Revision, with Kiese Laymon
“I believe artists are time travelers. I think we’re all time travelers. ”
About the Guest
KIESE LAYMON, born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, is the Hubert H. McAlexander Chair and Professor of English the University of Mississippi. He’s also the award-winning author of the novel Long Division, the memoir Heavy, and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Laymon also founded “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program aimed at getting Mississippi kids and their parents more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing. Follow his work at kieselaymon.com.
Best Books
Long Division, by Kiese Laymon.
Heavy: An American Memoir, by Kiese Laymon.
Kiese recommended The Prophets, by Robert Jones, Jr.
Transcript
KIESE LAYMON: I believe artists are time travelers. I think we're all time travelers.
BLAIR HODGES: Back in the 1980s, Kiese Laymon was a hard-headed Black kid growing up in Jackson, Mississippi. And he says there was a ton of cultural pressure on him just to be excellent at everything.
KIESE LAYMON: So like, when my grandmother would tell me and my mother would be like, you need to pretty much look like, you know, Malcolm X when you go to school every day with a bow tie and all of that, I'm like, I don't want to wear a bow tie. I'm a little fat kid! Bow ties make me sweat. I'm not doing it! You know? I don't care what you tell me!
BLAIR HODGES: And then at school, with that bowtie crumpled up and hidden away in his backpack, he had a lot of questions about the books they had to read.
KIESE LAYMON: How come nobody that you're making me read looks like me, comes from where I come from, or talks like I'm from? And you're like, “Well, because those people don't create classics!”
BLAIR HODGES: That did not go over well with Kiese Laymon.
KIESE LAYMON: Well, so then I'm gonna get upset, and I'm gonna try to create some art that a newer version of me in the future can actually enjoy.
BLAIR HODGES: And now he’s chair of English at the University of Mississippi, and that’s exactly what he’s doing.
Welcome back to Fireside with Blair Hodges. In this episode, author Kiese Laymon talks about his fantastical novel Long Division. It tells the story of City, a Black kid in Mississippi who discovers a hole in the ground that can transport him through time. It’s a dangerous proposition for a Black kid in the south.
KIESE LAYMON: Like so when City goes back, he looks at 1964. Yeah, he has a premise of what it's like, but then he sees all these things that aren't what he imagined at all. And I think similarly for you—I'm just guessing—you're going to find things that you never ever imagined.
BLAIR HODGES: By digging into the past, City has the chance to change the present and the future. Just like us.
KIESE LAYMON: So I definitely believe that we all have the capacity to time travel. The question is, what do we want to do with that time? What do we want to do?
BLAIR HODGES: What do we wanna do with the time? This is episode four. Revision.
Origins of Long Division - 1:58
BLAIR HODGES: Kiese Laymon joins us today and we're talking about his novel, Long Division. Kiese thank you so much for coming to Fireside today.
KIESE LAYMON: Thank you for having me, Blair. I'm happy to see you again.
BLAIR HODGES: I read Long Division just a couple of weeks ago. And it's sort of like—it's like Back to the Future if it was set in the south where young Black kids have to reckon with racism and the KKK at the same time that they're dealing with stuff like puberty. Is that a terrible way—Is that right?
KIESE LAYMON: [laughs] Right! Right, pretty much. That should be the synopsis.
BLAIR HODGES: How did you come up with this idea?
KIESE LAYMON: I grew up with my grandmother for summers, like early in Mississippi, we used to sit on her porch and you know, in Mississippi tornadoes just always came through every community, and a tornado just missed our house, but it hit the woods, right across the street, right across the road. And it took this giant tree and uprooted it. So there was this massive hole in the woods.
And I would just sit on my porch sometimes—and I mean, to this day, I swear I saw these two small people crawl up out of that hole. And I got my friend Shirley to come over, and we just watched that hole one day for hours. And then when I had my head turned, she said, "I saw ’em! I saw ’em!" And I said, "You saw them?"
And so long story short, I just wanted to make a story out of what we believed was true, which was like that there were these time traveling kids and a hole across the street from our house, and I wanted to add all kinds of things to it. You know, it's also heavily influenced by hip hop and Invisible Man and Bluest Eye, stuff like that.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, so there's a lot of influences from music and literature and all this stuff, and then your own personal experiences.
KIESE LAYMON: Definitely.
BLAIR HODGES: Introduce us to City. This is a character—or maybe it's like two characters. Talk about City. Who is this kid?
KIESE LAYMON: Well alright, so Long Division is a mirror novel. All the main characters have mirrors, except for City and Baize, right? Baize and City are the only names that remain the same. There's also mirror scenes. So City 2013 is this young boy who wants to rep for his people, you know? He's like, “I want to rep for all the Black folks out there with contentious demeanors and hair full of waves!” He wants to do his thing.
But he's got this arch enemy named Lavender Peeler who wants to show white people what Black people can do. So they got beef from the rip. And they're performing in this “Can You Use This in a Sentence” contest. And as you know, they get there and they find out that the contest is rigged. And City has an onstage meltdown. He becomes—
Can You Use This in a Sentence? - 4:27
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I want to tell people about what that is. So basically, it's not a spelling bee. It's like, they give a kid a vocabulary word and then say, “you have to use it in a sentence,” and then they judge it by things like dynamism, and appropriate use, and all this—
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah. I mean, it's a flip on battle rap, bruh. I'm obsessed with hip hop. And really, I think hip hop, when I got into it, it was the cultures, it was the breaking, it was the DJ-ing, but mainly it was emceeing. And emcees were just really, when you break it down, they were having sentence contests. And I just wanted to bring a sentence contest, also in honor of the battle royale in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and put that central.
But you know, really man? City is just one of millions of kids who's grieving. And he's trying to grieve creatively. And he can't talk about what he's grieving, because he doesn't know. All he knows is that these older people are always telling him he needs to watch out for white people. He knows these white people are talking to him like he's not him. And he's grieving a lot. But he's grieving, you know, through creativity. And he finds this book called Long Division and he sees his name in the book. So we get the other book with City's name in the book. So it's like a book within a book within a book.
But real talk, it’s just Black kids and, really, Jewish kids in Mississippi trying to make a way.
BLAIR HODGES: So he goes to this contest, and he's up on stage, and then he has this meltdown.[laughs]
KIESE LAYMON: Right, right. He has a meltdown. Because everybody at his school and in the city has been hyping him, you know, he's representing the state. And they give him a word. They give him the word, “niggardly.” And City is a well-read young person. But that word, you know, it throws him!
He's like, wait a minute, like, “N-I-G-G-A” is in that word. So are you giving that word to me because I'm Black? And, you know, he doesn't understand [laughs] that that word has nothing to do with Black people or really race in any way.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's like “stingy.”
KIESE LAYMON: Right! But he's still like, why the f— would they give me this word? Like, why would you give me this word? And so he doesn't use it, quote-unquote, “correctly.” And he snaps, you know what I’m saying? He goes off. He goes off on a racist diatribe. He goes off on the Mexican brother and sister who were there, he goes off on the judges, he goes off on everybody. But he's also sort of trying to emulate a Biggie-type character, you know? [laughing] “I'm also doing this for my confidants over here, and blah, blah, blah.”
BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yeah, he's giving shout-outs all over the place.
KIESE LAYMON: Yes, yes, yes! And he's like, “Death to my opposition!” He just uses the moment to snap. And he becomes a little quick internet sensation.
BLAIR HODGES: He ends up getting sent to be with his grandma for the summer, and that's where he encounters this tunnel that can take him back in time.
KIESE LAYMON: Right. And that part is semi-autobiographical because whenever I would act up, I would get—I mean [my book] Heavy has a scene in there too like that. Whenever I would act up my mom would send me to my gramamma. But in Long Division, he's literally getting sent to his grandmother's so she can baptize him, ideally to baptize the quote-unquote “devil” out of him.
Respectability politics - 7:24
BLAIR HODGES: And we should mention too, Heavy is the memoir you wrote. We'll talk about that a little bit later. So City is down there to get baptized. Did you have any experiences like that? Did anyone try to get you religion that way?
KIESE LAYMON: Oh, yes. I got baptized much earlier. I think City gets baptized at like, 13. I got baptized at 8.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, me too. [laughs]
KIESE LAYMON: It was, it was a wild experience, man! For a while, for a long time I thought I was like—I had the glow. You know what I mean? Like, when you come up out of that water, and you're so young, you don't really know what's happening. But you know that the adults around you are treating you different. And there's so much lore around the baptism and so much fear leading up to it. So the fact that you don't die makes you think that you're, you know, like the Lord has you, you know?
So I wanted to sort of play with that idea of like, having a ceremony that welcomes you into like this—City calls it a “gang of believers and followers.” I'm not at all—I mean, I think it can read like I'm poking fun at baptism. But baptism is so, so, so, so important in my family's life. I'm not. If anything, I'm just poking fun at that immediate post-baptism, when you literally think you and Jesus are like boys, you know what I'm saying?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Another thing—and maybe this was sort of incidental, but I also thought about how he goes with the baptism stuff, but then he later goes underground. There's a different burial for him and—
KIESE LAYMON: Absolutely.
BLAIR HODGES: —he goes, he's buried and comes back out as well.
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, that's it brother, that's it. Man I'm so glad you got that. I'm playing with religiosity and the religious myths that I was raised on all throughout. You can also read it as his getting baptized into a loving relationship with Lavender Peeler, his arch nemesis. But it has to happen under the ground. It can't happen above ground. Like they've written those young boys and those young characters off the face of the earth. But they're coming back, you know what I'm saying? There will be a resurrection, as I think the book implies. Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: So you also mentioned that City deals with a lot of adults who were kind of telling him how to act around white people and this kind of thing. There's the principal of his school, Principal Reeves, I have a quote here that I'll read from the book. City says, "Principal Reeves is always teaching us how we were practically farting on the chests of the teenagers on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee if we didn't conduct ourselves with dignity."
That seems like a lot of pressure!
KIESE LAYMON: (laughs) Right! Yeah, I mean, but that's autobiographical too, you know? I grew up like a child of the movement, you know? My father was in the Republic of New Africa when I was born. My mother just was super committed to politics in Mississippi. And you know, from—I can't remember when I wasn't getting speeches about how I needed to be better behaved, because young people were better behaved in the late 60s and all of that. So, you know, the entire first half of that book is lots of adults telling City that he's not being a Black young child the way they want him to be a Black young child, and they want him to emulate them, and these other young children.
And but City doesn't say this, but in City's mind, there's no way those young children were as boring as you say they were! “I'm just gonna go out and fight for justice!” Yeah, maybe. Maybe. But they also were goofy as kids! And City’s saying, like, “I want to be a goofy kid. I get the weight, I get it all. But like, can I just be free?” And they're like, “No. The stakes are too high, you cannot be free.”
And City's like, “Well, I'll be free one way or another,” you know?
BLAIR HODGES: And this is what I've heard so much about: parents of Black kids talking to them, saying “What you do will reflect on Black people as a whole,” this idea that “everything you do reflects on us as a people.”
KIESE LAYMON: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: Which isn't fair to anybody, but it does seem to happen.
KIESE LAYMON: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: And then also the idea that it's dangerous. It's dangerous even today for Black kids. You know, we know of kids wearing hoodies going to the store to buy Skittles and they end up being killed.
KIESE LAYMON: Absolutely. And City does this thing where, you know, he has this really, I think, terrifying encounter with a white dude who saw him on the internet.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, his video goes viral. His rant goes viral.
KIESE LAYMON: His rant goes viral. And this white dude, for the most part, plays with him takes his wave brush, and then they kick him in the chest. And City knows not to tell his grandmother. But he doesn't know why he doesn't want to tell her. But he thinks if he tells her something bad might happen to the white dude or to him.
And so, yes, I get why these adults—be they grandmothers and mothers or uncles or aunts—are like “you have to behave within this small, small, small corner. You can't go outside the lines. Because if you do, death awaits you.” But City is saying, “But death awaits us anyway. And what kind of life am I to live if I cannot be free anywhere,” you know? So he's not using that kind of language, but that's what's driving him.
BLAIR HODGES: Did you feel a lot of yourself was put into City? Or is he sort of different from you that way?
KIESE LAYMON: You know, a book like that comes alive once you realize that character is not you. I was not nearly as—like I couldn't write the way that kid can write. I didn't have the words, I wasn't as courageous. But I was hardheaded. When people told me things, if I thought about it and it just didn't make sense, I just wasn't gonna do it. Do you know what I'm saying?
So like, when my grandmother would tell me and my mother would be like, you need to pretty much look like, you know, Malcolm X when you go to school every day with a bow tie and all of that, I'm like, I don't want to wear a bow tie! I'm a little fat kid! Bow ties make me sweat! I'm not doing it! You know? I don't care what you tell me!
So I wasn't City, but I was definitely hardheaded if it was something that I realized just didn't make a drop of sense. And sometimes, you know, the way my grandmother and my mother believed in respectability, it didn't make too much sense to me. So I kind of pushed back.
BLAIR HODGES: Did you know any Lavender Peeler kids? Like, did you know any kids like that?
KIESE LAYMON: Nah, that was just—Lavender Peeler. I mean, I'm sure I know some people like that. I know grown people like that, for sure. But Lavender Peeler came about where I was challenging myself to create a character that I personally was sort of disgusted by. [laughing] But you got to make that character turn. So early in that novel, Lavender Peeler does something on stage that City has to respect, and I have to respect as a writer.
But you know, initially, I was trying to write a character I couldn't stand. But then I was like, alright, what can you make happen to this character to make you really respect and love them? And as we see, he realizes that the contest is rigged, and he could still win it, because they want them to win it. And Lavender Peeler does something differently. You know, he does what I think a hero does, and he becomes more complicated. So I didn't know any Lavender Peelers as children. I met a lot of Lavender Peelers as adults, though.
BLAIR HODGES: This is one of the interesting contrasts you bring out in the book. So at the contest, where they're doing the word contest, Lavender had been talking to City and saying, “Man, you're kind of getting played. Don't you see what these white folks are doing? They're bringing us in as Black people to show how enlightened they are or how open they are to, you know, multiculturalism or whatever. But it's a trick on us.”
KIESE LAYMON: Right? Yeah. And I mean, that's exactly it. Lavender Peeler, I mean, he thinks he's hip to it. He's like, “They just brought us here.” But even in his mind, he doesn't think that they're going to rig the game so they can win. He’s like, “Yo, they don't even know what they're about to run into!”
But the worst part is, he's like, “You?! You shouldn't even be here.” You know what I'm saying? Like, “They wanted you to be here. They gave you the Black words in the regionals!” And City's pondering, he's like, “They gave me the Black words?” And of course, they gave him the word “chitterlings,” you know? [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, which is like, it's a really soft pitch. “Go ahead and knock this one out of the park.”
KIESE LAYMON: [laughs] Right.
BLAIR HODGES: And it's devastating to him, I think, right? Like, he understands it right then. But he's on stage. He's on TV now.
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, yeah, he's on stage. And the word that Lavender gets there ends up being the same word City got in the regionals. But unlike City, Lavender intentionally uses the word wrong, because he doesn't want to win like that. But he's also not prepared for what it means to lose so dynamically in front of the world.
BLAIR HODGES: I love that scene, by the way.
KIESE LAYMON: Thank you, man.
Questions to think about - 15:23
BLAIR HODGES: So back at City's school, there are a lot of ways that they're experimenting with different forms of punishments. They're coming up with creative ways to try to get kids to behave. And there's this test that you include, it's a list of true and false questions, and you include the whole test. So if a kid gets in trouble, they'd sit them down and make them take this test. Is this based on a real thing?
KIESE LAYMON: It's based on the curriculum from the SNCC Freedom Schools. So later in the book there's a quote from Charlie Cobb, where—you know, when Freedom Summer came to Mississippi—where Charlie Cobb is saying about these kids, I mean it's sort of paternal, but he's like, “These kids have not been given the access to question.” He's like, “They're superiorly gifted, but the system they're in has sort of attempted to strip them down and make them feel ashamed. And so we as teachers have to think about what pedagogically we can create to encourage these kids to be as bright as they are.”
And then later on some other character is like, “Yeah, but everybody needs a test.” So if it's inspired by anything, it's inspired by the SNCC curriculum, the Freedom School curriculum. But in terms of the actual questions, that's just all—that to me is just stuff that I want people to ask themselves after they read the book.
BLAIR HODGES: That's what it felt like, is like it's the book's test laid out right there.
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And for people who don't know, SNCC is a group of students during the Civil Rights Movement that were organizing to oppose segregation and organize sit-ins and all kinds of things.
KIESE LAYMON: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: Freedom Schools were ways to prepare them to be able to confront society.
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah. And Freedom Summer is a violent, deadly summer. And really what it is, is like organic groups from within Mississippi, collaborating with groups of people outside of Mississippi, to try to register to vote, yes. But also to create healthy loving schools for kids. Because as we know, Mississippi wasn't interested in healthy loving schools for black kids at all. Then or now. Yeah.
We’re all time travelers - 17:19
BLAIR HODGES: Let's look at some of these questions because they bring out some themes in the book. So there's a bonus question on the test. It says, “Write three stories in three different time periods. The three stories should explore a question that you've been afraid to ask.”
Are you in this book exploring questions that you're afraid to ask?
KIESE LAYMON: Oh, absolutely! I'm absolutely exploring. I mean, there's so many questions. The big question is, how do we educate all of our children? How do we educate our children in this nation? Not just Black children in Mississippi, not just Jewish children in Mississippi, but how do we fairly, ethically, and honestly educate? And one of the answers to that is, we're not doing it right.
The second thing is like, do we actually want to be free? Like, do we know what freedom is? Do we want to be free?
Is time travel something we actually believe in? That's something I'm asking myself as a writer. I believe artists are time travelers. I think we're all time travelers.
BLAIR HODGES: How do you define time travel then, if we're all time travelers? How does that work for you?
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, you know, this is the thing about our language. I think once you have past, present, and future tense verbs, you literally are asking us and the people you're talking to to come backwards. Like right now, if I am going somewhere, I'm asking you to come with me—present, like, I'm about to go somewhere. Blair, you want to come with me? Or if I'm saying, Blair, we went home yesterday, you remember that? Like, we're going backwards. We're going—And you know, I'm just playing with Toni Morrison's idea of the past, present, and future all existing and the same time through our idea of remembering.
But I think artists not only change the future by the art we create in the present; we change conceptions of the past. You know if you think about what the greatest artists in our world have done—not just in regard to to futurity, but what they've done to the way we understand what happened yesterday.
I mean, [laughs] you want to talk about time travel? I grew up reading Richard Wright, like Richard Wright is why I'm here. A month ago, I blurbed a Richard Wright novel, that's weird, dude!
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KIESE LAYMON: You know what I mean? That's weird that a Richard Wright novel will be released in 2021. And then it's like, more weird that I'd be asked to blurb it. A little Black boy from Mississippi.
So I definitely believe that we all have the capacity to time travel. The question is, what do we want to do with that time? Like, what do we want to do? And I think Long Division is literally premised on that question: What do we do when we go back and forth—and we don't go back and forth alone. A lot of times we take versions of ourselves, we take people we love, we take people we hate. But like, what are we going to do? What are we gonna do to ensure that the people coming after us and the people who came before us have more choices and better access to love?
BLAIR HODGES: Well, that seems to complicate another question on that test. There's one that says, “Only a fool would not travel through time and change their past if they could: True or false?”
It seems like we don't have a choice, then.
KIESE LAYMON: I mean, I think you have a choice of what you do with that time. I think we all time travel. I think if you use language that is premised on an idea of present, past, or future tense, like we are living, and I think we live in language—I think we're traveling through time. I mean, time is a construct just as language is. Anyway, I think we're all time travelers, right? Especially writers. Like we literally have to be.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - 20:26
BLAIR HODGES: There's another question on here. “True or false: You were brought to this country with the expectation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
And growing up, for me, that's what I was taught. That's what I was told, that that was that way for everybody. And I would have easily said “true.”
KIESE LAYMON: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: So as a white person taking that test, I would have had a really quick, easy answer. What about a Black kid taking that test?
KIESE LAYMON: I mean, again, I think there's some immigrant groups here who might argue yes, who can say yes. But I'm a Black boy from Mississippi. I come from people who were stolen, you know what I'm saying, from West Africa. And most of those people did not make it. And we were brought to the coast of the Carolinas and then eventually to the Gulf of Mexico to be labor, right? We were extracted to be labor, and to create laborers, and to die.
And so, you want to talk about magic and time travel? It's a dastardly magic, I think, that makes people go to another place, grab human beings, and bring them over to do labor that won't be compensated. But it's another kind of magic, or beyond magic, that those people who were brought here are now doing stuff like talking on computers about art. I wasn't brought here to do that. I wasn't brought here to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. We were brought here to be labor and to absolutely die. You know what I'm saying?
And we have to fight—and thankfully, lots of white folks fought with us—but we had to fight to even get to where we are now. But we weren't—I just think it's important we always make it clear. We weren't brought here to thrive. We were not stolen to come here and thrive and think and talk about love. That's not why those people brought us here.
BLAIR HODGES: And you had to time travel to do that. You had to access a particular past. For me growing up, I wasn't really expected to access that past. So my time travel was kind of back to a much more generic sort of white history of, America being great, people wanted freedom and so they came here and created a great country, right?
KIESE LAYMON: Right, right.
BLAIR HODGES: So I could time travel, but I'm coming out of a different hole even when I try to time travel, right?
KIESE LAYMON: Ahh. I feel that. And but you know, what I would say is, yes. And, all of our histories—this is what Long Division is about—have to really be, not just contemplated, but you know, made gross.
Like so when City goes back, he looks at 1964. Yeah, he has a premise of what it's like, but then he sees all these things that aren't what he imagined at all. And I think similarly for you—I'm just guessing—if you do research, and not just take what people have told you about your past, you're going to find things that you never ever imagined, right?
BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.
KIESE LAYMON: And I just think that's what we have to encourage ourselves, but definitely young people, to do. In a way we have to encourage young people to do what adults have a hard time doing, which is to be like, “Don't listen to me, don't be like me, don't be me,” which runs antithetical to what most schooling is, because most schooling is like, I want you to either think like me, if I'm the teacher, or be like me, if I'm the teacher. And the closer you get to that, the more likely you're gonna get an A.
I think that's deadly. I think that's deadly pedagogy.
Long Division’s divisions - 23:26
BLAIR HODGES: That's Kiese Laymon. He was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, and he’s a professor of English at the University of Mississippi. We're talking today about his novel Long Division. It’s being reissued.
Now, this book Kiese, is experimental. It's constructed kind of as two books spliced together. In fact, you have to physically turn the book upside down. You read one half of it, and then you’ve got to turn it around and start from the other side. Was that how the first edition was as well?
KIESE LAYMON: Nah. I mean, that's how I wanted it to be. But again, I didn't have enough juice to get the publisher to do what I wanted. So it was just, it was interspersed. It’d be one chapter from 2013, one chapter from ’85. It was much harder to follow. But I always wanted it to be a flipbook. I wanted the two books to meet in the middle. When you get to the middle, you're in the woods, like there's leaves.
So you know, I'm trying to nudge readers to understand that when those characters are like, “I hear something, what is that,” you're in that hole. If I've done my job as a writer you're in that hole with the leaves with those kids. And the question is, like, what are we going to do down here? And what do we do when we come up out of there? Because we got to come out, I think.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, and that's great, because the book itself has a complicated history, too. So as I said, this is a second edition, but it's not the kind of edition that happens when a publisher wants to celebrate the anniversary of a publication or something. That's not the case with Long Division. What happened here?
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, you know—I was struggling, fam. I was struggling to get my work out. I had a book deal with Penguin Putnam. And initially, they told me to take the book out of Mississippi—this is after they already bought it. They're like, “Alright, maybe think about placing it in New York.” And I was like, “Okay. Then they were like, “Maybe think about making the narrator a white girl instead of Black boy.” And I tried to do all that.
And then they're like, “I want you to take the racial politics out of the book.” And at that point, I was just like, “Alright, I can't do that. I don't know what you're talking about.” So I gave the money back. And then I was just out there. But my friend Jesmyn Ward published a book called Where the Line Bleeds with this press out of Illinois. I thought if they got Jesmyn, they might get me. So I sent the editor three or four books. They called me back the next day or so, and they're like, “Alright, we want to do this.”
And you know, so they paid a thousand dollars for How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others In America, and they paid three thousand dollars for Long Division. And we went on to sell like sixty thousand copies or so. And I went to them at some point, I was like, “Alright, we've sold a lot of copies. I want to repackage the book differently to the way I actually intended.” I want to take some essays out of How to Slowly and add some more. And the dude was like, “Nah.” And I was like, “what?” And he was like, “Yes, if you want to do that you can make me an offer.” And I was like, “Make you an offer? Brother, like, you made hundreds of thousands of dollars off of these books,” you know?
Because in my heart, I'm just still like a fat Black boy from Mississippi who believes friendship is honor, and I thought that dude was my friend. And long story short, you know, initially he was like, I need to pay three hundred thousand or something like that. And I was just like, three hundred thousand dollars? Anyway, I got him down to fifty. So I paid fifty thousand dollars to get the rights to my books back. Then I made, I think, a pretty good deal with Scrivener to re-issue the books. And that's why Long Division and How to Slowly have come out in the last five or six months.
Writing and publishing as an act of love - 26:33
BLAIR HODGES: There's an essay in How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America—which is a collection of essays—where you talk about this publishing history. And here's a quote, you say, "In the midst of the most death-filled summer of our lives [because of COVID-19], I bought my first two books back from the publisher so I could revise and reissue them. Securing the rights to my books, revising them, and publishing the way they want to be published, are the most loving acts I could do for my work, my body, my Mississippi."
So this is an act of love, you say?
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, I mean, it's—Again, because of so much of the history we're talking about, you know? I mean, if you're brought to this continent as an extraction, and you constantly have people devalue your great-grandmamma, your grandmamma, your great grandfather, blah, blah, blah. And then in this situation, where I'm thankful that dude gave my books a shot, but it wasn't a fair deal. I shouldn't have signed the deal. And then when I went back to him, I was like, “Yo, can we change this up?” He's like, “No, you gotta give me more money”?
I just think, okay, maybe I would do that if I didn't come from Black folks who were stolen, who have been underpaid, not paid for our entire—But given my history and our history, and what was happening in this country? I just had to get my books back, fam. Like, I just had to get my books back.
And going forward, I just want to make sure that I only collaborate with people—not who agree with me, but at least who have some sort of reciprocal love. You know what I'm saying? That's the kind of person I am. If I work with you, if we collaborate, I want us to work on critically loving each other. The stuff that happened to that book at Agate was not loving at all. Like you don't charge somebody fifty thousand dollars for a book that made you over three hundred thousand dollars when you know they didn't hardly make any money off of it. That's just wrong. It's just wrong.
Advice to a Black writer - 28:17
BLAIR HODGES: You describe a lot of these difficulties in your books. And over the years, you've gotten a lot of advice from different people, from editors and others, about what it would take for you to succeed as a writer. And we get to read that advice, because you report a lot of it in your writing. I have a few examples of that. Can ask you about some of these?
KIESE LAYMON: I would love it.
BLAIR HODGES: Alright, so let's start with Margaret Walker. I think this is a woman who had mentored your mother, is that right?
KIESE LAYMON: Yes, she was my mother's mentor. But she was also one of the most famous writers to come out of Mississippi. She wrote For My People, Demonic Genius, Jubilee. Incredible writer.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so yeah, you're sitting down with her and getting some advice, and here's a quote from her. She's speaking about Black writers in particular. She says, "Our communication is the mightiest gift passed down by our people. Every word you write and read should be in the service of our people."
What do you think about that advice?
KIESE LAYMON: Absolutely. It's the most important, not just writerly advice, but [laughs] human advice that I think I've ever gotten. Like, you know, I think America and capitalism—and we're all a part of it—encourages us to do things that aren't in our best interest. And what Margaret Walker was trying to say is, you got to calm all that down. And when you step, or when you write, or when you listen, or when you make, or when you except, you have to do that with intentionality. And I just think that was incredible advice that I try to heed every day and I fail every day.
BLAIR HODGES: As a Black writer, that means you're gonna have to confront things like racism, and it reminded me of something that you wrote in Heavy. Let me read this quote. You had been rereading some James Baldwin stuff and it sparked a lot of questions for you. And when you were reading it, you said, "I wondered what Black writers weren't writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folks to change."
KIESE LAYMON: Ooof! Yeah, man. And I went through a phase of doing that, you know. That's ultimately why I got kicked out of school, kicked out of Millsaps College.
I still ask that question. I think we live in this world now where Baldwin seems so far ago, but Baldwin wasn't that long ago. Martin Luther King, Toni Morrison—I'm talking about a lot of people who died—Octavia Butler, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells. These people to different degrees, I think, tried to show the nation what it could be if it reckoned and changed. And some people listened. But the majority of people did not.
And I just think sometimes it's important for me to understand, like, when I'm trying to write that essay, where I can convince white people to change? Sometimes I need to be like, Yo. Baldwin! The illest, I think, essayist on earth couldn't get these people to change. So maybe you need to write another essay. Sometimes I think it's really important to work through your own demons, instead of encouraging people to try to reckon with theirs.
I'm not saying it’s either/or. But when you spend all your time trying to get people to reckon with themselves, you're literally not spending as much time as you should trying to get yourself right. And I think I had to sit with Baldwin and Margaret Walker to really understand that.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, so that brings up this advice from an editor that you call “Brandon Farley.” This is a pseudonym for an editor that had originally begun to work with you on Long Division. And this I think this is from an email, right?
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: You quote from him. So it says, "The success of your book will be partially dependent on readers who have a different sensibility than your intended audience. Too many sections of the book feel forced for the purpose of discussing racial politics. But white people buy books too, bro."
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, that’s a quote. [laughs] That's a quote! I mean, in a lot of ways, the quote is true! White people do buy books. And the people that Brandon was trying to sell me to did not share a sensibility. But as a young writer, my point to the editor was like, there are lots of people out there who you all are not trying to write to. Like, I'm one of them. And I'm like, let's put out some weird art, or some art that doesn't, you know—you can't telegraph where it's gonna go, and see if we can create an audience.
And it didn't work at that time. So I had to create a lot of essays and create my audience, you know what I mean? Like, I had to create a lot of viral essays in 2012, like four or five viral essays. That was how I got put on, right? I started working at Gawker, I started writing these essays, they went viral, and that attracted the kind of readership that I imagined existed, that the New York writerly editorial community said did not exist.
I knew we were out there because I was one of those people. I knew it. I just knew we were out there. And I knew that there were a lot of other people who didn't think there would be audiences for these books that also wanted the kind of stuff we were offering. And you saw that with Heavy, you know? Heavy has—you know, tons of Black folks and tons of folks of color, really feel that book. But there are also lots of white folks who do, who you would never imagine feeling that book, you know what I mean?
BLAIR HODGES: I would put myself in that category. I'm this white guy from Utah, and I mean I love Heavy.
KIESE LAYMON: So, I mean, s—, I'm a Black guy from Mississippi, and I love Utah, you know what I mean? Like I just love being confronted with a reality that is loving, and that's what I want people to feel in Heavy and that's what I long to feel in different art too.
I like to read art that is not intended for me. I just don't like when I have to do that in school. And when I question, how come nobody you're making me read looks like me, comes from where I come from, or talks like I'm from? And you're like, “Well, because those people don't create classics.” Well, so then I'm gonna get upset, and I'm gonna try to create some art that a newer version of me in the future can actually enjoy.
BLAIR HODGES: So it sounds like you didn't really feel a lot of pressure to sell out or to kind of like water down your stuff.
KIESE LAYMON: Oh, it was pressure. It was pressure! But I had a job. I had a job.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, but what about temptation? Yeah. Did you ever feel like, ooh, maybe I should do that?
KIESE LAYMON: You know what? I didn't have children. And I wasn't married, and I had a job. I was a professor. If I wasn't a professor—I always say this fam—I would have done exactly what that editor asked me to do, because I needed the money. And I needed the money. But I just couldn't write a Long Division with white girls narrating it, placed in New York, without racial politics.
BLAIR HODGES: Put it in Utah! [laughs]
KIESE LAYMON: I mean, yeah! They might as well have been like, you might, you want to place it in Salt Lake City? I mean, like, they might as well, you know? Because I had just moved to New York! I didn't know anything about upstate New York. I had no idea! They're like, place it in the forest up there. I was like, what forest? I don't know s— about upstate New York! But they thought they could sell that, like, “Look, here's the Black kid who can write white characters!” They wanted to sell a trick. And I was really wanting them to sell literature. You know?
When writing gets heavy - 35:00
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, well I mean, I think it's wonderful that you had the opportunity to hold out and write the book you wanted to write, so.
There's another piece of advice here that we'll talk about. This one comes from your own mother. She's also an academic. But as your memoir Heavy talks about, she's also someone who's had a lot of struggles, and you're pretty candid in the book about some of the most difficult aspects of your relationship with family. And in the book, you talk about how she was unsettled by that, because you're exploring things like abuse and things like that. And so here's something from her in Heavy, she says, "I just think you share too much with people who don't love either of us. You've got to be much more careful, Kie. White folk do not deserve to stick their nasty hands into our raw—"
KIESE LAYMON: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: —"Hiding from them and being excellent are actually the only ways for us to survive here."
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, I don't believe that. So. Um. [laughs] I love my momma and she is why I'm here talking to you. But the notion that you have to hide from white folks might be true, but what I'm asking is, what are the consequences of that? Because the things that she's asking me to hide from white folks, she's also asking me to hide from her. She didn't want me to talk to her about the insides of addiction. She didn't want me to talk to her about the ways that I've stolen and failed people. She didn't want me to talk to her about that. Much less talk to white folks.
So I get it. Yes. Historically, and in my life, if you give white people access to your insides, they're not going to do anything good with those insides. But also historically, when you give yourself access to your insides, and give people who love you further access to your insides, and long to have access to other people's insides, it's harder for any people in the world to stomp you out. Do you know what I'm trying to say? So, my mama is brilliant, but I just don't agree with that.
BLAIR HODGES: It kind of reminded me of like the principal from the book who is saying—
KIESE LAYMON: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: —“You've got to put your best foot forward. Look, plenty of people are already going to be prejudiced, plenty of people are already going to bring racism. So if you talk about these real issues, it could feed that. It could give them false justification for continuing oppression.”
KIESE LAYMON: It could. It could. And Martin Luther King was the most regal person we know. And he got murdered in Memphis at the Lorraine Hotel. Do you know what I'm saying? So—
BLAIR HODGES: Wearing a business suit.
KIESE LAYMON: Wearing a business suit, brotha. So that's my thing. You know, I mean, I grew up in Jackson with a lot of charismatic well-dressed Black men who the state went after. I grew up with a lot of, you know, Black race women who were putting us on their back and carrying us all—I mean, my mom is one of those people, and the state, to varying degrees, tried to make her suffer. So I get it. I just don't think you can out-talk or out-dress your way out of terror. It's not—there's no,—I don't think it works. It might, though. But I don't think it does.
BLAIR HODGES: And in Heavy, you're not just talking about problems that other people have. The book is really about issues that you've had. It talks about weight gain and weight loss and this really unhealthy relationship you had with your body where, I would say even just sort of abusive, just painful stuff. You're really putting yourself out there. This is a really personal book. Was that scary to do?
KIESE LAYMON: Um—
BLAIR HODGES: You talk about even like, you almost committed suicide once. You sat in a bathtub with a gun to your head, you describe what you had done.
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, you know what Blair? I'm gonna be honest with you. I never answered this question like this before. But um, I grew up playing basketball, I played basketball in college, played football and basketball all through high school. And, you know, when I was playing football, man, I played middle linebacker and I played fullback. I was like 230, 240. But basketball was my real sport. But the coaches were like, you look like a running back. But the problem was, if I saw somebody coming at me with their head down, I didn't have that thing that like it’s gonna put my head down and try to run them over. You know that thing that NFL players have, particularly linebackers? I didn't have that in me. I just didn't have it, bruh.
But in writing? I got that thing, which is like, if there's a hole in you, I want to explore it. And I want to ask myself how much of that hole I see in you is like the hole I find in myself. And so there are a lot of people who are going to turn their head away from themselves and their relationships to addiction and failure, and also like lush love. But my mamma made a writer. I ain't turning my head away from that s—. If I see it, I'm putting my head down and I'm trying to go in it. And that is bruising. It can be another form of abuse. But that's how I am. So like, is it scary? Yeah. But it's kind of like I'm wired that way, bruh.
And the football analogy is the only way I know how to talk—Biggie was wired, you know, I don't know if you're really into hip hop—but like Biggie was like that. Like Biggie and suicidal thoughts. Like, it's hard to talk to people about not wanting to live anymore. Especially when so many Black people are like, “We’ve struggled, and we suffered so you could be alive.” But I know all of those people at different times thought about not wanting to be here. I know most of us in this world have thought about not wanting to be here.
But most of us in this world aren't literary artists. And so as a literary artist, I want to walk into that feeling of wanting to kill myself. And I also want to walk into that feeling of hearing my grandmamma’s voice and having that voice save me that day. And that's just how I'm built, bruh. I can't even take no credit for that. That's my mama. She made that.
Writing to be a decent human being - 40:20
BLAIR HODGES: And you said you're a writer, that's what you are.
KIESE LAYMON: That's what I am.
BLAIR HODGES: And there's something that you’ve written, where you said you knew you were going to be a writer for a really long time. You say, “I had no idea if I would eat off what I wrote, but I knew I had to write to be a decent human being.”
KIESE LAYMON: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: How does writing help you be decent? Decency.
KIESE LAYMON: Well for me it goes back to that question about past tense and living in, you know, time travel. I think writing is the bedrock of my practice of revision—looking at how I've lived a day, lived a relationship, lived a piece of art, and going back and assessing what my vision for that day or that art or that life was, and then trying to revise it and make it better. And so that's how I live my life. And that's how I live my writing life. That's how I try to live my real life.
Like, you know, there's a lot of things that this Trump administration brought to us that I think people will be writing books about forever, but the most deadly was Trump's inability to revise. Trump's inability to say “We, or I, messed up, and I need to go back and assess that.” Do you know what I mean?
I just think revision is the most important gift we can give to any kid in this world. And I just think adults have a hard time modeling it. So I'm just trying to be better at that myself.
BLAIR HODGES: And that takes me back to Long Division too, because when you do long division, you know, teachers are always saying, “Show your work,” right? And there's a sense in which if you show your work, and the sum is incorrect, you can go back and revise.
KIESE LAYMON: Yes! That’s the point.
BLAIR HODGES: You have to do that. But you're right. When people don't show their work, when they hide their long division and they come up with the wrong answer, they're not going to revise it.
KIESE LAYMON: Right! How do you know, if I was to be like, “What’s two hundred divided by seventy-five?” And like, we gonna both guests like 2.56. Okay, but how about we do the work? [laughs] How about we do the work and see where the mistakes are, see where the successes are. Like that's it, bruh, like that's what Long Division is. I'm asking these young Black characters, these young Jewish characters, these young white characters, to go back and like—and they're telling us, like, we're gonna show you the work. And we want y’all adults to show your work too. And that's the only way we can talk about whether the work is deadly or loving or triumphant. But when everybody’s trying to hide their work, you can't revise that way.
BLAIR HODGES: You've talked about how fiction for you, and probably your essays, too, when you think about what they can do for other people, you think about what they can do for you. And you've written that you want your work to “help readers become better lovers of those they profess to love.”
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: And you wanted to “become a better person”—not just a better author, but a better person “worthy of forgiveness and risk” as well. So you're really looking at how literatures’ not—it doesn't seem like a game to you. This seems— maybe there are game-ish things about it—
KIESE LAYMON: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: Like, it can be playful, it can be all that. But it seems like you're really trying to reach and help people change and help yourself change.
KIESE LAYMON: The stakes are so high, and I don't want to get on my literature bandwagon, but you know, imagine growing up like a lot of us did in the 80s. We meet hip hop culture, we immerse ourselves in that. It affects the way we talk, we walk, we listen, we eat, we chew—everything. And then we go to these schools, and not only do the teachers never talk about the culture that we feel loved by, they never give us any books that are written by people who look like us, much less people who actually like, you know, enjoy some of the things we do.
But what they do instead is give us books and tell us to imitate people who don't see us. So we get better grades if we write ourselves out of our work. Because the people who we were told to imitate didn't see us. That's why I'm saying yeah, it's kind of a game, but the stakes are—When you win in this game, you lose. And when you lose, like I did in high school—because I refused to do that s—, I refused to imitate somebody who couldn't see me—you also lose. You graduate in the last fifth of your class, you know?
But thankfully, I had this art. And I could get into certain schools because I won a lot of writing contests. You know what I'm saying? When I was in writing contests, I wasn't doing as much imitating. I was still imitating a bit, but I was just trying, I was searching. I was experimenting with audience and voice and whatnot. And so yeah, it's a game bro, but the stakes are literally like life and death. And I just think we all have to accept that.
The fiction of neutrality - 44:49
BLAIR HODGES: It's frustrating that some people are going to feel uncomfortable with this idea. Here's a quote from you, you said, you’ve spent a lot of time as a writer, “reading and creating art invested in who we were, what we knew, how we remembered, and what we imagined when white folks weren't around.”
And I can just imagine some people looking at that and saying, you know, “It shouldn't matter. Any good art should be good art. Why do you have to think about writing for Black people?”
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, we can ask questions for days. But my understanding of history is that it's never neutral. You know, I mean, like, I think the person who asked that question is assuming that it's neutral, and we all got on boats, and we saw the United States of America, and we were like, “Hey, we want to go over there and put our feet down and start a new life!” Okay, that might be true for your family—but I think it's even more complicated than that for you—
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I agree.
KIESE LAYMON: It's super complicated.
BLAIR HODGES: But that's the myth that we have.
KIESE LAYMON: The myth! The myth is like, hey, all of these white immigrant groups are like, “Let's go and have a party over there!” You know, like, “Look at that statue. She's welcoming us!” Okay, that's bulls—. But what is definitely bulls— is that Black folk, you know, we didn't have that experience, fam. You know what I mean, like, we just didn't. That's not, that was never our experience. And so the premise of, “Why would you ever write to a group of people you've been encouraged to not write to, and you're one of those people?” If you break that question down, it makes no sense.
BLAIR HODGES: It's that arrogance, I think it really is that, like, what about me?
KIESE LAYMON: Right (laughs).
BLAIR HODGES: Like what good are you gonna do for me? But what, as you mentioned, like we already operate—like as a white person I for so long operate from a baseline of perceived neutrality, when in reality, everything has a context. Everything has a background. So as a white reader of your work, I can say there even sometimes when it almost feels a little bit like I'm eavesdropping.
KIESE LAYMON: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: Like, sometimes I'm not part of that imagined audience. But for me, I really enjoy that experience. And I'm not—I don't want to make you into my therapist, but what do you think of that? Is this voyeurism? is this—What's going on?
KIESE LAYMON: I mean, we're voyeurs! I mean, we love to eavesdrop on s— that we like to eavesdrop on, you know? I don't want to eavesdrop on some boring s—. I don't want to eavesdrop on a boring conversation. And so sometimes white people are like, “I couldn't believe how universal your story was, or how it appealed to me,” they literally say that as if we're like, completely different species. One from Planet Black, one from Planet White. But we are here because all of us came out of somebody that we call Mamma, you know? Whether that person was there after that or not, who knows? All of us were raised in this weird culture that does not ever want to look at itself honestly.
Now, there's definitely particularities. But like, that is the base for all of us. Our parents lied to us, the people who raised us lied to us. And we are encouraged to do the same thing. Now, this whole—let's talk about the differences if we want to, but that's baseline. So you shouldn't act like whiteness is universal. You shouldn't act so shocked that you can read a book by a human and feel it, you know what I'm saying? [laughs] I'm a human, you know what I mean? So I get it, though. That's American education’s failure when people do that.
BLAIR HODGES: Mmhmm.
KIESE LAYMON: But we got to be better than that, fam. Like white folks don't earn universality, you know what I mean? Like, they just don't. And like, why you're shocked that you can vibe off of a Black book? That's American education’s problem, because you should have been vibing off of Black books from the time you were two, you know?
BLAIR HODGES: I really appreciate this about your work, it gives me a chance to really think imaginatively more about what it might be like to be a Black kid in Mississippi. This is the power of literature, right? It's an invitation into these different worlds. It's strange to me that editors would encourage an author to water down those worlds, or to try to create a completely different world in order to fit a certain market, when they should know! Editors should know that this is what literature is for, is to bring us into these different worlds!
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, I mean, but this is—you know, you and me met over sports. And the thing about sports is like, you know, to get to play for the Utah Jazz, you have to go through the gauntlet, right? Like you have to play elementary school, middle school, junior high, AAU, high school, college maybe. But you got to be great. The thing that I think we forget about as workers in this country, is that athletes might be one of the only groups of people who have had to compete fairly from the jump. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, they're competing—
These editors, man, these editors man, who were telling me what to do. How did they get their jobs? I didn't know anybody who grew up in my high school who wanted to be an editor. And the thing about those early editors is that to be an editor, you have to come from money, because editors don't get paid much. You know what I'm saying? To be an intern, at least like twenty years ago, you had to come from money. So my point is, when you don't compete, you sometimes get people who may—
And I think the same thing about GMs, you know what I'm saying? Like people who become GMs, or president, or the people who run sports teams—like they running that team because they have the money. But they never had to compete. They never had to show that they could run a team well. Which is crazy to me, right? Like, how come the people who have the most power never have to fairly compete to use their power? That's what's brutal.
BLAIR HODGES: Do you think publishing has changed since you—I mean, you signed your first deal at 28, right?
KIESE LAYMON: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: And now you're in your early 40s. And so has the landscape changed in regard to that?
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, yeah fam. I'm gonna sound very big headed, but—I probably shouldn't say this—but yes, it has changed. And it is changing. And this whole Long Division, How to Slowly, like I think my career and the way I've become a writer in this world, is one of the reasons, you know what I'm saying?
Jesmyn Ward, who was also on Agate, you know, she went out there. Roxane Gay went out there, I went out there, and I told people about my early publishing deals, what this publisher paid me last summer. And that was embarrassing, you know what I mean? Because a lot of people for whatever—you know, you sell hundreds of thousands of books, people don't think you come from these very terrible beginnings.
And I just think, my belief—it’s like why I came to Utah to talk to the book club. It's why I would support a writer, if I met a writer in Utah who showed me some stuff. My belief is that the most important work a writer can do is off the page. And it's like encouraging other people to be fair in this writerly community, I think you have to do the work on the page, too. But it's a different—
You know, we have more thoughtful folks of color from different socio-economic backgrounds in publishing right now. We definitely have—I think we're seeing a renaissance in terms of like writing generally, Black writing, specifically. I think it is changing, but it's like anything else, you turn your head, the backlash will swallow you up. But it's changing for sure. Definitely.
Kiese from Jackson - 51:48
BLAIR HODGES: That's Kiese Laymon, he was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, and he's a professor of English at the University of Mississippi.
I noticed that a lot of your bios start off with that—“Born and raised in Jackson,” rather than, you know, a lot of author bios will start right off with the academic credentials. You start off with your hometown.
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, it's important. It's important that when people see my name, they say, you know, “Kiese Laymon, born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi.” It's important that, you know, when people see me that I look like, you know, I look like my uncle. You know what I'm saying? [laughs] Like, I got a hoodie. I got my hat.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KIESE LAYMON: That's not at all how I imagined writers growing up. And what that does is it dissuades you from wanting to write, because you don't see somebody that you want to be, you know? And I'm not dissing people who wear suits, or like the mock turtlenecks and all of that.
BLAIR HODGES: Sure, sure.
KIESE LAYMON: But we got enough of those people, you know what I'm saying?
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
KIESE LAYMON: And we got a lot of writers from Brooklyn, and a ton of writers from Manhattan, and a lot of writers from L.A., great writers from Chicago. I think we have some wonderful writers in Mississippi and Jackson, but I just think it's important that I put on for my city every time people say my name.
Happiness, holiness, and grandmamma’s porch - 52:48
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah it is. It's Jackson, Mississippi. And you're the author of the memoir, Heavy, the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the novel Long Division that's being reissued in June of 2021.
So Kie, I wanted to ask you about a profile that you wrote about a basketball player that couldn't quite make it in the NBA. They were still kind of trying to, they were playing in other countries, and the money wasn't great, but they were making a living. And you're writing this profile on them, and you kind of saw this person as chasing a dream that they'd never catch. And when you kind of brought this up with him, he just said, “Hey, I'm working, Kiese and I'm happy.” And then here's this quote from you, actually, do you have—do you have the book nearby? I'd have you read it if you do.
KIESE LAYMON: Oh, yeah, I've got one.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so this is on page 88.
KIESE LAYMON: Okay. Yeah, and then DeAndre says “I'm happy. That's enough for me.” And then I write, "I think, but don't tell DeAndre Brown, that I'm working too, though I am not happy. I think but don't tell DeAndre Brown that deep unhappiness, and really, this sprawling spiritual emptiness is, shamefully, enough for me. I think but don't tell DeAndre Brown that his dreaming inspires me to find my way back to Mississippi, the place I do my most courageous dreaming and witnessing."
BLAIR HODGES: So you're looking at this basketball player and thinking, what are you doing? Like, you're kind of wasting your time and they're like, I'm happy. And you realize something at that time. You weren't.
KIESE LAYMON: Oh, man. I was—
I mean, “depression” is too light of a word. But yeah, I was suffering with a lot of depression and a lot of bad stuff. And I just needed to be home. I needed to go home to my grandmamma's porch. But I had done that thing where I had convinced myself that if I went back my grandmamma, my mama, and everybody would be like, ashamed of who I had become, or whatever.
And talking to DeAndre was dope, because DeAndre was like, “I know you think I should do this, that and the third,” but he's like, “Bruh, like, I've been to way more countries than you have.” And that was true, because I didn't even have a passport. And so he's like, “I've worked. I've played ball.” He's like “don't trip, you know, like, your dream, our dreams were to play basketball for a living. That's what I'm doing.”
And anyway, my thing was like, “Yeah, but you ain't in the NBA, you're not preparing, and you could be coaching, and you don't have insurance.” And he was like, “Bro, but I'm dreaming. I'm dreaming in this country, and that's work.” And then it just reminded me that my dream wasn't to be a great writer in New York. My dream was to be a great writer in Mississippi. And a few months later, I went back home.
BLAIR HODGES: And that's where you are, and you talk about your grandmamma's porch—
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: —a lot, it seemed almost like a holy place to you.
KIESE LAYMON: It's holy, man.
BLAIR HODGES: And when I say, “holy,” yeah, I'm talking about like, it's ideal for work and contemplation.
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, it's our holy place. It's where I remember the first, what we call catching the Holy Ghost. Like I remember Miss Diggs catching the Holy Ghost. I remember talking to my grandmamma, I remember asking her questions she couldn't answer there, sitting on that porch is where I started Long Division because I saw those little kids come up out of that hole. You know, we sitting on that porch and it’s also where if you turned right during the Trump administration, you would see our neighbors who happen to be Mexican getting raided, you know, if you turn left, you would see our neighbor Mama Lara, who I write about in Long Division. So, you know, my career, my first four books are really written, real talk, from like the POV of that porch. It means a lot to me.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's clear, it's clear in your writing, and I feel really grateful that you take people there. You took me there as a reader—
KIESE LAYMON: Thank you.
BLAIR HODGES: —and I really appreciate that. Yeah.
KIESE LAYMON: Thanks, Blair.
BLAIR HODGES: All right, Kie. Well, we'll be right back. We have one more thing to talk about. We're talking with Kiese Laymon. He's the author of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the memoir Heavy, and the novel Long Division. We will be right back.
[BREAK]
Best books - 59:27
BLAIR HODGES: We're talking today with Kiese Laymon about his book Long Division that's being reissued in June.
All right, Kie, it is time for our segment called best books. And this is when you get to take the mic and talk about a book that's changed your life, or a book that you recommend or a book that you don't like, or whatever. It's your moment here.
KIESE LAYMON: Ah, yes, since we're talking about novels, I think the book that most recently made the biggest impression on me, the novel that made the biggest impression on me, was a novel by Robert Jones called The Prophets. It is—I always talk about how it is polyphonic. There's so many different voices. It's, you know, on the one hand people will be like, “Oh, I don't want to read about slavery anymore.” But listen, you have never—that book will convince you you've never read about slavery, and humanity, and humans, and the work that humans did to stay alive, and the work that some humans did to not, in the world.
It's also a throwback book in like, these characters make these large proclamations, like you saw like in the 70s and 70s writing, but and the descriptions are just so intense. It's exploring like this relationship between these two men. It doesn't do the thing where it just walks you in and you're like, “do they love each other?” No, the first chapter they are in love, and they are kissing, and they are going to show you what love looks like all the way through, and the consequences. So The Prophets by Robert Jones, it's that book, it's the novel more than any other contemporary novel that I wish I could write.
BLAIR HODGES: When did you read it?
KIESE LAYMON: I read The Prophets—probably, I read it before it came out because I blurbed, it maybe like two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago maybe? Yeah, but it came out at the beginning of this year. Incredible book. I hope those of you who like to read and like to be challenged, but also just like to be awed, I hope you give it a chance.
BLAIR HODGES: It sounds really good. Thanks for that recommendation.
KIESE LAYMON: Yeah, it's amazing.
BLAIR HODGES: Do you find when you read stuff like that, that it ends up kind of influencing what you're gonna write?
KIESE LAYMON: Absolutely.
BLAIR HODGES: I'm thinking of like hip-hop, for example. There's a lot of sampling. There's a lot of stuff that goes on. Does that work for you as a writer?
KIESE LAYMON: Absolutely. Like my friend Deesha Philyaw wrote this book The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. And that book is like again—like, it's the best short story collection I might have read, ever.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, wow.
KIESE LAYMON: And it's winning everything. I mean, it's won everything. And it's one of those books that like, quote unquote, “slipped through the cracks.” It was published by West Virginia Press. But like, reading that made me not just want to go back—because I used to write a lot of short stories—but it made me want to write short stories differently. You know what I'm saying? It made me want to like, make the reader catch up. That's what Deesha does. She doesn't like handhold you. She places you in the middle of a scene, and she's like, “Catch up, you'll catch up,” you know? And you do, or you don't. But yes, yes. I love being challenged. Yes, thank you.
BLAIR HODGES: Hey! Well, I'm gonna write both of those down then.
KIESE LAYMON: Aight! [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: They sound great, man. Well, Kie, thanks so much for doing this. I recommend people pick up Long Division. And it's reissued, so I recommend getting this reissued one. I really liked the physical book.
KIESE LAYMON: Me too, man. Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: There’s something about it where you have to literally turn it upside down to get the other part of it. I mean, you're like physically interacting with this book, man. It's just brilliant.
KIESE LAYMON: Thank you for that. I wanted to remind people that the readerly experience is a physical experience. You know what I'm saying? You gotta physically do some stuff. So yeah, thank you.
BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. Thanks for being on Fireside, Kie.
KIESE LAYMON: I appreciate it.
Outro - 1:02:49
BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. And thank you to Beyond the Block, our friend of the show and fellow members of the Dialogue Podcast Network. You can check out Beyond the Block, that podcast is especially for Latter-day Saint listeners who are interested in digging into our Sunday school curriculum. Check out Beyond the Block if you haven’t checked them out already. It’s a great show.
Alright, well this episode is over but the discussion continues. I’m on Twitter and Instagram at @podfireside. And comments are enabled on the website, firesidepod.org. You can click on an episode, scroll down past the transcript and you’ll see the comment section there. You can also email questions, comments, or even suggestions about future episodes to me. The address is blair@firesidepod.org.
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Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, right here in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistant, Kate Davis. She created the transcript. And also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, Caroline Kline, and Kristen Ullrich-Hodges. I also want to say thanks to Mark Bohn. He’s the one who connected me to Mary Rakow for our last interview. The Fireside theme music is by Faded Paper Figures.
Alright, I’ll see you in two weeks on the next Fireside—the place to fan the flames of your curiosity without getting too much smoke in your eyes. Just a little bit of smoke. Just the right amount of smoke. The kind of smoke you want to smell on your pillowcase in the morning. That is what we’re looking for. Alright. See you next time.
[End]
NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.