From September to November 2023, November presented a series of conversations at Karma Bookstore. The series opened with Rachel Tashjian, fashion critic for The Washington Post, and concluded with musician Devonté Hynes, known for his work as Blood Orange. In between, choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones, writer Sara Marcus, actor Michael Imperioli, and filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri joined to share their work, processes, and parts of their lives.

“I wore a skirt that’s made of old quilts, a tweed blazer,” Tashjian told November’s founder and publisher Emmanuel Olunkwa, recalling the outfit she chose to interview Ralph Lauren. On the day of the interview, she paced Madison Avenue, rehearsing her questions in a casual tone. Still, she explained, her best interviews often abandon preparation entirely: “to follow the thread of where the person is going.”

That kind of intuitive pivot aligns with Ishmael Houston-Jones’s choreographic method, which he estimates is 90% improvised. In conversation with writer and longtime friend Christine Pichini, Jones recalled struggling to remember steps as a young dancer. “I was always the person in the back trying to learn it as everybody else is playing across the floor,” he said. Improvisation became his strength and eventually his technique. The key, he added, is structure. “‘Bad’ improvisation has to do with lacking a sense of time.”

From the not-knowing of choreography to the not-knowing of academic research, November editor Dawn Chan spoke with Sara Marcus about her most recent book Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis (2023). Chan noted the timeliness of Marcus’s subject, but Marcus resisted the term. Timeliness, for her, is only a starting point to examine a longer arc of political non-fulfillment in the 20th century. The kinds of questions she asks—like whether there’s a way forward after a century of leftist political disappointment—require decades to answer. “This is why I went into the academy instead of writing quick takes,” she said. “I’m not great at just hazarding a guess. I feel more comfortable digging into an archive and having a slow take.”

In his conversation with writer Ryan Mangione, actor Michael Imperioli sifted through his personal literary archive: Candide and The Catcher in the Rye are his lodestars. Best known for his role on The Sopranos, Imperioli is also the author of the 2018 novel The Perfume Burned His Eyes, which he describes as tracing “lineages of artistic inspiration.” The novel follows a teenage boy who moves into the same building as Lou Reed—who was a real-life friend of Imperioli’s. “[The protagonist] learns through Lou that the creative act, whatever shape it might take, is this ballast that can help carry him through his own suffering.”

“Working on the film was the most miserable experience of my life,” filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri told curator Drew Sawyer. His documentary Two Refusals, part of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition Here the Earth Grows Gold, contends with Portugal’s colonial history in India’s Goa region. To make sense of that misery, Sanzgiri turns to Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology. “I take that quite literally to understand the inconsistent histories of Afro-Asianism and struggle and resistance, the weight of the past, the weight of 450 years of colonialism.” That haunting extended into the process of making the film. “I would wake up in a cold sweat many, many nights.” The central question that emerged: What if this world didn’t have to be the world? That question propelled his research into Afro-Asian solidarity and his family’s history, even as he acknowledged that “avant-garde film won’t change the world.”

Still, Sanzgiri keeps making films. That impulse to keep creating resonated with Devonté Hynes, who closed out the series in conversation with Olunkwa. “When I make music, it’s scratching an itch and comes from a very personal place,” he said. Hynes shared memories of niche scenes from London nightlife, like his time at After School club, where he met Florence Welch and Adele. He spoke with ease about his many collaborations—with Solange Knowles, Caroline Polachek, Theophilus London, and Ariel Rechtshaid—describing a sense of rightness, of things falling into place. “I don’t know the destination,” Hynes said. “I’m just moving.”