Here is a sign that you’ve become a person of consequence: you’re standing in line at a coffee shop, waiting to pay for your drink, when one of the baristas recognizes you and declares her love for you by using your Twitter name. Instead of backing away slowly in alarm, you respond with perfect poise, “Thank you! That’s so sweet!”
In her scholarly research, Ewing studies how and why the city’s inequalities came to be. On Twitter, she asks her followers directly how those inequalities have affected their lives. And in her art, she imagines how things could be different. In the introduction to Electric Arches, she compares this process to how, when she was a little girl, she was only allowed to ride her bike up and down a single block so her mother could keep an eye on her. The street wasn’t a good place for a child to play: the cement was cracked, and the neighborhood was full of gangs. But Ewing didn’t feel constrained, either by geography or her circumstances; in her mind, she was free to have glorious adventures wherever and whenever she wanted. (In those days, she signed all her schoolwork “Eve .L. Ewing,” and now she uses her middle initial as an homage to her younger self.)
“Eve is the kind of person who has a lot of clarity about her work,” says Julie Fain, Haymarket’s cofounder and editor. “She knows it very well. She knows what she’s trying to do and say. The book has struck a nerve in the way she’s been able to bring the personal into the political and have fun with it while being incredibly serious.”
“I figured it out in broad strokes,” she says. “I’m always discovering new and terrible things about schools. It’s bad. But I’ve also been discovering new and wonderful things about schools. There’s a lot of resilience and creativity. That’s part of being in Chicago.”
By Eve L. Ewing (Haymarket)
