First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Edgar Kunz about his new poetry collection, Fixer.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: How do you know when you’ve finished a poem?

Edgar Kunz: Showing the poems to other people helps, you know, because they can reflect back to you what they see happening in the poem and if they think the poem is fulfilled, right, if it’s achieved what it set out to do. But you also want to make sure that the poem is ambitious enough, like if the poem is just setting out to do something simple, and it achieves that thing, well, you know, fine, but you’ve got to make sure that the point is pushing past even the first, second, third thing that you might think the poem is doing, and then to some more difficult and nuanced place, a truer place, you know, ultimately.  So how do I know when it’s finished? When I read it, and I don’t hate it.  When I read it, and I’m not like, Oh, that’s so corny or I think that’s over simple, or it’s too easy or the elements of the metaphor, you know, the submerged content, and the surface level content are too close, they’re too close together, it’s too obvious of a comparison to be making, then I try to increase that distance, vastly, you know, I try to make the metaphor more surprising and more alive or I try to insist that the poem has more to tell me or that I have more to learn from it. This is all sounded very, like, I don’t know, woowoo. But that is how it is for me. I’m just acting on faith basically the whole time and hoping that something emerges. I used to write very differently, I used to plan my poems out ahead of time, and then I’d executed them on the page. And I go back and read those poems now, and I’m like, oh, no, no, no, no. It’s like Frost says in that in that great essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes.” He says a lot of great things and one of them is a poem, like a block of ice on a hot stove should ride on its own melting. And I don’t really know what that means, but I really like to think about it. The part of the essay that I’m thinking about is no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader, no tears in the writer, no tears in a reader. And I take that to mean that the reader has a great bullshit detector and they’re going to know when you set something up and then executed it, like, oh, I’m setting up the dominoes, and then oh, I knocked the dominoes down and it’s had this effect that I was building toward the whole time.  I have become, over time, more and more skeptical of that way of writing a poem. It doesn’t please me like it used to. And so now I’m trying to figure out a new way of doing it. And this book is a sort of exercise in trying to know as little as possible. Then when the poem feels intuitively finished, when I stop hating it and when I stop wanting to shake it upside down and hope that things fall out of it, you know, then I think okay, now it’s time to show it to other people. I have a couple of writer friends that I show things to and if they come back and say, you know, this seems pretty good, then I know that it might be a real poem.

***

Edgar Kunz is the author of two poetry collections: Fixer, named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book, and Tap Out. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Recent poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, APR, and Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Tan Twan Eng about his new novel, The House of Doors.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: There was an undercurrent in the story, which probably does not feel like an undercurrent when you’re living in Malaysia in this time period, of racism.  There was the difference between the Europeans and the Chinese and the Malays and Indians? In this trial you’re portraying the European woman is convicted of murder and set to be hanged. And she has a way out, which is to ask the sultan to for a pardon. And there’s a line in there that says, “How can we allow an Asiatic potentate to exercise the power of life and death over a European and English woman?”  It was so terrible.  I was so angry.

Tan Twan Eng: Well, it’s meant to make you angry. So, I’m glad you have that reaction. If you didn’t have that reaction, I would start to doubt you.  A lot of the stuff intentionally in there but also not overt, part of that sentence is real. That sentence was on one of the records in one of the letters which people wrote to the newspapers after the trial as well, when they found out that she was going to throw herself upon the mercy of the Sultan. I’m writing about the society 100 years ago, so I had to be true and authentic to the times.  When my American publishers first read the manuscript the editor was a bit uncomfortable with some of the words I used, phrases like Chinaman or cooley, and they asked me if I could change the words and I said, I don’t want to because those were the terms which were thrown about in those days and in fact, those are the words which Somerset Maugham himself used in his stories.  I wanted those words in there just to show how far things have changed. So, I wanted those words in there and again, I told them if you feel uncomfortable, that’s great because I want you to feel uncomfortable. So, they saw the point of it. And yes, it should make everyone feel slightly squirmy when they read that and to understand the sort of things that the Malaysian people had to endure in those times from the Brits.  They were very condescending, very superior. So, I wanted all that in to reflect accurately what they experienced.

***

Tan Twan Eng’s debut novel The Gift of Rain was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007 and has been widely translated. His second novel The Garden of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012 and the 2013 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Tan divides his time between Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town. His new novel is called The House of Doors and was long listed for the Booker Prize.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Richard Deming about his new book, This Exquisite Loneliness.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: The people you profile in your book are dealing with existential loneliness and external circumstances and conditions that impacted their lives that we can’t always help.

Richard Deming: I was thinking about this the other day, I was watching a very short interview with Boy George about David Bowie, and they asked him what did David Bowie mean to you? And he said that here he was growing up in suburban England, and he said, You know, I felt like I was wrestling with my identity, and I was an adolescent. And suddenly, I heard Bowie through the walls of my brother’s bedroom, and Boy George said, I suddenly felt like, if Bowie existed, then I’m not alone and Bowie gave me all permission to think about identity and who I am. And then, you know, he becomes Boy George, which is fascinating to me, because Bowie was really important to me, I’m younger than Boy George, and I’m not at all like, Boy George in a lot of ways, but also had a similar experience and so I was like, Oh, this also matters to me that Bowie, who was very consistently insistent about loneliness and alienation being part of his dynamic, that that was something that could speak in different ways to people, but in the same way very, very, very powerfully. And what then is interesting to me, too – is this is well after I finished the book – I heard that young Boy George, I can’t remember George’s last real last name, but he hears it as an adolescent, and then becomes Boy George, and writes music and becomes this big icon of the 80s. And so then other people hear his music, and I hear Bowie, and I write a book about loneliness. And Bowie himself is creating music and performing out of his loneliness. And so that’s kind of like the ideal economy of this for me that like, you express it in such a way that other people feel a kind of recognition, acknowledgement and permission to do it, as well. I think it’s really powerful. It’s kind of like you know you begin by singing along with the car radio and then you write a song and then you perform.  That’s the chain of expression in which you can recognize others and recognize yourself.

***

Richard Deming is a poet, art critic, and theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. His collection of poems, Let’s Not Call It Consequence, received the 2009 Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. His most recent book of poems is Day for Night. He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading, Art of the Ordinary: the Everyday Domain of Art, Film, Literature, and Philosophy, and This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity.  He teaches at Yale University where he is the Director of Creative Writing.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Jenn Shapland about her new essay collection, Thin Skin.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Because so many of these essays focus on this climate crisis, they focus on the excess of being human, the things we buy.  You write in there that “excess is a violent force.” And you write about the path of creativity and not having kids and a lot about Rachel Carson. And you talk about the concept of radical acceptance, and that that’s something one of your therapists was trying to help you with.  I was curious about that.

Jenn Shapland: Radical acceptance? Yeah, I haven’t quite figured it out yet. But it’s an interesting idea. I don’t have a lot of answers in this book, I really have a lot of big questions that I’m asking and that I want other people to sit with. And, you know, I want conversations to come up around those questions. But one conclusion that I did come to is that, as much as it seems to be helpful for some people to deny that climate change is happening, or deny that these different forms of environmental destruction are happening, often in the name of consumer capitalism, often in the name of us obtaining stuff, that living in the dark does not solve the problem, it doesn’t feel good either. Like, it doesn’t actually make it go away, or make you feel any better. Because there are all of these different forms of guilt and complicity that lurk under our knowledge and awareness around climate change. And those feelings are still there, even if you’re pretending it’s not happening. I think this summer is a good example. Because this summer, it is really hot in a lot of places. And, you know, that’s been happening for years. But I think people are feeling it on a day-to-day level in a way that they maybe have not felt it before. That’s something I’m noticing in conversation and noticing it in the media. And I think you can’t really live in the space of feeling that heat and also refusing to know what’s going on. So radical acceptance, for me, requires first acknowledging what has happened, and what is happening, and why it’s happening and how you might be complicit within that, how you might even be responsible for that. And then the second part, you know, beyond the acceptance, I guess, that I arrive at is this need to think about legacy and to think about, okay, if the legacy of human beings on this planet right now is one of destruction and devastation and species extinction, not to mention all these social problems we’ve also brought and violence and, and suffering.  I mean, if that’s what we’ve managed to do so far, rather than try to erase our impact, like get rid of our carbon footprint, what are some other ways we could start thinking about legacies we want to leave, legacies we want to leave behind.

***

Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and the Southern Book Prize, and won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, the Judy Grahn Award, and the Christian Gauss Award. Her second book is called Thin Skin.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Ben Fountain about his new novel, Devil Makes Three.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: I know this is a complicated question, but how did you do it?  You have information in there and characters talking about literature, philosophy, politics, you’re trying to represent the CIA point of view, there’s a lot to explain about how complicated the history is in Haiti, where it’s going, who the different factions are on the ground now.  And you also have to wrap this in a story where people want to turn the pages. So how did you hold this all in your head and then put it on the page?

Ben Fountain: Haiti is a complex place, and it seems to me all the complexities of the last 500 years, which are continuing to play out, today, literally, Haiti is the center of that, it’s ground zero for the last 500 years of how the world has gone. And it continues to play out in Haiti in this very direct and brutal way. And it’s complicated, it’s extremely complicated. And I felt like to write this book properly, I was going to have to do justice to the complexity of it. And yet, write a book that could be followed and understood. It might take a bit of energy. I mean, it might take a bit more mental energy than licking an ice cream cone. But you know, that’s the only way I could figure out to write the story.  It is a bit of a challenging book to read. That’s fine with me. You know, all these things that you mentioned, yes, they are all at play in Haiti, and they were all at play in the coup years, you know, 1991 to 1994. And I tried to develop them, elucidate them, as best I could through the lives of the characters, instead of me, like slapping some kind of polemic on to a plotline. I thought, well, I’ve got these people, it feels like they have a lot of potential, their situations who they are. If I can write them properly, all these big things will take care of themselves. Like these things will naturally come to play in the story. And hopefully they’ll develop in a natural way, in a way that feels right. So, Misha, for instance, she’s a scholar of the Black Atlantic, so she’s going to see her experiences during these months, her family experience, or work in the hospital, her work doing these patient records, she’s viewing this all through the lens of her scholarship, the scholarship of the Black Atlantic, she can’t not do it. So, she’s going around thinking about Hegel, and the dialectic of history while she’s driving through traffic in downtown Port au Prince. To me, it seems natural. Of course, she would. But Haiti keeps her grounded.  She’s trying to figure out what is going on. Why is this happening? You know, what confluence of forces and structures? What confluence of history, you know, has brought us to this point, this evil point? And so, she is actively engaged in trying to figure it out. You know, I hope it works. I tried my best. It was a heavy lift writing this book. I knew I would have to do things I didn’t know if I could do, whether I had the writing chops, whether I had the brainpower, but I thought well, I’m going to try, and it took me seven years.

***

Ben Fountain‘s work has received the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction, and a Whiting Writers Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.  His books include Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, winner of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award.  His non-fiction book is Beautiful Country Burn Again.  His latest novel is Devil Makes Three.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Daniel Magariel about his new novel, Walk the Darkness Down.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Was “Walk the Darkness Down” something that you heard somewhere else and thought I want to use this in a book someday?

Daniel Magariel: So, titles are the hardest part for me. For both of my books, I’ve just had titles that just never worked. And this title came at the very last moment, and that passage was not in the book. And I was struggling to find a title for this one. And this was after it was sold, it was almost being done edited, we were getting ready to put the galleys together and I still didn’t have the title and I returned to some songs that I had been listening to when I was first generating ideas for the book. And there was one album I listened to specifically when I was out at sea, it put me to sleep every night, because the engines were roaring on this trawler, and the waves are crashing.  You know you’re in your bunk and your stomach is rising in freefall. And I would put on Townes Van Zandt’s self-titled album, his first album, and there was a song called Lungs, where he sings, fingers walk the darkness down, mind is on the midnight.  And I just always loved just the way all that sounded, I didn’t even know what it really meant. And then I took a moment, I just sort of walked the darkness down and lived with it and, then Josie [one of the characters] just started speaking. And I just wrote the monologue, and I immediately knew where it needed to go. And I restructured that scene, and then I was like, that’s the title. And it’s kind of amazing, it came that late. And it’s such a critical part of the book. But I found that way with my first book, too, with One of the Boys. You know, it was a mantra that was kind of explored by the father in a way to persuade his sons to follow him and to and to do what he asked, to be a part of the group of the boys is how he manipulated them. And I didn’t really realize that was the major motif of the novel until the book was basically done. And I was like, that’s the title, and then you just sort of back build.  It’s just funny, because it’s just the slightest tweaks that really allow the titles to rise. And that’s exactly what happened with this one, too. It’s almost like, I’m so focused on the story itself, that I don’t really realize what the themes are. And then at the end, you sort of take this long view of it. And you recognize that yes, that’s what I was writing about. That’s what I was working through. That’s what I was interested in at that moment.

***

Daniel Magariel is an author from Kansas City. One of the Boys, his first novel, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and Amazon Best Book of 2017, was translated into eight languages and shortlisted for the Lucien Barrière Prize. He has a BA from Columbia University, as well as an MFA from Syracuse University. He teaches at Columbia University. Magariel lives in Cape May, New Jersey. His new novel is Walk the Darkness Down.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Etaf Rum about her new novel, Evil Eye.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Your main character has some cognitive dissonance because she sees the limitation of her mother’s life and she got to go to college and get a master’s degree and get a job and she thought she was gaining all this freedom when she got married but it didn’t matter because she was so unsettled on the inside.  She thought she had this freedom, and she didn’t.

Etaf Rum: Yeah, absolutely. That’s such a great way of putting it. The story is very much an internal story; on the outside, everything looks good, and that cognitive dissonance is the reality of so many women who come from these bad, bad backgrounds. There’s an almost guilt for thinking that there’s even anything wrong, even though you feel it in your body, you feel that you’re unsettled, and you feel that, why am I not satisfied? Why can’t I just be happy with having this life? So, there’s so many layers, and I felt that I needed to explore them; I couldn’t write something else. To be honest, I didn’t want to write another trauma novel. I wrote this novel during COVID. So, it was a nightmare, you know, emotionally. But I needed answers to these questions. And I thought that exploring them through Yara would help me have the courage to explore them within myself.

Mitzi Rapkin: And did it?

Etaf Rum: Yeah, I did. I grow and become a different person with each novel, I’m realizing. So, I’m a different person now than I was before I started writing Evil Eye. Yara taught me a lot, a lot of how I delude myself. She taught me the extent in which I self-abandon, and how much I’ve been taught to self-abandon from a young age. Deciding to write Evil Eye and A Woman is No Man, despite how painful it was to write, was the first time in my life that I didn’t self-abandon, it was the first time in my life that I said, I’m going to write about this. I’m going to force myself to go there because I owed it to myself to try to find the words even when the words felt so out of reach, and to try to maybe help someone else through the process that themselves re struggling to find the words. So, I do feel much more empowered after this process that you know what I didn’t give up, I did this for this child, who’d never had the chance, or was never able to be heard.

***

Etaf Rum was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, by Palestinian immigrants. She lives in North Carolina with her two children. Rum also runs the Instagram account @booksandbeans. A Woman Is No Man was her first novel.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Edan Lepucki about her new novel, Time’s Mouth.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: So, you sold your book but it wasn’t in its final form.  It’s interesting because I think a lot of people assume when you sell a book you’re not going to wholesale change it like you changed yours.

Edan Lepucki: You know, people say editors don’t edit, but I’ve been edited three times. I’ve always had editors who are super passionate and interested.  This case was the most extreme where Dan Smetanka at Counterpoint Press bought the book. Before he bought it, we had a phone call about his ideas. And he was like, I don’t even know if you like this idea, but here it is. And at that point, I felt like this book had so many special parts to it but wasn’t totally working and I couldn’t figure out why. Dan is kind of a legend in the business, and I really trusted him. And I loved his idea.  And I was like, let’s give it a shot. We kind of took this book down to the studs a little bit. Some of it is exactly how it always was and some of it is totally new material that just was there maybe a little bit of summary, and then I just blew it open and wrote 75 pages. And the ending is exactly how it always was, but we were sort of moving to get to that ending. I don’t know, maybe I’m not supposed to talk about how central my editor was, I feel like that’s maybe not allowed. You’re supposed to just pretend like this book arrived fully formed from the writer’s consciousness, but I think it’s useful for people to talk about the ways that their editors are involved in terms of having a vision for it, or a way to push you because Dan really challenged me and I know it’s a better book. I feel so much more confident about the book, and I feel like it came together in a way that it hadn’t come together before.

***

Edan Lepucki is the author of the novella If You’re Not Yet Like Me and the novels California, Woman No. 17, and Time’s Mouth. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Cut, Romper, and McSweeney’s, among other publications.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to James McBride about his new novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: My very first note on this novel was: communal story. Everyone is so connected and plot wise, it all weaves together. I could see it almost like a dream catcher, or like a macrame where everything’s knotted and folded together, and it makes this beautiful design at the end. Is it a messy process for you to get there?

James McBride: Yeah, I mean, because you’re really going on faith. You know, you don’t really know what’s going to happen, you kind of have an idea, you hope this happens and hope that happens, but it doesn’t work out that way. And, you know, especially if you’re trying not to write the book you wrote before. I can’t write the same book again and again, with different characters. There are similarities, of course, you know, between what I write, and you know, I guess I’ll leave it to my biographers in one hundred years if someone is goofy enough to even try it. But I just can’t write the same story again and again. So, you lean on craft to get your characters from one room to the next. But you go by faith, when you hope those characters will move your story from one street to the next street, and then from one county to the next county, and if necessary, from one country to the next country. That’s an act of faith. That makes writing an act of faith. But you know, the blow by blow just getting them up getting them moving around, you know, that’s just trade, that’s craft. The trick is to not fall in love with your words, but to fall in love with your ideas, and then let your ideas go. Let them go, so that story can enter the room.

***

James McBride is an award-winning author, musician, and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, published in 1996, has sold millions of copies and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list.  His 2013 novel, The Good Lord Bird, about American abolitionist John Brown, won the National Book Award for Fiction.  His new novel is The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Rachel Eliza Griffiths about her new novel, Promise.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: This is a book that made me feel. Sometimes you close a book, and it makes you think, which I’m not saying it didn’t make me think because it absolutely did, but what I’m left with is how I feel. And I’m curious about your reaction to that.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths: I feel the ideal book for me is an experience where you come away with both of those parts, you know, that you’re thinking, but you’re definitely feeling, there’s a visceral kind of intimacy with the work. So I remember this moment where I was out in Santa Fe and Joy Harjo was there giving a conversation about writing, and she spoke about the heart and the mind, and she said this remarkable thing about how kind of the artists goes into a room and allows the heart to kind of fling pains and rage and feelings and things on the wall and just completely wreck and shatter the room. And then the job of the mind is to come in afterwards and encapsulate that in language.  So, I feel like for me with Promise, I never wanted the mind and heart to be separated from each other.  I love smart, funny books, where it’s witty, and it’s fun, but I feel like the books that you reach for, to kind of save you, the feeling part can’t be disentangled from that. I think we have so much pressure to be smart all the time for everybody, and we get uncomfortable when we say the word heart; like this book made me feel something. It sounds so sentimental, you know, and people never ever, particularly writers, want the “s” word near their work and I don’t want that either, but it’s okay to feel something after coming through a book.

***

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, visual artist, and novelist. She is a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a NAACP Image Award. Griffiths is also a recipient of fellowships including Cave Canem, Kimbilio, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Tin House.  Her novel is Promise.