Putting the ‘I’ Back in Essay, with Deesha Philyaw and Kiese Laymon

I don't know if I ever told you this part about it, but I showed up not with my copy of "Heavy," but Michelle Obama's "Becoming." I got 'em confused. I forgot! (laughing) (upbeat music) - Hello, KS A. Lehman. - Hello, Disha Filia, what's going on? - Hey, it's always a great day when I could talk to you. Welcome, friends, to Reckon True Stories, a celebration of new and classic nonfiction, the essays, journalism, and memoirs that inspire us, that change the world, and help us to connect with each other. I'm Disha Filia, author of "The Secret Lives of Church Ladies," and you may know me as the co-host of "Ursa Short Fiction," where my dear friend, Donnie Walton, and I geek out on our favorite short stories. But today, I'm joined by my good friend, the brilliant KS A. Lehman, and we're going to be chopping it up about nonfiction. - I feel so lucky that I get to talk to you about nonfiction. - Well, that feeling is mutual. And, you know, KS A, you need no introduction, but we're gonna do one anyway, just so. That one person in the world who doesn't know the T. KS A. Lehman is a black Southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is the Libby Shurn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University, and he is the author of "Long Division," which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for Fiction, and the SA Collection, "How to Slowly Kill Yourself "and Others in America," named a notable book of 2021 by The New York Times Critics. KS A's best-selling memoir, "Heavy," an American memoir, won numerous awards, and was named one of the 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years by The New York Times. The audio book, read by KS A himself, was named the Audible 2018 audio book of the year. KS A is at work on the book's "Good God," and "City Summer, Country Summer," and a number of film and TV projects. He is the founder of the Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative, a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at helping young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising, and sharing on their own terms in their own communities. And in 2022, KS A was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He is officially a genius, and I am so blessed to be able to come together with you to do this program on top of all of the other amazing things that you're doing, welcome KS A. - Oh, thank you for that. Oh, and I feel like when we kind of know we've been genius-ish long before MacArthur people, but, you know, but, you know, in bad a way, I'm sure everyone knows Disha, but let's give her a introduction worthy of her skills and her gumption. Disha Phil Yaw's debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 Penn Falken Award for Fiction, the 2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize, the Art Senate Bomb Award for First Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on black women, sex, and the black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producer. Disha is also a Cambilio Fiction Fellow, and was a 22-23 John Rene Grisham, writer and residence at the University of Mississippi, and one of my saddest things is that I left when Disha came, but it's so great to be here with you right now, Disha. - Thank you, KSA, and everybody, I begged him to stay. (laughing) - I was there. - But now that you're gone, but now that you're gone. - But now that you're gone. - But now that you're staying here. (laughing) - But it was, you know, and it was an honor to follow in your footsteps because you also were the Grisham writer and residence there some years prior, so I felt like I was, I am in good company whenever we can be in the same space virtually or physically. Speaking of other virtual spaces, if you follow me over on our other podcast, "Ursta Short Fiction," you know Donnie and I, revel in the magic of short stories and the writers who write them, and we love sharing space with those writers, but we also knew that we wanted Ursula to explore many different genres of storytelling. And on top of that, it was our dream to one day collaborate with KSA, and what I told Mark and Donnie was that years ago when I was still stuck in corporate America, you and I laid the groundwork to do our own podcast together. - Yes indeed, and it should have worked, but I was, you know, I was a Mississippi at the time, like moving, moving, stressed a bit, but what I do want to say is that I love that you allow the essay and storytelling occupy the same space. You know, I don't have to try to convince you that the essay is a former storytelling, which is what I have to do with most so-called essay, and so that's another reason I'm hyped to get on here, talk with you. - Ooh, okay, we gotta talk about that, 'cause that whole concept is foreign to me, so I'd love to hear, you know, why people kind of resist that. But, you know, I'm excited for everything we're gonna do here. This is not our only collaboration. We collaborate with our brother, our cousin, our friend, friend of our heart, you know, brother from a different mother, Robert Jones Jr. - Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. - It's sending out love to Robert today and always. We have been collaborating with Robert for over a year now on the Lit 16, a quarterly reading series that highlights the work of 16 debut authors. We just wrapped the inaugural session season class, however you wanna call it, but we'll be back with the Lit 16. But today, I'm excited to be here with you to talk about some of our favorite nonfiction writing, to talk about how people see the essay as you mentioned KSA. All right, let's get into it now. As I mentioned earlier, nonfiction can cover a lot of different types of storytelling. essays, journalism, memoir, KSA, you've written it all. Our first, our first interaction was a virtual roundtable interview. I think you remember this 'cause you don't forget anything. You have a great memory. I did this interview with you and other writers who contributed essays to the 2017 anthology, the Jasmine Ward edited title, The Fire This Time, a new generation speaks about race. And so I got to interview you and some other folks and then fast forward. I was in this pop up book club in Pittsburgh and we read "Heavy." And I don't know if I ever told you this part about it, but I showed up not with my copy of "Heavy," but Michelle Obama's "Becoming." I got him confused. I forgot. I forgot which book, I read them both. I thankfully I have read "Heavy." But I was like, why is everybody holding a copy of "Heavy?" But okay, and so we read "Heavy," and that group of cool folks that I missed in Pittsburgh, they were stalking you a little bit and they're like, you know, he's coming to speak. So I wonder if we can take him out to dinner when he's in town. So I kind of flex like, well, I have his email address. I can make that happen. And then I think we hit you up on Twitter as well. And that was the first time we ever met and we've been tied ever since. And so, but one thing I don't know is when exactly you started writing essays. And I know from "Heavy," you know, your mom made you write essays. And obviously we all had to write "Press cold." But like, when did you decide like, this is my thing? And was it at Gawker? Because I think I first read you at Gawker and I think it was how to slowly kill yourself and others in America. - That's a great question. I remember that Pittsburgh time, too. I was so happy to see you. And I remember I always joke with Damien Young 'cause I felt like that place looked a lot like a boys and girls club, you know, like-- - Yeah, the A So Tell. They converted it into space. And I kept saying that, but they kept thinking it was a disc 'cause they didn't know me and my personality. But I was like, my finger, that's a compliment. Like, y'all flipped the boys and girls club. Anyway, yeah, you know, I started. My mother, again, it was kind of like, people who have read anything about my story, you know, my mother made me write essays, you know what I'm saying? Probably that I can remember starting at like eight, nine, ten, like a lot of people in junior high, high school. I had to write, you know, I grew up in the late 80s and coming up through the 90s. So hip hop was like beginning to like get their feet under the ground. And I was like really taken by like, what they call like the hyperbolic eye and hip hop, like the eye. And in school, we could just never use the eye. The school I went to, you couldn't use the eye. So I got on the newspaper, and I started, and I got on newspaper because my coach, but basketball coach was also the, he ran a newspaper. And on one day, I was just like, you know, just, I was on the newspaper just to kind of like, honestly, try to like not be in another class. You know what I'm saying? I'm not being a pin. And then we had a section on, essay on what they call editorials who were really like opinion pieces. And I just, I was like, I wrote I, if the second sentence of that piece, peace started with an eye. And then I was just like, I just was fascinated with like exploring like eye and really fascinated with why we could never use eye and any other writing. So I started, you know, editing my, my school paper went to the Millsab's College, wrote essays, started being one of the editors of that paper, got kicked out for essay writing, you know, went to Oberlin, wrote a ton of essays, edited the black journal there, edited the political journal there, edited Oberlin review. So I was writing essays, galore. And then I then I started writing fiction at Oberlin, got an MFA school for fiction. And I just kept on, you know, now I'm setting fiction for like a decade. And then I went back to the essay when I couldn't get my publisher to move on my book. So I was like, all right, I'm just gonna start making a blog, going back to this essay writing, which was my heart. And I wrote this essay called How to Slowly Hear Stuff Another's in America. And I had a former student named Emma Carmichael, who was at that point like a manager editor at Gawker. And she was like, can we put this on Gawker? And I was like, y'all want this on Gawker? 'Cause at that time, I was like, I don't know of Gawker in this fit. But I didn't tell her that because Emma was such a good student, you know, an incredible writer. And so she took that off of my blog, put that shit on Gawker. And I mean, that's one of the reasons we're talking right now. But when you asked that question, one of the reasons I love you asking that question, because I really see the essay as a place of exploration and experimentation. And I know people say that about your fiction. But I don't know if as many people say that about your essay writing. So I'm gonna say it, right? Like I, one of the reasons I love your essays is because they are so experimental to me, but they also feel familiarly soulful. So I'm interested in like, when did you start writing essays? And do you make a distinction between essay, the essay writing you started to do and the fiction writing you started to do? - So, you know, essay writing came for me as sort of like a consolation prize. It's a damn shame, right? But I think high school, school in general, ruined the essay for me. And I think it's particularly because, especially because of what you said, and I love the way you phrase it, the fact that we couldn't use the eye, that there was this detachment. So as soon as there's this detachment, I've lost interest now. And so I'm just gonna, you know, I'm a good student though. I'm a good girl scout. I'm gonna do exactly what you tell me, that five paragraph, essay structure, you know, I know how to, you know, the beginning, the middle and the end, I had not, I'm a thesis statement. And, you know, so it was all very rote for me. That's what essays were for me initially. And I took that into my adulthood. And so I started writing in general, when my youngest, when I'm sorry, my oldest child, who will be 25 this year was a toddler. And it was my thing that I would do for myself. And I was writing fiction. I wanted to write the disfaction I was feeling in my own life and give it to these characters. 'Cause I didn't think about, well, first of all, I thought writing the truth as nonfiction, I wasn't brave enough for that. Like I didn't even wanna face the truth, right? So I just gave it to some other black woman that I made up, you know? And so, you know, but those early characters were all based on me, either who I was or who I wanted to be. And so, but I wanted to get published, 'cause I thought, you know, that's what made you a real writer. You know, I was under that fallacy that operated under that fallacy, as many of us are in the beginning, you know, that that's what makes you a writer, publishing. And so I would try anything. Now I was also aiming at the wrong places. Like I don't even know, like at some point, the Atlantic has published fiction, but in early 2000s, they certainly weren't publishing, like the kind of stuff I was writing. I was looking for prestige, right? But I was also hunting for publishing opportunities. So I subscribe to this e-drum newsletter by this, you know, Afrocentric, I can't remember. It's Kalamu, it was something about the drum, okay? That's all I remember. And he had like all kinds of writing opportunities. And I don't, I got on this mailing list. And, but somebody at literary mama, which was incredibly white, and still is. And I'm on the, you know, I'm on the board of governors, so full disclosure, but at the time literary mama, you know, had columns. And they had, somebody had the foresight to advertise for, you know, or call for submissions for columns in this black focus newsletter for writers. And I was like, okay, what's this about? I'm a mother. And so literary mama is dedicated to motherhood writing. And for the columns at that time, you, they just wanted you to pitch something they weren't already writing about. And so I had recently, my then husband and I had adopted a child and our second daughter. And I thought I'll write about being an adoptive mother. And I call the column the girl is mine. And so I started writing personal essays. And for four years, I had two editors every month, I think it was, or every other month at literary mama. And plus my fellow columnists, we would give each other feedback. So I always call literary mama my MFA. That's why I learned so much about writing from being edited and from editing other people on that regular frequency, you know. And it was unpaid, but it paid so much. And it also was one of the rare unpaid opportunities where people who then wanted to pay me to write essays saw my work there and invited me to write for The Washington Post for Wonder Time, which was a Disney magazine for parents, but it branded itself as like smarter than say, you know, the family fun Disney magazine. So I wrote some great essays there, back when you could get paid like good money before the economy collapsed in 2008. And you know, so that was, so essays was like, oh, okay, so I'm in this kind of parenting writing space. And then as you know, my ex and I then went on to write a co-parenting book. That's also nonfiction, but you know, so I did a lot of op-ed writing as well around co-parenting outside of literary mama. And I was pining away for fiction. I really was. But then I, you know, what did Tony Morrison say, you know, if you surrendered to the air, you can write it. - Yeah. - And so I was like, I guess I write nonfiction now too. - Right. And I mean, one of the things that I love about, again, what I call your gumption is that you appear to me to be someone who is going to explore a genre or form, but not bow to it. And I think that's super important for all genres, you know, fiction and poetry. But I think that's especially important for the essay because we've been hit over the head with essays from like, you know, middle school on. And I'm not trying to say my experience or George Burns or anybody else's experience. But when you, when you were talking about like that, that column the girl is mine, even the creativity and name and that. One of the things that I mean, it wasn't like I needed time and retrospection to hate this shit. Like I hate it in the moment. Not just that I couldn't write an essay about me, but like if we were reading essays or, hmm, if we were reading books that had to do with characters that were grandmother's, they were often white. They're always white. I couldn't even write about my grandmother. 'Cause to write about my grandmother, I would have had to use an eye in essay writing class. I could do it fictively, but though you, you know, if you weren't letting your students use eye in essay class, there were no fiction writing classes at all, right? - Oh no, no, no, no, that was never encouraged. - Would you ever, were you ever encouraged to explore creatively in school, in middle school or high school? - No, no, my, I mean, I tell people again, I was 28, 20, let's see Taylor was when I was 27. So I was like 28, 29 before I ever started thinking about creative writing, except this is my one exception and I'm very proud of this. In the sixth grade, we did have a poetry contest and you could either recite a original poetry or you could recite another poem. And that's how I, 'cause we practiced in class and that's how I learned, what's that famous poem? It's like "Charge of the Light Brigade." I think, yeah, "Charge of the Light Brigade." Annabelle Lee and something else. I chose to write an original poem, right? - Right, right. - But in all of my years of school, I don't remember any other time and I won the contest, by the way, and the title of the poem was The Lazy Crew and it was about a sailing crew that was lazy. So original and nothing drawn from my own life at all. I have no idea where that came from, but I won. And so, you know, that's a shame that I don't, I don't remember that. I don't even remember in college. I think I was a good student in college. I was also an econ major, so I didn't do a lot of writing in college. And none of it was particularly inspired. - Right. - And so it was all very forgettable. And so it really wasn't until I had done everything right, I went to college. I had, you know, got married before I had a child. I married heterosexuality and then it's like, so wait, this does not feel like a prize, you know? - Right. - And then I had, and I think that's it. It's like you have something to say. So that could have been it too. Not only was I not encouraged creatively, but I really didn't have anything to say until then or that I would allow myself to say. And as I said initially, it was through fiction. I would allow myself to say it. But to what you were saying about not, you know, sort of kneeling to the form. - I attribute that for me to not having gone through an MFA program that is the blessing for me. And this is not to knock MFA programs because for a lot of people, they're exactly what they need. But what I never had to do was unlearn somebody each other than high school, you know, somebody telling me, this is how you do a thing or you can't do this or you can't do that. So at this point, I'm somebody's mother and I'm the boss. You know, and I'm already boxed in by things in my life that are like, you can't do this and you can't do that. And so my writing was the one place, the one time where I'm gonna do what I want to do. - Right. - And I've never felt beholden to anybody else when it came to my fiction or to my nonfiction. And I started that way in part out of ignorance. Like I didn't know what an MFA program was in the early 2000s, you know. - Right, right. - Yeah, I was like, you know, this is, I'm writing what I'm compelled to write. But beyond that, and I know that your mother and your grandmother are probably the biggest influences on your work as well. From me, having both my mom and my grandmother die of cancer, my mother at 52, my grandmother at 82, not having lived lives according to their own terms. I knew that to honor them, I had to live my life and that included my writing, maybe most especially my writing on my own terms. And so it's like writing is work, writing is blood sweat and tears, it's also joyful. And I want us to talk about that too. But why do something on somebody else's terms? Why put all of that poor, everything you have into something and have it be a half-truth. And you know something about that too. You started a whole last book with, I wanted to lie. - Oh yeah, oh yeah. - But that's my feeling is if we're gonna do this, if we're gonna take ourselves through this, if we're gonna ring ourselves out, if we're gonna lay ourselves bare, then we gotta do it on our terms. - Especially because we were encouraged to shit on our terms in order to get good grades when we were most vulnerable. - Yes. - You know what I mean? I mean that sincerely. And so for me, oh man, what you're saying is just like, it hits so hard because I start to think about what it actually means for, you know, I went to MFA school as a fiction writer and I went right out of undergrad 'cause I got kicked out of school and I just felt like I was fooling myself, but I felt like I was behind 'cause I got kicked out of college my second year. So I went to Indiana and fiction writer, but it was weird as I went to Indiana because you said Kumayaka the poet called me and you know, said that he liked my fiction. And that's all I needed. And I was like, oh shit, okay, I'm gonna go where you are. But you know, when I got there, I mean I could say a lot about my MFA experience, but I don't want to bore people. But the thing about my MFA program is that I think it really prepared me to be a better essayist because so me an essayist that we read, and again, we got to think about and talk about how we going at people on here 'cause on one hand I want to go at people. On the other hand, I do want to go at full, you know what I mean? But one of the things that I think we do in both of our fiction and not fiction is that like, you know, it's very dialogical, but there's also like, you know, like polyphonic, right? Like there's a lot of voices. Yes. And so I can, you know, in the mid, late 90s, when I'm going into the MFA school, you know, in my program you had to go to, you know, you had to teach poetry class, you had to teach a fiction class. Nobody talked about the essay. Nobody talked about creative knowledge fiction. I don't even know if you could go to school for that shit. But what I did learn is I learned how to create and make a scene, which is foundational, I think, to a lot of essay writing. I'll say that, not all essay writing. I learned how to make consequential action. I learned how to make secondary characters. I learned how to bring poetry into my dialogue in a way to make it, make it believable. All of those things are things I think you need for the essay. But what I'm interested in here from you, Disha, and this is tied into this kind of our conversation about think pieces, one, I'm interested in like, what you feel like is the distinction between a short essay and a think piece. And do you, like, if somebody's like, Disha, I've read your essays, like, what is the difference between your essays and your fiction other than one is called essay and one is coffee? Like, I'm just gonna say for myself, I don't outbuy into the genre distinctions and I can talk historically and futuristically about the essay and da-da-da. But I'm really not sure what the difference is between fiction, short storytelling, storytelling, and essayistic storytelling. I mean, I know they can be as different as night and day, but I think there's more similarities than we let on. Well, I feel like an essay is successful when it embodies the best of fiction, the best of storytelling, the scenes, the voices, all of the things that we try and do in our fiction, I think I agree with you. They, you know, I wanted them to show up in my essays as well. And I have some essays that, let me see if I say this right, I have some fiction that I've passed off as essays. I have some essays. - Yes. - Because I've passed off as fiction. - Yes. - You know, it just depends on how much do I want you to know about me. (laughs) - Try out, that's the best answer. That's the best answer. - You know, and so they, sometimes they can be, you know, they can operate kind of interchangeably. And so they're just, I think about this one essay that I wrote that was very kind of meta. And it reads, lyrically, there are scenes in it. It reads to me like a flash story, but it's nonfiction. And it's nonfiction that was inspired by my, needing to write a love story. Tyree's Coleman was doing a reading series for Valentine's Day 2020, right before everything changed, right? And there were three categories. Good love, bad love, sexy love. And she assigned us. And she assigned me good love. And I'm like, mother fuck, like I could write sexy love. I could write bad love, you know, my eyes closed. And, you know, and I was struggling to write this story. It was so, what I was coming was just flat, flat, flat, flat, flat. So I started writing an essay about trying to write a love story. To while I was stuck. And then the essay helped me go back to the story. And I was able to get unstuck in the story, finish the story. And then I came back and I finished that essay. And it's called Water Come Back to You on writing about love or something like that. And so there's a big entanglement. Often there's an entanglement between my essay writing and my fiction writing. But the very first writing class I ever took was a flash fiction course. And I took it multiple times at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. And I never got better at it while I was taking it, right? But we read a lot. And, you know, I'm someone who learns a lot from reading and critiquing other people's work as much as my own. And so, you know, not to say that those classes with Lisa tuning who was incredible weren't useful. I mean, they were definitely planning seas. But in the classes, I just couldn't nail flash fiction because I was too long when it, like brevity was just not in my wheelhouse at all. And when I finally nail brevity, it was through the essay, a flash essay. And so in the like early 2000s, I wrote this 20 page essay. I have to laugh at it now, right? About my father and everything he had ever done wrong. And it was like an indictment, a deposition, like, you know, I laid it all bare because as a kid, I couldn't talk about the things that, you know, the ways that my father left me wanting, the ways that he didn't show up for me and the ways I needed him to. And I had to, you know, defer to him. I had to consider his feelings. It was a mess, right? But when I got older, and now I'm a parent of my own child, and it's like, and I'm writing to, here we go, I'm just telling it, right? So I had two mentors at the time, and I sent the essay, the 20 page essay to each of them. I was like, oh, I just please tell me where you think I should submit this for publication. And they both separately were like, nowhere, this is a journal entry. They love me enough to tell me the truth. Yeah, that's love. And so, you know, one of my mentors, that's the word, one of my mentors, was a woman named Laura, and she calls me Dishila, and she's like, Dishila, all emotional expression is not artistic expression. True that. And I spent 15 years figuring out the difference. And 15 years later, I wrote this flash essay called Whiting, and it was everything I needed to say about my dad, and I don't even think Whiting is 500 words. So, same time, I had therapy, and my dad also died. So things did happen, but I did need to become a better writer, a better crafts person at this, as well, to know the difference, to take the experiences, the feelings, all of that, the journal entries, and to make art. And sometimes when we think about making art, we do think of the fiction as making art, but the essay is no less. When you say that, do you think that, think pieces? - I've never asked this question before. I just want to, I've never asked a question like this, but like do you think think pieces are art? And because, let me just say, before you answer that, I wanna say, I'm not trying to disnobody by even asking that question. Because I believe, I believe when we ask this question, it's such and such art, I think we disregard the fact that there's really fucking terrible, like that vacant art. But I'm not asking you how you value to think pieces. And I think you understand, I just wanna make sure people listen. I'm asking you, like, how about this? What kind of art do you traditionally think of, think pieces as being? - It's like, typically they're the equivalent of like fast fashion, right? - Uh-huh. - Like, it might look you, you know, but at what cost, you know, because I think there's something to be said for letting ideas marinate. I think there is a way to be reactive and thoughtful. - Yep. - And sometimes think pieces lack the thoughtful piece. - Right. - That we typically associate with taking more time. - Yep. - I think it's a real gift if you can be reactive and thoughtful the same news day. - Yeah. - I can't, yeah. - That's never something I have mastered. I can't stay here and say I even tried to. I just know me. And by the time I have solidified my thoughts beyond a few sentences on a topic that just happened, you know, the news cycle has changed, you know? And so I realized early on, even though I was not, you know, that's not how I kind of made my career, 'cause I wrote a lot of things that were, that could be considered, think pieces about co-parenting that were of the moment. Like Tyrese would stalk like his, his baby mama. And then I would use that as an opportunity to talk about healthy co-parenting and how to build a schedule and things like that. And so it was quick and it was timely and it was tied to the news cycle. But I felt like because my intentions were honorable and noble, I never called them think pieces. - Right, right, right, right, right. It's like, when people, it's like, nowadays people will call things that come out of their own mouths, rants, but I think when we were younger, like rant was some shit you didn't want to actually be like responsible to and for. But you know what, when you say that, like I think, if I'm gonna be honest, like I think that there's variations within think pieces just as their variations in essays. Do you know what I'm saying? And so most think pieces bore me, but actually most essays bore me. And I think think pieces tend to bore me a little bit more, 'cause I think, you know, often people stop when they should have started. I think they stop where they should have started. Often think pieces, especially think pieces, like especially, but often essays, I think start where they should have started. And I'm not into the essay where in the first paragraph, you tell me what you think and you substantiate the shit with seven other paragraphs after or fucking 17 other paragraphs, right? Like I'm interested, I mean, I'm most compelled by writing general and essays that move. Like there's two or three moves. - Tell me the story. - You gotta tell me, and even when you think about the ways, like, you know, you bring in like, well, what's the name of that essay? 13 men that you wrote? - Oh yeah, 13 guys you meet on a dating app. - And the thing about that essay that is so fucking brilliant to me and so many things is one, you're letting the reader know immediately, they're at least 13 moves that are gonna be made here. Meaning, I'm gonna introduce you into 13, not quote unquote people, but characters and really shades of characters, shades of voices. And I just love that you did that shit in an essay, because traditionally we would see that in innovative fiction. And I'm just saying that the essays that move me in 2023, just like I think in 2013 are essays that make moves. Now what's interesting to me, and I want to talk about this when we have more time, is I'm interested in what we do with all of those huge essays. Rachel Godza, Kaizie's piece is about shit, about- - Anything else. - Anything, bro? Like she was going off, and she made a genre out of writing the profile piece about the person you couldn't meet. She couldn't get she pal, she wrote a classy, she couldn't get Dylan Roof, she wrote a class. Tana Hossies, you know, reparations piece. Like there were these major long essays in the '10s of '20s, I'm not trying to put that era up as the era. But I'm interested in like whether or not we see, 'cause we still see think pieces, galore. But I don't know if we see or if the culture is as interested in 2023, and I think there's a lot to do with how we got to 2023, in like the long essay, the long essay. Like, I mean, in there, a lot of long essays being written, but I don't know if the long essays are getting traction the way they used to. - I started thinking about, and this is one, I meant to pull it, but I didn't, but we can definitely talk about it later, but after American dirt came out, is there his name Miriam? - Yep, yep, yep, she just wrote Crete. - Yes, right, and so that was a part, book review, part, manifesto, part, read, capital R, read, on American dirt and its author. And so I don't know if this is different about now versus the 2010s, but you, like I don't know that we can do any more quiet long essays. - Ooh, ooh, I love that, I love that. - Maybe that's it, that they gotta come out swinging, you know. - Come on now. - I'm looking at our friend, Naphisa Thompson Spire's essay from 2020. So, you know, I guess we would say that this essay is on the cusp of that era, but it's in the Paris review on no longer being a hysterical woman in the first sentence. I cannot locate the day that I finally meant it, this here to four speculative suicide think, but by some point, not long ago, it seemed I had only two choices, get a hysterectomy or die. - Come on now. - I have to read the rest of this. - Come on, come on. - If I didn't know Naphisa, you know, I gotta read the rest of this. Immediately, you talk about fiction and the essay. Immediately, we know the stakes. Immediately, we hear, this is the character and we have her voice and we know some things about her. And that if that's not the crux, the heart of a good story, then I don't know what it is. - Master class, master class. The sentence is a master class on force, pacing, and voice to propel a reader to the end. Like if the next sentence was whack and the next paragraph was whack and the next paragraph was whack, I gotta keep going 'cause that first sentence. And we know Naphisa, she's coming at each sentence after that it's just like unfurling more and more and more. But absolutely, I agree with you, fam. And it's interesting that those pieces came out like early 20s, right? 2020, like 2020, 2020. - And I'm glad you use the word, you know, you find a lot of essay sporing. I found a lot of books boring and I'm always, I feel embarrassed to say that 'cause I'm like, maybe it's me, I don't know. But yeah, there's a lot of shit that's boring. And so I think that if we were to call it the new wave, the post 2020 wave of essays, at least the ones that are resonating with me, long form, they're loud at the outset or they are subversive at the outset. I subscribe to Memoir Monday, which is a curated list of first person memoir essays. And I'm always, you know, discovering voices there that just jump out at me. Electric lit also, you know, has some fan, has a newsletter that has very voicey things, you know, coming through, but all genres, but, you know, including the essays. But people say, you know, oh, it's our attention span. I don't know that it's our attention spans, anymore necessarily. I think we just might be a little bit exhausted from the essay that either takes too long to say something or it's saying some shit I don't care about. - Right, right, right. - Whereas I think what we don't get enough of are those where like, oh, I didn't know I would care about this, but the way you wrote that first line made me want to know about this thing that I didn't even know anything about it. I never, you know, never, never considered previously. So I don't know, I don't know what shifted. I just refuse to believe that this is simple thing as our attention spans, but I think in some ways, and you tell me if you have observed this as well, like I don't find myself having to claw through too much boring stuff to get to the good stuff anymore. Like are they publishing stuff? Have the rules changed where, you know, editors are also less inclined to go with the quiet nothing. - Yeah, I don't know. - One thing I think I've been the last thing I'll say, I think the 10s to the 20s recalibrated readers. And so like when I'm writing that, like when I was writing my shit in 2012, like I was hoping praying, you know, maybe this could get to Disha, but now I think a lot of us because you know, your work is out there, changing people's fucking understanding of what books and words and rhythms can do. And all those people we just talked about, Damon has come out and changed. I just think now one of the reasons, if we see a change in the way like voice and tone are being used in what we call the essay, I think it's partially because we now notice so many dope, black, brown, queer folk are readers of the essay, which was what they were telling us all the time. - All the time. - Right, like we've been telling the publishing, we've been telling the publishing all the time, y'all. We want more. And then I think what a lot of us had to do is be like, "Fuck it, you don't believe it? "Well, we gonna go out and write the shit we want "to show you there's an audience for it." And all of those people we named had to do that, had to start out on blogs, writing essays that eventually showed publishing that there was a market for that. That kind of packaging of idea and story. I just think it's amazing now that we are literally writing to ourselves. When before we said it, but I don't know if it was true. You know what I mean? - Well, I know it wasn't true of me early. Like, I mean, I wasn't thinking to myself like, "Oh, how can I tailor what I'm writing "to get people to publish it?" Like, I definitely wanted to know the secret sauce. And so I just wrote these annoying fan letters to other writers, like basically asking them to tell me the secret sauce, right? And of course, there is no secret sauce. But I just remember thinking that this is what I'm writing. This is what's interesting to me. And I just got to figure out how to get somebody to want it. It never occurred to me to dilute myself or to squeeze myself into some kind of box that didn't fit. But I couldn't, I was like, "But what is the key?" And I know, like now we know whiteness is the key. Elitism is the key, you know? There's a lot of reasons that, you know, we didn't, you know, 20 years ago, there weren't all of the spaces even that are publishing the kinds of things that we're writing. And so, you know, so that was part of the challenge too. But dang, there was something else you said that you, something you said made me think about another essay. This one was from Ulster Magazine, which I don't know if you know Ulster, but Sarah Boughton, I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly, curates this magazine about age and her, you know, interest in fascination with age and aging. And this one by Stacey Greason is called Ferrell. And she has this, now this isn't the opening paragraph, but it's later in the essay. She said, from the AM radio on my bedroom dresser, I heard Helen Reddy's voice saying, "I am woman, hear me roar." I danced through aspen grows, pretending to be Marlott Thomas from that girl, making it alone in the big city in my treehouse. I'd light up another Virginia Slim cigarette stolen from a babysitting job. You've come a long way, baby, and a dream of my life as an independent woman. Like any Ferrell thing, I was unprepared for the cruelty of men. When I tell you I gasped, (laughs) when, 'cause it, what she did there, again, great storytelling is we see her on the cusp of, you know, young womanhood and freedom and independence. And that sentence, just like she was snatched, that sentence just snatched. - Absolutely. - And in a way, I wonder if there's a kind of snatch that only the essay can do. Because I know fiction can snatch us, and I know poetry can snatch us. But I wonder, I wonder if there's a particularity to the snatch that comes from the essay. And hopefully that's something we can continue to explore when we keep talking. Because my heart tells me that there is. But I don't know if that's true. You know, like I don't know. But anyway. - Right, 'cause we're saying two things. We're talking about the particularity of the essay, but then we're talking about its storytelling as much as fiction as storytelling. And I think those things can exist in tension and we could certainly have an entire show shows, you know, the whole podcast dedicated to parsing those things out. - And I hope we do. I hope we do that. - Thank you for this, Disha, I appreciate you. - Thank you. (upbeat music) - KSA, it's been so wonderful. A dream, truly, to be here with you today. - I feel so lucky to be here with you and please come back, please answer the door when I knock. Please come back, please let me come back. - Bed. - Bed. (upbeat music) - Thank you, everyone, for listening. If you like what we're doing at Rec and True Stories, share this podcast with your friends. We've got a lot of incredible conversations in store for you this season. So see you soon. (upbeat music)