Rachel Schwartzmann: Welcome to Slow Stories. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann. I'm a writer, creator, and the author of Slowing: Discover Wonder, Beauty, and Creativity through Slow Living from Chronicle Books.
For those of you just tuning in, Slow Stories is a multimedia project that began with this podcast and now includes a newsletter on Substack. There, I write about things like time, creativity, and pace—and on this show, I interview artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators who share slow stories—and big ideas—about living, working, and creating in our digital age.
Before we get into the episode, I wanted to quickly thank everyone who has shown support for Slowing in some way, shape, or form. Publishing a book—a first book, no less—is truly an all-consuming experience, and I'm so grateful to have received support and encouragement from readers around the globe. That said, if you want to show your support for Slowing, and if you've read and genuinely enjoyed the book, consider leaving a review, as this will help Slowing find even more readers.
As a reminder, you can also follow Slow Stories on Substack for a behind-the-scenes look at bringing a book to life, and follow me [on social media] @rachelschwartzmann for real-time updates.
For now, I'll leave you with this refresher on the book: Slowing caters to many literary sensibilities: essay and memoir, creative wellness, and personal growth. Language and lyricism are front and center, but there is also a practical component. There are various ways you can engage with and experience this book. For that reason, I don't know where exactly you'll find it on the shelf, but I'm confident it will fit somewhere in your home. That's where I wrote it, and that's what it means to me. I can't wait for you to read it!
Now, on to the episode, which begins with an opening story from Jess Focht, who shares how a small creature shapes her daily life—and slows her down. Here’s more from Jess.
Jess Focht: Hi, I'm Jess Focht—a writer, reader, and photographer in Brooklyn. I write A Novel Idea on Substack, which explores literature, culture, and feelings. I'm also a mom to my black pug, Hamlet.
His rhythms are different from mine. He eats, sleeps, cuddles with me, goes outside, and he's content with that. I feel very present and content when I practice slowing down with him. Lately, I've been keeping a book called Dog Poems on my bedside table, which is a small reminder to me of how deeply animals and Hamlet, specifically, shapes my life.
This is a poem called “Verse for a Certain Dog” by Dorothy Parker.
POEM READ BY JESS FOCHT ︎
Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you so much again to Jess for sharing. Again, the poem she referenced is “Verse for a Certain Dog” by Dorothy Parker. You can also follow Jess on social media @jessfolk.jpg and subscribe to her Substack, A Novel Idea. Now, here's my conversation with Caleb Femi.
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From 10:45 PM to 4:45 AM, readers attend the longest-running house party in South London, which is always held at an undisclosed inner-city spot. Rendered in minute-by-minute poetry, photographs, and other visual ephemera, we encounter intimacies, conversations, and perspectives from the party’s attendees, organizers, and the like. In this way, The Wickedest is a singular book that captures time—and a particular moment in time—where the need to gather comes at the height of a loneliness epidemic, and we grapple with what it means to truly cultivate communal space.
For Caleb, though, the latter is inherent. He continues to lead with humanity, curiosity, love—all of which engender creative work that transcends mediums—and time and space. And in this interview, Caleb shared more about navigating life as a multidisciplinary artist, the private aspects of poetry, the singularity of visual storytelling, and how he honors time both on and off the page.
True to form, this conversation took its time coming together, but a quiet transformation—one that only occurs when you find yourself truly in the present moment—unfolded throughout the hour Caleb and I spoke. But I don’t want to give too much more away. So on that note, here’s writer, artist, and director Caleb Femi.
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Caleb Femi: So, my name is Caleb. Caleb Femi—you know what? Just Caleb. Because outside of what I do as a writer and director and all of the other list of things, I'm just Caleb to my friends. I'm a huge, huge football—or soccer—addict, playing football and watching it. I'm a Manchester United supporter, unfortunately. I’m huge on anime, which is something that I have no regrets about. I wear that with pride and joy even though sometimes it doesn't necessarily come with the best of reputation. And I think, more than anything, I'm someone who is constantly looking for interesting notions of the human experience, the exercising of free will. How do I make one day different to another day? How many life experiences do I gather—[before] the end of my life, hopefully at a very, very, very old age—and look back on and be quite proud of?
What else, what else, what else? Peace of mind. I think, if you were to ask me what I value the most, [it] is peace of mind. I don't think I'm able to engage with anything that is remotely imaginative if I don't have this inner calm and inner peace. And I try to find that in the early hours of the morning. I'm an early riser, and dawn is the place where I usually just get to be the most free before the day begins, and you're sort of swept into the wave of everything, you know?
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, that's really interesting. Was that at odds when you were working on the book, which is so much about nightlife?
Caleb Femi: No, because much of the inception of The Wickedest and understanding nightlife came during the [COVID-19] lockdown where [there] was the absence of it. So then I was able to sort of feel what we had missed in nightlife, particularly house parties, and then through that kind of propel me into a more intentional understanding or engagement with nightlife when the world opened up again, and that came back into our existence again.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, it's really interesting, and we'll obviously talk more about The Wickedest, but before we do, I'm curious: I feel like at this point in the year, it's always nice to kind of take an inventory of what you enjoy and value, but are there some things you've learned that you haven't enjoyed or want to move away from—[or] something that you're ready to kind of leave and create space for something else to fill it?
Caleb Femi: I think more than anything, it's just coming into my thirties now. I'm less pressured to conform and do things in a way that has always been—specifically as an artist in all the various industries that I'm part of—traditional ways of doing things. [Whether that’s] methods, artistic techniques or just what you should do to advance in the industry and what you should put up with and all of that. I think I've been a lot more bolstered in my sense of self and being okay with what I may potentially lose out on if I don't do things in a certain way. And I think the book, The Wickedest, is one of the most expressive iterations of that: moving away from what was expected as what my second book was going to be or even on a poetic level—like what a poetry collection should look and feel like from subject matter to technical elements of it. And once again, just the incorporation of multimedia from photography to blueprint draw-ups, illustrative analogies, screenshots of mobile phone conversations, and notes apps and whatnot, you know?
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I asked that question too because when I was getting ready for this interview, I stumbled upon an interview you did with The Financial Times, and you said that you weren't doing another poetry collection that you “felt done with it.”
Caleb Femi: Yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Are you finished with poetry as a reader, too? Or what aspects feel the most complete?
Caleb Femi: Oh! That's a lovely question actually. I'm looking to clarify that a little bit because poetry never leaves you, especially as a poet. If anything, it embeds into the foundation of your artistry—I see everything through the lens of poetry, especially in my visual work, whether it's moving image[s] or still photography, applying the principles of poetry into it has made me better in all those arenas.
Poetry is something that is a private contemplation, a private exercise. The reading of poetry is something that I gravitate to regardless. I'm always engaged with the world of poetry. Some of my favorite poets, I still get super excited when I hear there's a collection [from them] coming or [when] a literary magazine has posted a poem that there's a new writer in the world—or an old writer who has decided to submit some beautiful poetry to the world.
So it would always be a private endeavor, but I think that writing another collection is something that I'm not necessarily excited about because, you know, as I said earlier on, there's this drive in me to want to explore different chapters, aspects, different iterations of artistry and I think I try to keep true to that. And if poetry isn't something that I feel that I want to contribute to the canon, I’d rather move to [something] different… like I've never written a novel. I really want to do that because I think that I have a story in me that best suits long-form prose, and I want to honor that rather than stay in a safe space that poetry is [to me]. I really want to challenge myself and develop as an artist [and] as a creative mind. So I guess that's, that's why I said that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And that's valid. And the thing is, our preferences change. You could change your mind tomorrow. I think that's what keeps it exciting. But it seems like now, with creativity, there's an expectation to be boxed into a certain brand or genre and stay there. So, I think it's great that you've expanded and have turned away from those expectations.
It resonates with me. I've always been a very creative person. I studied dance at a performing arts high school here in New York.
Caleb Femi: Oh, sick.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah! I'm a writer now and dabbled a little in art and photography, but just for fun. All of that to say, your background is really interesting in that way. And I'm wondering, because you've dabbled in so many different fields how it's benefited—and maybe challenged—your relationship with attention.
Caleb Femi: Fascinating. These are some knockout questions, by the way.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Thanks!
Caleb Femi: Yeah. Attention is something that I've had to curate over the years, and really understand how to order [the] multiple platforms that I have to share my attention with to work. I think, if you asked me eight years ago, I really struggled. I sort of would compartmentalize all of them and therefore, my attention was always never evenly shared. It was quite sporadic, and it felt more reactive than proactive. As I developed, I think something presented itself to me—like a method—and that was to see myself as a world builder or sort of a universe builder. Each art form that I'm into is its own planet, but they all work cohesively to fit in the same solar system essentially. And they all have a relationship with one another that allows a seamless movement or attention on the whole thing.
A lot of the time, I'm telling the same stories again and again in different platforms [and] pulling from different ideas and reinventing or reincarnating my ideas from one space into the other space. For example, I mean this is, this is not necessarily a cross-platform in that way, but in my first collection, Poor, there was a poem, I think, called “Yards” somewhere in the second half of that book. It's a party, there's a house party going on there, but then The Wickedest is one night at a house party and it's that house party that allows you to go deeper and spend longer in the world of that poem almost.
Then there are more obvious sort of versions: there's a poem in my first collection called “Survivors Guilt,” but then there's a song on streaming platforms that I made called “Survivor Guilt.” And then there's a short film. They're all very different and can be taken in their own selves—the song is the song. You don't need context from other spaces; you don't need the poem to understand that context. You don't need to watch the film because the film itself is a fantastical, dark comedy … but somehow there are elements of it that you can see. It shares the same DNA as the poem and also as the song as well.
So in that way my work is always constantly informing each other and growing all at the same time. My attention doesn't feel sporadic. It's almost like if you're painting on a canvas and you have different brushes and different colors and all of that—it all comes together. You don't paint all reds first, then all blues, and then all black. You do everything as needed.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I've thought about other conversations I've had with writers who say, yeah, you are constantly revisiting the same themes and questions in your work just might come out in an unexpected way. And I think, as you talk about the visual side of things or tapping into those modes of expression, I've often called myself a very visual writer. I'm very attuned to details and need my environment to be stimulating. I actually just put out my first book in September, which has a visual treatment as well. And you know, based on some of the other work that you've done, I'm curious what photography or film can say that other mediums can't.
Caleb Femi: That's a very interesting question. One that I'm still trying to—
Rachel Schwartzmann: It might be a lifelong one.
Caleb Femi: I think it will be a lifelong one, actually. …
First of all, words are a failed state. You know, they never communicate to sort of the perfect efficiency of what we're feeling inside as humans—especially the English language, it's not as rich as some other languages out there. So you always have to accept that there are going to be gaps, natural gaps, in what it is that you're feeling and what it is that you want to communicate to the reader. The reader also has a different way of interpreting words because their experiences are different—so what they draw from is never gonna sort of allow for perfect communication.
So, for me, photography, specifically, allows you to bypass that. It still presents you with a perspective but one that purely exists between what the eye sees and what the heart feels. It immediately draws you into empathy. Words gradually do that, [but] a paragraph is something slower to intake than photography. There is an instantaneous process there I think can serve us in a way that is so fantastic because half the time before you're able to even process a human experience—it's already passed, it's happened to, you see something, you see a flash of light and your consciousness doesn't even take it in often you have to like to sit down for a while and then in your memory you're able to process and slow that moment down. Photography is able to sort of bring you back to a specific moment that otherwise would've gone by quicker than you would've been able to process and give you an opportunity to digest it. Words and photography in that way just make it the ultimate team, you know?
Rachel Schwartzmann: Absolutely. And I don't think The Wickedest would've had the same reading experience without those visuals.
Caleb Femi: Yeah, I agree.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, maybe we can pause here and have you read from the book.
Caleb Femi: Mm-hmm.
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Caleb Femi: Oh, by the way, I forgot to let you know that I never read in the same way. … I think that [with] reading there should be something alive about it. So, I'm always in the moment, tweaking how the words are said or either changing the words altogether.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think that's great. Do you enjoy reading them aloud?
Caleb Femi: Yeah, that's the only way that makes me that that really keeps it energizing for me each time.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean it sounded great, and I was just looking at the photos again. Everything just flows so beautifully. I love that time plays a huge role in the book, particularly the timestamp element. I also have three essays in my book called “Timestamps,” which is so funny.
Caleb Femi: Oh, we're so aligned. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah! I mean, it's the concern of my creative practice—and life—time and pace. And I just wonder how writing The Wickedest affected your relationship with time and pace. How would you describe your relationship to those things or ideas overall?
Caleb Femi: Anyone who's ever read my first book would know that I've always had a preoccupation with time in terms of the days, but also like larger scale units like years and decades. I hear in the back of my mind's ear the ticking of the clock.
Before I was ten years old, my understanding of time was weightless and quite infinite. Then you see another kid your age die [and] you realize that the reality of that means that time isn't something that is abundantly free and universally given to everyone. So, what you want to achieve by a certain time was something that you know was planted in me. There were a lot of people— a lot of kids my age around that time—we always wanted to do something by like [age] fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Unfortunately some of my more traumatized friends, even by the age of like ten, didn't see their lives past twenty-one because most people or a lot of the people that they saw as icons or that they looked up to either ended up dead or in jail—which might as well be the same thing.
So I guess that that presence of time was ticking very much. Even once I was like twenty-one, I felt like, oh, this is the age that a lot of people say if you make it by that age then you'll be good. I feel now I have an abundance of time [but] what do I do with it? Survivor's guilt is something that also makes you think, okay, cool, how can I show that I have respected the value of time that wasn't afforded to my friends?
Fast forward decades, and the lockdown happened in 2020, and it feels like you have so much time, and there were days. Days run into days, run into days, run into days. The concept of time slowly disappeared. At that time, I was thinking a lot about about nightlife, of course, which was the inception of this book. But then, when time started again, and the world started moving as it normally does, nightlife and my attention to it was something that felt like: Oh, okay, there was something about partying with people that you love, that grants you the ability outside of time—a good party, a good moment with your friends feels as infinite as it feels fleeting. And it's that relationship, that push and pull, that I became fascinated with. I thought it was necessary to then timestamp the party.
I also felt [this] on a curation level as well: I think that the people who organize parties, [the] people who are preoccupied with the more sort of business side of partying—like how do you make sure that people have a good time all the time rather than like bookending your time? So maybe 12:00 AM to 2:00 AM is excellent and then after that, it all falls away—whether you keep the consistency. That in itself is an art form as well.
And then, as a writer: Some things that you write and talk about, [some of those] experiences weren’t clicking and I was like, why isn't this particular experience clicking? And I was like, ah, there's an opportunity here for me to allow the reader to key into why this makes sense. What happens at 2:00 AM is totally different than what could happen at 10:45 PM. Knowing that something has happened at 2:00 AM gives you an added context [or an] added layer to understand what it is that is being communicated.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It was a really useful and aligned device to use. Yeah. Are you familiar with Etel Adnan's work?
Caleb Femi: Uh, no.
Rachel Schwartzmann: She is an incredible philosopher—or she was, rather— an incredible philosopher, poet, and painter. She has a really beautiful book called Night, which is a meditation on memory and where it's held. I just wanted to share a few moments that I think would resonate with you and be applicable to this conversation.
Caleb Femi: Yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: She writes: “... night and memory meditate on each other. We move in them disoriented, for they often refuse to secure our vision.” And then later: “I can hear the night’s pulse. Divine will circulates around its edges.” And then later “Night deepens, and this is the question: Who’s dreaming of whom? A fault-line separates us from our share.”
There are so many more moments that I think align withThe Wickedest in terms of dreams, community, and memory, and I just wanted to share.
Caleb Femi: Yeah, that's beautiful. I'll check out her work.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I know you were saying earlier that you are a morning person, but I would love to talk a little bit more about the night and how it kind of has helped you appreciate the present moment. I mean, in The Wickedest, there's a moment in [the poem] “Max meet Shelly on the balcony” where you write: Like a planet flung I danced / unroped fading into / the song’s sublime colors / is this the seismic consequence / of looking the present in the eye?” I hope that was really beautiful. Do you like the present moment? Are you good at living in it or writing in it?
Caleb Femi: I love writing in the present moment because it's such a trickster, isn't it? You can never catch it; you can never truly catch it when it's actually here. It's always just going. It's been like a phenomenon that I've always wanted to be able to capture in writing. It's probably the slipperiest of all human experiences; you’re never able to catch it dead on when it's there.
And Max, who is the character in the book, who has some psychedelic enhancement who took, he took a tab basically [Laughs], he's able to actually for the first time—and this is me just wishfully speaking to that intent—to be able to catch the present so he's able to do it. He's able to understand or face the consequences of that.
It's almost like in Harry Potter, the idea of the golden snitch [Laughs] being something like that— or maybe even the philosopher’s stone: Maybe the present is something that is never about you finding the present, but the present [is] slowing down and stopping and choosing for you to see it in its true nature and what the consequences of that are. I think there's something, for me anyway, quite arresting about that.
Anytime I catch myself truly as close to the present or my awareness of the present, there's a fear, almost a reverence in me of—like this is the moment, this is it, and it's gone. The moment you feel it and then articulate it, it's gone. Have you ever, with you're with your group of friends, realized that, oh, this might be the last time that we dance in this particular place in our twenties? Once you get a peek into that present, there's a fear that is—that is more reverential— that takes your breath away, almost, and then it's gone. And that is the only time that we can truly, truly, truly live in the moment. I'm still combating that idea of the present philosophically and existentially. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I think we all are—I've been nodding. I think that's a really great way to put it, treating it with reverence, especially in this day and age. I mean, I don't know if you deal with this, but I have dealt with anxiety and depression for years, and that can definitely impede your ability to appreciate those moments or recognize them. But I did have one of those moments very recently after a pretty bad bout with anxiety. I was with my husband, celebrating our 10th anniversary in Amsterdam in December. This doesn't sound particularly revelatory, but I was like, wow, I'm in Amsterdam. It was more of a bodily sensation. I felt good about where I was, and I recognized as you said, the fleetingness of it. Those moments, I think, are hard to come by when our attention is pulled in a million different directions, and that's the great thing about storytelling: it really asks you to be with the words or the photos or whatever the content—however, it's presented.
Caleb Femi: Yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: On that note, maybe we can pause here again and have you read from The Wickedest.
Caleb Femi: Yeah, sure.
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I'd love to know what you think about joy and gathering and partying in adulthood versus youth or adolescence. What are some of the biggest things you've learned about how we come together throughout these chapters?
Caleb Femi: I think that contemplation—moving out of my twenties into my early thirties, was something that you are faced with because your unexperienced understanding of youth is hinged on age rather than a state of mind, rather than the principles of being a good member of your family, a contributing member of your family, a contributing member of your friendship, a contributing member of your community. Loving people! Youth is hinged on your capacity to love—that allowed me to have a really good understanding of who I was and what I was supposed to feel…
But for many reasons—it could be capitalism, it could be our culture in the West—the way that we see youth is very age-based. Anyone outside of that doesn't fit the confines of what's expected of them, the rigidity of especially an arena like party[ing] with people that you love within your community, are you supposed to give up at age thirty or thirty-whatever? Is there an expiry date on loving people in the space of or in the context of a party? Even though our bodies demand different things from us as we age, we adapt to that, but we should never start taking things away that are healthy for our bodies, like interacting with one another.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean community is so central to the book, and it's interesting, you know, writing is often seen as the story like solitary endeavor and I'm wondering if you like solitude and what a book like The Wickedest can teach us about solitude versus loneliness? Just as you talk about things that are good for our bodies and loving, there's a huge loneliness epidemic throughout the world.
Caleb Femi: Yeah, for sure. Solitude versus loneliness. The push and pull, like some of the characters in the book, arrive on their own. Frederick arrives at the party on his own. At home, where he's with his family, he feels lonely, and he's not in solitude—he doesn't live alone, he lives in a house full of people, but he goes on his own to a party, and his loneliness is cured there. Him, Abu, even Max—I really didn't wanna group people too much. I mean Shelly and Pris are there together, but I kind of also was thinking about… I did lockdown alone with my two cats, so technically, I was in solitude, but I didn't feel lonely. I felt like there was a community out there that was waiting for me or that I still felt connected to—take away technology and the online stuff—I mean physical places. I knew that if I had a bank of memories of people [and] physical interactions with people, physical interactions with my community, so even though I had not seen them, I had that to rest on.
My relationship with loneliness, I always knew that there was space to reach out to people. I knew that there was light at the end of the tunnel … I guess this is the importance of third spaces, which, over the last decade or so, have been decimated across the world. The third spaces that we know that we can go to on our own and find people there. The rise of loneliness across the world, especially in this age [and] every sort of age category. Where do we go when we just want to feel good or connected? And half the time, it's not necessarily even going somewhere to talk to people it’s like having a community library and going there and sitting down and getting on with what [we] need to do. But you see the same regular faces around and that's enough connection to keep you going.
All these places are gone, and we have to be in our houses. House parties [have] become more important than ever. The culture of inviting people over into your personal space. It's something that I felt like we need to exercise again on a larger scale. Why don't we invite people to our homes? I don't necessarily even mean friends—I know that comes with this whole set of things, but for those of us who can remember the nineties and decades before that, it wasn't bizarre to open up your home to people that you barely knew. Even the phrase “barely knew” now comes with so much trepidation and undertones of danger or whatnot in a way that it didn't many decades ago. There was always: let's lead with love first and danger is a possibility, of course, but let's always lead with humanity—
Caleb Femi: Yeah, and curiosity.
Rachel Schwartzmann: So, who would you invite into your space or your home if you could?
Caleb Femi: Anyone and everyone, My friends will tell you that my door is physically opened. I don't lock my doors. I know that sounds bizarre, but if you come to my house, you don't need to knock. The door is open.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Have you made friends that way? Has anybody ever—
Caleb Femi: Yeah. Again, this is [something] my friends will confirm, [but] I've met people off the street, and they've stayed with me for two, three weeks. There was a footballer from Cameroon who was stranded in London. His agent had abandoned him, and I was leaving the train station one day, and there was this guy with a suitcase, and he asked me for directions somewhere and explained his situation, and I was like, let’s try and contact your agent and figure out what's going on. He ended up staying at my house for close to a month. My friends always know that you can always crash at my house, no questions asked. I've developed bonds with people that I barely know through that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: That’s amazing. Was he okay?
Caleb Femi: Yeah. He got signed for a second division team and his life was okay. His [former] agent was going through stuff, and he had to change agencies and then find a new agent and then reengage the club. It was actually quite fascinating for me as someone who's a football fanatic to kind of see the business side of things up close.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I mean, that's a story in itself.
Caleb Femi: Yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: As you speak about friendship, something I love as a reader is to read the acknowledgments in a book first. And I noticed that you mentioned the late and amazing Virgil Abloh, and I was thinking of the retrospective I saw of his work at the Brooklyn Museum and his kind of infamous call to “question everything.” As we talk about fostering these connections with our people—with ourselves in these spaces—what are you questioning and is there a question that you wish people asked you more often?
Caleb Femi: I'm literally from the school of Virgil Abloh, this [idea of] question everything is in every element of what I do. Every time I conceive a new project, or I'm asked to come on board, I'm always questioning if this is the best way to go about it. I think, for me, it's always like the question is then: What else is possible? That's my most frequently asked question—even in my daily life. I’ll ask myself: How do you want to dress? What else is possible? What else would you love to pull off? So, in every aspect of what I'm sort of directly involved in on a sort of artistic level—or just the mundanity of life–that question is what keeps me excited about existing. What is possible? That question is the first step you take in yielding magic.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Oh, that’s so beautifully put.
And is there a question that you hope people start asking you more often? Whether it's about art, poetry, friendship, or really anything that comes to mind?
Caleb Femi: No. [Laughs] That's such an interesting proposition and one that I need to take into my life, actually. I need to think about what questions I should be asked and start facilitating a way for people to ask me that question.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, it's a tricky thing. I mean, I think people don't want to cross a boundary or maybe feel like they aren't the ones that should be asking that question, but I found that to be a very interesting thing to kind of end these interviews with. [Laughs]
Caleb Femi: Actually, you know what, speaking writer to writer, I would say that I would [want] writers—artists just in general—to have more of a fiscal conversation. Ask me! Because you want to know the numbers.
I think it's good that we have a level of transparency between us because that way we’re all on the same side. Let’s talk about the backend of stuff: How much was your advance for this thing? What are your numbers doing? That allows all of us to then have a better understanding of the idea of the value that we bring—because often, we're undervalued across the board.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. [Laughs]
Caleb Femi: [Laughs] It's like an unofficial unionizing if we can just ask each other these sorts of questions.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It's hard—sometimes you don't know the questions to ask until you're in it.
Caleb Femi: Yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, there's probably so much more that we could talk about, but maybe to close things out, we can have you read one more time from The Wickedest.
Caleb Femi: Yes.
Rachel Schwartzmann: That was my conversation with Caleb Femi. You can purchase The Wickedest and Caleb’s earlier work anywhere books are sold—though we recommend supporting local and independent bookstores if you can. You can also follow Caleb on social @caleb.femi. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann, and you've been listening to Slow Stories. Thank you so much for tuning in.