Joy, with Ross Gay
About the Guest
Ross Gay is the New York Times bestselling author of the essay collections The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy and four books of poetry. His Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Be Holding won the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. Gay is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Indiana University. Learn more at www.rossgay.net.
Best Books
Inciting Joy: Essays, by Ross Gay.
Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West 67th Street, Manhattan, by Darrell Pickney.
The Red Coal, by Gerald Stern.
Transcript
ROSS GAY: Joy is something like what we feel like when we help each other carry our sorrows, what we feel like when we sort of realize we're practicing our entanglement, our belonging to one another.
BLAIR HODGES: So one day I get this message from my good friend Steven Peck. He says "You've gotta read this book of essays by Ross Gay called Inciting Joy. You should try to interview him.
So I got a copy of the book, but not because I really wanted to read about joy. In fact I kind of didn't want to read about joy. There's so much going on right now that joy might feel impossible, or at least kind of self-indulgent. But I started reading it anyway. And as I read, Ross Gay changed my thinking about joy altogether. He joins us to talk about Inciting Joy in this episode of Fireside with Blair Hodges.
Defining joy – 01:05
BLAIR HODGES: Ross Gay, welcome to Fireside with Blair Hodges. It's nice to see you.
ROSS GAY: Yeah. Good to be with you.
BLAIR HODGES: I want to start with this question. Are you really bored by now when people ask you to justify writing about joy right now?
ROSS GAY: I don't know if I'm bored. I don't know if “bored” would be the word. I'm maybe curious, but maybe bored a little bit. But more like, curious and maybe a little sad, actually. Yeah. [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, tell me about that! Because I assume you get this question a lot.
ROSS GAY: Yeah. Or like there's that sensibility, a little bit, which can sometimes be in the air—obviously, if people are like, interested in my book, mostly they're not going that way. But the sadness is because it's sort of like—it suggests that this question of joy, which I have kind of a complex definition of, which is something like—you know, in the book I say “joy is something like what we feel like when we help each other carry our sorrows.” But even then, over the months I've been putting maybe a finer point on it: what we feel like when we sort of realize we're practicing our entanglement, our belonging to one another. When you think of that as sort of joy, then it's like if people think of that as sort of superfluous, or silly or lightweight, or whatever the feeling can be, then that seems sad. Because it's really, it's just like, how do we practice caring about one another? You know?
BLAIR HODGES: Your book starts out with people responding to the idea of writing about joy, kind of, probably before they know what you mean by that. And you know, someone at a reading had said, “I didn't know you could write about joy.”
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Is that a common feeling among people going into creative writing? An idea that writing about joy might be superfluous? Or what do you think?
ROSS GAY: I think it must be because people have definitely over the years expressed a kind of relief or like, okay, so there's many ways to write about our lives. Or the way I think of it, it's like, oh, we can write about our whole lives. Which includes what is devastating, and includes what is incomprehensibly beautiful, you know, like, that those things don't have to be sort of separated out, and it's the most heart rending stuff that gets separated out. That's the stuff of poetry.
Yes, it is the stuff of poetry. And it's also the stuff of poetry along with the other stuff, you know? But I do feel like I've sort of witnessed that or been asked that enough times now, and also been kind of like, like I said, people have seemed sort of relieved to be like, “oh, yeah, okay. Okay. We can think very hard about this stuff.”
BLAIR HODGES: When I first saw the cover of your book, it's really bright. It has these beautiful bright pink flowers on it. And joy is this huge word on the front. And I'm thinking about joy off the cuff as just happiness. Just like being carefree.
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: That kind of stuff. And as you've already begun to describe, your view of joy is a lot more complicated than that. So how did you start thinking about joy kind of in this new way?
ROSS GAY: Well, I think I thought about it—you know, there's a Zadie Smith essay called "Joy" that I reference in the book where she talks about joy. I can't remember exactly how it is, I should go back and reread the essay, but it really mattered to me, and it was something about how joy and the intolerable are connected, you know? And that seemed right to me.
And then, you know, some of the Buddhist teachers that I would read, like Pema Chödrön and Chögyam Trungpa, [Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse] Rinpoche, like some of these other people who are, I don't know if they're using the word “joy,” probably they were. But this sort of understanding of like, the fullness of our existence, which is complicated and difficult and mysterious, and many, many things at once. I feel like other people were sort of being like, oh, yeah, this might be a way to sort of think about this feeling that is often maybe—it's a harder sell, actually.
And when I say it's a harder sell, it's harder to sell, you know? Because if you have this sort of, what I think of as like a grave emotion, meaning that it emerges at least in part from the fact that we are, in fact, on our way to the grave—as is everything that we love—that's a harder thing to be like, “oh, but if you get this really beautiful pair of roller-skates, maybe not!” [both laugh]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah, exactly! Well, I mean, you're pointing out in the introduction that it's a kid's fantasy that we can just have this joy that's disconnected from anything else, or that happiness exists as a thing we can strive toward. I don't know, if life was made up of just seeking that out, a lot of life would kind of be unendurable for a lot of people.
ROSS GAY: And you'd also have to neglect all of this connection. You'd have to—that's maybe it, you'd have to neglect or isolate yourself from all of this connection. Which is that you know, just like we are, our neighbors are heartbroken in some way, just like we are. If we have friends, our friends are heartbroken, not necessarily in a special way. Now, sometimes in like a special way. And to sort of like pursue this one mode of life, which is kind of life absent heartbreak, for instance, like, just sort of pursuing the thing that's gonna keep me away from the kind of this—actually what I think of as like a profoundly common-ing experience. Or what makes us familiar to one another if we sort of study it, you know, what makes us family, is that heartbreak, but not only heartbreak, you know?
That's sort of the thing, you know, I guess one of my own questions about the way I think about it is like, I think heartbreak is a profoundly common-ing thing. It's a thing that we can kind of be like, oh, you're hurting, I'm hurting. Let's figure out how to get together. But I also feel like, you know, this other thing, which is connected very much to heartbreak, or maybe infused with heartbreak, which is love. Like, oh, you love your garden? I love my garden. Let's talk, you know?
Complications of joy and sorrow – 06:56
BLAIR HODGES: Yes. It gets complicated. I was just talking to a friend last night about this. They lost a baby, and she's talking about how people kind of want to connect with her about that, but also seem to want to rush through what she's experiencing. Like, we want to make people feel better. And so they might say something consoling, like, “oh, I hope you can have another baby,” or “I'm really sorry that happened, I had a miscarriage,” and they'll kind of turn it back into a story about themselves.
What do you think about—because I'm with you on like this need to connect. I also am often tempted to see the need to connect but try to short circuit it and skip through it and cover up someone's heartache because I feel upset.
ROSS GAY: Oh, yeah, me too. I know it. I know it. I feel like you do. I feel like there are some people who are like—you know, whatever the word is, but maybe “courageous” is actually one of the words, who can just be with other people in their sorrow. I feel like that's a good practice to have, to be able to be like, “okay, I'm just gonna be with you, and maybe ask you what you need.” But I'm definitely not going to be like, “and now let's kind of move on.”
Because that I get, I totally understand what you're saying. Like, we're inclined to do that. You know, my partner and I were just having a conversation. We were talking about someone just had—their heart was broken, and it was like, that was some years ago, and it was like, that's not—you don't just get over it! [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: No!
ROSS GAY: Maybe you kind of assimilate that.
BLAIR HODGES: I think it’s that the world changes.
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Like what they experienced, and this loss was as tragic as it could be. Like the world, it is not the same world, a 24-hour period changed the world for them.
ROSS GAY: Exactly, exactly.
BLAIR HODGES: I found that part where you're talking about that essay, go to page four, I'll have you just—it'd be great to hear you read that first paragraph there. It kind of sums up a lot of what we're talking about right now.
ROSS GAY: But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but it's also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? Which is to say, what if joy needs sorrow, or what Zadie Smith in her essay “Joy” calls “the intolerable,” for its existence.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, if joy needs sorrow for its existence. And you go on to qualify this too, and I think this is a really important qualification because you're also not recommending people seek out sorrow and you're not glorifying heartbreak or pedestalizing it either.
ROSS GAY: Yeah, yeah, I'm just sort of like, that's just gonna happen. We got that! Like you know, we got that, we got it. Like, we all got it, especially if we sort of take a second to not rush by it, actually, it seems like that is this thing like, okay, we are in fact tethered together by this profoundly familiar, even though very different, experience of it, but profoundly familiar human experience, then that's a familiarity that seems to me often overlooked, or like eschewed you know? Because what happens when we sort of recognize that, like, what do we do?
BLAIR HODGES: I think sometimes we go to distraction. I feel like today, we could be eminently distracted today. The opportunities for distraction seem endless.
ROSS GAY: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I guess we've got to make choices all the time like, am I going to be distracted? Am I going to, you know, [laughs] watch some more Allen Iverson videos? This is my go to. Or am I going to try to be with this heartbreak, my heartbreak, or the heartbreak of someone who I love or something? Which is also to say, or am I going to just try to be with myself, you know, be with who I love, which is not only the heartbreak but also like the delight and the wonder.
What incites joy and what does joy incite? – 11:03
BLAIR HODGES: Your book is guided by these two big questions. You're asking what incites joy? Like kind of what makes it happen, what makes it run, what fuels it? And also asking, what does joy incite? Like what does it create? What does it propel? How did you arrive at these as the organizing questions, because each essay is an “incitement.” It focuses on a theme.
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: How did those two questions come about?
ROSS GAY: You know, it's funny. So after—I sort of alluded to this a little bit ago—after I wrote the book and had a time of, got it sort of out of me, I realized what I was sort of wondering about was trying to define the joy. And the definition that now I think of is how we practice being entangled with one another. So I want to just sort of know how we practice that. What are the practices we have by which we sort of recognize, oh, we are fundamentally wrapped up with each other, regardless of how we kind of gotta figure out what makes that work. And then when we practice those things, what does that make happen? I feel like I sort of—How did I come to that particular question? I don't know—
BLAIR HODGES: This is interesting, because it sounds like it didn't guide you from the beginning.
ROSS GAY: Yeah, I was sort of following this—there's a writer whose work I love named Saidiya Hartman. Her most recent book is called Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. And it's a really close examination of Black women from the 1890s to the 1940s in Philly and New York, and she's sort of observing, looking into archives, and she's crafting a kind of story of the imaginative lives—the lives these people have imagined, in a way, on behalf of us, like how a particular kind of living amidst profound sort of pressures, you know, violence, in the midst of that, what they were sort of imagining in order to live, how they had to sort of like, make this life, what you might call kind of anarchic or political or all these ways of living.
And I've heard her talk about it where she talks about description, like I'm describing something. And that feels like a guide to what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to describe what a pickup basketball court is like really closely. And in describing it, showing how a pickup basketball court is actually a place where, at its best, it's a perpetual negotiation for how we're going to be in this space together and keep this game going.
And it has all kinds of flavors, you know, but the goal of the thing is to keep this game going, you know? And some people might not know that, but some people might just be like, oh no, the point is to win, right? Actually, the point is to keep this game going, you know? And so every time a new team steps on the court, that's a new set of experiences, a new set of how the rules are, and because there are no refs, and there are no bosses saying and how you're gonna do it, every player kind of chips in to be like, okay, that's what a foul is, or that's how we're gonna play today or like, nope, I'm not playing like that, I'm gonna take the ball, go to the other side of the court, and we're gonna, like, delay this whole thing until we negotiate. [laughter]
Or like gardening is such an obvious kind of place to me. Where, you know, we're in the midst of sort of learning how to be with a kind of abundance, a kind of earthly abundance. The Earth is always sort of teaching us of abundance. And if we're listening to that at all, receiving the benevolence of the Earth, it might incline us to be like, "alright, let's share seeds. Like, let's share extra, you know, I got an extra potato, let's share some potatoes, the garlic crop was wild. Come on. It inclines us to do those things.
BLAIR HODGES: And your writing is so good to pull us into those stories. I haven't played pickup basketball for years. And I immediately recognize this community of like—one part that really stood out to me is where this same guy that's like, putting numbers on me in one game, he's like my mortal enemy, and then the next time up, we're on the same team all of a sudden.
ROSS GAY: Isn't it wild?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
ROSS GAY: And that teammate might be like—and you guys might have fought! You might have like, gotten into it the game before.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah!
ROSS GAY: And then two games later you're teammates, and you really might play good together. Like, you really might know how to feed this person, you know?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
ROSS GAY: And then you might end up like, you know, having a beer together afterwards. Or maybe not, but whatever. It is wild and beautiful. And it is actually the fundamental point of the game, I say. The point of the game is actually making the game go, you know.
BLAIR HODGES: There's so much more to basketball. I don't remember the name of the author, maybe you do, but he wrote about street ball, and he's a scholar—and part of it is about Chris Paul, and kind of these memorial games that people were playing. I didn't know this about Chris, but he played this memorial game right after his grandfather died, and just had like the game of his life. It was before he was in the NBA, before he was anybody, and he just talked about basketball as a way to grieve, and that these communities of players would come together and play these memorial games, almost as funeral celebrations. I had never encountered that. But it ties together so many themes in your book about like grieving and joy and sport and physical engagement and community. Yeah, it all just spins together. [Ed. note: The book is called Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball, by Onaje X. O. Woodbine.]
ROSS GAY: So beautiful. The book, I don't know that book, after you're gonna have to tell me what that is. But the book that I referenced in my book is John Edgar Wideman's book Hoop Roots, it's the most beautiful book about basketball—or sport maybe, it's one of my favorite books, period. He goes deep in sort of like describing the game, and these sorts of elements, these sorts of caretaking. And you know, and also elements of refusal of certain other elements of the culture that happen on the basketball court, you know?
Beginning with a father’s death – 16:56
BLAIR HODGES: So this gives people a sense of some of the “incitements,” the chapters in your book. The first one you bring up, though, after the introductory incitement, is about death. I thought that was a really striking way to begin a book about joy. And, you know, people have already got a sense of why you did that. But I wanted to talk a little bit about that essay. You could have chosen all kinds of things to begin with. I mean, like, you're a New York Times bestselling author, you could have written the first incitement on like, finding literary success! [laughter] So walk me through the decision to start with the death of your father?
ROSS GAY: Yeah, that's a good question. I think in a way, because of the definition of joy that I'm sort of thinking about, it almost felt rhetorical. It almost felt like I was making an argument through this book, because I wrote the essays, and then I started to arrange them, though it is the case that that was the first essay that I wrote.
In terms of arranging the book, it felt like I was sort of, by crafting an argument toward joy as being something that is a grave emotion, that is actually about the way we tend to one another in the midst of our sorrow, and as a consequence, probably doesn't exist absent sorrow, it felt like the book in a way had to model that belief or that understanding, and as a way to model that belief or understanding, the long essay about my dad's—the six months or so of his death, is the first essay you get to go with, and so we’re introduced with this thing of like, okay, so clearly, we're thinking about death right off the bat.
BLAIR HODGES: And you write about how you kind of had a difficult relationship with your father. And this is a theme that comes up a few times throughout the book. Maybe give people a sense of what that looked like for you.
ROSS GAY: Yeah, it was like, you know, it was kind of commonly difficult, like, we were so connected, we were so—there were times I was sure my life that my—what do you call like my—I knew what my dad was thinking precisely. And I was, you know, eight miles away and I was like “Uh oh!” [laughs]
We were so deeply connected. And you know, the way my mom reports it is like, you guys are kind of alike, both stubborn, both strong-willed, and both, you know, whatever, and et cetera, et cetera. And my dad's particular kind of, when he would say it, like heartbreaks or frailties were, I think, incomprehensible to me as heartbreaks or frailties, because I was a child. And at the time they just came off as arrogance, or, you know, the same stuff that probably you could say about me! [laughs] Or whatever, you know? And the older I get, the more I'm just like, I know that. Which also, you know, adds a little bit to the heartbreak, but also leads me—it's all part of the heartbreak, but it's like, oh, God, it'd be so fun to age with this dude, to be like, “Yo, you remember? Man, why’d you feel the need to do that?” Or for him to be like, “What were you up to when you—” [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah! What was really going on? I have things I'm going to ask my son, if I get the opportunity God-willing, like, I know exactly what you mean. And I see—I lost my dad when I was fifteen.
ROSS GAY: Ah yeah, man.
BLAIR HODGES: So like, I didn't get to have any kind of adult relationship with my father. And so reading about your ongoing one was really compelling to me. Because that is an experience I just won't ever have.
ROSS GAY: And was your relationship with your dad, like, by the time you were fifteen had gotten—because I think that's a normal thing. If you have a relationship with your folks that you have a—it turns complicated, or more complicated at some point as we get older, and whatever that can feel like. Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, mine kind of always was complicated. I have ADHD and so I was pretty rambunctious, and my father was really straight-laced and pretty serious. And I think he—it's hard to say this, but I think I kind of just seemed like a screw-up to him. I think if he could look in the future and see the kind of things I'm doing, he'd be like, “Him? This is the kid? Who is this?” [laughs]
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: So it was complicated. I felt like I let him down and like never got to rectify that at all.
ROSS GAY: Totally. Totally. Isn't it funny, like some of the stuff that my dad was worried about with me was that I was like, you know, a flake, or like I wasn't serious or whatever, all this stuff, and come to learn that—you know, from his relatives—like, he felt that way about himself.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, interesting.
ROSS GAY: And like, you know, to think of the ways—and I write about this a little bit, the ways that my father would have reacted to me in my 20s in my, you know, as I'm nineteen or something, not wanting to work sixty hours a week over the summer because I'm already working forty and I play football, so I'm training all the time, and like that kind of like losing it over that, you could kind of, you know, get a little older and be like “Ah, he just, he remembers some things that he maybe wishes he had done otherwise, or whatever,” he's kind of working that through.
BLAIR HODGES: You talked about becoming more soft hearted toward him, toward the end of his life. I don't remember if you say exactly how long ago he died.
ROSS GAY: 2004. Nearly twenty years ago.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay yeah. So how did that play out? Like, you seem to have developed a pretty good relationship with him by the end there.
ROSS GAY: Yeah, it seems, in a way—I mean, those last six months, or five months or whatever it was, it felt really sort of like a necessary gift, you know, to both of us that I could kind of just hang with him and like not—not that we, you know, I talk about this in the essay, we don't get into anything, we're not like, “Oh, you know!” [laughs] Like, we're just kind of—
BLAIR HODGES: Let's go through every problem and fix everything! [laughter]
ROSS GAY: Yeah. And we're just kind of hanging out, you know.
But I feel like there's was, I don't know—it's a mystery, you know, like, on some level I think like, “oh, yeah, we just get older.” And when we get older, sometimes we're like, “oh, yeah, these people are going to become who they're going to become,” like, as parents or, you know, and so maybe there's an element of that, just like losing the will to sort of impose what you think someone else ought to be.
Or maybe also being like, okay, you know, this kid's gonna be okay.
Or, also just like, as I think about myself, you know, now ten years younger than my dad was when he died, but I just think of like, I'm less inclined to impose my idea about what someone ought to be on them. Like, I'm less inclined to have that fight.
BLAIR HODGES: I feel like that too. Yeah. Like I've become a parent, and I just, it has given me a lot more, I think, grace toward what they were going through—
ROSS GAY: Grace.
BLAIR HODGES: It’s like, oh, wait, I totally—I have sometimes difficult—I have a son, I love him to death. He's almost eight years old. And he's a handful.
ROSS GAY: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: Probably just like me, I'm just looking at this relationship and like, “oh, I understand my dad so much more!” [laughs]
ROSS GAY: Totally! Totally. Yeah. You get older and probably there's like, worry, regret, nervousness, you know, just like seeing the future and you don't know what the future is. And you're like, man, you know, like, this kid, he doesn't want to work all the time! [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, exactly.
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah, I felt the same way. This isn't the only incitement to joy in the book that talks about death. The sixth one is about laughter, but it's also about death. And I noticed in the chapters about death is where I think we learn most about your parents.
ROSS GAY: Yeah. Isn't that interesting?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. I assume that wasn't deliberate. Because I think you were just sort of writing what came to you as you were writing. But did you notice that? The most detail, it seems, about your parents come in these chapters about death?
ROSS GAY: You're totally right. That was the laughter chapter, and then that's absolutely right. It's, I mean, maybe because my sort of strongest consideration of death has been around my father’s dying and my mother sort of living with his dying, maybe that's it. Because even when I think about the Time chapter, that is really sort of thinking hard about time, my mother working all the time as my father's dying, but it's about that. And the Grief chapter is very much about sort of trying to figure out how to be with my mother in the midst of her grief. And it goes deep into my father and my relationship with my father in there too. That's a really great point. I had not noticed that.
Biracial footnote – 25:07
BLAIR HODGES: There's a great footnote—And by the way, people should know, like, you're like the king of the footnote— [laughter] it's sort of like David Foster Wallace style, seven page long footnotes, which I very much like—But there's this, I'll call it the biracial footnote, this is a conversation you had with your mom, it seems it was really, really fascinating.
ROSS GAY: Totally fascinating. Yeah, it was sort of that common thing where I grew up, where she sort of—what would you call it, the delusion, that sort of American quote-unquote “racial delusion” where we have a hard time—at least when I was growing up, but I think probably still to some extent—like imagining the white parents of these biracial children. [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yes.
ROSS GAY: Because you know, we have a kind of racial calculus, an old racial calculus that is like, “well, that child is Black. So that child—” And my mother has had so many experiences of people being like, “that's not your child.” [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
ROSS GAY: Meanwhile we look at a lot alike, you know, and you know, it's kind of like, it's just like, whatever, that's like a big illness we have to deal with.
BLAIR HODGES: It's so wild to see her coping with a sort of almost grief, or coping with a sort of erasure, almost saying like, “hey,”—because you're embracing an identity as a Black person—
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And she's like, well, “Hey, you're white, too!”
ROSS GAY: Yeah, yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And you're experiencing it from a totally different angle.
ROSS GAY: Right, right, right. And I'm sort of like trying to understand her thing, and what she’s saying really is that “you're part of me, like, I'm part of you, too.” And I think that's part of the sorrow. And part of the sorrow, I think, is that—and again, those things get mixed up and conflated. And she's like, yeah, but you're also white. And I'm like, that's not actually what you're advocating for. You're not actually advocating for a racial classification system, you know, you're not advocating for that. What you're advocating for is to not be erased as my mother, that's all, because you're a person who's my mother, and as anyone could see, if we were sitting next to each other, you'd be like, oh, you guys have the same eyes the same bone structure, you laugh at the same g*ddam jokes [laughter].
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
ROSS GAY: Yeah, that kind of thing. But it is. And it feels to me like a sort of a beautiful and genuine sorrow that I think probably, this is one flavor of it, but I think there are all kinds of flavors of it of like, not wanting to be erased as the parent of your children, you know.
BLAIR HODGES: Has she felt much reconciliation since that time? I mean, I don't know if it's the child's responsibility to sort of help the parent through that feeling, it seems like a therapist might do that.
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: But like where did you land on that?
ROSS GAY: I think it's such a kind of—I feel like this racial delusion is so profound in this country that I don't know what my mother, how my mother’s gonna sort of, she's 81. I don't know how she's going to relate to that question. If the conversation—Because in a way it's sort of like—it's both so simple and so confusing. Because we're so embedded in race as a fact, you know, as like, a fact that you could see that to pull that out of oneself and just be oh, yeah. Okay. To not actually sort of believe the kind of historical story or the classifications, this kind of classification thing. But to really believe that the question beneath the question is: I just want to be recognized as your mother.
I can see that taking a long time, you know? I feel like we're so deluded [laughs], by many things, by many things.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And you talk about that delusion, maybe give people a sense of what you mean. There are previous episodes that sort of talk about the construction of race, how race came to be constructed that way. So when you're talking about it with your background—
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: —how are you making sense of that delusion?
ROSS GAY: Yeah, I mean, just particularly, it's such a beautiful thing, there's this idea that people are like Black and White, and that those are sort of inherit definitions that mean anything other than a sort of, what you call like a system of classification that ultimately is meant to separate people for any number of reasons, you know, but usually, those separations seems to me are about power, consolidating power.
But so in this instance, the obvious sort of absurdity of it is that, well, here's this guy, and here's this woman, and I'm their child. And I'm classified as one of theirs’s [laughs]. As like one of them and unlike the other of them, that in itself raises the absurdity, you know?
Sort of like, okay, well, here we are, here's the absurdity of this thing, that we all go around sort of trying to figure out either like, just blindly sort of agreeing to or sort of trying to figure out like, how do I deal with this or be with it and also know how to ignore it when it's time to ignore it? You know, it's profound.
BLAIR HODGES: It's profound. It is, I also wonder what you'd say—some people want to take an angle and say, like, “this is why we shouldn't have Black History Month.” Like, “Yeah, exactly. We shouldn't celebrate blackness.”
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: How do you respond to that as well, because I can hear people sort of using your words as a way to discourage beautiful diversity, too.
ROSS GAY: I know. I know. Yeah. That's not really the takeaway! [laughs] It's sort of like, I mean, it is though, another thing. It's sort of like the profound erasure, say, that American history is made of, obviously makes a kind of need for saying, “And this too, is our history.” In fact, “And this too is us,” you know?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
ROSS GAY: But so that's sort of maybe like a brief on how that would be responded to. Because, you know—
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it connects to your joy thing because like, if we could be more honest about our history and the complications of it, then we would acknowledge the sorrows, the abuses, the difficulties, as well as the triumphs and the inspirations.
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And a story that could come out of that would be much more joyful and realistic—
ROSS GAY: Totally.
BLAIR HODGES: —than the one we have right now.
ROSS GAY: Yeah. And it would sort of speak to our entanglements, which are not just like happy entanglements.
BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.
ROSS GAY: Which are often brutal entanglements. And to not acknowledge the brutality of our entanglements is a way to keep them brutal. It was a way to keep erasing the facts of our lives and the facts of our lives together.
The hang and passing time – 31:51
BLAIR HODGES: That's Ross Gay. He wrote the book Inciting Joy that we're talking about today. He's also written The New York Times best seller The Book of Delights. He teaches creative writing at Indiana University.
Alright, Ross, I want to talk to you about Bernardo, you mentioned this guy. [laughter] He's, you mentioned this friend who told you to write about “the hang.” So tell me a little bit about Bernardo.
ROSS GAY: He’s just a buddy of mine, he's actually a student here in this graduate program where I teach, so we play a lot of ball. He's a good poet, real good poet. But he's really, you know, this essay about time, he shows up in this essay, because Bernardo is good at like, when it's time to hang out to just hang out. You know? [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
ROSS GAY: And we just stop. We stop doing whatever we're doing. And you know, we—and it could go on for like a long time. You know, it could go on for a long time. It sort of like really a gift to have a friend like that. Who's not like, “okay, we got to get to the next thing.” But who’s sort of just like, I say something like, he's—I can't remember, but his storytelling is like a wonder of associational logics, like, it can go on—[laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's just gonna connect to the next thing. It's just gonna keep going.
ROSS GAY: Totally. Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: In fact, sometimes you'll forget where you started. When you're with someone, and you're just really connected and enjoying it, time really evaporates.
ROSS GAY: That's it. That's it. Yeah, and it's a gift and a relief, actually, for me to be around people who have that capacity. Oh, you know, and also to have that kind of place in their lives where they don't have to run to take care of the kids, or whatever. It feels wonderful.
And it reminds me, and I think I have a footnote in that essay too of this thing that I remember, I was actually in a Zoom reading, and it was in Wadena, Minnesota, which is the town over from where my mother's from. And I was Zooming into this book club in Wadena, Minnesota, and this guy shows up on the thing. And he's the husband of a woman who's really there, but this guy just happened to know my name. And he pops on there. And he says, you know, “Ross, I grew up with your mom, my sisters were your mom's best friends. And I used to deliver milk to your grandparents.”
So we have this whole long conversation. He's telling these stories, and this and that. And then he says, you know, “you forget the stories until you visit like this.”
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
ROSS GAY: And it just was like, so beautiful to me, this term “visiting,” you know, which is how they say it, my mother's from Minnesota where you visit and—
BLAIR HODGES: It’s like chilling.
ROSS GAY: It’s like chilling. And one of the reasons you visit is to remember your stories.
BLAIR HODGES: And it opens a door. Like, it's like a time machine. I can get together with a friend from high school that I haven't talked with in years and it just opens a floodgate of memories and stories and stuff that I'd forgotten was even up there.
ROSS GAY: Yeah, yeah totally.
BLAIR HODGES: All right. So there's a section in here I wanted you to read. Here, it's on page 53. And here in this chapter you're sort of talking about how the hang can be looked down on as excessive and wasteful. You know, capitalism has instilled in us this idea of “being productive.”
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And we'll look at the hang as “not productive.” We're not producing something of like monetary value, or whatever you want to say. And this can apply to art and literature and all kinds of things as well. So if you'll read that section for me.
ROSS GAY: I can't tell you how many times I've heard conversations about W. H. Auden's famous line from his poem, “In Memory of WB Yeats,” “Poetry makes nothing happen.” I've been to panels titled such, where people have hand wringing conversations about the political utility of poetry—you know, can poetry be an agent of change? Can poetry interrupt a regime? Can poetry bring the masses into the streets to shut this thing down?
Always invoked in these conversations there's Neruda, whose poems, even the long ones, coal miners in Chile could recite. Or some Russian poets who filled stadiums because the people needed it, it was under the brutal repression of communism, et cetera. Seems to me those poets and attendees would have been sent to Siberia or the Gulag, but I guess that's not the point.
The point everyone insists on desperately is: wrong, W. H.! Poetry makes something happen! At some point, probably I heard someone else say it, it occurred to me that all these poets and all these conversations were mis-reading Auden's line, and that he was really talking about—inasmuch as a poem is him talking about something—what poetry makes, the sometimes product or effect or wake or artifact of poetry, of a poem.
Granted the line feels emphatic, grand, provocative even. Seriously, I can't tell you how many tweets jacketed refutations to Auden's line I have endured. (No one has ever explained to me the elbow patch.)—
BLAIR HODGES: P.S. I love the elbow patch,
ROSS GAY: Ayyyyyy! [laughter] That is great. Love that.
BLAIR HODGES: It's because I get holes in my elbows! That’s really it!
ROSS GAY: Well thank you! Thank you! That’s it. Finally someone explained it to me! [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: I was waiting for that, alright sorry, go ahead!
ROSS GAY: Alright, thank you, thank you.
But what the line makes made is not nothing, but nothing happening, or rather nothing happening. The Happening it makes is nothing. In other words, a poem or poetry can stop time or so-called time, at least.
First of all, what a good reminder it is that a poem is an action, and as Auden has it, a powerful one, too. Secondly, and not for nothing, this is one of the suite of poems Auden wrote in the late 30s and early 40s, a period when one might have wanted so called time, the clock, the airplanes, the trains, the perfectly diabolical synchronous goosestep rhythm of time itself, to stop. Unless, of course, you were the regime, or IBM, or Bayer, or the arms manufacturers or the munitions makers or the other companies profiting from the slaughter. More sales, more slaughter, more sales, more slaughter, more sales—
Footnote: As Arundhati Roy asks rhetorically in her book Capitalism: A Ghost Story, “Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons?” After all, the economies of Europe, the United States, and Israel depend hugely on their weapons industry. It's the one thing they haven't outsourced to China.
—More sales, more slaughter, more sales, more slaughter, more sales. Unless you are or were among the prophets and profiteers of progress, which so often is another word for murder, albeit sometimes murder outsourced, you too, might have been praying for a way to stop the march of so-called time, and poems sometimes might do that.
Poems are made of lines, which are actually breaths, and so the poem’s rhythms, its time, is at the scale and pace and tempo of the body, the tempo of our bodies lit with our dying. And poems are communicated ultimately body to body, voice to ear, heart to heart, even if those hearts are not next to one another in space or time, poetry makes them so.
All of which is to say a poem might bring time back to its bodily, its earthly, proportions. Poetry might make nothing happen, inside of which anything can happen. Maybe most dangerously, our actual fealties, our actual devotions and obligations, which is to say, the most rambunctious, mongrel, inconceivable assemblage of each other we could imagine. You ever been on a dance floor like that? You ever been on a basketball court like that, ever been in the long, sweaty, collaborative dream of an orchard like that? You ever been in a study group like that, a potluck, ever a forest or a garden, ever a conversation, a classroom, ever an impromptu rendition of Shai's “If I Ever Fall In Love,” ever a hula hoop game, ever when make an applesauce from the apples from your beloved neighbor's tree. Ever when trying to get the steps from the video of New Edition's “If It Isn't Love.” Ever on your roller skates, your skateboard, ever making love, ever at a laying on of hands? Ever in a dream?
BLAIR HODGES: Beautiful.
ROSS GAY: Thank you.
BLAIR HODGES: And throughout there, you keep going back to, you mentioned time, there's this part where you say, “a poem or poetry can stop time, or so-called time,” you keep reminding the reader that there's this idea of what time is and what it should be that we naturally assume, because of how culture is. Time is this thing that we break up into blocks, and we do something productive with them.
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And you keep reminding the reader throughout this whole thing—and I think your digressions do this as well—that that's not the only view of time.
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And that there are other options available to us.
ROSS GAY: Yeah. Thank you for reading that so closely. I appreciate that.
Yeah, that's kind of the point. And it's sort of like, to me, one of the wonders of poetry itself is that it can slow us down enough that it does raise the question of like, hey, what is this thing we call time? You know, what is this sort of thing that we're, like you said, we kind of bracket and we organize, and we arrange, and we, like, manage, what is this? What are we agreeing to?
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so I see a paradox here though, right? Because you started off by talking about a lot of hand wringing, a lot of worry about like, should you do poetry? Is this a waste of time? Is my poetry gonna change the world? Like, should I be writing poetry or enjoying music or doing this kind of thing when the world seems to be on fire? Will it change nations? Will it rescue people, etc.? Like, can it be useful?
And your argument is like, part of its usefulness is in not necessarily having to do any of those things, which to me seems profoundly disruptive actually!
ROSS GAY: Yeah, yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. I think it's—you're begging that paradox, which is that doing nothing in a regime of thought which demands that we always be doing something is actually, regardless of what you think, it's a kind of like attack on that regime of thought. You know?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, totally! [laughter]
ROSS GAY: Yeah. Yeah.
Education and commodification – 41:53
BLAIR HODGES: And this plays out in the way you teach, too, I think, in the way you approach university. Your eleventh incitement is about school. And you're pretty candid about things you don't really like about current university culture, especially when it comes to the classes you teach. So tell me a little bit about how you see these ideas of time and productivity and all this playing out in the university setting.
ROSS GAY: Yeah, and this chapter is really indebted to some writers and thinkers—Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and they have a book called The Undercommons, and other people along the way who have just been thinking about this stuff, reading Noam Chomsky or Paulo Ferreira and all these other writers and thinkers, and my partner and other people who have just been thinking about school by virtue of like, not only having gone through it, but maybe having kids in it.
You know, it's sort of—the essay sort of starts off being in a faculty meeting where a dean refers to the students—a little bit aware, self-consciously, but still—as units. And it felt like, oh, that's a kind of perfect description of how we're training each other to be, is to be units, sort of commodifiable little units that you can ship off to do whatever. And the virtue of a unit is that it doesn't talk back, it doesn't ask questions. It doesn't say no, it doesn't refuse, and all of these things.
BLAIR HODGES: And it does the things you need it to do.
ROSS GAY: Exactly.
BLAIR HODGES: It’s completely utilitarian.
ROSS GAY: Exactly.
BLAIR HODGES: It's a piece in a machine.
ROSS GAY: Exactly. And as a consequence, you know, usually, the best people at school aren't the kids who have ADHD or who've got other things going on. They're the kids who are very obedient and can sit still and take directions and follow directions. And again, not say “nah, I'm not gonna, that's not for me,” [laughter] you know, those kids go someplace else.
So you know, it’s whatever, you could call it a corporatization of school, but it’s for sure a kind of sadness that I sort of experienced being in school and also sort of witness a kind of sadness, you know, because it is—among other things it's kind of like the murder of wonder. Wonder is a very secondary aspiration in school, it seems to me.
BLAIR HODGES: It's hard to commodify it.
ROSS GAY: It's hard to—wonder is fundamental, I think, uncommodifiable. I think you're absolutely right, you know, because you can't—it's that which you cannot get your mind around, you know, it’s that which flummoxes you. But anyway, maybe I'll read this footnote about that, yeah, an example of how I learned a little bit.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
ROSS GAY: This person is one of my teachers. And I reference this little kid, and I call him “Bartleby.” And Bartleby is after the Herman Melville story in which the main character is just like—[laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: —“a scrivener”
ROSS GAY: —a Scrivener, he's like, I don't know, he writes stuff for, I don't know where he's working down like on Wall Street. But he eventually starts saying I refuse, “I would prefer not to,” to everything he's asked to do. He says, “I prefer not to.”
And let me just follow that up a little bit. I was at a basketball camp, and this kid, I’d say, “Hey, this is how you do this thing.” Like, you know, “just take a couple dribbles, and shoot.” He's a little guy, like seven years old. And he says, “Naw, I don't wanna.” And I'll be like, “Wait hang on, you're in basketball camp!” Like, “No no no this is what you do, dah dah dah.” And he says, “I don't wanna.” And then I'm just like, okay, this is nuts, I don't know what to do with this child! [laughter] But then I'm like, “Ah, you got a point there!”
Bartleby reminds us that part of the grand educational project—I'm not talking about school, or scholeío, the Greek word where the evolving and unfixed and unfixable project seems to be among other things expanding and opening the repertoire of what we love. I'm talking about the grand educational project, of which sports of course is an integral part, is to train us in and make a virtue of tolerating and enduring miserable sh*t. I didn't say difficult sh*t. I said miserable sh*t. Whether it's sitting in an uncomfortable chair for forty-five minutes when you're itty bitty, or trigonometry when you're bigger, whether it's running around until you vomit in field hockey practice or keeping it to yourself when your bell gets rung so hard in a football game that you see double for two days. One's capacity to ignore discomfort, to carry on and even be good at something despite truly hating the thing one is doing, or despite the thing one is doing causing one actual physical, psychic, spiritual, harm to the educational project, constitutes success.
It is a good, perhaps even the good, and it is cousin to this word lately being bandied about that little rich kids evidently need more of: grit. A more capitalist concept I do not know. (T-shirt: “Less grit, more love.”) Tolerating misery is a significant component of making this brutal system go, extracting wealth for the few from the loathsome work of the many. That's to say, it is an educational project to alienate us from what we love doing by rewarding us for doing and succeeding at what we do not love. Or more accurately, where we cannot stand.
My mother, a former teacher herself, was kind of befuddled and bummed at my niece's quitting the clarinet, which she is evidently was really good at but hates playing. My mom shakes her head because she can't imagine not liking doing what you're good at. She also loves going to the kids concerts and stuff, there's that. But I've been suggesting that maybe it's okay that they not want to do what makes them miserable. And I'm glad for them to work at difficult stuff. But I really hope they don't practice doing and getting good at what they hate doing. (I do wish for them abundant vegetable consumptions whether they love it or not.) I don't care if it's clarinet or volleyball or AP whatever.
Because when we are being trained to be good at what we hate doing, and surveilled while doing so, and rewarded for our endurance of such things, we are also being trained to tolerate working at Walmart, or Amazon, or the chicken processing plant, or the prison, or on Wall Street, or as a teacher administering these countless brainless miserable standardized tests, preparing people for wherever it is you work when you're the one miserably good with a joystick and a screen. And so you find yourself dropping bombs from drones on people you do not know.
BLAIR HODGES: This is a really powerful section here. And it's powerful because I, honestly, am of two minds on it. Like, I cannot come down on a side. And what I mean is, I see the value in working on something that is difficult or I don't enjoy. I will always regret not sticking with piano lessons. And I think I didn't keep with them because the teacher expected me to do it in a certain way. And that as an ADHD kid unmedicated, un-therapized or whatever, I could not sit at the piano and do the rote lessons. I wish I could have, and now my kids are doing piano, and my son’s similar. He seems to enjoy piano even more than I did.
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: But sometimes it's hard. So there are days when like, he does hate it. There are other days when he genuinely loves it. So like there's this sense of like, okay, we need to instill some kind of resilience, but also not beat people down into submission to what could ultimately even be atrocities, as you mentioned, like dropping bombs.
So what do you think about that tension of like, really instilling some, I don't want to say grit, because I agree with you about that word, but like some resilience maybe, versus not forcing that and not making it unhealthy?
ROSS GAY: Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think probably one of the things that the essay is wondering about is like the difference between, you know, teaching kids this thing—which is a true thing—which is that difficult things can be really rewarding. And sometimes you gotta kind of hang in on the difficult thing, and then you learn something amazing, or you have this skill that, you know, playing piano, that's going to nourish you for the rest of your life.
So that is a kind of—I agree with that as an understanding, I think more probably what I wonder about is the understanding which is that difficulty itself, or the loathsomeness of something itself, almost makes it a virtue. To be able to endure what is loathsome to you.
And in this thing is kind of different too, like, or maybe again, obviously, this is like a longer, probably we could do eight conversations about this question in itself. But like, the difference between difficulty and loathsomeness, you know, or difficulty and misery—because they're all in tandem, that kids whose bodies, minds, whatever you say, are different, are forced to sit in seats and as a consequence, are really sort of tortured. It's a kind of brutality for certain kids to have to do certain things.
And so some kind of ability is needed to discern the difference between what is brutal to children versus what is like, you know, “okay, there's a way for you to kind of maybe do this that will not be brutal, which might be difficult. But it won't be brutal, it won't actually be crushing you.”
Because I think it is the case that there are plenty of people who go to school to be crushed. And the teachers’ role is actually to crush children. And I'm not saying that the teachers are malicious at all, I'm saying that the system—
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, like, they think it's good for them. “I want to prepare you for the real world” is the phrase I hear.
ROSS GAY: Yes. And we think it's good for them. Like, we think it's good for our kids a little bit to be—
And not because we're malicious, but more because it's like, we want our kids to have jobs! We want our kids to be able to, like, feed themselves. And in this world, you have to be able to, a little bit—
Like I remember because I was a little bit like that kid, you know, like, I could do school in certain ways. But I was also just like, not. And I remember it was [laughs] —to my mother, who was a teacher for some years, and she's not like this, she's very obedient. She's a very sort of well-behaved person, you know, in a lot of ways. It was puzzling to her that I might have curiosities, interests, desires, other than what the adult in the room wanted for me.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah!
ROSS GAY: It was puzzling to her, you know? So yeah, I just sort of feel like, that's a long way of saying I agree with you. And I wonder how, you know, for instance, if it was you, is it the case that, “Oh, a kid like that needs ten minute piano lessons.” Or, “a kid like that—” You know what I mean? I don't know. I think there are probably, of course, there are brilliant, wonderful, soulful teachers who are like, “Oh, yeah, there's a million ways how these kids learn.”
Writing workshops, repair, and wonder – 52:46
BLAIR HODGES: That’s what my son has. We’re grateful to his teacher, because like, she'll notice, oh, he really likes DuckTales. So I'm gonna write a little DuckTales song for him. So that's what he's gonna be playing this week. Instead of: “Here's the book and we follow the book page for page, and we need to go at this pace, because that's how—” She definitely, I like that, of pacing, paying attention to interest.
It reminds me of your thoughts about the literary workshop here, you kind of aren't a fan of how workshops, writing workshops, are typically done. You see students sort of going at the job of “repair.” Like, okay, I need to fix this. Instead of wondering. I thought that was a really good distinction there.
ROSS GAY: Yeah. That's big—it's sort of like school, and that's kind of, maybe that is actually getting to the bottom of it, like the kids—You don't send a kid to school to get fixed. And I think we a little bit do, you know? We send them off, because they’re fundamentally broken or something. And so you send them to school to get them fixed up or something, you know, polish them up, you know? [laughter]
And the same thing is a little bit with workshops, where often—and you know, I think it's changing, I'm happily, you know, I was just at a dinner the other night, and a handful of people were like, I think it's getting less like that, it's lightening up. But that, to some extent, you know, the way those workshops work—for your listeners who may not know—one person brings in a poem, and everyone has a copy of that poem. And then you proceed to sort of, at its most generous, ask question to the poem that might be useful to the writer of the poem, but for the most part, my own being a kind of administer of workshops, but also being a participant in workshops, for the most part, the default mode is to figure out how to fix your poem, how to, quote unquote, “make your poem better.” And that involves a lot of—and this just drives me crazy, that “I want your poem to do more of this.” [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah. Can I get a little bit more of this?
ROSS GAY: I know, it makes you crazy! So but anyway, I'm just sort of curious more about how in workshops, you know, I've sort of prided myself on my ability to like, “fix” poems for years. And then I was like, oh, this is kind of a bummer. I kind of feel like what I've tried to help encourage in the classes that I'm in is more like, how do we wonder about each other's work? And how do we observe each other's work, actually, you know, which itself feels like a great skill. Like, I'm gonna make something. And now how do I just observe it? And by observing it, learn about “oh, okay, well, it does this, and it does that it does this it does that,” I've liked something that does precisely this, or I'd like something on the next one maybe I'll try to do like this. But not like, “it does this and that's bad.” Or even “it does this and that's good.” That, maybe more of that.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, well, that feels better.
ROSS GAY: It feels better.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, I'm going to try a little experiment just on the fly here. I hadn't really planned this beforehand, but like, I want to do a reading to you of your stuff, and then see what sticks out to you right now.
ROSS GAY: Yeah yeah, great.
BLAIR HODGES: So I'll read to you. This is from that same incitement. So you say:
The final definition of “fix" that I'll trouble you with is this: To pin down or stick a pin through or hold in place, which is also a kind of killing. Because isn't the point of beautiful art, again, like a person, like a life, that it is unfixable and unfixing, that it changes as we change, that it unmoors us, calls into question what we thought we knew and who we thought we were? Don't we often need and love, some of us anyway, that art asks more than we could ever answer—or this, or this, or this, or this? It says, no, no, there's more. It tells us to go deeper, and, come back again. It asks, “and this and this and this,” it interrupts, and in so doing unfixes those of us who encounter it.
If you think of art as something you wonder about, or listen to, or get lost in the making of, as something that might be trying to show you something, you do not yet know how to understand, something that again, unfixes us, perhaps we can practice making and heeding that. And if you imagine a classroom as a place where we do this unfixing work together, where we hold each other and witness each other through our unfixing? Well, that sounds to me like school.
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah!
ROSS GAY: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: So it's been a while since you wrote that. As you're hearing that back, what's going through your mind?
ROSS GAY: Sort of—one of the things that is always going through my mind is just all these beautiful conversations I've had to sort of arrive at that, to arrive for the time being at that, you know? And I think part of the unfixedness is also to sort of be in my head, like, “oh, and how is that going to continue to evolve,” you know, “to continue to unfix itself.”
So, I heard, because I do remember that bracket where the encounter with the piece of art is, “or this or this, or this, or this, and this?” And I actually was admiring you, I was like, “Whoa, you read that good. That's kind of hard to read,” right? [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: You got the italics in there to kind of guide the reader.
ROSS GAY: Yeah to guide, yeah. But I was—it was making me sort of feel in a stream of thought with other thinkers, other writers to whom I'm indebted. But also it was making me wonder, “oh, yeah, I wonder how this unfixing continues to work in my own life,” or even how that, like I said, how that relationship to school that so continues to unfix, the evidence of which is your question, your very question.
Because in a way, I don't exactly answer, or I don't exactly ask the question that you asked about this idea, the pleasure possibly, or like the missing out of like, this kind of difficult thing. It makes me almost think “Oh, yeah, that's, this conversation constitutes another opportunity to be unfixed a little bit.”
BLAIR HODGES: That actually answers—I mean, we've basically answered this last question I wrote down, which is like, what incitements in the book are ongoing revisions. And it sounds to me like you kind of view all of them as something that maybe even requires, or needs, sort of ongoing revision and—
ROSS GAY: Fully. And then part of the pleasure of these conversations, you know, when people have sort of seriously considered the questions you're raising, or the ideas you're raising, the attempts—you know, essays are just attempts—when people have seriously sort of considered them and then offer their own reactions or perspectives or you know, how they relate to the questions you have, or their own questions. When we're listening, which I think is a little bit like what school is about, learning how to listen. But I also think it's like what are relationships about?
And I also think it's like actually coming back to this question, this whole question about joy. When we're listening to one another, we’re being unmade. And so often we sort of think of each other as like what makes us. But actually, like, this conversation between you and me is unmaking me, and partly it's unmaking me into you.
BLAIR HODGES: If it's a real conversation!
ROSS GAY: If it's a real conversation, if it's—You know, to the best that we're able to, like, have an unguarded kind of open conversation, or even get glimmers of that, it's sort of like we get unmade, and we are, in fact, changed every second, you know? Which is both horrifying and it's also a kind of like, “oh, right. I don't have to be just this. I get to sort of be like—”
That's wonder, you know? That seems to me wonder, like, the opportunity to encounter someone over this weird machine and be like, “oh, yeah, thank you, I didn't think of that.”
BLAIR HODGES: That's Ross Gay. He wrote the New York Times bestseller The Book of Delights in addition to other books of poetry, and he teaches at Indiana University. Today we talked about his great essay collection Inciting Joy. I highly recommend it.
Alright, Ross, do you have a second when we come back for a best book recommendation?
ROSS GAY: I do!
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, we'll be right back.
Season 2 draws to a close – 60:30
BLAIR HODGES: It is once again that time. The fire is dying down, I’m going to stir the embers a bit to keep the fire going a little bit longer as season two is coming to an end. If this is the first episode of Fireside with Blair Hodges that you've ever heard I invite you to check out some other episodes. There are about 25 in all, and they’re just waiting for you right there in your podcast app.
I’m also cooking up a few few bonus episodes for season two, we’ll call them S'mores, mini-episodes where some Fireside friends will join me to talk about what's been on their mind as they’ve been listening to episodes from season 2. So be prepared for that, I'll be passing the smores along soon.
In addition to those, you can hear other interviews with me on the Wayfare Magazine podcast, and at the New Books Network podcast. I do some interviews there as well. I post links to all my interviews on social media and you can check those out on the About Me page at firesidepod.org.
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Thanks again for being here with me. You're the reason I'm creating Fireside with Blair Hodges. I'm grateful to the Dialogue Foundation for sponsoring the show as part of the Dialogue Podcast Network, and also to the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of this show and the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. Because of them, Fireside with Blair Hodges remains editorially independent. Maybe someday you'll hear an ad for Squarespace, or mattress companies, or like mail-order fresh cuisine, but not yet. Not yet. So.
Alright, let's get back to our discussion with Ross Gay.
Best books – 62:34
BLAIR HODGES: It's Fireside with Blair Hodges. We're back with Ross Gay. He's the author of the book Inciting Joy, a collection of essays.
All right, Ross. It's the best book segment, time for you to give us a recommendation.
ROSS GAY: Yeah. So there's actually two. The one is this book by Darrell Pickney, and it's called Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West 67th Street, Manhattan.
And Darrell Pickney, he's a writer, and this is a book about his relationship to the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. But it becomes a sort of meditation on, or it's sort of the story of a writer growing up in this milieu of writers, all of whom circled around or were involved with the New York Review of Books, a kind of important literary institution in New York, that probably started a little bit before Pickney got there—ten or fifteen years, maybe, before Pickney got there.
But the way it starts off is Pickney is a student in Elizabeth Hardwick's class, and they become friends. And they have this long friendship until she dies. And it's just a beautiful book. And you know, I love those books about how people kind of grow up. And probably it's interesting to me also, because it's sort of about growing up in a kind of literary culture and becoming a writer, it's very much about, in a certain kind of way, so subtle, it's a beautiful way, about becoming a writer.
It's also about Pickney's family to some extent. There's so many things that feel familiar and beautiful to me, but also it's a slightly different milieu than I am familiar with. But partly it's so moving to me, I think, not only because it's just a good book, and there's particular overlaps, but oh, but also because my beloved teacher, Gerald Stern, good friend and poet, Gerald Stern died last year, a handful of months ago. And I'm thinking so much about him as a teacher. So this long meditation on—Pickney's meditation on his relationship with a student-teacher slash friend-friend relationship to Elizabeth Hardwick makes me think hard about my relationship with the poet Gerald Stern. And I've been rereading all of his work a lot, and actually like finding old YouTube videos of his reading, which are really amazing.
But I've been rereading just recently his book, The Red Coal, which is like his third or fourth book. It's a beautiful book of poems. It's so moving for so many ways. But then to sort of talk about, I imagined, hearing that little bit of my book that you read to me, the sort of streams that I could hear coming through that essay. And when I read Gerald Stern, I'm like, oh, that's, there's many places where, this is one of the places where I learned how to write a poem, you know? Yeah. So those are two books that are on the bedside table.
BLAIR HODGES: In the book details online it says that “it's capturing a revolutionary, brilliant, and troubled period in American letters.” I don't know that—I mean, I know we don't have a ton of time, we're done. But I just have to ask you what was brilliant and troubled at that time?
ROSS GAY: As I understand it, there was a strike, the New York Review of Books, I think, started because of a strike at the New York Times or something. So this arrived, but then all of these, like, very important writers who came through and wrote for The New York Review, and it's through Vietnam that it's going on, it's through, like, all of these really intense American crisis historical moments.
And they're gathering a bunch of like, really great thinkers on stuff—as they still do, you know, but that the moment is kind of like, you read it at that moment it has that kind of like, “man, this was a little bit on fire,” like, this was extreme. You know, and you see writers like Susan Sontag working stuff out, you know, in the New York Review of Books, in addition to a lot of other people we know.
BLAIR HODGES: It seems, I mean, it sounds like a crucible kind of moment. I feel like we're kind of in one of those now.
ROSS GAY: Yeah, yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: It seems relatable.
ROSS GAY: Yeah. And it's kind of, what's beautiful, too, is that you can kind of tell, and this is—the more I write and the more I sort of live, I guess, the more I'm like, if you could tell a story you realize, oh, there are all these moments where it's like, man that was interesting, even though I never would have thought like, various—I mean, I think I might have been inclined to think this was interesting. But if you tell a story really good, in a kind of interesting way, things get interesting.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, they do. And your book shows that, Ross. I really recommend Inciting Joy. When people read this, things get really interesting. It's great to read a book like this, because it puts a pair of glasses on me that sort of makes me think about, and just looking around me, like what incitements would I write?
ROSS GAY: Yeah, beautiful.
BLAIR HODGES: I don't garden right now. But like, what in my life, where are those essays for me? And I think people that read your book will kind of have that same impulse. Your book gives that impulse to readers, I think, that helps us try to see joy and where it's incited. So thank you for that.
ROSS GAY: Thank you for saying that. Yeah, great. Thank you.
Outro – 68:27
BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.
Alright, another episode is in the books, the fire has dimmed, but the discussion continues. Join me on Twitter and Instagram, I’m at @podfireside. And I’m on Facebook as well. You can leave a comment at firesidepod.org. You can also email me questions, comments, or suggestions to blair@firesidepod.org. And please don’t forget to rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts if you haven’t already.
Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistants, Kate Davis and Camille Messick, and also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges.
Our theme music is “Great Light” by Deep Sea Diver, check out that excellent band at thisisdeepseadiver.com.
Fireside with Blair Hodges is the place to fan the flames of your curiosity about life, faith, culture, and more. See you next time.
[End]
NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.