On translating what you’re living through

How does your curiosity of the world of writing change with each genre that you write?

I try to use the form as a method of curiosity. If curiosity is the spark, then I’m just figuring out which tools work. Playing around with the tools is really an experimental way of being curious about how the form can tell a story. What’s underneath the rock of a story I thought I knew, and what can I learn from the form?

How does your writing process differ for each genre? So how do you start an essay versus how do you start a poem? Or do you go into it not really knowing?

A little of both. Sometimes I have a skeleton of something. For both essays and poems, the conception process is very similar. So there definitely were some essays that started as poems. It’s just about realizing what the best container is for the thought. Sometimes I need more of an argument, even if it’s an argument with myself, but what’s cool is that I can think about utilizing those techniques no matter what form. It’s about exercising, learning how an essay thinks, and then being able to apply that to a poem if I need to or want to.

It is a learning process, but I love how you’re like, “What skills can I grab from either genre?”

Part of my draw to other genres is just—there’s a fascination with language and with the word and what it can do. That’s me as a poet. Just—what is possible? And where are the limits, if there are any? When I approach craft as a whole, and my career, that’s the spirit I’m carrying. When I’m looking at other forms, it’s, how can this thing stretch? What can language do here? I’m trying to think about all those techniques as available no matter what I’m working on.

What did you set out to explore with You Get What You Pay For? What was the inspiring idea, and how did you decide it was going to be a collection of essays?

It took some time for the book’s identity to reveal itself to me. I had an idea of what topics and references would be swirling around in there, but it was down to the wire of, what is the story? What’s the arc of it?

It really started with an essay that I wrote about my depression, being in therapy, and this argument for therapy as reparations. I was like, what if I play that out and try to make that claim and use myself as a case study. It really was this experience of being in therapy and realizing how much of what I had held as my own neuroses were by design and influenced by politics and racism. Thinking about this undoing of white supremacist thought, a psychological liberation.

That hope, that desire for psychological un-chainment for Black Americans was really what drove everything else. I wanted that to be the central argument or plea. Essays are cool because I like research and I wanted to include some other voices. I do that in my poems some, but being in conversation with another text felt like something that I could do in an essay.

It wasn’t that I wanted it to be this academic argument, but in the spirit of a personal essay, a creative nonfiction book is in conversation with a lot of thoughts out there about reparations and mental health of the Black community. And then there’s the other part—the evidence that I’m using from my life. I am backtracking in order to follow through the line that ends with me. What are all the systems and steps that were taken to create the psychological turmoil that I am in and have been in? I took this wider lens and presented pieces of my past and my story, but also brought in conversations about the larger systems that are inextricable from my story.

That makes it sound a little bit drier than it is. There’s a whole other piece about a slave ship—my way of explaining what the Black American condition is, and the problem of talking about the economics of us. I’m putting pieces of my story next to these larger ideas. I wanted to have it building through the book and have a lot of different threads following up on each other and have pieces work almost like in a poem where a different image shows up again and again—utilizing those poetic techniques to build more of an essay format argument. It was a big project in my mind, but the gut impulse of it was very clear.

You’re bringing up some of the themes that I’ve found in your work since There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. Did writing this feel different than some of your previous books? Or did it feel like you were getting closer to what you set out to write? I guess I’m asking–

Am I in conversation with myself a little bit? Yes.

Writing this was frustrating. I was like, I already done said this to y’all. It taught me a lot about the poetic form, and it taught me a lot about prose and the sentence, because it was almost like self-translation. I feel like I could go from my first book and annotate, and it would be a nonfiction book. I already put this thought out there. It’s just that I did it in these three lines instead of 20 pages.

It was an interesting practice in, “what’s the other way of saying this?” At first, I was like, poems are the best. Why can’t everyone understand that I already said all that? I just put an image of a slave ship and an image of Big Pimpin’ and we’re done. But here I have to spend 20 pages talking about it.

So to then pull it apart and connect all the dots, dot by painstaking dot, the more I pulled it out, the more I’m like, but that also relates to this. And then I’m bringing in the Bible. The more you expand it, the more it expands. But the process of going through that gave me a newfound respect for each form and the different ways I can approach the same thought. It also forced me to double back and unpack those themes and see what I left out, and see what all the supporting cast members look like.

In a way, it is deepening what I’ve covered already and also pushing forward a little bit in the way that only prose maybe can do. And there’s value in repetition, obviously. The other frustrating part is that I’m saying these things that I already said, but then I’m also quoting people from 1901 saying it. So I’m like, well, what are we doing here?

That’s how writing is a lot of the time, especially when you’re dealing with past sources and other texts. If that person said it in an even better way, and that was 50 years ago when people were still acting a fool, then what am I up to? There’s also this sense of translating and updating these ideas and presenting them in a different context with different evidence and different examples—such as myself—and to a different audience. There is value in that. Sometimes it’s got to be said for 50 years, a million different kinds of ways. In a poem, in song, in skits. Maybe we just need to be hearing the same shit.

We as artists get so caught up in fresh and new, and this book taught me more than anything that the freshest shit is the oldest shit. We don’t look back enough.

How do you manage to weave cultural criticism and research into your work? And how can other writers practice this? You make it sound easy, but I imagine that it’s very difficult.

I mean, yes and no. It was, but my brain works that way. I really do like researching. Everything I’m learning applies to everything that I’m thinking about. The process of reading widely and reading specific things, and then living in the world through the lens of those things, makes the conversation with those texts a little bit more natural. I’m inserting these ideas into my own world versus trying to operate in some kind of academic or critical vacuum. When I started writing poems, I was in college and I double majored in creative writing and cultural anthropology. For that reason, I’ve always taken influence from other disciplines and used that in my work and used that as a launchpad to get ideas for my work.

In a lot of the cultural criticism that I’m doing, that comes in handy because I’m able to take a wider political view. Understanding my identity as a writer, and understanding the role of an ethnographer, was very critical, and it really shaped my writing practice. I was calling this book auto-psychologic ethnography. It’s like an auto-ethnography of my brain, of my mind.

That is a mode of my writing process. When I say writing process, I mean the collection of the ideas and not just typing stuff. The way that poems form in my head, they are interacting with larger ideas about the human condition and how we organize ourselves and bigger thoughts like that.

Mental health has played a large role in your work, especially in your YA novel. Tell me more about what made you be open with your mental health and how you continue to shape that writing.

Looking back, I’m like, Who Put This Song On? is a really sweet way to think about an Ars Poetica because I had to hide myself so much. The hero’s journey of that book is that she’s able to speak about it. And the conclusion is me. In the book, which is based on real life, of me writing this essay about my depression for my high school yearbook–to put that in fiction was a turning point for me and almost a pledge to myself that if I’m going to be living, I’m going to be writing about what I’m living through. And I can use my voice, so I will.

After having finished You Get What You Pay For, I’m really almost consciously not at the behest of therapists, et cetera. Everyone’s like, take a break, my dude. But I feel the weight of how long I was uncomfortable doing so and how ashamed I felt. So there’s a little bit of just wanting to avenge a teen version of me who didn’t feel like she could talk about these things.

It’s a guiding principle that I won’t sugarcoat my mental health journey. Because it’s not fair to me. Honestly, I don’t have time to play this game that I’m not disabled. It is what it is. I don’t want to stop talking about it because this is a real thing. It’s not, oh, it’s over because the book is over.

We want to see me as a character, but I am indeed myself, the author, and real people don’t have arcs. To that end, my artist statement that I live by is trying to describe to the reader as best I can—using all the tools I have—how it feels to be in this body during this time in this place. Just get as close as I can to reporting. To do that, you can’t just leave out a big old part or you can’t just diminish it. There isn’t any getting away from it. I never want to feel like I’m preaching a topic, but I do want to feel like I am bearing witness to myself. I think I owe that to myself if nothing else.

What has writing about Black womanhood, mental health, culture, and feminism taught you about yourself both as a person and as a writer?

I am part of something. I exist in a lineage. That is what I have found. I have found the ineffability of Black womanhood across ages. I hesitate to call it strength, even though it feels like strength, but that word just doesn’t feel right for us anymore.

But it’s a type of power for sure. There is something that I have gotten from reaching back into lineages and seeing how we’ve done it that allows me to be bigger than myself. There’s an elevation that we can get from each other, and that has been a really important lesson for me moving through the world, but also sitting at the typewriter or at the computer. I don’t always write alone.

How do you balance writing and discovering what to write about, with the exhaustion that sometimes comes with being a Black woman?

I am not a person who writes every day. I’m not good at doing that. I am also, once again, mentally ill, and I don’t necessarily like writing when I’m really depressed. In those times, that is where the typewriter comes in. I’m allowed to type because I want to hear the bell. I’m engaging in the exercise, but I’m not going to force myself to go there emotionally if it doesn’t feel safe.

In the past few years, I’ve had really long chunks where I was like, I don’t feel good. The world doesn’t feel good. I got nothing good to say. I’m not excited about language, and for me, it doesn’t work to write from that. It is a way of trying to first assess what I can make of this feeling, but sometimes the answer is nothing or I don’t want to. If I still feel like I need to exercise some kind of creative release, then I allow myself to, and I also allow that to not be writing. I am not a good visual artist, but I did get into doodling for that reason, because it’s a creative release and ain’t nobody checking for my drawings. There’s no pressure around it, and there’s very little politics around me drawing a plant.

Finding freedom in that and cleaning my typewriter. I also try to take in art in that time. I go record shopping and listen to records all day, stuff like that that feeds me. If I can’t release it, then at least I’m getting fed. I’m just reading June Jordan over and over and over trying to store up, basically.

I love the idea of storing up. Sometimes you just need to read for a month.

I always talk about my writing process in stages, and the first one is what I call the collecting stage, which is just living. Living, going to museums, watching movies, listening to records, reading liner notes. Just collecting, storing up, and then eventually it arranges itself and comes out as text, but you don’t really know how long that stage is going to take.