Poured Over: Kiese Laymon on Long Division

By Miwa Messer / June 24, 2021 at 12:00 am

Long Division

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Kiese Laymon — memoirist, essayist, novelist — is one of the most extraordinary and exciting writers working today. Best known for his acclaimed memoir, Heavy, he recently bought back the rights to his first two books, the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourselves and Others in America and the picaresque coming-of-age novel, Long Division, so he could revise them and send them back into the world as they’re meant to be. He joins us on the show to talk about language and memory, rewriting and rereading. Featured Books: Long Division, How to Slowly Kill Yourselves and Others in America and Heavy by Kiese Laymon, Punch Me Up to the Gods by Brian Broome, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deeshaw Philyaw, Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara, Corregidora by Gayl Jones, Sing, Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward and There There by Tommy Orange. Produced/hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang.Poured Over: The B&N Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Poured Over is a show for readers who pore over details, obsess over sentences and ideas and stories and characters; readers who ask a lot of questions, just like Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer, a career bookseller who’s always reading. Follow us here for surprising riffs, candid conversations, a few laughs, and lots of great book recommendations from big name authors and authors on their way to being big names. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here, and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: Long Division is the kind of novel that you need to experience for yourself. It’s a classic picturesque novel, it’s a coming of age, there’s this kid called City that you will meet and you will fall in love with and City as a handful. And city will also remind you of the book’s author, KSA layman, if you have read Heavy, if you’ve read How to Slowly Kill Yourself, and Others in America, you will recognize Grandma, you will recognize this kid, you will recognize the feelings and the writing and the sentences, you will recognize all of it. So Kiese, thank you so much for making the time.

Kiese Laymon: Thank you so much for having me.

B&N: I’m really happy to see your face right now. So can we talk about where Long Division started? Because there’s a bigger point about long division coming back into the world. And we’re gonna cover that. But let’s talk about the original genesis of this book. I mean, how did it start for you?

KL: Um, you know, I love those questions about where books start, because I think we answered them differently every time. I think this book started on my grandma’s porch when I was like 10 years old, looking across the Old Morton road at these really full forest. And I convinced myself that I saw two little kids come up out of this hole from this hole in the ground that had been created from a tornado. Tornado just come, torn up like for Scott County, and there was this hole in the ground. And I to this day, I think I saw these two kids come up out of this hole and go back into the hole. And I asked my friend Shirley to come up, we just sat on the porch watching. And she says she saw one of them come out. So it starts like a lot of stories start with a 10 year old not trying to discern a difference between reality and dream, you know. And then when I get to grad school, I was at university, this white third year, students disappeared, nobody knew where she was, the entire state was looking for her. And then I came back to Mississippi on a break. And I was in a Walmart with my grandma. And I saw all of these missing kid posters like right before you go into Walmart, and most of them were black girls. And then I was like, Fuck yo, like, I want to create some sort of story that riffs on and explores the paradoxes of missing black children, especially missing black girls. So those two things are sort of like the impetus really starts even before that, like, you know, when I had to read books that really didn’t see me or see the way we talked or spoke. But I think the concrete things are my grandma’s porch, and really thinking about, you know, missing black children and missing black girls specifically.

B&N: How long did it take you to write Long Division?

KL: I don’t know. I’m saying like, if I started if I saw that at 10, I started trying to write about it a 10. It probably took me about 20 years, but I really, really started trying to write a book called Long Division in grad school, 1998. So it took me like 10 years.

B&N: We’ve got this pickeresque coming of age, we’ve got this kid city who was sent to his grandmother’s house, is it fair to call it rural Mississippi?

KL: Oh, you better call that shit rural Mississippi. Because again, like if you came to Mississippi, you might think Jackson, where city is from where I’m from is rural. But for us, it was the epitome of urban. And so when you go from Jackson to Forest or to Malachi, the fictional town I’m talking about there, it’s rual, it’s super duper rural.

B&N: So here’s this kid, he has become internet famous for a very funny reason. I’m going to ask you to explain.

KL: Yeah, so City in his in his arch nemesis, Lavander Peeler, are competing in this thing called can you use that word in a sentence contest, right? It’s a riff on like spelling bees. And for me, I just were sort of obsessed with hip hop, obsessed with battles. I read a lot of Ellison and a lot of others, a lot of blues texts. And so I just wanted to create like a competition at the center of the book based around sentences because that’s what I feel like the dozens are for like hip hop that is rude. It’s just like a rhyming sentence contest. And City and Lavander have, you know, move their way through to where they’re representing the state in this contest. And then they come to find out that maybe it’s been set up all along, and maybe they aren’t as good as sentences as they think they are. Or maybe the white people who run the contest just didn’t want to give them an opportunity to prove how good or bad they work. And that actually comes from my life as a young person. I was one of spelling bee kids and I never won and when I lost I was always like, it was a setup, they didn’t want you to win. And so I just wanted to flip it. I was like, Well, what if they all wanted me to win? What if everybody wanted me to win? What would that feel like? So that’s that’s what it comes from.

B&N: But the book as it started is a very different thing from what is coming out on June 1.

KL: Oh, yes, indeed.

B&N: So you bought the rights back to this novel and you bought the rights back to your first essay collection How to Kill Yourself Slowly in America for the sole purpose of revising them and putting them back out into the world. Yes, as they needed to be which one I love that as an inveterate revisionist I rework stuff I literally have to have people take things away from me and I write books. I read them I write fun book up and and I literally have to have someone say to me, you have to let go of that now. Yeah, not do any more with it. And I’ve gotten better over time, but there was a period where I would just noodle a sentence a little too long.

KL: I mean, I think book copy might be the hardest thing to write and revise. Because you always I assume, I would think you can always get closer to inviting the reader into this text like I can change this sentence, I can change this punctuation. That’s scary actually thinking about revising book copy, I would never turn it in ever.

B&N: It’s really exhilarating. Actually, when you know, you’ve got it, right. It’s really it is It is that moment. And it’s, it’s funny, because some people could argue it’s just ad copy, but you’re talking about books. So it’s not, yes, you’re finding that moat, that point of entry, right? For a reader. But you did that with two books. And you did that with two books in a relatively short amount of time.

KL: Yeah. Well, I mean, I’ve been revising both of those books for like, five years, because I again, I just don’t feel like anything’s ever done. And, I went to the publisher of the initial books, and I was like, All right, before I was gonna buy him back, I was like, I want to put these revisions in the world. You know, here’s some things I want to change about both books, and the person who ran the company was like, no, but if you want to do that, you can make a you can buy them back from me. And you know, I sold Long Division for like, $3,000, I sold How Slowly for like, 1000, I was just like, Wow, do like I’m buying that back from you, after we sold whatever amount of copies. But again, long division, specifically, the book cover was supposed to be a part of the book, there’s always supposed to be two different book covers are supposed to be a book within a book within a book. And you know, the way the old one was, you know, so many words on the page, there wasn’t enough space for the reader to breathe. And then you know, we sensibilities change, like, there was a lot of ableist language in that book that was not checked by the book. So like, I’m cool having characters in there say racist shit, a sexist thing, say ableist stuff. But the book, the design of the book has to in some way, critique that, and there were just some things in there that I did not critique. And I wanted to go back and make that closer to what I actually believe now. And there’s some other things in there like Easter egg, things I wanted to pull out, I just wanted to make more room for readers to breathe because I am asking a lot of families to books and you’re reading to a middle and you’re flipping a book over and you’re reading to the middle. So this book ends in the middle, and begins where and so I’m asking a lot of readers in that way. And I just wanted to make it more inviting, and also a little bit more lush, to me.

B&N: I had to say goodbye to a character that I was not prepared to say goodbye to. And I was very mad at you as the writer and I understand the pure artistic reasons. And I was still really mad at you because I really liked this character. I really, really, really liked this character. That’s one of the things that I love about books in general, when I’ve got an author who surprises me and says, Well, you know, I know where this is going. I’d see where this is going. And then I sit there and my jaw is kind of on the table. So how much of the story did you know when you started writing? I mean, you’ve got City, you know, you write the anchor. He’s absolutely the anchor. You’ve got great character names. Details that, you know, I mean, the Dukes of Hazzard and, you know what time travel?

KL: I’m playing with, like literature and art making as time travel in that book, you know, when I, when I first was on tour with that book, I was on the coast, Mississippi coast, and his white dude who was in a wheelchair came up to me, and he kept looking at my book when I was doing a signing. And he was like, you write this? I was like, yeah, and he went and bought it. And he wheeled himself out of the bookstores of Barnes and Noble on the coast. Gulf Coast store, went out to Gulf Coast store, he came back into my signing what really waited in line? And then he said, This ain’t about no goddamn mathematics. And he threw my book down. And I was No, but I get some of the things from the science fiction people. But I’m like, yeah, there’s a bit of science fiction, but like, this is literary time travel. So started with like, there was this character named City who thought that he was a runaway character. He felt like everyone was writing these like narratives, including his family, definitely white people, white culture, Mississippi, and he wanted to run away. He’s like, I don’t like the narrative. I mean, it’s not the language he uses. But I don’t like the way people going to pose in their narratives on me, I want to run away. So he’s running away from a book while reading a book. So the first draft of Long Division, the second book doesn’t exist, I needed to write that second book so I can understand what City was running away from and what City was running to, and the character who you say disappears. You know, I wanted to show how like disappearances, we want to believe sometimes it’s so clear, like a stranger comes and takes a child. Yes, maybe. But also in this culture, like a lot of us are responsible for the disappearances of our you know, of our children. But I will say that character is not gone. I will say that, that characters not gone. I want to say that, writing that character out. I mean, that bruised my heart for like five years. It was tough to write that character out. But I know that character is not gone.

B&N: I cannot wait to read that book. Because really, I got so attached so quickly. I’m fond of City and I’m fond of some other characters, but and I mean, there are hard decisions that are made, you’re flipping between 1985 1980 64 in 2013, and those are all very fraught moments. Yeah, for Mississippi, I mean, the fraught moments for America, but they’re also fraught moments for Mississippi.

KL: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, 1964 You know, this is right before a Freedom Summer, like really pops off 1985 We’re in the middle of Reaganomics. This is right after Ronald Reagan has come to the Shelby show the state county fair and really, like, made a declaration that states rights were were right, you know, particularly as it related to black folk 2013. You know, this is post Trayvon, this is in the middle of Obama. So I wanted to put the Obama Reaganomics and Freedom Summer in conversation in some sort of way that might not seem organic, but could at least seem interesting.

B&N: As someone who’s lived through both periods, actually, it did feel organic.

KL: Good, I hope so. I hope so.

B&N: I’m just I and you know, for listeners, it sounds like we are slipping around in the story. But it is the language and the characters, and this series of images that you sort of really need to experience and not have someone just talk to you that I mean, we’re talking about what drives the art. And the revision is a lot of what drives the art. This is actually a very different book from what it was when you first published.

KL: It really, it really isn’t. And like you, I believe that a book doesn’t start when you open I think when you look at a book like that book is started, like you’ve made a decision whether or not you want to read it. So like when you hold a book, the weight of the book says something that means something you this book weighs differently than other book, it definitely looks different. It is inviting for all of you, for those of you who might, I might be lucky enough that you might want to buy my book, please know that the book, The Art on that book, is the beginning of that book. And that art is referenced because that physical book over and over again in that book, and in the middle. Oh, no, this isn’t the one that you got. But in the middle, like we see something we don’t see in most books like I want. Like there’s a there’s a there are four leaves, like I want people to understand like they are in that hole with us at the end at the middle slash end of that book. And so yeah, like that wasn’t in the first book. It’s a different book heavily inspired, of course, by the first one. But this is the book much more like the book I wanted to put in the world.

B&N: And the essay collection, you added what three or four pieces?

KL: Oh, I added like six pieces, I took out a five pieces. And I just and I reversed it like I started 2000 22,020. And I go back to the first essay, which was the initial first essay and How to Slowly which is about my uncle. So it just goes in reverse. It starts here thinking about the pandemic Trump’s America or the awakening. And then it goes back, you know, outcasts sometime in Poughkeepsie, a lot of time in Mississippi as a young person. So yeah, but you know, these are three different books. And one of the things you said to me before was that the thematics and these, you know, all of these things are similar, right? Like his grandmother characters were very similar. I’m always interested in writing about what books have done to young people, particularly Black young people. You need different tools, write essays, the way I write about it, and How to Slowly is different than definitely and what I’m doing in Heavy, right. And as you said, before we started like, what I’m trying to do a comedy and tragedy is wholly different vision and I’ve done I’ve done in anything I have created before.

B&N: I want to bring up a line that is from How to Slowly Kill Yourself and others in America. And it’s from an essay called Hey, Mama, an essay in emails. And I love this essay so much. And you write Mama, how we’ve been having the same conversation about language for 30 years.

KL: Yeah, I think that was when my mother was telling me not to use some phrase that I use that she thought was not correct English. And when we had that email conversation, Heavy wasn’t written yet, but that essay is like the precursor to Heavy like, right, alright. I’m like, Mama, let’s talk about some things. I was like, Okay, I don’t really want to talk about that. But so like that essay, like is literally the precursor. And after that essay, I was like, alright, shit, we got a lot more we need to talk about, but like that line. Yeah, my mom was trying to tell me not to break a verb. And that was the first time I’d ever told him like, Mama, like, I’m your child, like, I know the language because you made me know the language. And if I’m someone who knows the language, you need to let me bend and break and play. And she’s like, No, no, speak correctly to me. You need practice, speak correct English out there in the world. If you don’t, you’re more likely to get destroyed by these people. Same shit she told me when I was 12. She tells me at 42.

B&N: So part of me understands exactly where your mother’s coming from, because I live in a world and part of me is with you on the language piece because I would much rather bend language and watch it evolve and watch it change because that’s the first signifier of cultural change is shifting language. And it’s so important. I mean, I’m hoping like Asian American doesn’t have a hyphen. Finally, it’s such a tiny thing, but actually, for some of us, it’s pretty momentous.

KL: Oh, it means a lot. I don’t think we can ever overestimate what sentences do to our bodies like sentence Yes. Like that’s what I’m saying in this book like, like sentences literally destroy entire civilizations. And sentences also help entire civilizations to gain and rise. The thing about Black Lives Matter as a movement, its appeal and in the backlash to it are wholly because of the like evocative miss of the sentence lack lot, like that’s a sentence RAM, you know. And so we’ve made a sentence into a movement, and when I want to argue is it like to make America great again, is also a sentence that is a movement that is responsible for gazillions of people suffering, so sentences, you know, they they’re always there. And I think they dictate like often like how our insides move. And this what Long Division is really about, these Black kids trying to rewrite sentences to find themselves in the sentences because for so long, they haven’t seen themselves into sentences at their schools and their churches in their communities. And so they like fuck it, we want to write sentences where we see ourselves like, Can we do this? That’s a question, can we do it? And I mean, yes, no.

B&N: I could sit here and quote you for forever is another great line. But this time, it’s from Heavy and it’s revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary required will and maybe courage, revised word patterns were revised thought patterns, revised thought patterns, shape memory. That is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever read. And, and I can feel it. I’m a full body reader, I will admit it, I get very involved in what I’m reading. And for me a great book, tattoos itself on my DNA, and I end up as a different person because of what I’ve read, write me. I’ve always been a big reader since the time I was small. The worst thing I can think of is running out of stuff to read. That is the worst punishment ever. Like, I run out of things to read. I will read the cereal box if I ever run out of things to read. I’m that kid.

KL: Oh, yes. And I’m just say like reread revision. And rewriting is in my practice, like, I mean, that is my practice. That’s my religious practice. Revision is my religious practice is my artistic practice. But Rereading is also part of that prayer. You know, like, I am someone partially because I’m a writer, like, I want to understand more about technique and craft from everything, even if it’s writers who I can’t stand. But I also think it’s hard to you know, we just throw around this word love, love, love, love. I love that love it. But the thing about Love Is it necessitates like revisiting you know, if you love someone, you often want to see him again, if you love a song, you want to hear it. I think books, because they’re so unwieldy or because we’ve been taught that they’re unwieldy. A lot of times young folks don’t want to go back and reread older folks definitely want to go back and reread what I’m trying to encourage with this book is like, I don’t know if we’ve read anything if we haven’t gone back and reread it, and I get why we don’t want to reread a lot of shit, especially stuff that like write to us out of the reading process. But the rereading the Rereading is as important to me as the rewriting definitely.

B&N: I find rereading sort of marks me and very specific points in my life. And there’s stuff that I loved when I was in my 20s that now I’m just like, oh, that’s something you really read in your 20s. Like, I can understand why I loved it. Yes. The best example I can give you honestly, is Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. It blew my head up. And I was like, Oh, I once had a conversation with my dad over frozen peas. And I was going on about freedom and you know, standing on the lip of the volcano, and he just looked at me and said, When I was your age, we read it for the dirty bits. Okay, my dad just…

KL: And you know, what’s interesting is it can really work opposite too so, you know, I had to read A Rose for Emily by Faulkner, like, you know, 6789 every grade, and because I had to read it in that classroom, which was I’m not gonna say it was a jail cell, but there wasn’t much life in that classroom. And we never had to read anything by anyone who looked like us or about us, but I couldn’t fuck with that book. I just could not deal with it. When I reread it post grad school, and I was like, Yo, Faulkner is writing from the POV of a town and like stuff he’s writing about is I was just like, oh my god, like I was like, Damn, what was I reading all those years? That’s why, I think, for some of us who have been like written out of so much text. Sometimes it’s good to reread that stuff that we thought was like unwieldy and like sort of like damaging because a lot of it was but sometimes if you read it outside of those classrooms, sadly, this the text can come alive. I meet a lot of people on the road are like, Yo, I had to read having a class I didn’t really mess with it. I read it post class and I was like, damn, I felt that and I was like, that has everything to do with the text. Yeah, but really has everything to do with school and teachers.

B&N: I came late to Faulkner to in high school I was assigned Intruder in the Dust literally because there were no cliff notes. Also, I thought cliff notes were cheating. So I was like, I don’t care. You know, like, garbage. I’m gonna do the work and Intruder in the Dust is not the way to introduce a 16-year-old to thought, well, it’s not 16 I kept me off of Faulkner for a really long time. Yeah, there’s so many writers out there who are doing important work. But I also do just want to be told.

KL: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s the thing. You know, you talked a bit about this earlier, but like, the essay, and fiction, for me are different for a lot of reasons. But, you know, in fiction, you gotta have a story, you know what I mean? And so like, city, like, there’s like, this is a very talky book, like, these young people talk a lot. And sometimes I think people who read long division can forget that, like, they’re talking, but that shit is propelling the story forward. Like, there’s a movement, like, you know, that movement happens early on, they get to the event, whatever happens there happens to the has to go to his grandmother’s, and he’s there and while they’re, the whole ship just explodes. But for me, it was just like, I could definitely just have these kids talking in a room for 150 pages. But what would they be talking about? I want them to move. I want them to talk each other out of stasis. I want them to talk each other like into mobility. So yeah, I think it’s true. The story matters. Even in essays, the story matters. I think we sometimes fool ourselves into believing that you can just, you know, say what you think because it’s an essay, well, you can but who’s gonna read that? You know, like, you have to keep it moving.

B&N: I think there’s so many people who don’t know that. But you also have to shut up because you have a piece that involves Michael Denzel Smith and Darnell Moore, who are two of my favorite guys on the planet. And I just end the title of the piece is Echo. And then it’s everyone’s names. And I I’ve also I met Kai i think when Darnell did a reading for us, Upper West Side. But Michael and Darnell, it’s been really wonderful to see what they’ve been able to do with this kind of vulnerability that often Black men are not allowed to share in their way.

KL: And Marlon just came out with his book, burden on cage, you know, we’ve been, we’ve been trying to talk and write through the importance of what we call vulnerability for about a decade now, that group of the and you know, I love I love those men, they love me. And we wanted to write to each other because we knew if we wrote to each other, like directly, we would write into parts of us that we’d never written into before. And so like those letters, and the responses to those letters, I don’t know about what this word honest actually means. But that might be like the most honest literary engagement I’ve ever been a part of, like, especially cat like, because saying in that essay about, about transitioning, and about like being dislike, you know, I was once this beautiful black little girl, and you’re like, I am now a black man, like, now we’re going to talk about this, and you don’t have to deal with it. And but I’m going to talk about I want I want to explore like, not just the holes, but the fullness of this transition and this move. I thought Echo could hold all of that. And I think you did, you know, I think that’s the most important piece in that book.

B&N: It does. But that sense of vulnerability to I mean, that is one of the pillars of your work, whether it’s the novel, or the essay, or the member, that is a collection of the memoirs, if you’re unwilling to be vulnerable, then those books don’t exist as they do in the world.

KL: Yeah, I mean, vulnerability, or frailty, or softness, like all of those are, again, are ingredients for revision, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, we have to live in this world. So we have to put up hard sort of cloaks and stuff to get through. But when I’m doing my art, I don’t want that cloak up, I want to be able to be a better person in my art and when I’m going into when I came out, coming out to when I came in. And for that to happen, I have to look into those, those like calcified scabs, kind of get beneath them and then really write about what because when you when you get believe beneath the scab, you’re writing to what connects me to you, you to Charles, Charles, to Cynthia, Cynthia, to Hasanati, that’s where people’s real well, you know, I couldn’t believe how universal it is what the fuck you talking about? We’re humans, right? We are humans, like, you know, we are human beings, we have scars. And so I just want to write lovingly about those scars.

B&N: I think the more we can do that, the closer we get to whatever comfort, passion, I mean that that is always going to end in you do write very compassionately about lots of difficult moments, not just for you, and not just decisions you made or decisions your mom made, but also your grandma’s of a generation, and I worship your grandmother. I’ve never met her. I’ve only met her on the page, I should say, and I worship this woman, but she also really does care what other people think. And your mom really cares what other people think, for people of our generation to be able to say, hey, wait a minute, actually, I need to carve a different path we need to change these conversations. It can be really difficult for elders to understand what we’re trying to do and how we’re trying to do it.

KL: Yes, I mean, that’s heavy, but that’s also running fast water running in Long Division, you know. Because for me, it’s easy to think about anti blackness as It is invested in by white Mississippians like you know, and I can’t avoid, I will not avoid that. And I think a byproduct of that is sometimes away, we as family, really encourage children to shut the fuck up and be quiet, right? And just accept this narrative. And all these multiple, multiple narratives we’re placing on you just find your way in the narrative don’t push back against the narrative, and I get it. When it’s coming from my grandmother, my mother, they’re worried they’re like, Emmett Till got killed for nothing. My uncle got killed for nothing. People we know got killed for less, and I get it. But at the same time, I’m like, while I’m here, I want to be free. Trust me, like you, you’ve raised me to be ethically free. I’m not gonna hurt anybody. But I want to be able to talk how I want, I want to be able to ask questions, I want to be respectful. But we can’t be respectful, even like grow. If you’re always telling me, Don’t talk like that in front of them. Don’t ask that question. The answer to this question can’t because I said, so. That’s a bullshit answer. And I’m just saying I want young children, particularly young, Black children, Mississippi, to be like to be encouraged to step outside of these narratives freely and ethically. And I don’t think we’re doing that. You know, I’m not blaming the families at all, I’m actually blaming something going way beyond the family. But I also think within the families, we got to do a better job of being like being free. And I understand why I understand the consequences for that a dire, but I just think we have to.

B&N: Can we switch for a second to literary influences? Because I felt like while I was reading Long Division, I was hearing echoes of Toni Cade Bambara. And I was hearing echoes of GaylJones, specifically Corregidora. I just I felt like those women were sort of in the back brain somewhere as you were writing long. Who? Because you’ve got some other I think you have and it’s and I’m not talking about Faulkner or Welty. And I get their role in your education too. But I feel like there are writers that sort of sit in the back of your brain and you’re kind of going.

KL: One of the writers that sits there is the writer who introduced me to Gayl Jones is writer Calvin Harrington. You know, I got kicked out of Millsaps college and when Jackson State and then eventually went to Oberlin and reason was because the literary critic Gerry Ward, he wrote the most incredible introduction of Black Boy, one will ever read. He was like, You need to go to Oberlin to work with Calvin. I was like, who was Calvin Hernton and he wrote Sex and Racism in America, he wrote Scarecrow, so when I get up there, Calvin is like, he got this beautiful laugh,he’s like an old dude. He’s my professor. We used to go to gym play basketball, he’s shooting left hand jumpers right hand jumpers. Taught us Corregidora. And again, I’ve been in classes I’ve been an English classes before that. I never read Gayl Jones. But the tone, like the horrific tone that Gayl Jones sets with Corregidora is something I definitely wanted to try to set in Long Division and then try to write through with lines and characters that were a little, you know, not necessarily like traditionally realistic. And then Toni Cade, I mean, I ran up on Toni Cade and Millsaps college and I mean, I write about that and Heavy the first time I read the first sentence and Gorilla, My Love, I was just like, Oh, my God, you mean you mean to tell me sentences can make me feel like a roller coaster made me feel, like rap music made me feel like a good ass fucking dinner, like a kiss on the cheek? Like I didn’t know, until I read that, that words could do that. And then said, No, you know, I got a lot of write on me. I got a lot of Morrison and Jesmyn. That’s my heart. Like I’m different writers. But that’s the writer I most want to be like, if I couldn’t be me, I want to be Jesmyn, right? If I couldn’t have my tools, I want to I want to have Jesmyn because I think she can do anything. She’s proven. She can do the essay. She’s proven she can. She can do different types of novelistic writing. So Jesmyn is always right there, but also just a lot of music and a lot of TV, too.

B&N: All of which contributes to the culture. I mean, again, all of that pushes language forward. If you think about music and the challenges that music is always faced from certain corners, you know, it’s to this it’s to that hormone lab and everything else. Well, maybe it’s also just a release valve for a lot of kids who don’t have space otherwise, or certainly don’t hear themselves. And yes, there are writers and you’re one of them where you can quote Shakespeare as fast as you quote, a lyric. I think that really matters. And if you’ve listened to some of these songs, and really listen, just listen to the lyrics or read the lyrics. It makes so much sense.

KL: Absolutely. And you know, like people of like my generation, you know, we we came along like right before Hip Hop starts. And then and then the culture just a lot of us got baptized in that culture, meaning like we started to walk differently. We started to talk differently. We started to think differently about sound and words and, and love and body. But like we went into our schools, our teachers never acknowledged that this sort of like baptism, cultural baptism had happened. So the entire time I’m in high school, no teachers talk about music period, they don’t talk about hip hop. But in doing that you’re not talking about us. We were we literally came to school, reeking of hip hop, like reeking of it. And like we what we needed was someone, some older person to be like, I see what y’all are reaching up, talk to me about what that shit makes you feel. So but but they did the antithesis. And so what I want to do in my books is not do that, right. Like, I want to not to bring that hip hop into Intex at all. But what I also want to do is, again, show these black young characters who are striving for some semblance of free, and some semblance of connection. And unlike Ellison, I don’t want to talk about this person in solitary terms, I don’t want them to be under the ground alone. I want I want there to be a collective because I think the most meaningful black culture productions in this country come from black folks going on the ground creating often for each other first, and then for the rest of the world. So that’s why the end of that book, those characters are under that ground. You know, some ways it’s not it’s not innovative. It’s like a harkening back to a lineage a creative lineage like this shit wants to destroy us, okay? They want to put us under the ground. Okay, let’s go on to the ground. Let’s go in this dungeon. Let’s go in this hole. And let’s make art and Let’s love each other on this art. We got to come up eventually. But before that, let’s try to make art for us by us. That’s what I’m trying to show.

B&N: Are you telling me you’re working on a sequel to Long Division?

KL: Oh, done that’s wrong. That’s done. I’m saying I would love, you know when Kathy and let me put it out. That’s another that’s another story.

B&N: Okay, well, we can quietly work on her. I would really like to read that book. Who are you reading right now that’s making your head explode who’s great.

KL: I just read Brian Broome, Punch Me Up to the Gods. Guys, I mean, real talk. I’m a Mississippi supremacist us everybody thinks the worst about my state. I always want to talk about my state so incredible people doing work, but what they doing in Pittsburgh right now is scary. Damon, Deeshaw, Brian, I’m sure more people that are Oh, no, no, you’re not me. Like they’re just this is their moment, man. And I think it’s not a moment. I think this is them. Like they’re going to be creating incredible death defying art. So I’m reading all of those people right now.

B&N: Yeah. Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Blew my mind. I have actually a perfect story collection. And I’m very hesitant to say something is perfect. Yeah, I will tell you though, Jesmyn’s Sing Unburied, Sing isn’t actually perfect. It is a physically perfect novel. Yes. The tension is perfect. Everything is just spot on. Perfect. And the first time I interviewed her, I just looked at it and said is Jojo. Okay. And she? I am a full body reader. I write it to these narratives.

KL: She’s a full-body writer, right? I’m sure she. Yeah.

B&N: Exactly. And really like the idea that I’m still thinking about this kid months, years after I read, Sing Unburied Sing, like I have a huge appreciation for that. But then The Secret Lives of Church Ladies rolls around and I it is one of the smartest, tightest, literally there’s not a wasted bird. And I’m frequently a person who says, you know, that could have been shorter.

KL: You know, I don’t know if you’ve ever interviewed Deeshaw, but we became really close friends in the last two years. And so, we were gonna do this podcast together. We were gonna all this was before before she popped off. Some things happened that we couldn’t do it. But she was like, Kiese, I got three more stories to write before I’m done with my collection. She was like, can you read it? And I was like, hell yeah, I’ll read it. I read that shit. And I was like, I don’t even know the word to describe. It’s the word when you read perfect art. And I’m like three more stories. You have to write three more so like, yeah, you know, for symmetry sake. And I was like, but these are so good. Like you don’t want to just rush three stories. She’s like, I got this. And then she fucking like, you know comes up with like Peach Cobbler.

B&N: Oh, that story.

KL: She just did it and then to see the world do what the world doesn’t normally do, which is to love on like incredible art that didn’t come through the traditional corporate mechanism you know, like that’s West Virginia Press, I think.

B&N: It is and it blew my mind that it was the University of West Virginia press.

KL: And that says so much about where we are. I’m big upping West Virginia Press but I’m also saying something’s wrong in the in the industry for that have to come out of West Virginia press. But it may it may be if it comes up somebody else. Maybe it’s different. I get all of that. But somebody who has some money and has a budget was supposed to be like that shit is perfect. Come over here.

B&N: It deserves everything. And Damon is one of the funniest dudes. He is so funny.

KL: And the thing about Damon is like, you know, it’s just hard to be funny on the page. But you know, I love Damon and he is I mean, I think he was a like a scary formal writer when he came in reverse my brother’s way back in the day, but that dude is a writing demon right? Knowing what the essay he can make it do anything. Yeah, you can make the essay do anything.

B&N: Vulnerability that you have. And that’s part of what makes it I mean, he would be very funny on the page. So because he’s willing to be vulnerable because he’s willing to say the things that he’s willing to say and own his mistakes. I mean, you have a Heavy where you’re like I didn’t do right by my students. And that was a moment for me when I was reading that book where I thought, Okay, I need to know this guy, like, I need to know because who in the world I have never heard of any professor say I made a mistake.

KL: That’s terrible. That’s terrifying, because of what we talk about revision is because there is no education without revision. But if we’re not admitting to ourselves and other people that we failed the most important people who ever interact with are students, how are we going to start filling our students? And so that was really hard to write. And I wrote and Kathy made me cut a whole bunch of that because I’ve written about the ways I failed my students profoundly. And Kathy was like Kiese, nah bro, you know, you got a job, we don’t need to we get it, you fail. We don’t need to go deeper. And she, I was like, Are you sure you want to cut down she like, trust me, you you don’t want me to cut this? And I’m like, All right, let’s do it. But for me, I can’t talk all that shit. I’m talking and heavy about my educational experiences. And then that, like, when I became an educator, I was just like, you know, perfect. Shit, I was, and I am a work in progress, who often fails people, but I feel like I’m less less likely to fail people if I’ve met to fill in people. And that’s true. You know, like, it’s the truth, it’s true. I don’t think you just have to like admit, I don’t think admittance is the work. But it’s hard to do to work if we don’t admit when we fail.

B&N: Well, I think too, that’s where the art comes from. Sorry to sound like the queen of cliches for a second. But if you’re not willing to do the work, and you’re not willing to be vulnerable, and you’re not willing to be honest, and you’re not willing to revise, then where are you? No one produces a clean first draft. I don’t care who you are. No one produces a clean first draft. That has never happened in the history of the earth.

KL: Know what I tell my students who love Jesmyn. I’m like, Yeah, but you know, the thing you crazy. I’m like, the craziest thing about Jasmine is that she fucking revised. Yeah. Now, if she revises, you mean to tell me you can revise like this, this person who we all look away up to, you know, Baldwin revised. Morrison revised. If those people can revise in practice, I think we have to.

B&N: What do you want readers to know about Long Division?

KL: I want readers to know that it’s okay to go into a book that is about hard things with the expectation that this will be fun. And I don’t think fun necessarily means you’re going to necessarily know know, what happened, I think is a book you need to reread. If you want to know know everything that happens. But also don’t want you to short chain what you do know what happens and what you do know. And what you do know I think from reading that book even once is that these are like some very strange characters who have had everything imposed on them. And they’re trying to get out through sentences through talking through love and through sentences. I think if you go into this book, wanting to have fun, allowing yourself to see what young people think about the ways we impose structures on them, I think you’re gonna be happy and satisfied, and if not, not, but what I loved about Jesmyn blurbing it and Tommy Orange blurbing it is that, you know, I gave it to them in two different times. And they both were like, you know, this is you know, the writing is great and all that but they’re like this shit was fun. It was fun was a fun book. You know, I want to rewrite a fun book.

B&N: And Tommy is exactly the guy who would get this. There There is one of the most kinetic novels I’ve ever read. And it feels like it’s an even though it’s set in the bear. It feels like a very la novel to me. Sorry, Tommy. I know what you know, I love the book. But I still always, I love that book. Because the energy, yes, energy. It feels like a 70s movie in a way. It does. You know, a lot of metaphors here.

KL: I think, I mean, you know, you’ve named books that I think changed the way novels are written. I think seeing change the way people wrote novels post. I know There There changed a lot of how people and not just change what corporations want to publish, but also I mean, but that matters, but also change the way writers feel like they can write. And we all know as people when we see somebody modeling a kind of freedom, like we get permission to try to do freedom a different way. I think that’s what Tommy Orange and Jesmyn Ward do best, like their writing encourages me to try to do freedom differently. And that’s just what you can ask about of authors.

B&N: So what are you working on now?

KL: Oh, man, I have a book due to Kathy today. It’s called And So On. I’m wearing this shirt. And I’m not supposed to talk about it at all, but it’s it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever written. But it’s also hopefully it’ll be most beautiful thing. I’m working on some TV and film stuff that I can’t talk about a lot and I have an incredible picture book coming out of Random House. Random House in June next year. It’s called City Summer, Country Summer.

B&N: Oh, that’s awesome. That sounds really really great.

KL: Yeah, I think you’re gonna like it.

B&N: As someone who likes to do the bifurcated things as you know. Yeah. Sounds kind of perfect for me, but also, it’s written by you so it’s gonna be great. Kiese, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you again. It’s always great to see you. I would really just like to hang out with you all day.