Poured Over Double Shot: Ava Chin and Christina Sharpe

Jenna Seery

These riveting works of nonfiction by two incredible women have powerful narratives on family, race, and the way we get to tell our stories.

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe compiles art and short vignettes into a beautiful work that explores the Black experience through a wide variety of themes. Sharpe joined us to talk about how these notes came to be, the wealth of literary influences on the project and more.

Ava Chin’s Mott Street follows one Chinese American family through generations of struggle and resiliency as they work to build their lives. Chin joined us to talk about uncovering her family’s past, researching an intergenerational story and more.

Listen in as both talk separately with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.  And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Jamie. 

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Featured Books (Episode):
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
Mott Street by Ava Chin
In the Wake by Christina Sharpe
Counternarratives by John Keene
Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
Obasan by Joy Kogawa
Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo
Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark
Wayward Lives by Saidiya Hartman
Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
Black Futures by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham
Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I have been looking forward to this conversation with Christina Sharpe for oh, I don’t know weeks and weeks and weeks whenever we scheduled it. You may know Christina’s name from In the Wake, which is a seminal book that was published by Duke University Press and Kiese Laymon, Hafizah Augustus Geter, and Min Jin Lee and Tayari Jones, Yaa Gyasi and Claudia Rankine, and Ross Gay are just some of the writers who love this book. I’m a bookseller who happens to love this book. And when I saw and I can’t even remember when I heard that Ordinary Notes was coming out. But that’s Christina’s new book. And it is 248 notes. And we’re going to talk about the structure. And we’re going to talk about all of the beautiful things that pop up in this book. And I just remember thinking, Oh, goody, now everyone gets to understand how great Christina’s brain is. I’m going to try not to gush too hard at you, because I really…

Christina Sharpe
I was just gonna jump in. It’s like, this is so generous now

MM
Well, but I’m just going to hold my copy of the galley up to the screen so everyone can see now I’m really not kidding. There’s, there may not be a dog eared, and un-dogeared page in my copy of the galley. So thank you for joining us,

CS
As a teacher I love to see that. Right, I love, because that’s what my books look like. Thank you so much. It’s really lovely to join you, too and to meet you.

This is a book, my notes are this is a book about beauty and love and honesty and reality and so much. Can we talk about the structure that because some of these notes are a sentence, some of them are several pages, some of them bring in the work of other writers. I mean, there’s so much to work with here.

Sure. Well, I knew that. So that so some of the notes actually began life as part of another book that I’m still working on, which is Black Still Life, which will be published by Duke. But then there were a kind of series in that book of what I was calling encounters. And so at some point, I realized I was giving a talk at a gallery, and I realized I wanted to take those encounters, and make them the basis of the talk that I was giving at the gallery. And so then I decided that I thought that that would be part of the structure of this book that I wanted to have a book that made an argument, but made an argument for kind of accumulation and juxtaposition. And that that would allow me to do a different kind of work on the page. And also with the blank space, the sort of white space, a kind of breathing space would allow for both accumulation but also breath and respite. And something else, I always love to sit with a word and try to activate as many senses or definitions of it as I can. And so you know, both the note and ordinary allowed me to do that though the structure is really note

On a purely sentence level. I mean, I’m really not kidding when I say there is not a single un dog eared page. And yes, there are people with feelings about dog earing, but I’m a very active reader. I’m a very, very active reader. And I feel like you had me thinking in so many different directions and there’s also four color art throughout the book, which I love. I just it’s such a marvelous sensory experience, which you don’t always get on the page. And I love the idea of you leaving space for us to breathe as the reader because there’s so much and there were times where I didn’t want to race through this book. And I’m a very quick reader. But there were things I really wanted to linger on. There’s a lot of grief to in this book. I mean, we can’t ignore that. But I think anyone who reads knows that sometimes there’s a lot of beauty that comes out of grief. When did you start working on this book?

Well, I used to have a file on my desktop called notes towards something. So, I would write little sentences and put them in. So I think a few of the notes I had tried to think about, some of them are quite old or things that I have, you know, obviously, some of my obsessions are in this book, you know, the note that’s really about This American Life. Yeah, you know, I’ve been thinking about that, since like 2008. And this gave me an opportunity to fully write out what I’d been thinking about it. So some of the notes are things I’ve sat with for some time, but I’d say the majority of it I wrote in about a year and a half. And you had asked me something about this a varying length of the notes, that’s the other thing I really liked about the kind of form of the note is that I could just have a note that was a sentence like a dictionary suggests itself, which would still build and move sort of backwards and forwards. And the note gave me the form in order to make the kind of arguments and invitations and gestures and remonstrations that I wanted to make.

At the risk of sounding slightly weird if I ever get a tattoo, I can tell you now what the line will be. I have collected lines, and they have collected me, which is something that you said, it’s note 102. And I sort of want to start there, because you talk so much about the books that have made you again, you go back to seminal texts, I was so happy to see John Keene pop up in multiple places.

Oh I love him

I think yeah, he is the bomb.

He really is. I mean, and I would say that, you know, Annotations is a book and a form that deeply impacted me. And I teach Counternarratives as often as I can, you know, I feel like I proselytize about that book, Counternarratives is an amazing, amazing, amazing book.

I was very, very happy to see Punks get quite a lot of love.

So was I. He is an amazing poet, fiction writer, translator, essayist.

But I do want to talk about some of the books that got us to this point, to Ordinary Notes, because I was delighted to see that you and I have very similar childhood reading experiences Paddington books,

I loved those books when I was little. Yeah, your mom was a big part of books. And you have this lovely story about your mom and her Sunday afternoon teas? Can we start there? Because I just I feel like she’s so much a part of this book. And yet she asked you to never write about her.

Yes, but I think she’d be happy with what I’ve written. Yeah, my you know, as I said, there’s a there’s a note in which I talked about Toni Cade Bambara, I always feel like it’s the introduction that she wrote to maybe Gorilla, My Love. In which she talks about, it’s an that she says it’s 1948 and she’s sitting on the floor in her kitchen and her mother mops around her and so she thanks her mother for, for that space for giving her that space. And that exact thing didn’t happen, but that’s something that, you know, my mother did not think that if I was reading, I was doing nothing. My mother thought I was reading; I was definitely doing something. And so she gave me the space to read and she, you know, every birthday, Christmas, you know, my mother would say gifts for the body, gifts for the mind, gifts for the soul. And there were always multiple books and we read together and she loved to read, she had a beautiful, you know, I was raised Catholic. We’re the only Black family in our Catholic Church. And my mother, once women were allowed to become lectors, she was a lector. When people would come to the mass, they were like, oh, Ida Sharpe is reading, they would come to the mass just to hear her read. And so you know, she really gifted me with a love of language, and a love of what reading and writing could do for you. You know, I had no Black teachers until I got to university. You know, anything that I learned about Black history, I learned through the books that she gave me, any Black authors I read were because of the books that she gave me until I got to university.

And one of the things I really want to stress about Ordinary Notes too. And usually, we on the show will ask writers you know who they’ve been reading or who someone there is so much greatness, and I have to check my notes for a second because you have a couple of notes where you talk about looking for the books. Yeah, there’s a note two or three of feeling you wanted or needed to feel and you’re talking about books.

Yeah, that’s not necessarily a book that you even love. Right. Right. So, I mean, I think I say in there like the Golden Notebook, there are things I love about the Golden Notebook, but it’s not a book that I started overall love, but, you know, there’s something about that, like produced a certain kind of feeling or a kind of, you know, intellectual spark or something. When I first read it in a graduate seminar, and then I came to really kind of love it in another way. Um, yeah, but there are many books like that.

You also talked about Lydia Davis. Oh, yeah. Which I so appreciate and the fury.

You know, I reread the end of the story again, recently, when I was writing the notes, like I went back and read. I went back and read it. And I thought, yeah, this, you know, sitting next to her when she came to Tufts English department and saying, you know, I hope you don’t think this is strange, but that book really helped me. And she really did. She looked at me she was like, I think she understood why, or she was just being generous. Either way. I so appreciate the world she can make in a story of four lines.

Going back to note 205 for a second, which opens you with a quote from the poet, Dionne Brand, which is quite lovely, but I’m going to jump down for a tiny second because you write books, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, theory, memoir, biography, mysteries, plays have always helped me locate myself. And you grew up in Pennsylvania. You’re a professor in Canada now. You’re a Black queer woman in America in the 21st century and yet books and again, sometimes you want to feel the thing that doesn’t necessarily feel great, but books have always been there.

And it’s good if you want to, you know, feel that thing and you can locate it in a book, you don’t have to do it in the world. Right? I’m a big rereader. And that’s part of the reason I reread you know, and I can reread nonsense. I reread a lot of nonsense. My mother was a big mystery reader. So I reread like Dick Francis novels, Ruth Rendell novels like PD James, I am a rereader of mysteries, partially because like, I don’t have to hold on to the plot, I don’t have to hold on to anything. I’m still thinking. It’s also kind of comforting. And it’s kind of when I was in graduate school, and I got to the point where I thought I never want to read another book. It was actually which, you know, happens?

Yes, absolutely. We all go through dry patches, we all go through them.

And it’s also like, I was naive, I didn’t know anything about graduate school, I thought, Oh, I love literature, I’m gonna go to get a PhD in literature. That’s not what a PhD is for. It can drive the love of literature out of you. So for like, six months, I could barely read anything. But okay. I can reread. And it’s rereading that got me back into then reading and reading new things and reading the things I should be reading, etc. And I also think no reading is, is lost on you. Everything is useful for something.

It’s funny, you know, certainly when we’re producing sort of two to three hours a week of original audio, the reading memories that pop back while you’re working on something or the things that you can be thinking about are the reasons that you read. I mean, there are people who read for comfort, there are people who read for education or Intertek, whatever everyone has their reasons for reading. And I’m always kind of amazed when a weird detail pops up about a book that I haven’t thought about in ages, but you’re just listening to the other person talking like, oh, wait, you know, it all just becomes layers of whatever we are. And I love the way that you talk about emotion and what that connection between books and emotion, I think, you know, we see it a lot, obviously on TikTok.

Which I actually don’t watch.

Yeah, I’m in the book business, I can’t not. But at the same time, when I see adults and young adults really responding, it’s wild, because there are times where I just want to read for language. And I don’t necessarily want to read for any kind of… And then there are also times where, frankly, I’m reading for homework.

Yes, absolutely. Yes, I’m reading for teaching, which is, you know, I get to choose the books I teach.

When did you know that Ordinary Notes was something that was going to stand on its own and it wasn’t just a document on your laptop?

I think it was Lynn Henry, who is the editor in chief at Knopf Canada, was in the backyard, talking to my partner. And then at some point, turned to me when I knew that already and asked me so what are you working on Christina? And I said, well, I had just gotten this letter, and it’s one of the redacted notes in there. I think it’s note 15. And I said, well, so I went, and I got my laptop, and I read her the letter and I think, and I said, you know, I think this is, you know, this, this kind of pushed me even further into thinking about this as a project of sometimes short, sometimes longer notes. And she said, well, you know, how much do you have? And I said, about 60 pages. And she said, Can I read it? And I said, Okay, the next day, I sent it to her. And I think if she hadn’t asked, it would still be on my laptop, and I’d still be writing it. I’d still be I’d still be thinking about it as something I would do gradually, or maybe nothing would come of it. And so it’s really that she asked me what I was working on and said, You know, I really liked this. And I would really like to acquire this and I thought, oh, and then that’s what I really wanted to be writing.

I love the serendipity of that, because this book is so organic. I mean, at points you’re talking about photos of your grandmother and your mother and learning who your mother might become and then that leads you to a point where you say, well, I haven’t lived my mother’s life. I’ve had a very different life and you’re taking us through these revelations, and we start very clearly in the past. And you keep moving us closer to the present day and there’s that peace, you refer to, you know, sort of This American Life from 08. But there’s also some work that clearly was written in the summer of 2020, which at this point feels like a lifetime ago. It really does, that energy feels like a lifetime ago. But did you know that was the path you were going to take, as you sort of worked through? I sort of feel like you always knew where you were going. But I don’t want to assume.

I mean, that’s interesting, you know. And I also want to, before I answer that question, I also want to say that, you know, the other person, you know, so there was Lynn Henry at Knopf, and Eric Chinski, at FSG. And Eric, has been such a wonderful, wonderful editor. And together, they were just like, I couldn’t have asked for better for better people to work with, you know, I in a sense, yes, I think I did, because I moved very few notes around, I only have like two or three notes, the order in which I kept adding notes. And so it was kind of a nightmare, because, one, I was like, Okay, now I have to go through and change, you know, what was note 11, because I put to 111. Because I put two no notes in there is now note, you know, 115, but I mostly wrote them in the order in which they appear. I think I had a sense of movement, I then had to figure out, how do I want to think about a kind of sequencing and is there a logic, but I think anybody who knows me who listens to this will say like, she says this all the time, but this is again, my obsessions. I don’t think particularly logically, where my logic is a logic of juxtaposition. I really do think juxtapositionally. So I always kind of had a sense of what I wanted next to what, because of what I thought that might open up. So I did have a sense of movement yet to hear you say you begin clearly in the past, and then you move forward. I hadn’t really thought about that.

That’s how it felt for me as a reader. I love the idea of juxtaposition and using that to reveal that does not feel illogical to me.

I mean, I don’t think it is.

yeah, no, no, I clearly agree. I’m just thinking do those other people are getting it wrong.

They’re wrong.

Because honestly, when you think about especially where we are in the world, right now, we seem to be breaking into a binary wherever we are, no matter what the conversation is, whether it’s about art, or literature, or television or film, or, you know, daily life or community or all of these ideas. We’ve split into a binary. And people seem to be much more comfortable in that sort of black and white space. And I’m one of those people like no, no, the world is gray. The world is gray, books are— everything. Like there’s always the gray area. And that’s the space what we actually live in. And I love this idea of juxtaposing notes.

It’s not that I don’t have like, firm ideas, I really, really do. At the same time I love the possibility of what might happen by putting the unexpected things next to each other. Like, what does that spark? Maybe it doesn’t? Maybe it sparks nothing new or interesting, but maybe it does. And maybe it causes us to think differently about things we thought we knew. Or maybe it causes us to expand or contract what we thought we knew or saw or heard or understood.

I mean, isn’t that why you write?

I think so. And that’s also why we read or that’s part of the reason I read, you know, like one of the things that was a real gift in working on the book and then having early conversations with both Lynn and Eric with a kind, like, I thought I knew where I wanted to go. And I had this lovely conversation with Eric and Deborah, who was working on the book at the time before she before she left to become an associate editor. I think I had asked her; I had a couple of notes that were definitions. And I said, you know, I was really interested in this project, the, the dictionary of untranslatable Blackness. And Eric said, I really think that should be a part of the book. So that did become section six of the book and it’s a kind of chorus of I think it’s 18 people who I invited to write notes, all said yes, and wrote these beautiful, beautiful definitions of words like elegance and time and archive, liquidity. You know, the 18 people who respond to life. And so that was also this other, like what happens if you inhabit a word as we inhabit words as we inhabit concepts and define it from the position of Black thought, of Black living. And so that was this other kind of beautiful, sort of choral moment. That isn’t quite juxtaposition, but it is you know what happens when you have you know, Alexis Pauline Gumbs next to Biko Mandela Gray next to Rinaldo Walcott next to Phoebe Boswell defining life, something else happens, something else is made in those articulations that I think is quite lovely.

There’s so much tenderness in this book. And you do have a note that very specifically talks about tenderness. But the dictionary that you’re talking about, all of it is so tender and so wonderful. And even when we’re talking about things that are difficult, and hard, and will make people uncomfortable, there’s so much tenderness and so much love in Ordinary Notes and I really don’t want to lose sight of that.

I deeply appreciate that. Because, you know, it’s not that it wasn’t difficult to write it was, but I really hope that it was infused with the other things that were, you know, a joy to write, even as they were difficult, or the tenderness that goes through it, or kind of hands that go through it and hands as both and often the hands are tenderness as they appear in the text. I’m so glad that that came through to you. I couldn’t ask for more.

Did writing this book change you? Did it free you up in a way because I mean, academic writing… In the Wake, it is a monograph. It’s a very important monograph. But it is still written for— it’s not necessarily a book that people would search out unless the word of mouth was behind it. And I can’t even remember who it might have been Min Jin Lee, honestly, who told me about it. But I know someone specifically said to me, oh, you should read this. And I said, yes, of course I should. It’s very short, but I couldn’t race through it. I really needed to sit and I love the metaphor and the way you can use wake, language is so mutable and malleable. And it’s just…

Isn’t it amazing. It really is. Who could ask for like, better work.

And you know, the things that you do, but again, it is you know, it’s it is more academic, and a little less pliable in some ways than Ordinary Notes and Ordinary Notes. I mean, certainly Claudia Rankine’s Just Us comes to mind. But I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a book like this before, just between the formatting the ideas, I mean, because I’ve heard you before, certainly, but also, you know, if you read Black writers, there are concepts that are going to be familiar, there are going to be names that are familiar, but the way you structure it and your voice, you’re doing something really new here. Thank you. And it’s exciting. It’s really exciting to be part of this. And I really want people to just not make assumptions before they pick it up. Like I got really excited when I saw the jacket. it made me really happy. This is I mean, it’s a galley, but this is what the jacket is going to look like. There we go.

When you take the jacket off.

Oh, I cannot wait.

They did such a beautiful job. The designer Jen Griffin, that was Jen’s idea. She just did a beautiful, beautiful job. And from the beginning, as I said, like, Lynn, who was my first editor was like, we’re gonna make it a beautiful book. Christina, don’t worry, we’re going to make it a beautiful object. And they and Lynn and Eric and then Daunt in the UK also made a beautiful, beautiful text. This is a photograph that I took that they made the cover. It’s paperback, it’s paperback in the UK and it has a Jennifer Packer cover.

I have I will confess I have occasionally bought books from the UK just to have covers, I am one of those people I am shameless.

Who needs just one copy. We need multiple.

But again, it’s this life of books and connecting with people who aren’t necessarily exactly like us. I mean, I finished my BA It was lovely. I had a very good time. I got very good grades and then I was done. That’s like hello world, I’m here. There’s going to be no you know, I had a very good time in school. I liked it quite a lot. And then I was done.

I was like, let me see how long I can draw this out. And I didn’t necessarily have a good time. I

Right. But chose a life though of books and I chose a life connecting the dots for people and projects and ideas…

Your of books and your relationship to reading is so clear and the joy comes out in your in your speaking and that’s a real pleasure to engage with.

It’s so important too, and thank you for that. But it’s so important to be able to sit with other ideas and other people and language. I keep coming back to language, but language really matters. I mean, it does. You and I both read so widely that you know, there are times where I read for language. There’s time I read for character, and I don’t have to like characters to be able to stay with. Sometimes I read for feeling but I’m also an ex-Bostonian and we’re not really that’s not a factory preset, like we’re not really good with it. I can recognize it.

But I’m not programmed for that.

Yeah, not always, not always. Also, there’s certain books, you know, you were talking about rereading earlier, and I forget who I was talking to, it was just the other night, but John Cheever’s Wapshot Chronicle came up and I was like, oh, my party trick used to be I used to be able to just recite the last paragraph of that book. Well, it’s Leander’s, you know, it’s Leander’s letter to his son. And I don’t know why. I have no idea why I learned it.

I’m very funny. I won’t tell you my party tricks.

Cheever, I mean, dude can write, without a doubt. But I’m like, why that 18-year-old me decided that that was a nifty thing.

15-year-old me decided that Of Human Bondage was my book, Somerset Maugham, who was just a racist, misogynist, et cetera. When I graduated from high school, I was a commencement speaker. And I quote, I mean, oh, gosh, I was 17. And. Because there’s that moment when it’s like the kind of enumeration of all Philip’s miseries and it’s like, and Philip was happy, Philip realized there was no happiness and Philip was happy. You know, I quoted that in my commencement speech, that tells you everything, probably about 17-year-old Christina. Of Human Bondage was her go to book, I read that book so many times.

Game recognizes game because honestly, I read that by the pool on vacation, probably around the same age, I used to and I still have a fondness for Graham Greene.

Oh, wow, it was so funny. It was a formative. I mean, I realize that the sort of deep racism and everything else in that, right, but also it, it taught me something deep at that age about the futility of this thing called happiness. Right? There are other ways that you might structure finding joy, or structure your life or than around this kind of consumer good of happiness, right?

I think joy can be fleeting. But again, Joy doesn’t exist. If you don’t have grief, like the idea that you always live in one state. Right? It doesn’t work, we can aspire to certain things. Sure. But there are also times where honestly, I just want to stare at a wall, I need space. Sometimes I need to stare at a wall. Sometimes I just need to go for a walk like we can’t always just be the search for the thing that makes you sort of go this is it. This is an immune your eyes get big and all of that, and absolutely not. I appreciate that, too. In books, and especially you do this quite a lot in ordinary notes where I have a flash of recognition, this redacted notes that you refer to early in the tablet. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I had so much identification. And no, I didn’t grow up in Pennsylvania. Massachusetts, isn’t that far off. But you know, I love the idea that while you and I have different stories, I don’t think there was a single page where I didn’t have a moment of oh, wow. And sometimes it was an intellectual response. But a lot of times it was okay. And I don’t get that with every book that I read. So when it happens that frequently. It makes me kind of sit up a little straighter and go, Hey, what’s going on? What is this? How did she do this? How did Christina do this? And I think a lot of it is you’re just very observant. And you take a lot of notes in the play on your title bed, and I’m obsessive. Yeah, okay, obsessive doesn’t hurt, but I do feel like you pay attention to details and people in a way that books may have taught you but yeah, there’s something a little beyond that. Can we talk about that for a second?

Sure. Certainly, I think I think books taught me but I’m terrible at like recounting plot, but I can recount certain details. And it will take me I have to recount all of those details to eventually get to Okay. Well, the plot is this right, I think, to certain things land in me. And even when a part of me is not consciously paying attention to them, yeah, I’m working on them. And they are working on me. And that’s why, you know, I’ve collected vines, and they’ve collected me, they really have. And so there are certain things that I think I get activated, that I’m not even necessarily aware of, but then they come back to me, and I realized, Oh, I’ve kind of been thinking about this all along. And so when you asked me about sort of being freed of something, after writing the book, or free in form, I’d say both freedom form and freed from certain obsessions that I don’t think I will return to anymore. That’s a beautiful thing as well. Like, I think each thing and I feel so lucky to be able to, you know, to have written three books and to be working on some other things. Because that wasn’t at all a given to me that I would write anything past monsters intimacies, which was partially my dissertation. And then three new chapters. Oh, that was such a slog, I was like, do I really want to write books? Oh, I did then writing in my wake. Yeah. You know, my editor can WIS occur? I was working on another book then, too. And my editor came with sucker. You know, so Well, that’s interesting. But you know, let’s see how it develops. And then I emailed him and said, Well, I’m thinking about this other thing. He said, Oh, definitely. I want that. And I went in, and I said, you know, this is how I’m thinking about, I want to write it. Yes, it’s an academic book. But I also wanted to be able to be read by people across educational backgrounds. And he said, write the book that you want to write. And that was deeply freeing. And I feel like each thing that I’ve worked on makes its own form. So it’s been a real joy to be able to formally shift how I want to approach the text.

I love the idea of each text having its own form. But I do want to shout out Duke for a second because this jacket, this jacket is crazy great.

And that’s, of course, in Boston.

I thought I recognized that it’s been a minute. I saw something recently of hers in Los Angeles that I really quite liked, but also adding the art. I’m going to use that for a second because adding the art to Ordinary Notes. I honestly wasn’t expecting I was delighted. How did you decide that that had to be a piece of that? Because I feel like your work is so evocative. And yet, I would all of the photos are fantastic. I mean, it’s just it’s so good. But when did you decide we needed photos too?

I mean, I’ve already narrative about for beginnings to Ordinary Notes. So this is another beginning that I’ve also narrated is I was in Los Angeles to do something at the Underground Museum with Saidiya Hartman.

I miss that space so much, just for listeners who don’t know what it was. It was an amazing, amazing art space. And of course, every time I went in, I bought more books.

I only go there once and it was fantastic.

I loved supporting them but also the bath. Do you remember the bathrooms, there was the bathroom for Black people in the bathroom for white people and just the bathrooms are designed. So one of the bathrooms was very elaborate and lush and wonderful. And, and then the other bathroom was like basically a closet. And it was a play on Jim Crow. It was just, it was a really,

I think, to say that it’s coming back to me as a memory because one is really large.

Yes. And that’s that’s Yeah, and it just it, it was a really good way to keep you grounded in the space and grounded next to the gallery.

And then the beautiful outdoor garden. Oh, right space right now, which is where we had the event. Oh, wow. But Saidiya and I had lunch earlier in the day. And she asked me, you know, what are you working on and I told her the two projects I was I wanted to work on. And then I showed her the pictures of my mother and grandmother that appear in the book. And she said, You should work on that one. It’s the more difficult one, you know how to do the other. And it changed because I was doing I was going to do this other thing and part of it is in in Ordinary Notes and part of it may not be anywhere else but it may be thinking about my mother told these wonderful kind of painful stories about her childhood and, and childhood friends who died and they’ve informed who I am and I so love those photographs and I wanted the opportunity to read them and think about how we are constructed and how we construct ourselves.

Is that what made this book difficult, that having to sit with the ideas that we used to construct ourselves, I mean,

Partially, and having to sit with various violences. And, you know, against ourselves and others around us. Yeah. Yeah, it was, it was it was difficult. And so I’m glad that you say that, despite that difficulty, that of that sort of tenderness comes through, not just in the notes, and tenderness is at the center of the notes.

I trusted you completely and I love it when that happens with a book. It’s not every book. Yeah, it’s not every book, but I was so compelled. And again, I didn’t want to put it down. But I didn’t want to rush. And that I think, is really an important way to approach what you’re doing in Ordinary Notes that, you know, sometimes you’re gonna want to read a little bit. Yeah, and then go do a thing and come back. And sometimes you’re gonna want to sit for a long period.

I think a form that allows for that open a way in which, you know, there are books that I’ve started and then had to do something else, and I have to go back, you know, and reread, reread, reread. And so yeah, I think I think the form allows for that, and it allows for what I hope is for both an accumulation of thinking. And

I think having a read it through as it is exactly, you know, in the in the galley, I think having read through once. Now I sort of feel like I can go back and dip in and out. But I am gonna say I would recommend that it’s read for the first time start to finish. And then you go back, I mean, the way you sort of reach a crescendo,

thank you so much for your, for your reading.

I’m just a giant book nerd. But you’ve made a really important thing. And I just want people to understand how important this book is.

Thank you so much.

But I would say you know, the first time you sit down with the book really do go from start to finish, follow how Christina has laid out these notes. And then go back. I mean, I’ve been thinking about museums a lot. You have feelings about museums that you and I have similar feelings about museums, let’s put it that way. But moments that I know, I will come back to lines that I want to come back to certainly your book lists. I mean, I did have a moment of sort of, Oh, great. Okay, you’ve read that too.

I just have to say that’s sort of crowd sourced.

Oh, it is, but I’m pretty sure a lot of it is you too, you went on to Twitter. You said what books or books produced a feeling you wanted or needed to feel and then suddenly it’s you know, things like the yellow house and we’re reasons and by the Oh, the yellow house is magic. I am the year she won the National Book Award. I was banging on the table. I was that person. I was making so much noise sister outside or Audrey Lorde Book of Delights. Lots of Dionne Brand too. And Franco Harris Collected Poems popped up. And I was like, oh, yeah, actually, those I get that. Homegoing Yaa Gyasi. Anne Carson. I mean, there’s so much. And I feel like because you read so broadly too, I mean, yeah, I know. It was crowdsourced.

And it really was.

No, no, I do understand that. It’s a shame that Twitter’s no longer useful thing. But yeah, exactly. I love the way all of those titles and the notes or the tweets come to life. Yeah. And I do feel like they reflect you and I do feel like there’s overlap with your personal taste on I do. And I had a moment of just…

And then there are books that like I’m obsessed with, that I haven’t written on that I used to read like a book like Obasan. Oh, I love that novel. And I always think of it like I think of Obasan and Beloved being published in the same year. And the kind of beauty of the language and like, Naomi’s rage at the end, you know about they said, We were happy and these photographs, picking beets, this is what was really like when she finally like, experiences the rage that she kind of inhabits and tamps down I just think there’s something about, about the way that Morrison writes, beloved, and Kogawa writes all of a sudden that there’s some deep connection for me, maybe it’s a connection of feeling for me, but I think there’s some other kind of, like the beauty of the language. You know, you don’t think that a novel that or a text that describes horror is going to be beautiful. I mean, that’s the same thing. I can’t read it in French. But that’s the same thing like reading. And these are not novels. These are our memoirs, Charlotte Delbo’s the Auschwitz and After. Yeah, I mean, the astonishing clarity of language and something like none of us will return. US simply don’t. I mean, I think I think like in the intro, I think Lawrence Langer calls them like, prose ice sculptures or something, and they, you know, so I think that’s the kind of sort of thread between some texts that, that describe brutality with a kind of crispness and clarity of language. That’s kind of astonishing.

I think it’s also slightly easier for me as a reader, because I refuse to turn away. And not everyone reads like that. It’s really important for me as a reader, not just as a bookseller, but as a reader to make sure that I’m not I mean, and also I did read DM Thomas’s White Hotel for the first time at a very young age, and then I went back later.

I have never read it.

I’m still sort of processing how I feel about it. But I’m still very glad I read it. I was probably 12 or 13.

I haven’t read it. And I know that’s why too.

I know exactly. And, but at the same time, I was punching above my weight for a really long time when I was reading. So it was I that’s what we did. I mean, we were just let loose in the life, you know, and raised by wolves a tiny bit on my end, but I mean, everyone was sort of like, well, it’s books. And also, I read a lot of stuff that was not hired. I’m not going to, you know, make fun of it.

I remember sneaking to my sister’s room and reading, like Looking for Mr. Goodbar at like 9.

I have, I have read some of Michael cote recorders over Yeah. It’s also a period sort of in the world where you know, ya wasn’t what it is now. And we sort of read whatever we could or whatever the adults had lying around, or whatever you found in the library that no one stopped you from?

Exactly. Just hide in the stacks and read what you wanted to read.

Yeah, there was a lot there was,

what time we are, once again living in when people like all of these people are trying to defund library right, you know, yeah.

I’m a very grateful library kid. Maybe an adult now. But yeah, libraries were magical places. For me growing up. What’s next for you. I mean, this is this is not a small book.

This is this is a big, epic, beautiful work of art. But what’s next, I’m still working on the Black Still Life book. But I’m also working on a book called What could have sob. And that expands an essay that I wrote for the catalog for the vnla. And for the milk of dreams. corporative works from Ursula Gwyn carrier bag theory of fiction, but also then looks at some of the artists who were in the show not so much to reproduce. readings of individual works, though I do sort of talk about the works, but to really sort of think through and inhabit the kind of possibility and impossibility of the vessel. And I would like to keep working on that. So it’s going to be a very small book. And it will be published by Knapp and FSG in 2025. And I will come back to working on it. So that’s, that’s what I’m working on.

I’m really looking forward to reading that. I’m really, really looking forward to reading that. Christina Sharpe. Thank you so much. Ordinary Notes is out. Now, if you have not yet read In the Wake, I cannot recommend it enough. And you know, I gave you all of the writers at the top of the show who loved his book, so really, you should read that too. Christina, thank you so much.

Thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure to speak with you.

Poured Over