around the country screening Rebel with a Clause. I already have my eye on a new camera.

Russell: How can others see Rebel with a Clause, and do you have any plans for a follow-up?

Brandt: We are screening the film in person and virtually for organizations around the country, we’re going to be showing it at festivals, and we are constantly adding new dates on our website.

Ellen: People can sign up for our mailing list if they want to be alerted about screenings. Also on our website is a form you can fill out to bring the film to your organization. We are even going to be showing the film at a boat club soon!

Russell: Will the movie be available for streaming?

Brandt: We don’t have any details about that yet, but we’ll announce them on our website as soon as we do.

Russell: In other words, be sure to check out rebelwithaclause.com for details and updates. In the meantime, thank you so much, Brandt and Ellen, for talking about your film.

Brandt: Thank you, Russell. Don’t forget that you are in the film, in footage from that ACES conference.

Russell: My first cameo! And here you are, almost six years later, with a book and a documentary that brings it all to life. I hope you and the Grammar Table will be around for a long time to come.

Ellen: There’s an awful lot of grammar left to discuss.

[Russell Harper is the editor of The Chicago Manual of Style Online Q&A and was the principal reviser of the 16th, 17th, and 18th editions of The Chicago Manual of Style.  He also contributed to the 8th and 9th editions of Kate L. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.

Here’s a list of the posts on Rick On Theater that are about writing in some aspect or another.  As I said above, most only touch briefly on grammar specifically, but it’s always there in the background. 

    •  “Writing,” 9 April 2010
•  “‘GHOTI’” by Ben Zimmer, 7 December 2011
•  “Why Write?” 4 March 2013
•  “Words on Words,” 1 February 2014
•  “Four Worthies” by Kirk Woodward, 5 January 2016
•  “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In,” 28 July 2015
•  “More Words on Words,” 8 June 2016
•  “Nominalization” by Henry Hitchings, 25 January 2017
•  “Verbification,” 12 August 2018
•  “How I Write,” 25 February 2022
•  “Peter Elbow and Freewriting,” 12 March 2025
•  “Bad Writing,” Parts 1-5, 19, 22, 25, 28, and 31 May 2025
•  “Punctuation” by Sarah Boxer, 29 June 2025
•  “New Word Coinages” by Madison Malone Kircher and Callie Holtermann, 29 July 2025 

[There are also several posts on tangential subjects, including writers, playwriting, reviewing and topics less obviously connected to writing—but ROTters will have to seek those out for themselves.]