Why I Write: A Guest Post by Hanif Abdurraqib

Music and basketball and great Ohioans are just the start. MacArthur Genius Grant winner Abdurraqib plays with time and memory, intimacy and vulnerability, going away and coming home — and leaves everything on the court. Read on for an exclusive essay from Hanif on writing There’s Always This Year.

The more that I spend time thinking on the “why” of it all, I realize, increasingly, that I don’t write because I believe my own curiosities and interests are overwhelmingly exciting and/or vital to the ever-expanding ecosystem of curiosities and interests that encase our world(s,) both collective and individual. Sure, yes, I do likely write because at the ground floor of my obsessions are often revelations that springboard me to another obsession and another, all of them making me a more curious person in the world. Which, if I am talking about my interest in writing in the language of selfish pursuit, manages to sound at least a little generous when pushed through that lens.

The other, greater ”why” dawned on me last year, in the midst of being on the road for around eight of the year’s twelve months, signing copies of There’s Always This Year, sitting down on stages and having conversations with people, hearing stories from them about some small (but also not small!) corner of their living that was propelling them from the next day to the next. I think that I write because I hope that we (in the widest sense, the “we” meaning “you and I, reader”) have passed each other in the long arc of our lives. That you have been somewhere, and I have later come along to a similar somewhere. That when you were younger than you are now, you witnessed a moon, a scattering of stars from the hood of a car and, without my knowing who you are at all, I may write of my witnessing a moon from the same exact car, the same exact tone of longing ringing in my heart that was ringing in yours.

In short, I imagine, I wrote, and still write, because I was a lonely kid and am sometimes still a lonely adult, and it makes sense to me that in the reality of world-building, or asking people to go with you to a place, there is an intimacy that we (both writers and readers, again, the “we” is a set of wide open arms,) can tap into that serves our shared memories, our shared affections. That, momentarily, shrinks a world that can feel overwhelmingly large.

And the trick is, as always, that I don’t care how much you care about the things I’m writing on, or considering. I heard all year long about the people who didn’t really care about basketball, BUT! – and this is what I’m in pursuit of, always. The thing after the initial dismissal of what the imagined central topic is. There’s Always This Year was, and remains, my favorite book I’ve ever gotten to live alongside for a full year, because, being my sixth book, it was a book that most pushed people to rely on an established trust. Someone saying ok, I don’t know anything about basketball, but I am going to walk away from this with something else. And whatever that something else is, and there were many something elses, is the ground we get to meet upon and stretch our pasts into our present, or laugh about  our fathers, or talk about a place in Ohio that is not what it once was.

A writer who I learned so much from was the late, great titan, Greg Tate. And more than any craft point, more than any kind of Words On The Page advice, the thing I learned from Tate is that it would serve all of us, as writers and as people, if we cared about others more than we cared about ourselves. I wanted to write a book that would offer more questions than answers, or results, in part because I wanted to see people working through those questions. I wanted to be there when they had their own revelations. In short, I wanted to care, deeply, about how their brains and hearts were working, because inch by inch, it helps me figure out my own.

Photo Credit: Kendra Bryant