Two Acclaimed Writers on the Art of Revising Your Life

Many of the most contentious debates right now center on whether we, as individuals — and as a country — are willing to revise. To revise our understanding of history. To revise the kind of language we use. To revise the nature of our personal, and national, identities. To revise how we act in our everyday relationships. Revision like this is often necessary, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Making fundamental changes to the way we think, speak and act requires the kind of self-scrutiny, discomfort and sacrifice that many of us would rather avoid. There are few public figures who model revision — of one’s work and one’s life — as openly and honestly as Kiese Laymon. Laymon has written the prizewinning memoir “Heavy” as well as essays for The New York Times, ESPN and the Oxford American. His nonfiction tackles sports, popular culture, the politics of literary publishing and, above all, his home state of Mississippi. On every page, you’ll find wit, but also heart-stopping vulnerability and a reckoning with tough love: for himself, his kin, his community and the complicated places where he has spent his life. Laymon has mastered the art of revising his own words. But for him, revision is also a moral, even a spiritual, act — a crucial part of becoming a loving and responsible human being. He is the first to admit that he is a work in progress, that each period of his life is a draft that can be improved. In a way, Laymon thinks of his entire life as an act of revision. And he nurtures a radical hope that America can change for the better, too. This conversation focuses on how Laymon thinks about revision. But it also considers how he navigates a publishing world that often puts pressure on minority-group artists to suppress their full identities to appeal to white audiences, the way his writing pushes the boundaries of conventional genre and canon, why Americans have such a hard time reassessing ourselves and what we can gain from trying to change. Mentioned: "A Southern Gothic" by Adia Victoria Book Recommendations: South to America by Imani Perry Shoutin' in the Fire by Danté Stewart Abolition for the People by Colin Kaepernick This episode is guest-hosted by Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist and writer whose work focuses on higher education policy, popular culture, race, beauty and more. She writes a weekly New York Times newsletter and is the author of “Thick and Other Essays,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and “Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy.” You can follow her on Twitter @TressieMcPhD. (Learn more about the other guest hosts during Ezra’s parental leave here.) You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Julie Beer and Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein, and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:19Ezra Klein?

  Hey, it's Ezra. While I'm on paternity leave, we are turning the show over to an all-star team of guest hosts. This week, Tressie McMillan Codham takes a helm. Tressie is a research professor at UNC Chapel Hills High School. She's a contributing writer to New York Times Opinion. She's got a great newsletter you should sign up for. She's author of the National Book Award finalist, Thick and Other Essays, and she is just one of the most interesting, fun-to-talk-to people I've ever had on the show. So I'm very excited to hear what she does with the mic. Enjoy.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  I love talking to great artists who help me make sense of the world, especially those who are wrestling with the same problems that vex all of us, and who aren't afraid to pour themselves onto the page in the process. Chiese Layman is the most uncompromising artist I have had the pleasure of knowing. Chiese is author of the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the award-winning memoir, Heavy. His nonfiction tackles race, gender, sports, popular culture, the politics of literary

• 1:32Speaker 01

  publishing, and above all, his relationship with his home state of Mississippi. His writing expresses a radical hope that Mississippi, and by extension, America, can change for the better. Chiese's prose crackles with wit, resistance, and revolution, yes, but it also simmers with wisdom, vulnerability, empathy, and even love. Breaking from iconoclastic American novelists like Hemingway and Faulkner, Chiese Layman is not afraid to love on the page for all of us to see.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  His style of courageous art takes conviction and a very clear idea of who you are. In 2020, Chiesa did something that shocked the publishing world. He bought back the rights to his first two books for about 10 times the price he was originally paid to write them. Looking back on How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and his novel Long Division, Chiesa realized there were parts of the books he wanted to change. So he made an investment in his own art that, from one angle, might have looked surprising. But it's not so surprising when you consider the way Chiesa approaches his entire life as an act of revision.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  When I chose to interview Chiesa for the show, I wanted to learn more about how he thinks about the act of revision of himself, his craft, and his voice in a world where gatekeeping often requires minority artists to revise their identities against their will so that they can be illegible to mainstream readers. But we also end up discussing so much more than that. It was truly a pleasure to have Chiesa on the show.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  In complicated times, which are all times, no matter when you live in, in your point in history, we've got some complicated times. I look to the people whose voices bring clarity to me, not just about what's going on in the world, as important as that is, but clarity on how I should be thinking about or feeling about experiencing what's going on in the world. And Chiesa, you're always one of my favorite people in the world to think and feel and emote alongside. So I wanted to talk to you during complicated times. How are you?

• 4:10Speaker 02

  I'm good. I'm happy to be talking to you during complicated times. You know, I read you at all times and that helps me sometimes make things less complicated, sometimes make things more complicated in a good way. So I'm just happy to be here with you.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  I want to talk about... Craft in writing before we get into bigger conversations, which we'll get there. But you're you're also just one of my favorite writers. And I think that we don't often talk with black writers in particular about the craft of what they do, because our work always has such an urgent political and social context. But our work is urgent because we're good at the work, right? We're good at writing. So like, I wanted to talk, let's start there. I know, right? Let's start there about, um, throughout your work, you talk a lot, both in your talks, but also in your books, your essays, about what writing did for you as a person.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  And I want to start with sort of a two parter, which is what you needed from writing when you started out? And what you need from writing now is like, you know, as you mature into your process. So when you start out, what what did writing solve for you? Why writing and not like, I don't know, you you toyed with being a basketball player, a football player, um, you know, a hip hop star is every young black boy from the South wanted to be. Yeah. But you settle on writing and took it pretty far, like it worked out for you. So what was writing solving for you young?

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Writing was just the only thing in my life as a young person. And it's the only thing in my life as an adult that I'm not like afraid to mess up in. You know, basketball, I could play, but I was afraid to miss. I was afraid to make bad passes. You know, I was that person who would always say my bad, even if it wasn't. I'm sort of like that in my life too. But when it comes to writing, partially because I was really upset at the way we were taught writing. But when it comes to that writing, um, I think like you, like I want to go in there and I want to leave not just the page, but I want to leave the genre different. That's my goal. And so that means you're going to fail a lot. But it's like the only thing in my life that when I fail, I take it super seriously, of course. But I just get back on and try again.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  And every other part of my life, everything interpersonal, every other thing intellectual, I'm I'm terrified. I'm a I'm a I'm a scared fat black boy. But when I get on that page. I'm scared, but but like that fear just kinda like is always met with something. And often that's that that that fear is met with like my trying to use in a similar language as I haven't seen before. I just think if I can write, it's because I'm I'm I'm unafraid to fail in that medium. Like, I'll try anything. I'll write anything. And and that doesn't mean that doesn't mean you gonna see it. But it means that I will try anything on the page.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  I've told you this many times. I'm gonna keep saying it. I read Heavy and I was angry. I was angry at how vulnerable you were and how powerful you were. I was angry that you kept pushing me to think and feel at the same time. Because like a lot of intellectuals, I prefer to do one or the other. And even then, only on my own terms. And like you just kept insisting that we do both. And then you wrote it in a voice that was undeniable, which I just think of as the ultimate act of creation. When I can argue with you, but I cannot deny you.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  I'd like for you to go for a little bit for our audience. You mind reading a little bit from Heavy? And I wanna note that you, in this passage, the second person addressed is your mama. It's your mama. The book is addressed to her.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I read a bit from Heavy. In this passage, I'm writing about Renata, who's one of my mother's students. And Renata was like twenty-two or something at the time. I was between eight and ten. And Renata had been molesting me for a few months, so. Ever since we were old enough to spend the night or day at our friend's house, we'd all play this game called Hide and Go Get It. One person had to count to thirty-five and the other people had to hide, usually in a dark closet or hallway. We played with boys and girls, but in the dark of those hallways and closets, sometimes folks would touch each other in ways they never touch each other when the lights were on. I was too afraid to touch anyone, but not too afraid to want to be touched.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  My body didn't care if the person touching me was a boy or a girl. My body felt grateful for tender touch, no matter where it came from. Around the same time, girls and girls' bodies and girls' booties and girls' touch. Made me feel not just special, but sexier and more beautiful than boys' touch and boys' booties. I didn't know why and I wasn't sure how to use words to explain it. I didn't know who would listen to me explain something so scary if I thought I'd found the words. I kept thinking you should have been the one I talked with about it all since you were the one who taught me to read and write. But sexuality and bodies and feeling good and pain and tender touch. And booties were something we never talked about.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  My body told different stories about you and Renata, even though her touch was rough and yours was gentle. When either of you touched me, it all felt like love until it didn't. Then it felt like dying. Though I had no idea what was going through Leila and Dougie's heads and bodies as they talked in Daryl's rooms. I wondered if they ever felt love while they were in there with the big boys. I knew I would have.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  See, that's the kind of thing that made me just wanna pull you close and push you away all at the same time.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Why you wanna push me away?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  You know why? I think one of my challenges as a writer is being comfortable with the vulnerability that you do so bravely. And so you pushed me to be brave about it, even when I wasn't sure I was ready to be. So like this, the way you sit there and the ambivalence of some of those feelings of wanting, frankly, the want, the want, which we don't. Always pay a lot of attention to in contemporary black writing, we're more comfortable with it in historical writing. Think, I think looking back at black writers in the context of history. But in contemporary work, right, we're supposed to, we're not supposed to want. Anything. And yeah, so I think it's the comfort with the wanting. How do you reckon with wanting so visibly on the page?

• 10:38Speaker 01

  I know you talked about not being afraid, but you've gotta at least be wrestling with yourself a little there, aren't you?

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wanna be clear. That's a great, I wanna, that's a great place for me to kinda make clear something. I am afraid on this page, but I, I, I attempt to meet that fear. You know, like a lot of times, you know, if we were together and I don't like to go on airplanes, right? And you were just like, yo, K S A. I'm like, what's up, Tracy? And I say, I'm, I'm in the North, North Carolina. You're like. Want to fly up to New York? I might be like, yeah, let's go because I think that's what you want to hear. You know what I'm saying? But shit, once we get close to that airport, I ain't got my Xanax, I ain't got my, you know, that must start. I'm not going on that plane, right? Like, I'm just gonna tell you, I'm, I'm that dude who's be like, yeah, let's go, blah, blah.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  But when it comes to the page, I just feel like, one, because I was trained as a fiction writer. And the thing about, I think training matters, right? Like, I was trained to look at characters other than myself and question their ambivalence, like way the teeter totter of emotionality that, that we all sit on. And I think the hard part for some of us is applying some of the stuff that we might do fictionally or see fictionally to ourselves. And the hard part for that, so, yeah, it was scary to write. You know what? When those boys were molesting and sexually assaulting my friends, in addition to being mad, in addition to being scared, I actually felt like, damn, why didn't they pick me? And then I assumed I wasn't picked because I was fat and I was sweaty and all of these things.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  So writing that was hard, but it's the only place in my life where I'm going to write that. You know what I'm saying? I'm not, and, and I'm not gonna be like, oh, this is the answer either. Like, two years later, I might rewrite it, but once I sit in it, I'm gonna put it on the page and like, it's gonna look at me and see if it reads me. And then I'm just gonna keep going if I can, but I think that's a really important point. Like, I, I hit fear on every single paragraph I write, especially when I'm doing essays. But sometimes you just gotta meet that fear head on. Sometimes you, you gotta run away from it.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  And that's it. Seeing you choose to not run away from it in the page is, I think, the calling in to the reader that makes your work so resonant long after you finish reading. You talk about something that I want to talk with you a lot about today.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  You said, listen, I'mma write it, right? I'mma write it. If that's the one place where I'mma do this thing, you said, I may come back and rewrite it later, but I'm gonna write it. I'm gonna talk to you about revision. Key, not just to the process of like revising our text, but like what revision means as an ethic. Because when I go back and I read over all of your work, You have never been afraid to say, this is not my final attempt at this, even though I'm sharing it. I may come back and I may change this, I may recast this because I change and now I see this differently. I think about the characters motivations differently. I think about what this essay has done in the world and I want to revise it.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Why revise something once it's out and about? This is not what we tend to do as writers.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  I mean, there are a number of reasons. The first reason is because we love each other, you know? And when I put a book out there, like for better or worse, like I have all the critiques of capitalism in the market that we want. But that book is competing with, among other things, Tressie, Tressie's book. And I'm just not good enough to compete with Tressie.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Ah, stop it.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  No fam, I'm being straight up. If you let me write one, you know, first draft, second draft, third, I literally have to do 2025 drafts. Not simply to compete, but because like I'm not ever really sure what I think about an idea. It's why I don't really like Twitter as much as I like Facebook, you know, like I will delete everything that I write on Twitter. Not because I'm scared, but because I changed my mind 10 minutes later, you know, and they don't have that function where you can revise it like Facebook does. So for me, it's just, one, I'm just not good enough to do it. And two, like part of what I try to do, Tressie, and I, and I, I see this in, in a lot of your work is,

• 14:45Speaker 02

  I know at the end of the day, like my art practice has to be versed in sort of like pushing back against the worst of like Americanisms. And one of the worst Americanisms is like, if you did it, it's good. And two, like especially for like cisgender men, cisgender straight men, like, everything I do got me here, so I shouldn't regret anything I've done. You know, like that, that's dangerous for an artist, but it's catastrophic for a human. And so like, I want to revise sentences because I know they can always be better. I have an idea of like a vision. I have a vision in my head for a sentence or, you know, for sentence passages and I want to keep going until I go beyond that.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  But I also want to give myself the freedom in the future to be like, you know what, can't say like that line you thought was the illest line in the world. You today are embarrassed of. And I think that the market.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Kind of encourages us to think that, oh, if a book is published, there's, you know, which really often means some group of white people think that it can get some money for it, that it's done. You know, like, if you graduate from a school, which often means some group of white people think you've achieved, you know, what you need to achieve to walk across the stage, you've graduated. I just don't trust the people who often tell us when things are done, so I'm never gonna be done. That's pretty much it.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  That strikes me as not just a creative practice that you talk about. That's about what kind of human being you want to be.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Oh, it's tough. You know, I had a coach who said, uh, you play the game the way you live your life, and this was my college basketball coach. And I really don't believe that, actually. But in writing, I, I find that I live my life better if I'm playing the writing game with more integrity. I live better. I treat myself better. I treat the people I love better. I treat the world better. Um, if I'm like, you know, have like a dutiful relationship to art, and I'm trying to make it more beautiful with every time I go into it. Like, when I, when I don't read and I don't write a lot, I'm just a terror to be around, you know? And I know that now.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, we share that. You know, we share that. There's this old cliche that, you know, writing is revision. You're not writing if you're not revising. And I want to read a quote from an essay you recently wrote for Vox, which was partly about, uh, revision. So this is in response to a conversation that you're having with your childhood, uh, friend, Ray Gunn. I love Ray, by the way. Don't know Ray. I just love him through your writing of him.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  He loves you.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  I really do. I was like, oh, I know Ray. I get Ray. Right? And this is what you say, Casey. You say, "I thought he was talking about revision. A word our professors and high school teachers believe necessitated us, reducing all of our black rhetorical abundance into meager-ass absolutes. In my own sloppy work, on and off the page, I was beginning to understand revision as a dynamic practice of revisitation, premised on ethically reimagining the ingredients, scope, and primary audience of one's initial vision. Revision required witnessing and testifying. Witnessing and testifying required rigorous attempts

• 17:56Speaker 01

  at remembering and imagining. If revision was not God, revision was everything every God ever asked of believers."

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Love that. You elevated revision. You elevated revision to faith, which was, yeah.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  It just, yeah, it struck me.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  I thought the Bible folks was gonna be mad.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Really?

• 18:19Speaker 02

  I thought my Bible people were gonna be mad, but whatever.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  But they, they rolled with you? They rolled with you?

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz it's, cuz it sounds, you know, if you, if you can make some sound biblical, I think your Bible people will be like, well, that's okay. That's okay, you know?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, cuz they think you've read the Bible, and that's all they ever want.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  That's all the Bible people want, for you to have read the Bible.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  That is it.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  So we're gonna get into like that, that life-giving part of revision, um, uh, later, but first, I wanna talk a little bit more about the type of revision, cuz this gets at the heart of why you got your rights back for the book, which I wanna talk about. What the marketplace asks, especially of black writers. So when you talk about revision that reduces our black rhetorical abundance, what do you mean by that? And when has this been done to you?

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Huh. I'm going back to, um, second grade, third grade, fourth grade. I was a kid who used be an action verb, you know? Be sitting, be walking, be, and, and I came from a mother who was just like, don't do that, right? But I still did it at school, and nobody ever told me why not to do it. And nobody ever told me that there was any value in it. I'm talking about a second, third, fourth, fifth grader. Or like when somebody say like, you know, they took they house away from them. That to me sounds, I mean orally, like they took they house away from them. One is the repetition of they. That sounds better to me than if I were to say, they took their house away from them.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  And so, my point was not that I didn't want my teachers to tell me what was right or wrong, but my teachers never saw any value in the right way of being that we brought to school. And so much of that right way was informed by hip-hop, real talk, which was informed by blues, if you take it all the way back. So I just assumed that like I was, my teachers from second, fourth, fifth grade, all the way up into graduate school, just were denying a blues ethic. And when you deny a black people Mississippi a blues ethic, you're denying those black people. And so, you know, it can go from all the way to there, to when I publish books now. And some I could be saying like, you know, so and so had to go get a switch. And let's say I have an editor, it's like, well, I'm gonna need you to explain to the rest of the readers what a switch is. Well, I'm not about to break this illusion to describe a switch.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Because the people who are on the first row of my audience, they understand what a switch is. And they understand that when I, if I break this to go describe what a switch is, they're gonna realize that they're not reading something that is like directed. Especially to them. Do you see what I'm saying? So, so for me, it was just a matter of like, I mean, it's deeper than this, but one, on one level. I think it is often teachers slash editors not simply not knowing from whence our abundance comes. But not knowing how to value it in any way and just saying, no, that's wrong. I'm not that kind of student. Like, I need you to explain to me more than it's wrong. Like, I want you to tell me there's some value in this, but for now, we wanna see you try to communicate with this word.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  As opposed to misuses of they don't have a place in the school. Okay, well, you're telling me a big part of me and my family don't have a place in this school. And I just think we need to make it clear. And that's exactly what they were saying, you know?

• 21:24Speaker 01

  That, that is, and that is the sole crushing part of what's necessary for you to do that kind of brave engagement with fear. That you talked about earlier on the page. Uh, I don't think we get bravery from other people's words. Right? We get the bravery from the words we got from our people. And so if you take that away, it's really hard to be brave. I can't even talk like myself. How are you supposed to be brave on the page?

• 21:49Speaker 02

  And there's the collective intelligence, like we know when we come into these buildings, that there's a way that we're supposed to talk. That is different than the way we might communicate at home. But at some point, I'm gonna need you, teacher, to tell me and show me that you value the way I communicate and talk and be at home. And if you don't, I'm gonna resent that. And in my resentment, armed with this library my mama gave me. I'm gonna try to write books that can supplant the books that you put in these classrooms, because I know that these students wanna be known that there're different kinds of ways of being in different homes too. You know what I'm saying? So like, a lot of my fear just comes from like a hatred of the way I was taught about me.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Not just about like standard language, but they, they taught us about us in the most demeaning, like decrepit, horrible ways possible. And you know, some of us, when we got that pen, we kinda wanted to undo some of that work. And that's sort of what I think. I'm doing, among other things, trying to undo that work, you know?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  And you're very successful at doing it. So I wonder, as a successful writer, are the expectations of your revision process now just coming from you? Or do you still have editors? For me, it's always a copy editor, by the way. I now put in all my contracts that I get final say who copy edits me. Because I don't, I won't have any. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this anymore with white copy editors editing me in text. So do you still get this at this level of your success where it's clear you own your voice? That it's clear that you know how to assemble your audience and to speak to them in different registers? But do you still get pushed back on that kind of soul crushing revision that you need to do it?

• 23:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question, Tracy, because I actually like the collaborative part of writing, which is the editing part. Like, I, I love, like, I'm gonna put this out, you're tasked with reading my stuff and sort of telling me how you think it can be better. And then I'm tasked with coming back and being like, well, maybe we can do, you know what I mean? Like, I love like that, that part of it. But the thing that we don't talk enough about is that, in this so-called awakening, if we think about how, how it relates to publishing, I think we finally see lots, lots and lots of people who look like us who are getting opportunities that they should have always gotten. My hope is that they get three and four and five and six opportunities as like some other people do, right?

• 24:13Speaker 02

  But the, but the flip side is that I think we need to talk about editors who for the longest just haven't edited people who are not white and don't have the skills necessarily to edit people who aren't white. So sometimes I feel like the collateral damage is the writer, sometimes who is the guinea pig. And I'm a writer now who like, I can, you know, like you, I can publish wherever I want, but that doesn't stop editors from pitching to me, like these very elaborate pitches. And really, they're just asking me to sign my name to their pitch. And I'm like, I'm not about to sign my name to like this argument, one, because I don't agree with it. And two, because even if I agreed with it, I wouldn't cast it that way. And then sometimes I think we can get into a rocky road, but what I, I don't say yes to editors

• 24:57Speaker 02

  who give me three-page pitches and then say, this is what I want you to say. But that happens a lot, fam. Like, I don't know if you, I mean, you know, you seem like you're a lot more in charge of your career, but that's what I'm saying. Like, I can, I can do all that shit on the page, fam, but I-

• 25:13Speaker 01

  If that's what it seems like, then the PR is working.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Because writing is a very vulnerable position to be in.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  You always think that another opportunity isn't going to come around. No, I don't know of any writers who feel secure that people are always going to want to hear from you.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  So I think that that vulnerability is built into the industry.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  And that's what gives editors and publishers sort of the upper hand, um, right? So, no, I absolutely get those similar pitches, like, you know, it would be great if we could get a Tressy book about wokeness. And I'm like, congra-, you know, good luck. But, yeah, I think that, I think that continues to happen, which is why I think you pushing back on the idea that anything you do publish is an eternal work in progress is really a powerful way, especially, I think, for minority and people of color and black writers to think of it as a constant process of revision.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  We have to. I mean, and, and I understand all the reasons we think understandably, like, if we disappear, we might not appear again, right? Like, if we go back into the annals and, like, just take care of ourselves and don't get edited for a while. I understand people who are like, yo, ah, it took me forever to get here. I'm like 55, I'm not about to- but at the same time, y'all, like, the work we create is our work. Like, our people didn't, weren't brought to this nation as labor slash technology for us to, like, let these people tell us when our work is done. It can, maybe it's done before you think, but I think often it's not done. And I just think we have responsibility to continually revise when this market tells us not to.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  All right, so one thing you and I have in common, I like to think as writers, is that we work really hard at being ourselves on the page.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And in your ethic of revision, you show us over and over again how hard that work is, how hard it is to go back and change something, to make it more reflective of who you are as you mature. And you have done that brilliantly and impressively with How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. So you bought the back the rights to that book, and you revised, basically, the whole text, Kiye say. You started the new version with an essay that is about the process of revision in its own way, right? Revising America, revising your relationship to America. So listen, why, why do this?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Why revise so much of that book? Why show us your work in that way? And does it matter that you did it right now?

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I think the why right now is that I just was not sure that I was gonna make it. And, um, and I say make it-

• 28:24Speaker 01

  You mean make it out of, yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Out of COVID, you know, like, I don't know about, yeah, like, we haven't talked explicitly about this, but like, you know, when, like, I was, I was on book tour when it hit, or when, when, when they say it hit. And, you know, the people that I knew closest to me that were dying were like my good friends, partners, and my students, my cousin. Like, those are the first people. And then I was just like, oh, um, you know, that's that fatalism shit that a lot of us have. I'm like, not only is my granny done, because I thought my granny was done, right? Immediately. And I'm like, okay, I might have two or three weeks. And I was just like, yo, if I pass, and I let my first two books stay in the hands of someone who I feel like did not respect my talent, I am not worth anything.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  And so, one of the things that drove me to get those- Rights back was the fact that I didn't think I was gonna be alive and I knew that the books would live longer than me. And whether I lived through COVID or not, the books will still be out here in this world longer than me. And I just wanted to be out in the world with like, you know, with the style and a shape and a content. That I could actually like get behind, you know, how to sort of kill yourself and others in America is interesting revision because I don't know that I made that book better. But there were just some essays in there. I couldn't stand by like, I couldn't stand by the Kanye essay, couldn't stand by the. Michael Jackson joint and I wanted to take those out and I'd written some new stuff about OutKast about the pandemic. I just wanted to put it in there, change the sequencing up, kind of tell it backwards.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  And more importantly, I wanted my rights to be my rights. You know, we sold like forty thousand copies. I hardly made any money off of it. So I just thought that was foul, long division, sold for like three or four thousand. So I just wanted my books back. I had to sell, I had to buy them back for fifty thousand. But in the end of the day, like I just wanted to have a little bit of integrity because I didn't think I, I didn't think I was gonna make it. I didn't think I was gonna make it.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  You felt the presence of death that presently in COVID?

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you know, I'm a, I'm a, I mean, this is what I'm thinking. This is what I always think this is about like. People talk about Afro pessimism because I think if we talk about like what that, what that, not, not what we've been taught that word means, but. Like, you know, the state of being like utterly pessimistic and fatalistic as a black person. I don't think we need much around us to encourage us to be like, oh shit, they, they coming, it's coming. And you know, when I grew, you know, I grew up in Mississippi. So like the blackest state, the poorest state in the Union. I'm a big black boy. Like I did not, I just assumed that like that shit was gonna get to us. I mean, I remember my family being like, yo. When it gets to our lungs, that's how we talked about it. When it gets to our lungs, we gotta blah, blah, blah. So the assumption was.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  First of my granny, my mama might not be here no matter what I did, no matter how much money I made. And then I was like. I don't know how I'm gonna make it. So at least let me just get this art out here the way I wanted to. That's very. Self-centered too, but that's what I felt.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  I don't know that I think it's uh self-centered, but yeah, I think the urgency has not been felt the same by everybody, which is why I wanted to follow up on that. Because COVID felt very urgent to me too. I, it's so funny. I talked about it the same way. We're both southern, you know, from Mississippi. You're from Mississippi. I'm from North Carolina. We both come from the black southern tradition and maybe that's just what was coming out of me, but I also kept talking about my lungs. It's just like, well, you know, there go the lungs.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  The lungs.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  So you talked about that being like part of the context of you saying, basically, if this is the end, if I'm, if I'm looking at like a meaningful end to the people I love and maybe myself, because that's what COVID felt really present and urgent. Against that backdrop, you're like, my artist was gonna be left standing. And you wanted the most recent revision, not just of the book. You're saying you're not sure you made it better. Were you just making it more present, like this is who I am now? Was that the goal?

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Well, that's the thing about, I think, revision. I think if we're honest, you know, like sometimes I think, yeah, like the goal is to make something necessarily better. But I think sometimes making something have a bit more integrity is not necessarily making it artistically better. Do you know, it's like sometimes when you ask people who their favorite MCs are and they'll give you a top five or whatever. But then you'd be like, okay, but tell me who the best MCs are. So with this, like, I was trying to make this have more integrity for me. You know what I'm saying? But when I imagine the readers reading it, it wasn't gonna hit the same. But it wasn't even about it hitting the same. It was about five years later, let me look back at these essays that gave me an opportunity to talk to Tressie.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Like that essay collection gave me an opportunity for people in this world to see what I do with art and what my home does with art. But I just wanted to go back and like tell it backwards and actually make it a little bit more complicated of a piece of art. I just wanted to get the art back, really, from people who I didn't think had my best interest at heart. So if we died, I wanted this art to go forward with my family. And, you know, whatever comes from that, I wanted it to go to my family and not necessarily to someone who I thought didn't really have any love or, or, or, or trust for me.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  One of the things that helps you, or seems to be part of your revision process is something you mentioned about, you like the collaborative part of writing. You talking, you were talking about editing, but you also call out to the polyvocal. Character of black art making. Throughout your work, you will bring other people in as a voice. That might be more common in fiction, but you even do it in your essays.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Which I find fascinating. So you've got like, you know, you'll bring your mom in as a voice.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  And you'll treat your exchange with your mother and your back and forth with each other as a text. And as, you know, part of your argument, you do it with other writers. So like there's you talking with, um, it's a collaboration of like letters with other black male writers. In one of your essays, you do it when you bring Ray Gunn and your friends in and you do this back and forth. I've seen you do it with text messages, which now I hear.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  You push your students to do that. So you clearly also do it for yourself. Like you'll even show your text messages as an essay.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  And you treat it that way. Is that the community of people you feel responsible to?

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  The people whose voices you bring into the text and like choosing to bring a voice in when you're doing something like an essay is really tricky.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is tricky, but you know, again, I, I think sometimes when people ask me to write stuff. Like if you were to ask me to write something for your publication, I think when I was a much younger writer, I'd be like, man, what do I have to say? And I think now as an older writer, I'm like, what do I have to say that can wreck the genre? And one of the things that I think for better or worse wrecks, like the genre of the essay is when you bring dialogic voices of black folk in to serve as quote unquote experts. You know, I've never talked about this explicitly, but I know my mom is an expert at what the fuck she's an expert in. I know my boy Ray Gunn is, and Noel Athan is, you know, I know, I know the people, I know Magic Crump is.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  But the question is like, how do you allow them to have like the flexibility and the fluidity of like their real character? And like the directedness of quote unquote expertise? And one, you just have to, you know, reportages, you have to ask some questions, you have to ask these people questions, sit down and listen to answers. But then I just think you have to think about, okay, what happens if I bring, you know, Ray Gunn's voice into a piece about Chauvin and, and what happens in Minnesota? My grandmother, like I've interviewed my grandmama probably two, three thousand. Hours cuz I'm always in my mind, I'm thinking about to do this, this different project. And so my grandmama was not allowed to read and write in any sort of public way.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  And then they used her ability to read and write to not allow her to vote, though she went outside the bounds to learn how to read and write. So you can't tell me not to put this person who gave me life and gave me like artistic and ethical vision. You can't tell me not to put her in some, in some essay, particular essay, you don't think she belongs. So that's why when you asked me to write about OutKast, you know, Oxford American, I'm gonna spin this about my grandmama's innovation. You know what I mean? When you asked me to write about black churches, or you asked me to write about three on three basketball. I'm also spin this into like, you know, this woman who grew up in nineteen twenty nine, who used to play basketball on this like poetry. So it's some way you can see like, oh, he's, he keeps on writing about his grandma or his family.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  But in my heart, it's like, yeah, because y'all tried to write my grandma and my family off the face of the earth. So I'm gonna try to bring these people into some, hopefully majestic sort of artful creation. That's just basically what I do. These people mean the world to me. These people hurt me in ways nobody else can. They love me in ways nobody else can. They know about my birthmarks. They know everything. And when I was growing up, I was always dissuaded from putting them in the stuff that I was turning in for school. So when I got my writing mite up, I'm like, nah, I'm gonna put my people in everything I write. And you gonna have to tell me that it's not good, but I'm gonna do it. You know?

• 37:16Speaker 01

  When you're revising your text, it sounds like you're also revising the canon that made your text necessary in that way, right? Like assign me anything, but I know that the thing you're assigning me has never included this. And so you're pushing back on just the canon always. Yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  And you know us, you know, we, we tricksters, you know what I'm saying? Like, like, yeah, I wrote a book called Long Division and there's two characters called City. And you know, that book is doing a lot of things. One of the things I'm doing is like, I'm literally writing back to my mother who made me read a tale of two cities like eight times before I could do anything. Well, I'm like, okay, mama, well, I'm gonna craft my own tale of two cities. And it's gonna be called Long Division. Now, I don't need to make that explicit for anybody else on earth. But me and my mama, do you know what I'm saying? But I just think sometimes those kind of things are what carry art. I'm not like just trying to reactively write against normative cis white shit.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  But I am trying to affirmatively write myself and the parts of myself that I don't even love into whatever people are gonna be reading tomorrow. That's for sure. I'm definitely trying to do that.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  You talk about revision as an ethic a little while ago. And I wanted, I wanted to get at your decision making about what you choose to revise and when. So you talk about in the collection of essays, pulling out, like, but revision was actually editing. You pulled out two essays, one about Kanye West? And what was the second one you said you pulled out?

• 38:45Speaker 02

  There was one, it was about, uh, Michael Jackson, Tupac and, um, Bernie Mac.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Why these? Why did you pull these essays out specifically?

• 38:54Speaker 02

  I mean, the Kanye essay, one, I'm using the meat of that Kanye essay, which was about my grandmother's relationship to her husband who died about a year and a half, maybe two years ago. I'm using that for this new book. But secondly, the things that I've written about Kanye, I just couldn't stand behind anymore. You know, like the whole piece was supposed to be about how Kanye is this once of a lifetime artist. And like so many of our other artists, he just doesn't get gender right. And neither do I, and neither does my grandfather. Like that's sort of what the work that the essay was doing. But, you know, then the dude did a whole lot of shit I didn't see him doing. And I was just like, I can't, I need to write a lot more about Kanye.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Or I need to take Kanye out of this essay and just focus on my grandmother's relationship with her husband, which is so much more interesting than Kanye, right? So I took that out for that reason. The Michael Jackson stuff, I mean, real talk, it was just like, I put that essay out and a lot of people who I love are like, we love that essay, but you didn't speak to Michael Jackson allegedly sexually abusing and harming young people. You didn't do it. And you know why I didn't do it? Cause I didn't have the skill or the will to do it. And so I was like, all right, let me take that essay out, cause I wanna do something else with it. So there was just like, those are two essays I just really needed to take out because ethically I just couldn't stand behind them anymore. I just couldn't, I couldn't be like, I believe that, you know? I don't believe that anymore.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  What did Kanye do where you were like, okay, listen, either I got it, is it the Donald Trump stuff? Or is it just his descent into sort of like this public performance? Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  I mean, the Donald Trump, by the time the Donald Trump stuff comes along, like I'm in a, um, my relationship with Kanye had, had gone through like six different phases. But like, it was real talk, it was when Yeezus came out and Kanye got critiqued. When My Dark Twisted Fantasy came out for being like explicitly hyper misogynoir, hyper. And he heard the critiques. I know folks who know him and they, he heard the critique and then he doubled down on those critiques on Yeezus. And then I was just like, okay, well fam, like this is not the person you thought, which I thought was this is a person who, once they are educated, they take the education and in their own way gradually figure, figure out ways to fold that education into their art. No, Kanye heard that people thought he was a misogynist and Kanye doubled down on misogyny. That's what happened.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  One of the things I like about your ethic of revision, by the way, is that you show it in your everyday life. So you're like, listen, I will take the hit on revising an essay collection that was very successful. Not just because the arguments don't work, which is another, or that there was a factual error. But this is not who I am in this moment and what I want a piece of art to represent for me. But I also, within that art, you talk about the things that you personally give up as you revise your relationship to the things you love and to the world. Can I get you to read the one that really jumped out at me?

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  It is from Mississippi. You moved back to Mississippi, super successful. You're living like sort of this parallel life in Oxford, Mississippi as like a John Grisham endowed writer and resident

• 42:03Speaker 01

  in this place where you never would have stepped foot in when you were growing up in another part of Mississippi. And I love here how you, you want to engage as the person you were, but you got to acknowledge that you're a different person now. And the way it manifests in this, can you read that for us?

• 42:20Speaker 02

  I drive by two massive Confederate monuments in Oxford. Black officers are guarding them both. I want to ask the brothers if they are humiliated guarding monuments that commemorate our destruction. When they start answering or radioing for backup, I want to say, "Oh, one sec, bros." Then I want to blast the first verse of Fuck the Police. I imagine the brothers parked in the shadows of the armed monuments banging a beat on their cruisers and all of us rapping Fuck the Police until backup arrives. When the white officers arrive, I imagine getting all bougie black professor on them explaining that white Mississippians cling to the Confederacy, not because they lost the Civil War, but because they cheated in a rigged battle against black Mississippians.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Their monuments are memorials of our suffering at the hands of folk who never had to pay, play, live, or fight fair. But they already know that. Every Mississippian, whether they admit it or not, knows that. What they don't know is that Fuck the Police was one of our memorials, one of our most evocative monuments, and every member of NWA had roots in the South. I wanted to play it so badly as I watched that police precinct in Minneapolis burn, and when Trump sicced his National Guard on peaceful protestors so he could get a photo, Bells Above would be jealous of. I want to bump Fuck the Police right now.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  The existence of the song is proof that even if we could not bring as much material suffering to white folks as they did to us, we could memorialize and channel the spirits of those beaten, killed by nasty cheaters. Mama's greatest worry is that I will be shot out of the sky by these cheaters. She is right. One day I will not get up off of the ground. Mama knows that in my dreams, we soar, bulletproof, and often, we crash. In my actual dreams, I run like Ahmad, I shoot mid-range jumpers like George, I heal like Brianna. I rap every lyric to Fuck the Police in a Monte Carlo pack to the brim with them

• 44:25Speaker 02

  and Mignon and Tim and Henry and David, fiending for new ways to love each other. I fantasize about doing the white folk and their police what they do to us, and more than fantasize, I remember and relish publicly rapping words grandmama could never whisper outside of her house.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  But there's a way to commemorate our losses and wins without humiliating queer folks and subsequently morally debasing those of us who are not queer. Those who we seek to humiliate, we eventually seek to destroy. And that first verse of Fuck the Police does not fairly memorialize or commemorate the lives of queer folk. I had to stop rapping it two decades ago. I had to stop listening to it in 2015. As absurd as it sounds, the only thing harder than giving up Fuck the Police was giving up lying to people I purported to love, giving up disordered eating, and giving up gambling. Queer antagonism, like trans antagonism, like anti-blackness is an addiction broken only

• 45:28Speaker 02

  by honest reckoning, consistent practice, and the welcoming of radical spirits. Like most Mississippians, I am an addict. Like most Americans, I am a coward. I wave at black officers guarding the Confederate monuments. They wave back. A D A Victoria's and then you die churns in the background. And I drive myself home. Fuck. Fuck. You talked to a D A the other day?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  I did, yeah. I talked to a D A the other day, talking to her again very soon, actually. Uh, D A Victoria is a beautiful, modern blues woman is what I call her. I like the idea that blues women are still being made young, uh, which is one reason why I love a D A Victoria. Has a wonderful album, uh, Southern Gothic, which I think of your work as being very much in a conversation with, that, that contemporary, however, Southern Gothic, which I think you capture there, which is the complicity that we all have in reproducing this everyday stuff. Like, it's easy to talk about, not easy maybe, but it's easier to talk, defund the police.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Than it is to drive by the police and not nod a nice polite hello, especially when you're standing in the middle of Oxford, Mississippi.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you know how hard work is to come by. You know how hard work is. This is not an excuse. This is just an, uh, uh, uh, uh, a look into what we actually, some of us actually do feel, you know?

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Is this something, this revision of yourself of saying, I love this art, like I love N W A? Or for me, it was saying, I had to give up one of my favorite songs by Salt and Pepper because I realized there was something in it that I just couldn't, I couldn't resonate with as an adult. Well, they've got, they've got, they use a um, pejorative for intelligence uh, in um, uh, what a man, what a man, what a mighty good man, and I just can't say it anymore.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  I can't say it anymore, right? Even though we know what the art was made in response to, right? There's being a particular type of black feminist ethic about black women being desirable and having the choice of partners. But they built it on uh, pejoratives and slurs that I can't live with. And in the same way, you have this thing with the N W A song that, yeah, was serving a particular purpose for us, but was doing it in a way that compromises our love for a broader community. And you being able to do that revision in real time and talk to us about what that looks like and feels like. Do you think you've gotten better as an adult, as a big grown up, as an official grown up? Have you gotten better at holding yourself to task like you do in that passage?

• 48:03Speaker 02

  I'm gonna be honest with you.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  Yes, it's so, it's so hard to say, it's so hard to say yes to that. I just don't think that you ask anybody on earth to do anything that you aren't willing to do. And so I have, you know, you were talking about Kanye, I got a million critiques of Kanye. You talk about this human being, Donald Trump, and all the people who made Donald Trump. I got a gazillion critiques of those folks. But at the end of the day, I know that I need to be able to give up something that I do not want to give. Like, I love Fuck the Police fam, I love the memory of what it, of what, I mean, I love it.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Memory, I remember it so clearly, the first time, I saw the video for the first time that I heard the song. I also had the images, I saw the video, blew my mind.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Blew my mind.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  It was a moment.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  It, it, it was, and, and you know, like, this is where this thing word, we have to remember words or word, and they have histories, but they also are alive. And so like, I was baptized into N W A. And, and yes, I can be like, well, all of the rape, because they literally rapped about rape, all of the murder, that was over there, but fuck, okay, you can say all that if you want to. But for me, when I'm asking these white folk down here to divest themselves of the worst of Mississippi, the worst of this nation, the worst of white folk, yes. But then I also have to be willing to divest myself of sometimes the things that are like wholly ableist, like absolutely completely queer and trans antagonists. And like that song,

• 49:37Speaker 02

  a song that like made me feel like I could walk with my head up, is also a song that is like steeped in that stuff. So like, I'm not trying to do any sort of like, um, prove to anybody I'm better than anybody by not fucking with that song. But like, I need to not fuck with that song because I don't need more incentive to believe the ideas in that song. And I have plenty of incentives to believe the ideas in that song. That's, that's me. You know what I'm saying? This isn't for somebody else. It's because like, I'm already queer antagonistic. I'm already trans antagonistic. I'm already anti-black. I'm already misogynist. If I know certain things are gonna encourage me to be more, I need to as a grown human being who creates art be like, I gotta divest myself of that art.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  And I think that's what we all have to do as human beings in this world if we wanna move to a more honest, tender place. I can't control the world, but I can control what I do, you know?

• 50:27Speaker 01

  That seems to me like a really good response to the argument that we are always supposed to take art within its historical context. You know, this idea that you cannot judge art by contemporary standards and ethics. And what you're saying is, no, you, not only can you, but as the artist, you had better, right?

• 50:45Speaker 02

  You better.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  That is an imperative for the art to do what you want it to do in the world. You know what one of my greatest fears is, KJ?

• 50:53Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Creating something and putting it out in the world, thinking it is going to make something I care about better. And people finding something in it to make the exact counter argument. I worry constantly when I release something. I spend manic hours up in like two, three, four AM, trying to find every way that somebody could misconstrue my meaning.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  To counteract what I intended. And I think of your ethic of a revision there saying it starts with you, the artist, you the creator as, you know, being a response to that of holding yourself responsible. I gotta hold myself responsible for that as much as I do the people I'm afraid of.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  And it's tough to make lush art because like you talked about secondary characterization before, like if I bring in a secondary character who has a notion of progress that I don't have, you know, like my mother, for example, my mother's belief to this day, even post heavy is like, we don't have rear view mirrors. Do not talk to me about the past. I don't want to hear nothing about the past. My mama says, right? So when I put that in a book and then I see it quoted back on Instagram, we don't need to look back into the past. The past is, I'm like, but fam, you're quoting somebody that the book is actually arguing about, but they don't see it that way. They'll be like, yes, they said, don't look back at the past. You know what I mean? So I just think it's, I feel you the same way, but also just feel like once you bring

• 52:18Speaker 02

  in other characters who start saying things that a lot of people might agree with, they'll give that shit to you, even though you're trying to say the opposite.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  And a heartbeat because we have a hard time separating the art from the artist. I think especially when the artist is different from us in some critical identity, right? We have a hard time separating women from their work, have a hard time separating black people from their work, et cetera, et cetera. You know what else I think we don't, that you do really well, that you reflect really critically on how places and your location in these places really make you. And so I want to talk about how these places have revised you as a person, as a thinking person and a creative person. So Mississippi is always the backdrop of your life. Everything you write starts with, listen, I am from this place and this history, but you have also moved from, you graduated from Oberlin, you go to Indiana University for

• 53:11Speaker 01

  your MFA, you end up in Vassar, you come back to Mississippi and now you're starting out on a whole other new place. You're going to Texas, which I just gotta say, Texas feels big. I don't know why. I feel like you're moving to another nation when you move to Texas. How do these places shape you and revise how you think?

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Well, that's a great question, but I I'm gonna try to be short because I could talk too long about that. You know, my mom was nineteen when I'm born, my father's twenty, and I'm born on the campus of Jackson State University. So as much as Mississippi shaped me and Forest, where my grandmama lived, which is a rural community, chicken community, forty-five mile. Like, I grew up on an institution, they go to grad school in Wisconsin, I go with them there, go back and forth with my grandmama. I'm in school, I go to a high school, I go to another high school, go to another high school. I've never not been in school, like, I've never not been, I was born in school. You know, when I finished grad school, I went directly to Vassar, I went to University of Mississippi.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  And I'm supposed to be starting at Rice in January.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Are you expecting the culture of Texas to, what do you expect from it?

• 54:19Speaker 02

  I'm kind of trying to avoid that question right now about Texas, fam, because like, I'm from Mississippi, you know, and it's very terrifying to move to a place like Mississippi that has one abortion clinic. And, you know, the Dobbs case is about to come out, they're trying to take that one out. And to move to a place like Texas, you know, when you leave Mississippi, like, we left for for Illinois, we left for Milwaukee, you know what I'm saying? We left for Indianapolis, we left for Atlanta. I'm not necessarily sure about what it means for my leaving Mississippi when it is in the state it is in to go to another place that is trying to outdo Mississippi.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  I I I don't know, but that's where I'm supposed to be going, so we'll see.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  We're gonna check on you.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, check on me, you, yeah, I'm gonna need that, I'm gonna need that.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  I feel like, though, you've got the, um, you have the theory of moral practice and creative practice that you're taking with you that I've got to think it's got to be a boon for how you will think about that place, though. I might be more worried about how you'll change Texas than maybe how Texas will change you. I think that that's the hope for me.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  See, I'm forty seven, fam. Like, I, I, I'm, I'm, I don't wanna change sexes no more. Like, don't, please don't let me go there and try to change sexes. Cause I feel like sex, I, I feel like I, I, I, I'mma, I'mma try to, I'mma try to feel it out before I try to change it. Let me say that.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  All right. So I think about the American project to the extent that it is still a project undergoing is in many ways a project about this nation's refusal to revise. Right. Won't revise its history, won't revise its present, won't revise its narratives about the future. And this is an attachment, not just to the status quo, but to like the founding myths of what this nation is supposed to be. And so in many ways, the fight over things like Confederate monuments, which you write about, or fights over critical race theory are about this nation's refusal to revise its story about itself. But you're constantly revising yourself, you're constantly modeling it. And so I'd just love to hear you talk about what you have learned

• 56:33Speaker 01

  through this sort of like lifetime practice of revising yourself. And our role in like a place where revision is not valued as an ethic. How could we value revision in a nation whose entire story is about resisting revision? I think it's important for people to know that revision might be hard, but clearly worth it to you. So even though it can be excruciatingly painful from time to time, it has some overarching value. What is that in your view?

• 57:01Speaker 02

  I, I think the thing that connects all of us is that it is really hard to look back yesterday at something that we did that we don't wanna look at. On a very elementary level, I think a lot of us don't even want to assess what we have done, if we have potentially done something that is harmful. So we can't even talk about revision and if you don't talk about the vision, like the assessment is the vision. And so. The thing that I've learned most importantly is that, you know, the times in my life when I'm so sure that I have done a relationship, a job, a piece of art, like ethically and tenderly, like those are the times you have to like commit more to looking back and seeing like, you know, like what kind of harm was done, if at all, what kind of joys are secretly in there.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  But for me, like the act of revision on the page is so tied to the act of living our lives. And the hardest part is the assessment. I just want to say like that, like the vision, like looking at who and what you've done. And then if you look at that with like any sort of like rigor or clarity, I think one can be like, okay, well, here's what I need to do differently. What I think we do as Americans is that we resist the hard vision. We resist the hard assessment. Therefore, the revision seems right out the door. And what most people want in a revision is a commercial, like this will make you better. This will, no, like revision is, is like the commitment to perpetually assessing work going forward. So there's no done, you're never done.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  But I don't even think we can get there because most of us are afraid of what we see when we look backwards. And I am too. But I know that like the only way that we can grow backwards and forwards is to like honestly assess the ingredients that we put into life. And that's what I try to do with my work.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  So our final question for you, Kees, is something that that editor said to you that I wanted your opinion on at this stage in your career as you're at the precipice of making another important move, as you have feel confident in your ability to be reflexive about your revision process of yourself and your role in the world as an artist. And that is, the editor kept saying to you, you know, you could be a real black writer. If you would do this, if you would do that, you could be a real black writer. What does it mean to you today to be a real black writer? Does it mean anything?

• 59:21Speaker 02

  I mean, it's gonna sound like I'm full of myself, but to be KSA Layman, sort of means you're a real black writer. You know, I mean, like I, I accept myself now and I'm a lot of things. And I'm terrible at a lot of things. And I'm a fake a lot of things, but. I'm a real black writer fan and I'm so grateful that I can live long enough to say that to you because I know you know what that means. I'm gonna always, always be invested in revision. I'm gonna be always, always invested in the voices of our people that were never given space and I'm always gonna be invested in weirdness. And to me, that's what being a real black writer means and that's what I try to do.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  You do it brilliantly and you shine a light for the rest of us to choose how we want to be weird in this world. So, thank you for that, Kiyazay. All right, my brother, we always end the episode, I say we, right, but for temporarily, this is the trusty show. And like Ezra, we always end the show with three book recommendations. What do you have for us?

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  So, the books that I would recommend this week are, I read in Monty Perry's new book, South to America. Man, it is something I've just been waiting for actually my whole life. It's what we need. Another book is Shouting in the Fire, An American Epistle by Dante Stewart. Incredible young book by this young, young brother who fancies himself a preacher, but also who found God via like a lot of our black intellectual heroes who often pushed Christianity to the sides and remarkable read. And Colin Kaepernick just released his first book, Abolition for the People, which is a book of essays on abolition and policing,

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  edited by Kaepernick. And it's just an incredible book. It's like, you know, I know a lot of people are like saying they're surprised how incredible it is, but it is, it's a phenomenal book. So, those are the three that I would suggest.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Wonderful recommendations. Thank you, Kiyazay.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:01:36Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times书店. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Orsha Karma, and Annie Galvin. Fact check by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.