Ross Gay, THE BOOK OF (MORE) DELIGHTS: Essays
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[0:33]Ross Gay is the author of the book of more delights.
[0:36]Essays, Ross is the New York Times best-selling author of the essay collections,
[0:40]the book of delights and inciting joy and four books of poetry.
[0:44]His catalog of unabashed gratitude won the National Book Critics Circle Award
[0:48]and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
[0:52]Be holding won the 2021 Panamerica Jean Stein Book Award.
[0:57]Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit,
[1:01]free, fruit for all food justice and joy project.
[1:05]And has received fellowships from cave, canum, the bread loaf writers' conference,
[1:09]and the Guggenheim Foundation.
[1:10]He teaches at Indiana University.
[1:12]Ross, thank you so much for coming on Momstone.
[1:14]Don't have time to read books to discuss the book of more delights.
[1:18]You're ladies.
[1:19]Awesome.
[1:20]All right.
[1:21]Glad to be here.
[1:22]I was just holding up the book of delights, the book of more delights, and inciting joy.
[1:27]And that's only, you know, a piece of the puzzle.
[1:31]So tell us about the book of more delights.
[1:34]And I know you talk about in the book about how you decided to wait
[1:38]and you had a whole plan for when you would write it and everything.
[1:41]But tell us there's a little bit about that.
[1:44]Yeah.
[1:45]So, you know, it's a follow up to another book called the Book of Delights,
[1:49]which I wrote between, I guess, August 1st of 2016.
[1:52]Yes.
[1:53]And August 1st of 2017.
[1:55]And this, you know, I toward the end, I think I talk about this in the introduction
[1:59]to the Book of More Delights.
[2:00]But let me just say sort of what that book was.
[2:02]Basically, the premise of the book was that I decided, or in almost feel like it was sort of decided for me,
[2:08]that I would write an essay every single day for a year about something that delighted me.
[2:13]And I gave myself three very sort of simple constraints.
[2:16]The first one was to do it every day, which I almost did.
[2:19]The second one was to write them by hand.
[2:22]And the third one was to do it quickly.
[2:24]So I gave myself about 30 minutes to draft all of these essays.
[2:27]For the first book, and I took those constraints to the second book as well.
[2:31]When I finished the first book of my buddy, the writer Patrick Rosal,
[2:36]he was, we were actually at a writing retreat together.
[2:38]And he was like, so do you think you're going to keep doing them or what?
[2:41]And I decided, I don't know if right then, but they're abouts that I would probably want to do it again,
[2:46]just to sort of see it, see what it looked like.
[2:49]I love long, sort of long over time serial projects.
[2:53]There's a painter named Robert Motherwell, who wrote, who made a bunch of paintings called,
[2:58]I think decades he was doing it.
[3:01]There's a writer named Anne Waldman, who sort of, she has a project called the yoga project.
[3:06]I think it's called, but she's an over long period of time.
[3:09]I'm very interested in that.
[3:11]So like the idea of like, oh, what would it be like to do this years and years?
[3:15]Maybe decades project of considering delight.
[3:18]So that's, that's kind of what it is.
[3:20]Wow.
[3:21]So when you did the first book, where there are things that came out of it that you weren't expecting,
[3:26]like I would expect that you would find a newfound appreciation of life and the small things and the big thing.
[3:31]You know, what else came out of that?
[3:34]Like, did you miss journaling essentially when you finished that year?
[3:37]There was something, yeah, there is something sweet about having to express and express it.
[3:43]I don't know, obligation or like task or duty in a way that you give yourself that you're every day,
[3:48]you're going to write.
[3:49]It's been 30 minutes observing and contemplating and wondering about ultimately what it is you love.
[3:54]There's something very sweet, more than sweet organizing in a way to that.
[3:59]And I definitely sort of felt a little bit like, oh, you know, that's a loss.
[4:04]I don't know if a loss, but, or, or at least like a sort of directive to manage to continue considering that and other aspects of my writing life and my otherwise life as well.
[4:14]Yeah.
[4:15]Yeah.
[4:16]It's always nice having an assignment kind of is cool.
[4:18]Yeah.
[4:19]Yeah.
[4:20]I like, I hated school.
[4:21]I hated school, but I liked being coached.
[4:24]Yeah.
[4:25]Different, different sides of the same coin.
[4:27]Totally.
[4:28]So, and then inciting joy came in between.
[4:31]So tell me about that.
[4:33]So inciting joy, I was sort of thinking about it came up very quickly actually.
[4:37]And I don't know if this is quite right.
[4:39]I've been watching in Atlanta Hawks game when they were like playing in the, they called it the bubble during the lockdown times.
[4:45]And maybe the Hawks had like MLK on their jersey.
[4:48]And I felt like there was some kind of something that I felt about the capitalistic appropriation who was actually were doing this on the 16th.
[4:58]The appropriation of who was fundamentally a radical figure.
[5:02]That's one of the origin stories of that book.
[5:04]Not the only one.
[5:05]But I felt like I want to write these essays that consider this sort of deep question, which is what does it mean in the face of that in the face of that kind of like.
[5:17]Obscene what I think of as a kind of obscene appropriation of the advocacy of life, which MLK and all these other people represent, but it was MLK at the moment that I was thinking of.
[5:30]I, you know, I sort of decided to be fun project to write all of these essays about these aspects of my own life that do two things.
[5:40]Well, I wanted to consider what insights joy.
[5:43]The user word very intentionally.
[5:45]What insights joy and by joy, I think of the feeling that we enter when we help each other carry our sorrow.
[5:52]So what insights joy.
[5:54]And what does that joy insight.
[5:56]Those are the questions of that book.
[5:58]And so I consider like, you know, pick up basketball.
[6:01]I consider gardening.
[6:02]I consider school.
[6:03]I consider dancing.
[6:05]I consider my father's death and some other things.
[6:09]And so that's sort of the premise of that book.
[6:11]The longest one is like 60 pages.
[6:13]Whereas the longest delight it's going to be.
[6:15]You know, maybe five pages.
[6:17]Well, you talked in and said enjoy about someone coming over and visiting when your father was ill.
[6:24]and what that whole period of time was like, is that what do you do with the sorrow like that?
[6:29]How do you turn it into prose properly and what is it do for you once you've done that?
[6:35]It's a great question.
[6:36]I don't know exactly.
[6:37]I mean, I think part of the desire for me as a writer is to sort of have an opportunity to think very deeply.
[6:45]About a question.
[6:46]And so obviously sorrow is a question that allows itself to be considered contemplated on and on and on.
[6:53]Just as joy is, you know, because joy is not to me joy is not something that is absent sorrow or that is the opposite of sorrow or that is the without sorrow.
[7:02]Joy is very much sort of made of sorrow.
[7:06]So I feel like the, you know, among the things that meditating very deeply about or considering very deeply or writing through writing as the consideration of these things.
[7:17]It allows me to more fully understand the questions to maybe more fully be able to articulate the questions.
[7:24]But it also is this moment where I get to sort of witness myself in the process of changing.
[7:30]So that's what's interesting and the older I get, the more I think, oh, that's one of the most moving experiences of writing is that I'm witnessing myself change.
[7:44]You know, as I come to sort of understand or have a different relationship to something.
[7:49]It is very much that thing of like, oh, in the process of this consideration.
[7:53]If you if you are true with it, you will in fact be a different person.
[7:58]You know, you're creatureliness, which is to say you're always changing this will be made available to you.
[8:06]Interesting. It's like my ninth grade English teacher. It was like a great book is the illustration of change.
[8:13]It's kind of right. I know.
[8:16]At the time I was like, really, no, let me think of something. Let me just find another example that goes against that.
[8:22]Yeah. I think very often the school school wants us to imagine that the objective is to become fixed and to be able to impose a notion.
[8:34]Like an essay can impose a kind of truth.
[8:38]But I'm not interested in being that as a writer or a person.
[8:43]And I don't want to be interested, you know, even, you know, if I am interested in that, I'm trying not to be interested in that.
[8:49]What I want to be interested in is being sort of the loving witness to my change and other people's change.
[8:55]You know, and that happens I think in poems often happens in essays often.
[9:00]And how does your you spend time reflecting on your own life illustrating all of that writing it.
[9:08]And now your life undoubtedly has changed from the success of your own career writing the stuff.
[9:14]So what, what has that all done to the way you look at things and is it something that you expected to really have things sort of hit the way that they have?
[9:24]No, not at all. Not at all.
[9:27]I mean, I knew that that like, and what I say that that book of delights was sort of offered to me.
[9:33]I mean that I was walking, I was actually in Alberta today in Italy. I was having like I was at another kind of writing retreat thing artist retreat.
[9:41]And I was walking home through these like beautiful fields, sunflower fields and, you know, birds were singing and, you know, honeybees or honeybees.
[9:52]And I was in a moment of like, I was in a, I caught myself in a moment of delight.
[9:57]And when I thought I should write an essay about.
[10:00]And I say that it was sort of instructed, you know, I was sort of given to the task of writing about every day for a year, that was sort of given to me. I don't, you know, I sort of arrived.
[10:10]And part of the arrival was like, this will be useful. This will be, this will be an interesting question for people, including this person, first and foremost, you know, first and foremost, me.
[10:23]And so that's a long way of saying I both didn't know, but I also knew that there was a kind of deeply pressing question inside of that thing.
[10:31]And the question being something like what happens when you contemplate what you love.
[10:35]And if you were to write an essay this morning, if you haven't already, but I don't know, maybe you have five 15 on these kids who knows, you could have written like 20 essays by now.
[10:45]What would you contemplate today? Like what, what is something that happened today that would be worthwhile of an essay or that had joy or delight in it?
[10:52]I mean, I could tell you about stacking the firewood, you know, it's very cold here, or small detail of like sort of organizing with my partner, you know, a little bit on behalf of my partner to keep her warm.
[11:07]That might be a thing, you know, watching the cat we live with stretch out in the sun, really beautiful. There's others.
[11:13]Just listening to your delights puts me in a better mood. I'm serious.
[11:18]Yeah, it's very cold here too. And where are you? I'm in New York City. And you're even you live in Bloomington, right? Don't you?
[11:27]Yeah, I was just I'm coming there and I have a novel coming out and I'm coming there on my book tour.
[11:32]Oh, sweet. How's me? Where are you going? Do Morgan stories? Yes. Awesome. Good book story.
[11:37]Because someone else in the community reached out and they're like, they're great authors here like, Ross Gay.
[11:42]I was like, I was great. Yeah, it's great. Okay, cool. But anyway, so what is in store after your epic tour and everything else coming up.
[11:53]What else are you working on for writing and any more poetry and music and all that?
[11:59]Yeah, I'm kind of writing a book about my garden right now. I've been writing essays about basketball for a while, but a little bit more.
[12:06]I have a sub stack in mind that I think it is some staff will kind of come up on that. Yeah, I think I probably, you know, I got the poems. I'm kind of like working on slowly.
[12:15]That's some stuff. And what a how much time do you spend reading a lot hours daily hours?
[12:23]Well, you know, depending on my on how much time I have, but I like to spend a lot of time reading for sure.
[12:30]Are there books that have been sort of talons for you your whole life that you take with you everywhere?
[12:36]Oh, I have books that I will go back to often. It's funny. I just ordered another copy of John Edgar Whiteman's father along.
[12:44]Whiteman is one of my most important writers for sure.
[12:47]I just reread a book by the writer Elaine Scary called on beauty and being just really beautiful book. I go back to Beloved every few years.
[12:56]I might just resections of it time to time, but there's a point named Mary Baraka whose work is always sort of deeply sustaining. I go back to often have been a little bit extra lately. That's a handful.
[13:10]That is a handful.
[13:11]What advice would you have for aspiring authors?
[13:17]I just think a really profound question is like what do you love and how can what you love sort of be the engine of the inquiry that you're writing is about.
[13:27]You know, like what do you love even it's like yeah, I have a story I wanted to what's the love inside of that.
[13:32]I think that's a kind of not only like I think it's you know a useful important sort of ethical way to proceed, but I think it's probably more it's probably a sustaining.
[13:43]You know to sort of keep on being like what do I love what do I love.
[13:47]It's one of those things without stopping to reflect. I mean you miss the best parts of life.
[13:55]When you have to that's what it's all about.
[13:58]Amazing. Well thank you so much for coming on mom's don't have time to read books really appreciate it.
[14:03]My pleasure. Good to talk to you.
[14:05]You too.
[14:06]All right take care.
[14:08]Thanks for listening to this episode of mom's don't have time to read books.
[14:12]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zibi Owens and at moms don't have time to read books.
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[14:24]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan in fact texture sound for the sound editing.
[14:28]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.