About halfway into Wendy S. Walters’s new book, A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint (Scribner, 2026), the author writes about encountering a fellow writer at a literary festival who asks her what she was working on at the time. “White paint,” she tells him. And without knowing all the details of her project, he goes on to assume that Walters “must not hate it that much” because she was wearing a white blouse, and proceeds to point her to a wall that he mistakenly takes for white rather than beige.
The man’s comments read as openly derisive. And reflecting on that run-in, Walters explains that it was how people often responded when she told them about her project, which recently earned a spot on the National Book Award’s longlist for nonfiction. “Their reaction to the topic of white paint was characterized by a prickliness and, of course, doubt that it was a topic at all. But this was a strong reaction to have, I thought, if there was really nothing to it,” writes Walters, who is also a poet and an associate professor of nonfiction at Columbia University’s Writing Program of the School of the Arts.
But her instincts were right. And in the end, Walters has given us something wonderfully bold and free: a book that traces her relationship with white paint, the substance’s ubiquitousness in our daily life, and what she describes in her Author’s Note as the material’s “symbolic power.”
At the same time, A Dead White is a deep look into aesthetics, art, architecture, history, and people and places, and the ways in which they all relate. Weaving together these threads, Walters pulls off something difficult: She takes the obvious (that white paint is everywhere) and shows us that perhaps we should look more closely at what is obvious and question our choices and those that might have already been made for us.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Walters throughout the month of September over a shared Google Doc. We discussed a range of topics, including the influence of architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, genre, Walters’s research and writing process, and the influence of the industrial Midwest, where Walters grew up.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Rumpus: I found your book to be completely unique. It was about the color white, but it was also about so much more. Along with the main narrative thread, which is your coming to grips with just how much white paint there is in the world, there was also history and personal history and meditations on art and architecture. Can you take me through your process? When did you know this would come together as a book? Were you accumulating notes and thoughts towards one, or was it something more gradual?
Wendy S. Walters: Thank you for those kind words. The book started with a feeling of irritation while visiting my son’s school, one that was a new sensation. Immediately, it seemed that my concern was material. I knew that the paint on the wall was making me feel uneasy, but it took me a while to understand why this was so. The process of gathering details was definitely gradual. When I began writing, I thought the piece might be a lyric essay, and that’s what the first draft turned out to be (published in Full Bleed). But even in that early form, it seemed that the widespread use of white paint meant that its implications would be drawn from a much broader context. The thing I was not sure about was whether I could find a story amid those details.
Rumpus: Were you surprised at how much detail you found on the subject? Because part of the experience of reading the book is realizing that such a ubiquitous, everyday feature as white paint has actually had quite a history. But then you think, “Of course it has!” I’m curious what it felt like for you as the writer on that journey. And what, if anything, surprised you the most while researching and while writing?
Walters: I was most surprised to learn that I was not the only one who had strong feelings about white paint. Frank Lloyd Wright was strongly antagonistic about it. Le Corbusier seemed to love it with a similar intensity. In both men’s lives, such intense feelings led to interpersonal and professional conflicts. The fact that white paint could serve as a locus for tension was compelling for me on both an investigative and storytelling level.
Rumpus: Yes, it is definitely interesting that it has inspired such strong opinions over the years. Why do you think that is? What’s behind these feelings? Especially considering that for many folks, white paint, in the form of white walls and surfaces, seems like the default setting the world came with.
Walters: I’m curious about the idea of a “default setting the world came with.” Can you say more about that? But to your question, behind these strong feelings are other motivating feelings such as fear, doubt, or pain that have emerged from real conflicts. I am talking about big stuff like war or accidents or personal trauma—essentially “life or death” events. In the book, I make the case that the “neutral” is devised, perhaps intentionally, to hide unresolved issues from the past.
Rumpus: Yes, that was where I was going with that question. Not that it is default in any intrinsic way but that it has been positioned as “neutral” and placed in so many spaces that make up much of day-to-day life. But in reading your book, one realizes it is anything but neutral. And I’d like to talk about this, particularly in relation to its prevalence. Because when painting, I use white mostly to mix colors, to change tone or value. But on its own, out the tube, when used for something like a touch of light, very little can overwhelm and alter an image. But somehow, in our day to day, it is everywhere. How did we get here? And can you say more about this idea of it being devised as “neutral”? What’s behind it?
Walters: Part of what brought us to this point was an overreliance on the authority of key architects and designers, such as the aforementioned ones. But that’s not all of it. White paint’s widespread use manifests as a matter of habit for a lot of people, which was trickier to unpack. There are unconscious factors at play—such as fears about the past or anxieties about the future. I spend some time examining my own. The book is an invitation to engage with white paint’s history and context in order to understand how our engagement with it reflects our values.
Rumpus: Yes, I can definitely see how habit plays into this. Can you say more on what made that tricky to unpack? Was it while writing or researching, or both?
Walters: A habit is a tendency that is hard to give up. It is a practice of engaging with the world that seems customary or proper, though perhaps only because we have done it repeatedly. We develop our habits through a mix of impulses and instincts, which lead us to a simplified understanding of behavior. Habits are personal, but they can seem intuitive. When we internalize them, they can seem to be universal. They can distort our perspective. This is what makes them tricky.
Rumpus: Yeah that’s an interesting space, how something personal can seem universal, and vice versa. This might be a good place to talk about the current moment. Because to some extent, white paint rose to its current prominence during what we classify as the modern age. Is that an accurate reading? And we now live in a different time that seems to be defined by colors and tones that rose up in the 2010s and on, and around Millennial adulthood, from “greige” to gray and muted tones. And this book really felt like an exploration of our surroundings, of being in touch and questioning how everything relates. And I am curious how you would consider these newer color trends that have taken hold and what they might signal. Can their prevalence be seen as a response to white? Are they just trends? Or do you see a break with the color white?
Walters: It’s a good question—but I do want to be clear that my argument is about white paint, not the color white. I’ve focused on a specific substance because its application is physical and not abstract. My discoveries about it are rooted in actual spaces and objects that are also material. With that in mind, there is still a lot of white paint to reckon with, especially in institutional and commercial spaces. I’ve not yet noticed a break with it. That said, I appreciate the unusual tones of the Millenial palette, though I think every generation shapes their own color trends.
Rumpus: Yes, the distinction is important. And I enjoyed how you focused less on the abstract and more on the material ways that it shows up in our lives. I want to loop back and ask you more about the writing process. You mentioned earlier that at one point you were unsure if there was a story amid all the details. I would love to hear more about that, about how the book took shape. Was there a particular moment, or moments, when you began to feel the story emerge?
Walters: Because the book began as an essay, it initially was compiled associatively, as a kind of lyrical, annotated list. But this structure didn’t really make sense for a longer work, so I needed to think about how its progression might develop. I have always been an admirer of literary arguments such as Milton’s “Areopagitica” (1644), which criticizes the King’s authority over what can be printed in a press and David Walker’s “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World” (1829), which advocates for the end of slavery. Both essays follow a passionate logic, one that is uncompromising and sincere, though neither adheres to any set form. In my affection for these works and other works of dramatic persuasion, I realized that it was important to try to shape the project according to an increasing sense of seriousness about the consequences of using white paint. What I mean is that there was a point in my research when I had to acknowledge that violence is also a part of the story. Without giving too much away, the story of the book began to emerge when I realized that I could not leave those details out.
Rumpus: Can you say more about this idea of a “passionate logic?” I like the term. It makes me think of something that follows its own course, which is something I felt when reading the book. It was a refreshing and brave approach, and it calls to mind something you mentioned in a conversation with the Michigan Quarterly Review about how a lot of your work “comes more from the impulse than the desire to place it.” You were mostly speaking about your poetry and lyric essays. And you also posed the question: “What if there is no genre?” To what extent, if any, did you feel when writing A Dead White that this book resisted categorization?
Walters: For me, a “passionate logic” is the kind of discourse that is as much embedded in facts as it is in feeling. Feelings drive the speaker’s initial pursuit of perspective, even though facts may ultimately have more of an impact on what is discovered. As for genre, I think that a discussion of genre has been beneficial for the project of teaching literature, but I am not entirely sure that it serves the art of writing in the same way. Now that this book is done, I see it falling squarely within the genre of nonfiction. But nonfiction is a capacious category. So much of what might have first been called nonfiction was treatises, recipes, rulebooks, manifestos, detailed descriptions without any action, and arguments. Many of these works were expressive opportunities for the writer to meander and speculate. Sometimes historical context was offered, but not to the extent that we might expect it today. The voice of the writer had to convey a sense of urgency about the concerns. Genre is a way to organize a reader’s expectations in their era, I guess.
Rumpus: Speaking of perspective, I wanted to end by discussing something that was mentioned briefly in our emails. I understand you are from the Detroit area, and something I am curious about as someone who grew up not far from there, is in what ways you feel having lived in the industrial Midwest might have influenced your perspective and approach when writing—both in a general sense and also specifically with this book, which deals directly with aesthetics, sensibilities, and the way the world around us has been built up.
Walters: I’m immensely grateful for having grown up in the industrial Midwest. There’s definitely a view of the world that comes from living in proximity to factories. One point of reference I took from my experiences there was an awareness of how committed to work most people were. I also learned how much they wanted the accomplishments of their labor to be reflected in their personal lives. People displayed a sense of style that was earned. This meant that they often collected new things—curtains, sofas, tableware—when they could afford it. In the backdrop, white walls provided a visual boundary between one’s worklife and homelife. It made sense that people needed a boundary between the factory and home. But perhaps that’s not all those white walls did. Maybe they also distorted our expectations of what “the good life” should (or could) look like.
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