Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 256: G'Ra Asim and His Mixtape to His Brother 'Boyz in the Void'
142 Plays4 years ago
G'Ra Asim, author of Boyz in the Void: A Mixtape to My Brother (Beacon Press), stopped by CNF Pod HQ to talk about this incredible book, punk rock, and straight edge culture.
Great talk.
Social media: @notjadedpunk, @CNFPod
Patreon.com/cnfpod
Recommended
Transcript
How to get featured on the CNF Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Here's a pro tip. If you want to get on this podcast, be into punk rock, grunge, metal, and in the title of your memoir, maybe include the words mixtape. That'll fast-track you from the CNF pod slush pile right to the main stage.
Jira Asim's literary lineage
00:00:18
Speaker
And so we feature Boys in the Void, a mixtape to my brother by Jira Asim.
00:00:26
Speaker
Jira has art in writing in his DNA. His father Jabari has written like 4,600 books and poems. I highly recommend his poetry collection Stop and Frisk. He even said, well Jira even said that his family was kind of like the Salinger's, JD Salinger's glass family.
00:00:49
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'll be interested to see if my family or my siblings find that to be a flatter in comparison, but it's definitely an accurate one.
About the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:57
Speaker
Oh hey, now in our ninth year, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories, I'm Brendan O'Mara. Hey, hey, let's hit it.
00:01:15
Speaker
Boys in the Void. Boys in the Void. Published by Beacon Press. G. Rasim. Man. This dude can write a sentence. He can turn a phrase. He wrote this book as a manifesto to his younger brother, Jiaxi.
00:01:33
Speaker
Here's a riff from the back cover of the book, writing to his brother, Jira Essim, reflects on building his own identity while navigating blackness, masculinity, and young adulthood, all through rye social commentary and a music pop culture critique. And that critique is all about punk and about straight edge culture. And what does that even mean? What does it mean to be edge?
00:01:59
Speaker
the planks of a straight edge platform are, of course, no drinking, no drugs, no promiscuous sex. You know, clear the deck, focus on your work, focus on you.
Engaging with the podcast community
00:02:11
Speaker
It's all good stuff. Love this book. Man, I love this book. Be sure to be the first. Be sure to be the first? What the hell?
00:02:21
Speaker
First, but first, be sure to keep the conversation going on social media at cnfpod and consider being a member at the Patreon page. We've got a small little cohort of folks who will get an exclusive audio magazine beamed right to the special feed on Patreon.
00:02:43
Speaker
That will not be in the usual CNF pod feed. Issue one isolation will always be there, but subsequent issues are only for the Patreon community. If you want to experience the great work and support the great work of the writers and the work of putting it together, head over to patreon.com slash CNF pod.
00:03:03
Speaker
This whole jam will still be free and show notes to this in every episode at brandedomero.com. Go there. There, sign up for the monthly reading recommendation, newsletter tips, writing prompts, book raffles, exclusive digital happy hour.
Reflecting on family influence
00:03:22
Speaker
Newsletter goes out on the first of the month, no spam can't beat it.
00:03:27
Speaker
Stay tuned for where I part and shot, pot and shot. But in the meantime, here's my conversation, which took place back in February with G Raw, a scene.
00:03:50
Speaker
Your family is very artistic and there's a literary lineage in the Essim family. And so I have to think that it's probably a feather in the cap of your parents and also something that feels good for you to be kind of following in the footsteps of such a creative people. Absolutely. You know, it's one of those things that I very vividly remember calling my mother when the book sold.
00:04:18
Speaker
and telling her that I recognized that through a certain lens, even getting to this point kind of relative to our origins was a pretty improbable occurrence. And so the conversation we ended up having on that occasion was about my awareness. You know, at this point I was in my early thirties and that
00:04:44
Speaker
My parents are kind of set up a series of dominoes, a really long series of dominoes to make it possible for me to be in a position to even extend that legacy that you reference. And yeah, it was like a really, it was a really cool and gratifying thing to say, I'm like, Hey, I appreciate your vision. I appreciate your
00:05:03
Speaker
Perseverance, thank you for making this possible for me. And I hope this feels like a kind of payoff for you, a return on investment for you. And how have you come to see writing as maybe more than an art form, just in terms of the craft and the message and the power that can be wielded with a great turn of phrase?
The essence of writing and life
00:05:30
Speaker
Well, you know, I think about this a lot with my students. I think it's actually really useful to sort of be someone who's already an inveterate reader and writer, but who has to periodically make the point to folks who were in an earlier stage on the journey or make the case for why it's worth becoming one of those. And I was come back to this Simborzka poem where she talks about writing as a, as a revenge of a mortal hand.
00:05:57
Speaker
And, you know, when I think about consciousness, when I think about being alive, there's like such a experience is such a rich thing. Consciousness is such a rich thing. When I actually hold boys in the void in my hands, I feel like I've achieved a sort of revenge of a mortal hand. I feel like I've actually encapsulated what it means to live and think about living. And I imagine that would be a gratifying
00:06:26
Speaker
point to get to and it's even better than I thought. Revenge of the Mortal Handly. What a line. I love that you're able to just pull that from your own hard drive. When you came across that line for the first time or maybe even upon rereading it, what was that like when that line just stuck out to you like a bolt of lightning?
00:06:50
Speaker
Well, I mean, one of the beautiful things about literature, and I think a lot of people relate to this, I don't want to say it like I'm the first person I've ever thought, but my experience of it was, oh, this is a preoccupation that I have, but I've never been able to crystallize it like this poet has. Yeah. And when you, it does a few things when you recognize
00:07:11
Speaker
that your experience is convergent with the experiences of people who were not in any surface level way, anything like you. You really feel a part of something greater. You feel aware of the kind of like grand tradition
00:07:28
Speaker
of letters and, you know, you could even say the grand tradition of human experience. And that line really made me feel like, okay, this this ongoing impulse I have to sort of like bottle up
00:07:43
Speaker
what it means to be alive and how it feels to be a human being is something that lots of people have, right, that people have had since time immemorial. And this poet is very cogently capturing that and speaking to the necessity of it. So it kind of made me feel like, wow,
00:08:01
Speaker
pursuing revenge of a mortal hand is worth it, and there will be others down the line who will benefit from my pursuit of it the same way I'm benefiting from Simborska's explanation of it. What's great about hearing you say, you know, bottle up a certain feeling and, you know, trying to encapsulate it in whatever that might be, it could be a poem or a book or an essay. What's really neat about that, and it's very evocative in a sense of, like,
00:08:31
Speaker
you know, sort of the topical ethos of your book being a mixtape for your brother, that it's like there are albums on our shelves sometimes, I guess they're on Spotify now, where you can pull down a record or something in this record, it's like this is speaking to
00:08:47
Speaker
you know, a certain theme, there might be eight tracks and it might be 30 or 45 minutes long. And this thing speaks to this and this is how I'm feeling and I'm going to hit play and I'm going to sink into it and really lock in. And so I just love hearing you say that, that there are certain books and ways of writing that can do something similar.
Punk and straight edge culture's impact
00:09:07
Speaker
Like if you want to sink into a different mood, a certain bathtub of a mode of resonance, you can pull that off your bookshelf and then kind of swim in that for a while.
00:09:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great connection you're drawing. I mean, that's, I think that's sort of the thing that can be lost when someone tells you about something that they love or something that they have had a lifelong engagement with, like I happen to have with punk and straight edge culture is, you know, it's one thing to say, Oh, you know, I heard minor threat when I was 14. I thought it was really cool. And then I was, you know, starting my own bands and stage diving and making zines for the next 20 years.
00:09:43
Speaker
And in that kind of summary, you know, if you had that conversation over coffee, you might be like, Oh, sounds great. Like, you know, cool story, bro. And this book allows me to sort of open that up and explain to my brother who's who's witnessed a lot of my engagement with punk, but not necessarily known what
00:10:04
Speaker
my interior relationship to it is. And so instead of just saying, hey, here's a song, I hope this song conveys all the crazy associations I've had with it and all the memories I have associated with it, in the book, I get to actually break that down. I get to say, okay, yeah, this is a song by Anti-Flag and you could listen to it on its own and I'm sure you'd get some cool things from it, but let me place it into context. Let me explain why it hit me
00:10:32
Speaker
in a particular way vis-a-vis the social location I inherited on Earth and that you inherit too to some degree. It's really exciting to be able to find an avenue to share that component of it with my brother and obviously with readers worldwide.
00:10:53
Speaker
Why was it important for you to write this book and to compile the mixtape, as it were, for your younger brother?
Inspiration behind 'Boys in the Void'
00:11:03
Speaker
There's a few different dimensions of that. I think a major one I would point out is I think there are particular affordances to having a rapport with someone 14 years younger than you. And in his case, particular affordances to having a rapport with someone 14 years older.
00:11:21
Speaker
something I think about a lot and sometimes we talk about in my families, like on my mom's side, each generation is separated by a gap only slightly bigger than the one between me and Josie, meaning like my mom and my grandma are only 19 years apart. My grandma was only 19 years younger than her mother, right? So in a way, the gap between me
00:11:41
Speaker
And my brother is almost a parental-sized gulf, but we can talk about things and transmit experiences to one another with an ease and with a comfort that is obviously typically harder to come by with your parents.
00:12:02
Speaker
I think we would be living in a really different culture if we had more comfortable intergenerational discourses. There's a lot of things about the world in 2001 when he came to Earth that
00:12:20
Speaker
that shape his experience going forward, but that no one, it's likely no one has really narrated for him in a personal and accessible way. And by the same token, I think he has a vantage point that I particularly as an educator, right? Particularly as someone who spends a lot of time working with people his age. A vantage point that I can learn a lot from and that I've
00:12:44
Speaker
can't really simulate on my own. So I think having my brother as sort of the audience for the mixtape, there's a few different angles to it, as I mentioned, but that one, the age-related one, like, hey, instead of just saying, you know, when I was your age, or kids these days are so this or so that we get to actually have the kind of conversation you might have between peers, except
00:13:06
Speaker
where we actually have such different temporal markers that we can enlighten each other in ways that a more literal peer could not.
00:13:19
Speaker
was this book always going to be written for your brother or was it, you had this idea of a mixtape and you could have very well just said this is like my mixtape and just written it kind of like in these linked essays, how these songs infected you, but you framed that as a way to bestow some lessons for your brother. I wonder how maybe that evolved for you.
00:13:48
Speaker
I sort of began the project thinking about how punk rock and straight edge culture had shaped my orientation to the world. I knew it was something that was not just like a way to pass a time as a hobby, it was something that I knew had really influenced the kind of philosophical template I used to make decisions. And I was looking for the right vector by which to address all of that.
00:14:14
Speaker
And at some point while kicking around, some writing that did make its way into the manuscript, my brother sent me the email that you find in the very first chapter of Boys in the Board. And I realized that he was beginning to wrangle with many of the same questions that dogged me when I was in my early teens, and that punk and straight edge had
00:14:43
Speaker
had helped me to answer or at least countenance. And so I thought, hmm, what if I made this email that my brother's sending me the point of departure for the conversation that I wanted to have with a reader or with myself about punk and straight edge culture and my particular relationship to
The mixtape structure of the book
00:15:05
Speaker
it. And I kind of wrote a first essay in response to the email.
00:15:09
Speaker
And once that happened, I realized that a mix tape would be a really cool superstructure for the whole thing. And the rest kind of came together from there.
00:15:20
Speaker
I think it'd be important to kind of unpack two things regarding the manuscript and you've said it twice already. Your relationship to punk and punk rock and how that, for lack of a better term, like infected you and also the straight edge component. But why don't you run with punk rock first and that importance and how that resonated with you and just sort of interlocked itself with your own DNA.
00:15:47
Speaker
punk music is something that spoke to me in a almost sub-intellectual way from a very early age. I definitely had the moment of like, this just sounds cool and I'm not sure why. And it's for me. I can tell that it's for me in a way that I'm not yet able to articulate. But it's also the case that the substance of a lot of punk music happened to
00:16:13
Speaker
Harmonize I would say with like the very particular and eccentric home environment I grew up in and You know one way to explain it you know the first punk band I heard like a lot of people was a Green Day in the early 90s and I was super into it But not really aware of them as being connected to the punk tradition I actually really thought of them as an alt rock band and then later on I
00:16:39
Speaker
The real sort of gateway punk band for me was Operation Ivy, who of course hailed from maybe not coincidentally the same scene that birthed Green Day. The lead singer of Operation Ivy is his name, Jesse Michaels. He was the primary lyricist and his lyrics are really what first moved me and made me think, man, this, you know, this punk tradition speaks to something that I also perceive in the world and sort of feel in an innate way, but wasn't really sure
00:17:07
Speaker
how many other people were on the same wavelength. And I think one of the reasons that Operation Ivy intuitively appealed to me, I would only find out much later, Jesse Michaels is a son of Leonard Michaels, who's a pretty well known writer. He does essays, he does fiction. He was an English professor at the University of California, Berkeley. And obviously, I, you know, my father's a writer as well. At the time,
00:17:33
Speaker
became engaged with Operation Ivy. He wasn't yet an English professor, but he is now. I actually think that one of the things I identified with in Operation Ivy lyrics was like the hallmarks of having this really literary anti-establishment upbringing. And so Michaels, the younger Michaels, I think could speak to me on a wavelength I understood because
00:17:59
Speaker
we had similar, possibly had similar upbringings or at least had similar, you know, dance. And it just kind of, once I got really passionate about Op Ivy, that led me to discover lots of other related bands and really inform my politics and how I navigated growing up. Do you have a particular song from them that is just your, it's like your anthem?
00:18:23
Speaker
you know, not a particular one, they have so many, but I think a thing I think about a lot is a song called junkies running dry. And I can, the I want to say it's the second or third verse of the song runs through my head, I would say once a week. It's something you know, it's something like, I always looked up to the ones who walked away, choosing themselves over preset ways. And then it goes on to say,
00:18:51
Speaker
This wonderful generosity, a third of a life to do what we please, doesn't look that great to me. In fact, it doesn't really look fair. They call it youthful idealism, and even I would have to agree with them, except some of us grow up and it's still there. And I think about those lines because I first heard them when I was a kid, like in middle school, and I understood that it was talking about a kind of
00:19:18
Speaker
adult submission to conformity that was probably on the conveyor belt for me, right? That it was like, down the line, I'd be that person confronting that pressure to conform. And, you know, when I listen to the song now, it makes me smile that it's been so many years and I've managed to, I hope, knock on wood,
00:19:41
Speaker
maintain that youthful idealism that this speaker in this song is saying most folks have to give up. I love that. And I also love how you describe your family is not unlike a 21st century edition of J.D. Salinger's glass family. I love that line. It cracked me up.
00:20:05
Speaker
the glasses, man, you gotta love them. Yeah, yeah, he's just, you know, you're right, you're a close-knit but contentious family of bookish eccentrics struggling to reconcile your bohemian sensibilities with the prevailing norms of our era. I love that, that was so evocative. Yeah, well, I'll be interested to see if my family or my siblings find that to be a flattering comparison, but it's definitely an accurate one.
00:20:32
Speaker
Yeah. Another component of the punk rock scene that you folded into is also this notion of the straight edge component of it as well. Maybe you can describe what that is and unpack it and why it's so important to you. Straight edge, a lot of my punk rock
00:20:55
Speaker
Exposure began in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is a suburb of Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. has this robust tradition of hardcore music and punk music more broadly, but some people would call DC the birthplace of hardcore. And one of the most significant bands in the early days of hardcore was Minor Threat. They had a song called Straight Edge, which
00:21:20
Speaker
depending on who you ask, I suppose, sort of accidentally led to this movement, this sort of reputation of the excesses of 70s rock culture.
00:21:33
Speaker
And the planks of the Straight Edge platform are, of course, no drinking, no drugs, no promiscuous sex. And it comes up in that song, obviously, they're a titular anthem, Straight Edge, but people kind of took it and ran with it and the movement became a lot bigger than what that particular band was saying about it. And so obviously when I come along to Silver Spring, Maryland in the early 2000s, there still is a lot of
00:22:01
Speaker
DC hardcore aficionados and lots of adherence to the straight edge lifestyle. And so I was kind of heard about it straight edge as a thing at parties and at shows and stuff. But I really gravitated toward it after reading this book called the philosophy of punk, which I mentioned in the manuscript. And, you know, some at some point in either like late eighth grade, early ninth grade, I decided to take the plunge, so to speak, that I was going to commit to straight edge.
00:22:31
Speaker
largely because I thought I was sort of persuaded by this idea that if you were invested in the world, if you had a humanitarian view of the world and you wanted to see society improve, you needed to maintain a lucid engagement with reality. And you needed to also invest in your own longevity, your own physical and spiritual longevity. And, you know, for whatever reason, ninth grade me was like really into that. So
00:22:59
Speaker
I jumped on a straight edge train and I've developed some ambivalence with it over the years. It's something that I've had moments where I didn't want to be Edge anymore. Most notably in 2012 when Trayvon Martin was killed and the whole respectability politics angle of that controversy was at a fever pitch. That was a time when I really questioned straight edge, but otherwise it's been kind of a
00:23:30
Speaker
a lifeline for a long time. Yeah, I came away thinking that Straight Edge for you was in a way kind of a mode of self-defense as well in kind of subverting assumptions or snap judgments people might make of you on the street if you were being like profiled or like
00:23:54
Speaker
No one could say you were drunk or high or anything like it was a way that you said that you have a lucid connection to the world and it was also something that no one could hang anebriation on you as an excuse to prosecute you if that makes any sense.
00:24:13
Speaker
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, the self defense, I've actually never thought to put in those terms, but I think it's a very useful phrase. I did kind of feel, you know, I was raised with like a very robust awareness of, you know, the the perils of being who I am in an anti black society. And it was never like, well, as a function of, you know, how dangerous and complicated it is to be a black person in the US.
00:24:41
Speaker
you need to never drink or never smoke or, you know, never have to miscue sex. That was never, that was not the explicit conversation. But, you know, the kind of politics I was raised with made it really obvious to me that staying free and staying alive long enough to sort of actualize my dreams was going to be difficult. It was going to take a lot of my energy and a lot of my concentration that there was not going to be
00:25:10
Speaker
There wasn't gonna be an escalator to any of that. And so Straight Edge felt like, okay, if I commit to this as an ethic I'm going to live with, I'll be able to ration my energy better. I'll be able to preserve the personal qualities that I need to sort of navigate what seemed to be, was self-evidently, I should say, a really treacherous landscape.
00:25:40
Speaker
Right. And rationing energy is a great way of phrasing it as well because in essence certain units of decision are already made for you and you don't have to contend and wrestle with maybe the peer pressure or
00:25:57
Speaker
Even if you're just trying to abstain for whatever kind of reason of personal development, you know, you're not fighting or walking uphill against a certain ethic. Like, this is just who I am, what I stand for. And yeah, when it comes time to, you know, go out and party, I don't have to wrestle with should I drink tonight or should I not drink? Should I smoke or should I not smoke? It's just a decision made for you. And then you can better, as you say, ration your energy towards more productive means. Yeah, that's it. I mean, it's a perfect way of putting it and
00:26:26
Speaker
It sounds kind of high-minded, but for me, it's really played out in an extremely practical way. Even when I talk to people about my writing practice and they say, oh, how do you find time to write, to work on stuff, to write songs and be in a band like you also do? People think I'm joking, I'm being self-deprecating, but I kind of feel like it's easier for me to do that because I'm a bit single-minded.
00:26:54
Speaker
I'm pretty, I have a long track record of being single-minded. I'm not really distracted, I think, by a lot of things that I'm sure are worthwhile pursuits for plenty of people and I don't, I disparage that, but that I've just decided are not going to be part of my program so I don't spend any time thinking about them or being tempted by them. Where do you think that that single-minded drive comes from for you and putting that in and putting that energy towards the writing?
00:27:23
Speaker
I'm not sure. I do think that I benefited in a lot of ways from my parents having me so young. A lot of their own
00:27:36
Speaker
creative life. I was really sort of front and I had a front row seat. I really watched how my mother, for instance, pursued making theater. And I really watched my father's artistic practice as a, as a poet, and then later as a nonfiction writer and then a fiction writer.
00:27:55
Speaker
and then later a journalist and eventually an academic. And it kind of connects with what punk culture thinks of as the DIY ethic, the do-it-yourself culture. My parents were both very much people who were, neither of them finished college. They weren't what you would think of as like
00:28:13
Speaker
they weren't formally, there wasn't that much formal education between them in terms of higher education, but there was like a very observable autodidactic quality to how they lived their lives and how they approached creativity. It was very much, hey, I might not know exactly how to build a set, for instance, but I can read a book about it and then go for what I know and then sort of use trial and error to improve upon the process.
00:28:42
Speaker
And so since that was kind of like my day one, so to speak, I mean, I would come home from school and we wouldn't, or I would get out of school, I should say, and we would go straight to rehearsal and I would watch my mom, you know, run around theater company for six or seven hours. And then we'd go home, have dinner and I'd go to bed. That would be my entire.
00:29:00
Speaker
day after school and I think watching that and seeing both that a couple really key takeaways one that you could kind of do whatever you want like you don't need to have a
00:29:14
Speaker
a ticket to something. You can make your own way into things that other people might see as really esoteric or that other people might see as requiring getting past some kind of gatekeeper. And then the second key thing is that if you wanted to make your own way, it takes a lot of concentration. It takes a lot of tenacity. And the more energy and focus you have available to make your own way, the better. And I think both of those things really
00:29:42
Speaker
uh, inform my gravitation to straight edge and obviously, you know, inform my creative practice as well.
00:29:49
Speaker
I love hearing you say that because a lot of people will say, I need an MFA. I need another degree to prove that I have some sort of outward validation that, yes, I'm a writer. Or fill in the blank for making film or music or whatever. But that DIY ethic that you learn from your parents and that you've been able to
00:30:15
Speaker
put into practice for yourself. Like, you just have to have the courage to do enough bad work and have enough assurance that if you do enough bad work, the good stuff has no choice but to come out eventually. I mean, that's gospel to me. Right? It's funny. I was actually thinking about this because I was rewatching The Wire recently. Are you familiar with the show? Familiar with the show, though, I unfortunately have not sat down and seen it yet. But I know what it's about.
00:30:46
Speaker
Well, it's mostly an extremely bleak show, which you probably know. But I'm noticing now some of the very rare moments of hope and optimism on that show. And one that has slipped by me in previous viewings is where a guy wants to open his own boxing ring, is at another boxing ring scouting it out. And he's complaining to the guy who owns the boxing ring they're in about the difficulties of it and the difficulties of reaching young children in Baltimore in a way that they'll respect you.
00:31:15
Speaker
And the older guy who owns a boxing ring is like sympathetic, but also kind of like, you know, man, you can't let that stuff stop you. And so to, to sort of illustrate his point, he points, uh, to a corner of the gym where there's a really young boxer in training and he's slapping whatever you call those the gloves. And so the older guy says to the younger guy who wants to open a boxing ring, what do you call that? Right? That person over there. And the younger guy says, I call that week. You know, that kid doesn't know what he's doing.
00:31:46
Speaker
And the older guy says, that's not weak. That's a beginning. And the point is like, if you want something, you need to accept that at some point you're gonna be that dude very lightly tapping the gloves with like no precision or force. But if you commit and accept that condition, you can absolutely build from there. But it just seems so canny to me because it illustrated the two different ways you can look at that same
00:32:16
Speaker
beginning. You can look at it as weak and be discouraged, or you can say, this is A, but you've got to have A if we're trying to get to Z, and accepting A is like the precondition for getting to Z.
00:32:28
Speaker
Oh, that's so perfect. And what it echoes just coincidentally about a Baltimore native and Ira Glass and that creative gap where you're here at A as a beginner. You have killer taste, but you're nowhere good enough to make
00:32:47
Speaker
the thing that your taste wants to make. But it's just a matter of you just got to keep repeating, you got to keep writing, you got to keep shooting films, taking pictures, recording interviews. And eventually, you know, it's just you have to have the the the endurance
00:33:05
Speaker
and the singular love of the thing to endure the bad stuff. And eventually that gap closes between what you're capable of and in your skill. So it's just so great to hear you echo that because it's so important to underscore that. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things I feel like I try to mention to my students, I think once you get to college, maybe
00:33:31
Speaker
you sort of already formed some ideas about how worth it it is to be bad at something in the beginning. But I feel like it's something all kids could stand to hear explicitly more often and early.
00:33:46
Speaker
Yeah, especially in a day and age where we're in a quick fix culture anyway. That's been that way for decades, if not centuries. But social media has further fomented this idea that people just appear fully made, where you don't realize that in all likelihood, that took 10 years for that person to get to that point. Right.
00:34:10
Speaker
You know it's that whole thing and then our culture is just so seduced by precocity with 30 under 30 list that if you feel like if you haven't been anointed and been on one of these lists that then what's the point of even trying if i have no. If i don't have what it takes to make this list and maybe i shouldn't even be starting.
00:34:28
Speaker
So it's so great to just hear that. And I think it's very important. I think it's, it would behoove, it's great. I think it would, maybe the students don't want to hear it right away, but I think maybe once they get into the mud of it, they'd be like, oh yeah. I remember when, you know, Professor Essim told me that he's like, it's going to take a while and that's okay. And in fact, that's normal.
00:34:50
Speaker
Yeah, you know, if you if you come into with that, it's even kind of fun to sort of yeah, mark your progress, right? Because then if you know that that's the long game, and that it's going to take a long game, then making the jump from
00:35:04
Speaker
you know, clueless to mildly clued feels so much more gratifying. Yeah, it's like almost thinking like, in five year chunks instead of like five months chunks or something, you'd be like, you know what, this is kind of what I want to do. I have maybe over the course of a lifetime, maybe anywhere from 15 to 16, maybe if I'm lucky, 17 or 18, five year chunks.
00:35:29
Speaker
And maybe I just need to play my cards for five years at a time and see if something really gloms on and see if they can get a certain degree of mastery over those little chunklets and see if you want to parlay that momentum into another chunklet or pivot entirely. You know, your father's a great example of how he's
00:35:47
Speaker
He's going from poet to fiction and nonfiction. You name so many things, and he's got so many different disciplines all under this one umbrella of communication and words. So it's one of those things where maybe you just take those assessments at various intervals in life. It can be a very fulfilling journey. Yeah, absolutely.
00:36:06
Speaker
Punk has really reinforced the wisdom of that for me.
Learning by doing
00:36:12
Speaker
The thing I mention to my students a lot, or I've made a couple lessons out of, is Joey Ramone having a conversation with Joe Strummer before the clash really got going. Strummer saw the Ramones live and was really impressed and was like, man, I would like to get to that point, but the clash are not that yet.
00:36:34
Speaker
And Ramon, when he heard Joe Strummer say that, he was like, nah, man, we don't know how to play. We're lousy. If you wait till you can play, you'll be too old to get up there. Yeah. And Strummer took that to heart, obviously, and the rest is history. And I think it's instructive in the sense of you do learn by doing. And if you have the confidence to dive in, not lean in, but dive in, you can
00:37:04
Speaker
the very experience of having Dovin is going to be so edifying that you can kind of put the rest together from there. And it's really, it's kind of that fear of beginning, that fear of not, you know, quite having the credentials to do the thing that kind of takes so many people out of the game before they even start. And that Ramones attitude is something
00:37:29
Speaker
I try to bring everything that I think will pay dividends for just about anyone. You've referred to a writing practice of some kind and everybody has to adopt it in some form or another. Either you can be a binge writer on the weekend or you can be someone who gets up very early in the morning and writes for an hour and then those little drip by drip things add up. What do you identify as your writing practice?
00:37:59
Speaker
Well, it took me a while to learn this, but I'm very much a person who's kind of always writing, even without typing.
Jira's writing process
00:38:08
Speaker
And so the practice, a key development in my practice, I think, was learning to realize that just listening closely, reading closely, allowing my mind to make connections at points that we might otherwise describe as idle time.
00:38:29
Speaker
is usually step one to pumping out an essay. And so I don't, a lot of people say, oh, I want to do 350 words a day or I want to do a thousand words a day, whatever it is. I tend not to put that kind of pressure on myself because I find that once I sit down to hammer out 2000 words or whatever it is, I've already kind of generated a really, a high percentage of those words
00:38:57
Speaker
in other places. It might be text to some of my friends. It might be conversations I have with my parents. But the sentences have already come out of my mouth somewhere. And sitting down is usually just the point where I begin to fully realize which sentences go where. So the backbone of my practice is really just trying to maintain a really
00:39:27
Speaker
vigorous attunement to the things around me and allow that attunement to produce observations and let them accumulate. And once it feels like a lot of accumulated, I gotta sort of unload them.
00:39:47
Speaker
And how do you go about keeping track of them, keeping track of ideas so that when you're ready to sit down in your workspace, it can spill out onto the page?
00:40:01
Speaker
Well, it's funny you say that I'm trying to get better at that. I mean, I'm blessed to be able to have a pretty good memory. But what I'm noticing as I as I get older is that I probably relied on that too much. So I'm trying to, you know, build the habit of like making a of organizing different kind of subheadings. Like, you know, I have a file of ideas for what I think my next book will be.
00:40:31
Speaker
And then I have another file of ideas that all seem to fall under the same heading, but I have no idea what kind of project it is yet. It could actually be fiction. It might be a play, but I'm describing it as organized. It's the sort of thing that another person would look at it and be like, wow, that is actually a mess. You just have a name in bold face at the top, but otherwise it's a mess.
00:40:59
Speaker
Yeah, I like that. I'm like a voracious note taker and a curator of notebooks. Like I always have one on me and I consider it kind of like a butterfly net because if I come up with an idea just out on a walk or wherever, I need to capture. It's like a dream because you think you're going to remember, at least for me, I think I'm going to remember it and invariably I don't. I'm like, God damn it, that was actually a really good turn of phrase and it's gone now.
00:41:26
Speaker
It's a but if I had a notebook on me I could have captured it and stowed it away somewhere But at least it would have been captured and then I can you know play with it later But if I can't do it unless I capture it, you know Yeah, it takes discipline to like make sure you capture it. I think it's Paul Simon. You know, I I read a lot of interviews with songwriters I'm always interested in how songwriters think about what they do because it's such a
00:41:54
Speaker
It's such a vocation that is both like rigidly formulaic and sort of mysterious and magical. It might be someone else. I think it's Paul Simon who says, you know, if he, if a melody comes to him and he's at the grocery store, he could be getting his teeth cleaned, whatever. He's going to stop what he's doing and get to the tape recorder. He is going to hum that melody into a recorder hook, nook or crook. Uh, and that.
00:42:23
Speaker
He only arrived at that level of discipline because he had so many moments like the one you just described where he had a really cool idea and slipped away and it never came back. And so I always think about that, right? To sort of use that frustration of having lost what we think is the thing, like the best idea to sort of cultivate that discipline that will allow it to not happen again.
00:42:49
Speaker
Yeah, I love hearing you say that you draw kind of a creative inspiration for, you know, probably your essays, your prose from music, but you also, you know, write music in play. So there's, there's that element to where you, you know, you're, you can draw that inspiration from that pool.
00:43:04
Speaker
It's always cool hearing where other artists draw their inspiration from. And if you're primarily a writer, what movies or music or anything helps inform the thing you want to do. You're like, oh, that's a really cool thing they did. I want to try to do that over here. I like drawing inspiration from the way chefs think about food. I think there's so much writing involved in the making of a recipe.
00:43:30
Speaker
And so that's one of those things where I draw inspiration from. So it's really cool to hear you unpack, say, the way a songwriter is approaching sort of the strict boundaries of the form, but then getting wildly creative within those lines. Yeah, that's the inspiration you take from the culinary world seems super aligned with that, where it's always fun to kind of transpose another artist
00:43:58
Speaker
rubric or paradigm or whatever it is into the medium that you're working with. Because if you start thinking about your medium in a vacuum, I think that's like sort of when you fall off and you begin to rely on sort of only the most familiar gestures or choices. Being able to look outside your medium, but then also extract whatever that is and apply it to what you're doing, I think is like a great way to keep it fresh.
00:44:27
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And there was this one line in the book where you wrote that, you write, during grad school, I took a class on narrative long-form journalism. In it, the professor touted the importance of anesthetizing your personality. And I wonder when you came across that and you really make a point of speaking to that in the book, what did you make of that when you heard that?
00:44:53
Speaker
Hmm, yeah, that's funny. It's a really loaded notion actually. So I do think it's great advice to aestheticize your personality. Like I'm not, it's one of those things that in a vacuum, finding a way to sublimate your own way of being in the world into a text or into whatever form of art you work with.
00:45:20
Speaker
course. Yeah, that's, that's the way to go. Like, I'm with it. What I found, even in the context of grad school, specifically MFA workshops, what I found is that some personalities are not as legible to readers, based on those readers limited
00:45:40
Speaker
sense of the social imaginary. And when I used the phrase the social imaginary, I kind of just mean what we think other people can be like or like what kinds of people we think exist. And what I had found up to that point in grad school was that when I would submit my own personality into a text, the people in my cohort and some of my professors had a really difficult time imagining that the person on the page could accord with
00:46:10
Speaker
what I look like. Like they could see my face and they'd read the text and they couldn't connect the two. They couldn't imagine that I'm that person. And so I don't think that's a, I don't mention that to say that it's a flawed heuristic or a flawed kind of truism that you should aestheticize your personality in your work. What it really made clear to me was that in my work, I would need to both address
00:46:40
Speaker
what it's like to be a person that other people mostly can't imagine within any text in which I submitted my personality that I had to do two, it was a two pronged project, I had to both, you know, bring my way of being in the world onto the page. And then while I was there, I had to address the elephant in the room that a lot of people who read who are otherwise very
00:47:05
Speaker
aware and intelligent and imaginative have some pretty limited ideas about what black people are like and a lot of what I have to say Does not accord with those limited ideas? And so in a way I'm doing that in boys in the void I'm mentioning that experience as a key to the reader as a clue to the reader Hey, if you're having some difficulty picturing somebody like me, well, it's understandable But let's work on it
Expressing personality in writing
00:47:37
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have so many like, just incredible sentences in this book, too. I just remember just, yeah, they like you just have such a great just,
00:47:50
Speaker
I don't know, it's like coming across great song lyrics and you're just like nodding along and like that one comes along and it hits with the right chord and the right downbeat and you're like, oh man, like that, it just hits you across the jaw in such a in the best possible way. And the book is just totally littered with that great stuff.
00:48:10
Speaker
And I just, in my own little notes here, I just have something that made me crack up, was studying creative nonfiction in a master's program. Seems like at times, like a contest to devise the most dynamic prose selfie. And I just cracked up when I heard that. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, that line makes me crack up too. So we probably have a similar sense of the preoccupations of MFA students.
00:48:40
Speaker
Yeah, if you want to make a dynamic prose selfie, you have to be recognizable. And that's harder for some people than others.
00:48:52
Speaker
And given that, you know, you talked about your parents and that DIY ethic of just how they went about the work. And of course, you know, punk rock is very grounded in that. And so in that auto didactic stuff you were talking about earlier about just learning by doing. And yet, you know, you go to grad school for creative nonfiction and everything, and that's
00:49:15
Speaker
not as DIY as your folks did it. I wonder if maybe when you were in that program or applying to it, did you wrestle with this idea of going to grad school when a part of you knows that, maybe if I just grind it out on the ground here, I could maybe get there eventually without going through the degree program. It totally makes sense. Ironically, I wasn't
00:49:44
Speaker
I wasn't that preoccupied by that by the time I went to grad school. But as I mentioned in the book, I really took my time going to undergrad. And part of the reason I did take my time is because of what you're talking about. You know, when I was a senior in high school, I really had the attitude of like, well, you know, I have direction, I have a set of interests, I just am not so sure I need to be at school to work on them. And
00:50:12
Speaker
So what I did, I devoted the lion's chair of my energy to being a band that I read about in the book. And then I also wrote a bad novel at the time. But I was really, I had this, I was really committed to this idea that I was going to be a free ranging intellectual, that I was going to be an artist who managed his own practice while working like an
00:50:34
Speaker
nine to five or, you know, whatever kind of blue collar work I'd get my hands on. And that would be as enriching as kind of like going to some tiny college town and, you know, knocking back PBRs or whatever it was. But I did that I did this kind of like self styled thing from 18 to 24. And I got bored of it. And that kind of persuaded me, let me try something else just to see what happens and to my
00:51:05
Speaker
surprise and maybe to some degree my embarrassment, I found out that 24 year old me liked school a whole lot more than 16 year old me did. And that sort of, I had so much fun in undergrad, intellectually speaking, that I just didn't want to go back to the real world. And I just figured I would love MFA World and I really did.
00:51:34
Speaker
Great talk. Great book, man. I wish I was smart like that guy. But no, we're just mopping the bathroom floors of the literary scene here. Don't mind me. I'm just the sad, fat janitor from so I'm thinking of ending things. Don't mind me, man. Don't mind me. Just squeezing out that water from the mop bucket, scrubbing the urinals, scrubbing the toilets.
00:52:00
Speaker
It's gross, don't I know it. I was janitor for many years and I'm the figurative janitor of the literary scene just sloshing around, listening to podcasts, making sure this place looks stick and span.
00:52:19
Speaker
He's not, he is at NotJadedPunk on Instagram. I'm at CNFpod on IG. Grammin' out quotes and audiograms. Oh well, it's time for ye olde partin' shot. I wasn't sure what direction to take it this week. Last week was kind of a bummer.
00:52:37
Speaker
And this one is kind of a bummer, too. Yay! I've got two quick things to talk about. Actually, it's only gonna be one, because the one is running long. So I called my dad, talked to him for about an hour today. He's usually pretty quick to get off the phone. It's kind of his jam, but he kept on. We hadn't talked in a while, and I think he was kind of lonely. His wife already flew up to Cape Cod to get her cottages ready for the season, and Dad's still down in Florida.
00:53:08
Speaker
It had been a while and it popped in my head, I should call that.
00:53:12
Speaker
And instead of dragging my feet, I called the guy. He's at an age where, you know, he could drop that at any minute. And if you think about it, if it really pops in your head that, oh, I should call that aging person I haven't talked to in a long time, it could be gone tomorrow at a drop. And if you don't call them and you just put on your to-do list and you wait a few days, and they do, in fact, kick the bucket, you'll kick yourself for not calling.
00:53:41
Speaker
So why didn't I, you know, you'll be like, why didn't I call when I was thinking about it? I put it off now and now what? It also got me thinking about how I almost have to play a role with each of my parents and even my sister to an extent. They have a certain image of who I am and I sort of just like context shift between whoever I'm talking to.
00:54:04
Speaker
So for my mom, I kind of have to be a loser. She sees me as a sorry little loser, her talented loser or whatever who can't get a break. And if I tell her I have some success, she's liable to kind of cut me off and cut me out of her loop. She's got a loser mentality that stems from years of being told she was garbage. Like literally her mother would tell her, I should throw you back in the garbage where I found you. Yeah.
00:54:34
Speaker
So the minute people turn into a success or become somewhat successful around my mom, she kind of recedes from them or cuts them off because you're no longer the lovable loser anymore that she can relate to. And listen, I'm far from making it, but I'm not a hundred percent loser. I'm more like an 83% loser, but not a hundred. But that 83% is probably enough for her to say, I don't even know him anymore.
00:55:02
Speaker
With Dad, I can't really celebrate anything I do or write or produce. He called my first book tedious. I remember being really excited to send it to him. It was an early draft. It was coming out that year, so it's 10 years ago, which is really sad that it's the only book that I've published. Maybe that's next week's bummer in the parting shot that we'll talk about. On Christmas Day, he was just like,
00:55:30
Speaker
I found it kind of tedious. I remember, like, he said, you know, when is he going to make his point? I'm like, Merry Christmas, Dad. When I invited him to an award ceremony where I won an award for a feature I wrote, he was like, they give everyone an award. And so it was at that moment that I was like, I'm just not going to share any of this with him anymore.
00:55:56
Speaker
I don't need to invite that kind of energy to my work. I'm my own worst enemy. I'm my own worst bummer. And so if he asks me if I'm writing, I just say, eh, a little here and there. Don't really have the time or the energy, which is kind of true. And he just goes, oh, he probably wishes I'd send him something and maybe I should.
00:56:15
Speaker
But now, hold on, actually I did a couple years ago. I wrote a feature I really liked about the great potato toss. It was like the 30th anniversary of this potato prank. Minor league baseball team, Williamsport, Pennsylvania, whatever. I thought it was really funny and it was a good feature.
00:56:34
Speaker
I sent that to him because I thought he might actually like it and then he he said something offhand about the potato prank Remembering reading it about reading about it in Sports Illustrated, and then he didn't even acknowledge my piece so I was like okay Yep, not sending anything that way so I have to pretend. I'm just this anonymous loser kind of perpetual disappointment Gotta stay in context same with my sister gotta keep the
00:56:58
Speaker
anchor around my ankle around these people. Stay in context. Be the little thing that's just sinking and barely keeping his nose above the water. Otherwise, the world might just spin off its axis and we'd all die.
00:57:16
Speaker
I had something mildly inspiring to share, but I'm freaking exhausted now, since I went down that traumatic road. So I'm just gonna leave you, alright? And I'm sorry that it's his big a bummer, but if you know it, you could always rewind and listen to G Rock, cause he was pretty fucking cool. In any case, stay cool CNFers, stay cool forever. See ya!
00:58:10
Speaker
you