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Rachel Schwartzmann: Welcome to Slow Stories. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann. I'm a writer, consultant, and the creator and host of this podcast. For those of you just tuning in, I interview artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators who share slow stories—and big ideas—about living, working, and creating in our digital age.
This episode begins with a story from multidisciplinary artist Caro, who shares musings on pace and a book that stays with her no matter what. Here's more from Caro.
Caro: I'm Caro, a multidisciplinary craft artist working in the mediums of metals, embroidery, and lace. There's never been an epiphany for me—to slow down, that is. I feel slowness to be a product of intention, care, and singular focus. I've forever been there, so there isn't a singular poem, book, or moment that precipitated a reversal of a worrying four-dimensional self. I didn't grow up with a TV; the internet was small and unimposing in the nineties, and I read constantly. I was wonderfully sheltered, in a sense—slow from circumstance—but I've come to regard it as the most essential bulwark against the pace of modernity. It provides testimony to that which is palpable and tangible. The reason we ache for a languorous afternoon and a reveling night. Our desire to be suspended.
I'm going to read from a section of The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, which I would classify as my "if you're trapped on a desert island and can only bring one book" book.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you so much again to Caro for sharing. Again, the book she mentioned is The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, and you can learn more about Caro's work online at https://carolinerossoff.com. Now, here's my conversation with Ross Gay.
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Rachel Schwartzmann: To hold joy in your hand means to honor sadness in your heart, for the two are inextricable. This sentiment is one that many of us will recognize after a prolonged period of chaos and transformation. But for poet and author Ross Gay, the study of these modes has metabolized into art that will stand the test of time. You may recognize his words from The Book of Delights, a compendium of small delights noticed and recorded over the course of one year. Now Ross is following up these themes with Inciting Joy, a collection of essays that "considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life's inevitable hardships."
There is a liveliness to Ross's prose that makes it hard to turn away from the full spectrum of humanity. From gardening to grief, Ross charts a loving exploration into what it means to connect in a world that challenges our time, attention, and hope. And as we collectively continue to question systems that prize productivity and efficiency, Inciting Joy makes a compelling case to slow down and reconnect with all of the things that make life joyful.
And in this interview, Ross shared more about writing and re-encountering his life, the joys and lessons of aging, and the importance of change and curiosity.
Ross Gay is someone who expands your mind and your heart. I can't think of a better conversation to close out another tumultuous year. So without further delay, here's more from Ross Gay, author of Inciting Joy.
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Ross Gay: I'm someone who's been really cared for and is being really cared for. I like foraging, you know, I like gathering, I like getting together. I like dreaming with people.
Rachel Schwartzmann: For some reason—just based on reading your work—I imagine that you hum a lot while you're doing those kinds of things. Is that correct? [Both laugh]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Nice. Well, I'm going to borrow a page from your book and ask you to tell me about something beautiful you discovered this morning.
Ross Gay: Yeah, I'm in my studio. I live in Bloomington, Indiana, and this morning I'm checking on plants and stuff. We planted these Pawpaw trees. They're probably three years old, and they're doing good. One of them made fruit this year—and enormous fruit—and I've just been kind of waiting to see when that fruit was going to fall. Because most of the Pawpaw trees in Bloomington that I know of have pretty much gone through their thing. And this tree was just hanging onto these fruits, and it was a cluster of like five or six of them and kind of the biggest ones that I've seen. This morning I went out there, and sure enough, they were [there]—they're ready kind of when they're on the ground. So they were on the ground, and that was a marvel. I'm about to leave time for like a week, and I was just nervous that I was going to miss them.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, talk about a slow story. It held on for you.
Ross Gay: Such a slow story. Gardening is a slow story, actually.
Rachel Schwartzmann: That's one thing about living in New York that bums me out a little bit—just having access to private green space. I mean, I'm lucky to live right near Prospect Park, which I guess is its own sort of beauty: there's life in many different contexts all over the place. But it must be nice to have that privacy.
Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Kind of watching things very closely over a long period of time is pretty, pretty special.
Rachel Schwartzmann: You know, when I was reading both The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy, I could almost hear you speaking to me. Physical presence, physicality, attention—those are such big things that you talk about and experience. I know you [also] have a background in sports. Basically, there's just such a liveliness to what you do. And I wanted to know how joy or delight manifests for you physically. In other words, which of your five senses is awakened first?
Ross Gay: That's such a great question! I have not even come close to thinking about the kind of sensory experience of joy. I haven't even come close to it in part because I think it's ... every sense that is available to you is involved in it. Maybe, maybe? Or maybe it's like sub-sensual central or super-sensual or something. It's such a great question. Can I just tease it a little bit [and] try to think about it?
Rachel Schwartzmann: Of course, yeah.
Ross Gay: If I have a kind of definition of joy, it's something like the feeling which I often describe as a kind of light or luminosity that comes from us when we help each other carry our sorrows. And so it's a kind of radiance. ... it's like the taste of the Pawpaw might—I'm wondering— might incite the feeling, but the deeper feeling is: how lucky am I to be in this circuit of care which is manifested in this fruit and that this tree has been so kind as to offer to me. Which I guess is to say ... yeah, I don't even know. That's a great question!
Rachel Schwartzmann: Maybe the senses are a portal to something we can't really feel or name. It's like a sixth sense, for lack of a better word.
Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is fun to say even just to try it—like the joy sense, you know? [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, as you say in the books, that could be a good t-shirt slogan.
Ross Gay: Yeah, that's a T-shirt. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, that is a t-shirt. [Laughs] I know it's a hard one, and it's something I'm constantly thinking about since so much of my experience and existence is informed by technology—[I'm a] millennial through and through. I'm always curious to hear how people sort of react to that because you forget you actually can notice these senses as they're unfolding.
Ross Gay: Totally, totally. Yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And I feel like, for me, joy in my experience has often been touted as something that's synonymous with loudness. I'm actually an intensely shy person. And so, you know, I wonder what you would say to people who are shy but want to incite or experience joy in quieter ways.
Ross Gay: Well, I think my sense of joy is that it's an understanding or falling into ... the awareness of more connection than we could ever conceive of... The dance floor is an obvious place where maybe joy could be kind of expressed or experienced. But it's also just as easy to me to imagine ... to use a tech term for you [Laughs], if there was this kind of circuitry that is constant and way more sort of plugged in than we could ever imagine it, then in a way we're never alone.
I think it's a very common experience for people to feel that, fall into that feeling while, for instance, being in the woods by themselves—with other people but also in the woods "by themselves." And I think probably there's some understanding that there is this whole kind of holding—neutral holding—that's going on in, say, a forest or a place like that. That we often might say, "I go there to be alone," but in fact, it's not going there to be alone at all. It's going there to be in a kind of presence that is almost beyond our capacity to recognize it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: What about silence? Can silence be its own form of joy?
Ross Gay: I think. I mean, personally, solitude and joy are not at all antithetical to me. I can often feel profound joy in solitude. Probably in part because the more I think, learn, practice, study, et cetera, the more I know my solitude is never—in a certain way—complete. Because even if I'm by myself, I'm bringing my folks with me in my body, you know? And that's a lot of folks, actually. There's always a gathering inside of us. And sometimes I think what feels really delightful to me about being in some solitude is that you get to reacquaint yourself with that gathering, that gathering that's inside of you—which sometimes I think can be very difficult to do if you're busy or in the midst of other kinds of gatherings.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you write alone, or how do you like to write with these themes in mind?
Ross Gay: Yeah, I mean, these days, I kind of write wherever. I think part of the thing with writing that book of delights, which is a book where I wrote an essay more or less every day for a year, is because I kind of had to get it done. I learned how to write wherever. So now I can kind of write forever. So I might, you know, find myself writing on the train or at the coffee shop. I love coffee shops to work out of, partly I like to work at coffee shops where I can be alone but also be in the presence of people.
I was just thinking about this the other day. My partner and I were having a conversation about the ways we like to drive from place to place, and I almost always will choose the place where I can see people, even though I like to be alone! I really like to be alone, but I kind of like to know that there are people. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Right? Best of both.
Ross Gay: Yeah, totally. Totally. And the coffee shop where I like going to, we're going to run into people, and I get to just hang around and bullshit. But I also say if I want to work on something, I also like going to the coffee shop where I'm not going to run into anyone, but I'm glad to know that there are people to run into.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you get distracted easily?
Ross Gay: I think I'm fairly both, I'm like fairly distractable, and I'm very focused as well. But if a person comes around—like if my buddy Dave walks into the coffee shop and I'm working on something 99% of the time, unless I have like a deadline really on myself, I'm going to choose Dave. It's hard for me not to; it's kind of why I'm always late if I'm walking someplace or I know people; I'm not gonna be on time. [Laughs] Because I'm probably gonna choose that—which is also to say that I don't think of that as a distraction. I think of that as the point of it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, that's a good way to look at it.
Ross Gay: Yeah, distraction, inefficiency, I love it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And often, you don't even realize or know their distractions; it's just life happening, taking you in a different direction.
Ross Gay: It's just life. Yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Just speaking to the broader culture of efficiency and productivity, having to unlearn all of those things, it's been kind of magical to get back to a place where I don't have to subscribe to any of that.
Ross Gay: Yeah. Yeah. It is powerful. And I think of like different places where it's more and less. I live in Indiana, and although I live in a university town—which kind of imports a lot of certain values—I think it's also the case that people here are slower. There's just a generally a sort of a slower mode of life than when I was living on the east coast in Philly or near New York or whatever—where the greatest virtue, the indication that you are actually a person is that you're busy. It's like the best thing about you is that you're busy.
Here it's not so much that way. So it's not actually that difficult to run into someone at the supermarket and then just end up sitting around talking with them for an hour. I mean, I could do it right now. I'm glad that we're having this conversation, but I could go over there right now and probably like run into someone and have at least a ten-minute conversation. [Both Laugh]
Rachel Schwartzmann: So, would you say you're a patient person?
Ross Gay: I'm both. There are times that I'm very patient, probably less patient with myself, you know? I can be impatient with the people I love the most—my dear mother. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, well, I think that's universal!
Ross Gay: That's universal, you know? But generally, I think you'd say impatience is not one of my top afflictions.
Rachel Schwartzmann: That's a gift.
Ross Gay: Yeah. I mean, my mom was, is impatient... I think I write it in the delights; when I just even begin to describe it, my mom needed to get somewhere on time, and if we weren't as quick as she was rattling her keys. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: The subtle "hurry up!" [Laughs]
Ross Gay: Man, it's still in there. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, yeah. Those little things stay with you. All of those details you rendered really beautifully in both books. And I think as we talk about connection and patience, would you be open to reading from Inciting Joy?
Ross Gay: Yeah, so this is an essay called "Free Fruit for All!" and it's an essay about this community orchard. It's called the Bloomington Community Orchard. I've been involved with it from the beginning, and it's just one of the most important projects I've ever been a part of—in part because it was a bunch of people gathering together around an idea that we all believed in, people who didn't know each other, gathering together around this idea. And the idea is more or less in the phrase "free fruit for all"—this kind of ethic of sharing basically. And in the course of nine months or whatever, we made an orchard. But among the things that's interesting about it is that it was a profoundly inefficient experience. [Laughs] And that I write about that.
Part of what's so moving to me about the project is that we weren't only gathering on this idea. We were gathering around this sort of practical thing that we were going to put trees in the ground, and we just don't actually know what happens after that. We will care for the trees, but everything changes, including the fact that we might not be here to see the trees fruiting, or we might really not be here—we might be gone.
As I talked about in the essay, some people who were deeply involved in the project have since died. And this idea of planting something that might feed someone in the future who you do not know and you could not have imagined was really moving to me. But it also sort of tussled with this other thing: this other nervousness, which is about leaving stuff for the future that maybe we don't want to leave for the future. A certain kind of ambition that I think is familiar to a lot of people. Doing grand things. In the essay, I'm sort of tussling with myself.
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Rachel Schwartzmann: It's a beautiful passage, and I'm so grateful to hear it out loud.
Ross Gay: Oh good. Thank you.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I don't know if you know this, but I'm actually in the process of writing my first book.
Ross Gay: Oh, cool.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. Just as I go through this process, I'm thinking about—or I'm trying not to think about rather—the future just so I can really commit to what's happening on the page at this moment. But have you had to wrestle with that tension even as you gain more experience? It's interesting when you're writing about joy, obviously with The Book of Delights, it was a regimented practice, but do you think it's good to have distance from an experience before you write about it?
Ross Gay: Oh! Sometimes I think it is, and sometimes it isn't. Because I do feel like sometimes the closeness of a thing can be its own wisdom or light. I think a kind of orthodox thing—definitely among writing teachers—is to suggest that something very present [or] very current in our lives and imagination is not the thing to meditate on—in part because the presumption is that distance and a certain particular kind of distance [or], reflection makes us more able to properly meditate on it. But I don't always agree with that. I think there's something kind of beautiful and useful to a kind of very current in-the-moment meditation that, in all likelihood for a lot of writers, we go back to, to sort of revisit and to revise to re-see anyway. I'm not one way or another on that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: So, was it a big departure between writing inciting joy versus The Book of Delights? Because you were mining a lot of the past.
Ross Gay: I mean, exciting is actually the word. Like my relationship to writing these days—when it's sort of clicking—I have no idea what's going to happen. I know I have a story to tell—I mean, maybe I do, often I do often—I'm sort of reflecting on something that happened. It might be my father's death or my buddy describing how I laugh or telling about this bike ride with my brother and his kid or something. But I never know what's going to happen, which is also to say that my process of writing is so clearly now one of discovery. Almost any time I know what I'm going to say, it will be an essay that's really uninteresting to me. But when I approach it, very curious about what I will say, what I will discover, what will have happened to me... I think I did that right—what had happened to me? [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Something like that. [Laughs]
Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to anticipate how I'm going to recount and re-encounter my life. Part of why I love to go write is because it feels like the best show--a show I'm very interested in, and I think it's a good spot to get to. I think it's hard to get to it sometimes, in part because I think, in many ways, we're encouraged to know what we think. All of these things, I think are overlapping with questions you're already raising. Like we're encouraged to be efficient, we're encouraged to know, we're encouraged to display a kind of mastery, particularly when it's of ourselves.
I just said this the other day ... I'll say it again, and then eventually, probably, I'll change it. The two most interesting things about us are that we die and that we change. And writing that knows itself before it starts does not offer evidence of that change. Writing that's very interesting to me and that I'm trying to write and that I want to be reading is writing that is a kind of artifact of some kind of change. It is the evident artifact of some kind of change, which, like I said, means going to the page each day or whenever you do, means you're going to witness your change.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And you have to be willing to meet it.
Ross Gay: You gotta be willing to meet it. Yeah, you gotta find it okay or even exciting. But you gotta be curious about it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think it took me about ten years to get to this point.
Ross Gay: Yeah. So when you're writing these separate essays, are they about topics? How's it going?
Rachel Schwartzmann: It's funny; I pitched this book... So it's called Slow Stories, and it's basically the next iteration of this project. And I pitched it mostly as interviews, but the feedback I got was: we want to hear more from you. And I've spent so much of my career interviewing creative professionals—and I love it. I love asking questions. Now that I've turned the gaze on me, it's been interesting to explore slowing down, time, and all these things that we're talking about through my own experiences that maybe aren't so apparent to people when they meet me or Google me. So I think I would describe the experience so far: I was just working on an essay before this [interview] about secrets and how they're so sacred in our culture of oversharing, but instead of writing sacred, I accidentally wrote scared.
Ross Gay: Oh!
Rachel Schwartzmann: I thought that was so telling! But that's a very long-winded answer. So it's going, and it's humbling, but it's hard.
Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. Great answer.
So here's a funny story, which is that the first book I sold is this book called This Black Earth. And it was a sort of proposal about my relationship to the land. I was going to go—and I did—interview farmers, black farmers. I was going to do historical stuff and all this kind of stuff. And I wrote this proposal, the whole thing that you probably did, and it has been pretty much impossible for me to write. That was in 2016 when I sold that. [Laughs] In the meantime, it was funny because then, actually, on the day more or less that I sold the proposal, I started writing The Book of Delights, and that was a book [where] I had no idea what it was. I was just like, "all right, I just want to write these essays every day; we'll see," which was really captivating to me.
Then there's this other book called Inciting Joy, and basically, I kind of had the book almost put together, not entirely, but like a kind of draft of it that I offered them ... which is to say basically that I think it's difficult when there's a kind of anticipation for what it might be from [the] outside or inside. I've just sort of learned that about myself in the last, I guess, seven years: that it's challenging for me when I have a little bit of a contract or maybe a proper contract with someone, and part of that contract is like: "Here's what you're supposed to do." Even if that's as broad as possible, like no one has been telling me, "Don't do this, don't do that."
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I mean, all of that resonates really deeply, and I think it's because this is my first [book], so it's new. I just want to get it right, whatever that right looks like. I think I'm trying to figure out or renegotiate what that means, but no one's putting the pressure on except me, which I think is the case for most things. Actually, on the subject of learning and changing, would you be open to reading another excerpt from Inciting Joy?
Ross Gay: Yeah, totally. So this essay is called "Dispatch from the Ruins: The 11th Incitement," and it's an essay about teaching or about class, about school. Actually, it's about school. The initial point of departure is that I am telling this story about driving from Vermont, where we had hung out for like a week, back to Indiana, and I had gotten stuck behind all these Amazon trucks, and so I start meditating on these Amazon trucks and then remembering that I was in a faculty meeting once where, some dean or someone came in and referred to the students as units, which went into my ear like a fucking dagger [Laughs]. I remembered it. But anyway, the essay is trying to think about basically what's useful about school and what's not useful about school. And the not useful part is that school is often a place of kind of coercion and conformity and a certain kind of... I would call it brutality, actually.
And at the same time, there are glimmers in school, always, of profound tenderness and curiosity and openness—a proper sort of loving exchange. Also, this essay is like deeply indebted to this whole kind of almost cosmos of thought around this work called The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. It's a beautiful book, and they're writers, philosophers, stuff like that. But yeah, I just want to say that this is in conversation with the conversations around that book.
At this point in the essay, I'm sort of describing—offering—some possible exercises that I do in my classes and ways that I've sort of seen it maybe being different.
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Rachel Schwartzmann:What changes are you going through right now?
Ross Gay: Well, every day I'm getting older! [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. Aren't we all? [Laughs]
Ross Gay: Yeah. I feel like that's a good one. In my relationships, I feel like I'm sort of steadily learning how to try to ask questions, trying to unknow the people that I love most and think I know the best. I talk in the book a little bit about being in couple's therapy with my partner and the sort of often terrifying experience of being like: Oh, I actually don't know this thing about you. I have to ask it. So many of my predetermined understandings of you, and not only you, so many of the people in my life, are probably wrong.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Or changing. They're not fixed.
Ross Gay: That's right. That's right. They're changing. So I feel like that is something that in my life is ongoing; it's changing. ... I feel like my teaching is always changing, too. You know, it's a big part of my life, and I think about it a lot.
I'm teaching this class, a grad class this semester, and I just feel like where I started teaching, you know, not quite, well yeah, twenty years ago, I was perfectly awful at it. I mean, I think I was a "good enough" teacher. Like I did my job, but I was sort of properly hierarchical, properly like dominant and all that stuff. And in this class, I was just noticing that this kind of, again, mutually supported bewilderment was really happening yesterday. There were all of these things at the end of class, and I realized, "oh, this next thing that we're going to do that is actually gonna determine..."
We're going to try to write something for publication together, but we got to some of the depth of the conversation that we needed to—not because of anything I did, but because of someone else saying, "hey, could we just all go around and read the thing that we wrote?" Which I wasn't thinking I was going to do. Not like I ever really have a plan, but I think that wasn't in the mix, and I was just like, "oh yeah, okay, so this person just guided us, you know, in this class that ostensibly I'm the teacher of record for," and I feel like I could mention five instances of that in yesterday's class. I'm just starting to notice, like, okay, the older you get, I think the more you're changing into this properly, at times, collaborative fella. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: [Laughs] Yeah. Well, you talked about age and being a grownup essentially so beautifully with Katherine May, and I wanted to actually ask about this because I thought it was so interesting. As I mentioned, I'm 29 at the moment, a millennial, spent the past decade really growing up and growing into myself and my needs. In my case, a lot of that was happening because I was so distracted by the demands of life and performance and all of these things. But I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about age and perspective and how that contributes to our understanding of our misunderstanding of joy.
Ross Gay: Yeah, you know, I was just talking to a guy very briefly—one of my dearest friend's fathers who has Parkinson's, it's pronounced ... I could also say my dad's first cousin who died a couple of weeks ago who had MS for 40 years. But these are like examples of people whose bodies, in the way of their own accord, the boundaries of their bodies start to dissipate sort of explicitly. If you have Parkinson's, your body's moving in a way that you're not in control of, or MS, your body maybe isn't moving in a way that you're not in control of. ... I was just thinking talking with my friend's dad and thinking, oh, there's a way that the notion that we are separable from each other. The older we get ... or the ways, ways that our bodies change as we age, that boundary seems to get more flimsy, which all the many things like, of course, if you're fighting that, then that could be horrible and terrifying. And I'm sure maybe if you're trying your damnedest not to fight it, it could be all those things too. And heartbreaking, of course.
But at the same time, that's a thing that I'm sort of noticing as I get older. When I was thirty years old, I was just ready to fight all the time. I mean, I was just on fire in a certain kind of way. When I say I was on fire, I mean my brain was just a fucking mess. I was just really troubled, and part of the troubledness was, I have to think, wanting to sort of or trying to imagine myself as like this really discreet unmovable thing. And having the illusion of it, too—all of the sort of ways that that might factor in, like being a dude or being big or being like blah blah blah, all these different things. And while at that time I was just falling apart—
Rachel Schwartzmann: There is some kind of weird liminal space because I've been going through my own anxieties. It's been really pronounced this year. I don't know if it's like we've been subliminally messaged to that by the time you're thirty, something is going to happen. I'm sure it's not as generalized as that. Sorry to cut you off, but... I get that.
Ross Gay: No, I wonder about it too. That age—is there something in this culture—you can imagine at different times it would've been this kind of thing you would've cracked up in a certain kind of way when you were nineteen or something. I do know that—or I think that—part of my trouble at that time was that I was resisting this thing that I was able to see in my friend's father—which is that, oh, the boundaries between him and everything else are starting to fade away. He's kind of becoming everything else, which feels like a profound gift of aging if we're able to be with it, I guess. What a gift to know that I'm as close to becoming a part of the soil, in all likelihood, being taken up into a tree. That there's that kind of joining in in my future, that this thing that I've spent my whole life sort of cultivating and curating and defending and being ready to fucking kill over, as it gets older, it becomes less and less that, and more and more everything else. It's hard to actually describe what I'm saying, but part of getting older, for me, feels like that softening.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Probably a really big departure from how you thought about almost slowing down at nineteen versus now—and what that means is we kind of inch closer to the inevitable slowness.
Ross Gay: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Even like when we talk about these essays, let's say the school essay, so much of that is about distinguishing yourself, separating yourself from the crowd. We have a million encouragements to do that throughout our lives—to be a sort of distinct, coherent, unmovable, often little thing, a little critter, you know? And except not a little, little critter like a force. [Laughs] And when you're a force like that, then you get to kick the shit outta the day or however we say it now. And that is, one, not true, but two, it's a horrible thing to have to maintain that kind of rigidity or that belief.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It's exhausting.
Ross Gay: It's exhausting. It's exhausting.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And I don't think it leaves much room for the change. There's just no room to change. There's no energy.
Ross Gay: That's it. That's it. Yeah. Being right does not—again, as you said—does not permit change. Being wrong permits for change. [Laughs] And by wrong, I don't even mean wrong. I mean just being one thing and then knowing that you're going to be something else. Like you do not have to be a single coherent thing that will travel through time and space, never to be shaken off track or off path. You will, in fact, again and again, and again, and again, and again—and hopefully more than that—be blown around.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Again, it's just that willingness to meet that moment. It's inevitable—whether you're planning for it or expecting it, [you] might as well embrace it.
Ross Gay: I know it. I know it. I know it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I want to have you read one more passage from "Grief Suite," but before you do, I actually have a question about questions. Going back to what you were saying about unknowing the people in your life or really engaging with them on that intimate level, how do you hope people do that with you? Is there a question that you want people to start asking you more often—whether it's in the context of delight, joy, sorrow, connection? What comes to mind?
Ross Gay: I think I'm just really curious. I don't know that I have a predetermined desire or hope even for the book, but I have tremendous curiosity about it and for it.
One of the things that I'm really curious about is that there's a kind of looking that I feel like I'm doing in this book, which, again, comes from other people. I'm deeply indebted to the writer Sadia Hartman—her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. I'm deeply indebted to Moten and Harney, as I mentioned. This woman, Anna Tsing, who wrote a book called Mushroom at the End of the World. All of [these writers] are really studying hard, these things that maybe are understudied [and] looking very closely at things that we often sort of just overlook and seeing where in those things might be these sites of say joy or at least these sites where the practices and structures of joy are sort of built-in or available to us.
I know it's going to happen; if The Book of Delights is any evidence, people will tell me things that delight them. I suspect that I'll hear of people being like, "oh yeah, you said, pick up basketball and skateboarding, these places where all these structures built in [and] seem to make possible this kind of mutual care, these sites of mutual care and troubling a property and blah blah blah. I suspect someone's going to be like, "but you didn't talk about X, Y, and Z." I can't wait to learn about these other places where people are like, "I think it's happening here, too. I think it's happening there, too."
Rachel Schwartzmann: I wondered how you kind of discerned which spaces to focus on because there's so much you could work with here.
Ross Gay: So much. Yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: So I think one of the big points—as you read this next passage—that I just want to make sure listeners know is that you kind of drive home, again and again, that joy is dependent almost on sorrow. The two can coexist. They're not these isolated experiences.
Ross Gay: And more to the point, that joy does not exist absent sorrow. That's something else.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Absolutely. Your essay "Grief Suite" was filled with both of those things everywhere, all at once, and will leave people feeling nourished.
Ross Gay: Yeah. So this is an essay about many things. Ultimately it's an essay about grief. It moves around things like masculinity and family and football...
PASSAGE READ BY ROSS GAY ︎ PURCHASE INCITING JOY︎︎︎
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Rachel Schwartzmann: That was my conversation with Ross Gay, author of Inciting Joy. You can purchase Inciting Joy and The Book of Delights anywhere books are sold—though we recommend supporting local and independent bookstores if you can. Stay tuned, as we'll be sharing highlights from this episode on our own channels @slowstoriesofficial on Instagram, along with my own personal Instagram @rachelschwartzmann, and more. I'm Rachel Schwartzmann, and you've been listening to Slow Stories. Have a wonderful holiday season, and we'll see you in the new year.