Poured Over: Tommy Orange and Roxane Gay on Wandering Stars

Jenna Seery

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange is a multigenerational saga of Native American heritage and culture, and a stunning follow up to his previous work, There, There. Along with writer Roxane Gay, Orange joins us to talk about identity and writing, representation in literature, unexpected connections to other authors and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by 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):
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
There There by Tommy Orange
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
Opinions by Roxane Gay
Epitaph of a Winner by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Blindness by José Saramago
NW by Zadie Smith
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and we are taping live tonight from our flagship store on New York’s Union Square. So thank you all for joining us. It is, of course, my great good fortune to be sharing a stage with two of my favorite, favorite, favorite best selling writers. Number seven New York Times right now they just gave us the list as we were walking out. Yeah, thank you. Roxane Gay, best selling author, professor, book publisher on top of it. We’re going to talk about how she finds the time to do all of this stuff. Advice columnist. She’s writing film, she’s writing television. Also personally my favorite Bad Feminist but okay. And of course, Tommy Orange, the author of There, There and Wandering Stars. And I’m going to tell you, we’re gonna stay a little spoiler free in this conversation because the book just came out. And I’m a bookseller. I mean, I get to talk to people and it’s really cool, and it’s great. And I love it, but I’m a bookseller. Hint, hint. Okay. Okay, good. So, what we’re going to do is wander for a bit, but we’re gonna wander through Roxane’s work. We’re going to wander through Tommy’s work. We’re going to talk about influences and identity and language and all sorts of cool stuff. And we’re super spoiler free. Roxane, I want to start with you because you picked Wandering Stars for your book club, which I happen to be quite fond of. And Kaveh Akbar, your ears are going to be burning tonight, my friend, talk about Wandering Stars for a second, why’d you pick it for your Audacious book club.

Roxane Gay

You know, I didn’t realize at the time that I picked it that it would follow Kaveh Akbar’s novel Martyr, and I didn’t realize that they knew each other, and that they exchanged novel pages together. So it was really an exciting coincidence. But I chose the book because it’s rare that I like a second book more than the first. But I loved the follow up. And they’re the sophomore novel, as they like to call it. And I loved the way it was trying a lot of different things. I thought it was very ambitious. There are a lot of stylistic flourishes. And I mean that in the best possible way. There are a lot of different narrative styles, which I always love, I love a polyphonic book. And this really embodies that the sense of history. I think it builds on the story that is told in There, There. But it also completely stands alone. So if you either did not yet read there, there, I don’t remember all of the details, you’re still going to be okay. So I just felt like it was going to engender great conversation. And I always like to pick books that I actually enjoyed reading,

Which I appreciate too, because I follow along with your book club as well. We have overlapping tastes quite often; I think we do. I met Tommy in 2018. Just as There, There was coming out. At the time I was the director of Barnes and Nobles Discover Great New Writers Program. And I sort of had one mantra at the time is “I know it when I see it.” And I knew it when I saw it. Straight up. I knew from page one, that I had this sort of crackling kinetic wild kind of novel. And I kept describing it as sort of a as having the kinetic energy of a LA crime novel. And no disrespect to Oakland, I promise no disrespect to Oakland. But I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles. And that was my reference point. And one of the beautiful things about There, There was I could also give it to kids who didn’t really consider themselves readers. And this is huge for me as a bookseller, right? Like I always want to bring people into the conversation. Like, it makes it more fun, right? But I have nephews who are younger, and I have, you know, friends whose kids maybe are not beholden to TBR stacks, and all that kind of stuff. And I could just hand over There, There and they were completely hooked. And yes, is there a stack of Wandering Stars in my office waiting to go to some kids who were some really good sports? Yes, absolutely. Tommy, I heard a story about how a trip to Sweden and a song brought together Wandering Stars. I know do we want to start in Sweden? Or do we want to start with the book’s title because I love both of these stories.

Tommy Orange

If you want to go chronological, we would start with the song, okay? And a very unromantic setting to think of a book, to think of a next book probably even annoying, where I thought of it. So I was signing books in north of Baltimore at a Penguin Random House warehouse. I was signing There, There and the sales reps played a Spotify playlist based on There, There by Radiohead, Wandering Star by Portishead came on and for whatever reason, and this, you know, this is a weird thing that I’m only realizing this is weird now that I’m saying it like I’ve, because I’ve said it a few times. Now, I knew in a single moment when I heard this song, I’m gonna write a follow up book. And it’s going to be called Wandering Stars, just the certainty for whatever reason, bizarre. So I was writing a straightforward follow up novel, following characters, sort of in the aftermath of what happens at the end of There, There. No spoilers. And so then I’m spring of 2019, I’m in Sweden, I almost wasn’t there. I was so overwhelmed by travel. That, so I was invited to go to Sweden, to Sweden, Amsterdam, Italy, on a little European translation tour. And we parked at the Lake Merritt BART station, which is sort of infamous in Oakland, as a place that your car will get broken into if you leave anything visible in it. And we were there for the Lunar Festival at the Oakland Museum. And I even said something to my wife, about like, I hope my stuff gets stolen, so I don’t have to go. And I went in from my backpack, and it was super crowded. I went back out and put my backpack in the car. Because I was like, bumping into people and I felt awkward. We were in for one hour. And I came back out and the broken window. Everything in the car was stolen, leaving my kids toys. It was just like toys in a bag. Everything was stolen, my passport, my laptop. And I was like, privately, like outwardly I was like, oh, man, this sucks. But inside, I was like, I don’t have to go. And I called my agent who’s in the crowd. And she’s like, No, you’re still going. And so I got this emergency passport, and I missed Italy, which is probably the best part of the trip, would have been the best part of the trip. And so I went to Sweden, and the event organizers invited me to a museum, I didn’t know why they were just like you want to come to our museum or this museum. We go in and they’re like, I’m getting this weird meta tour of like, we know now it’s wrong, that we have all this stuff. But like, you do want to see it right. And so we go to like the second floor and this exhibit where they have Southern Cheyenne regalia. And it’s there that I see this new newspaper clipping that sends me into this rabbit hole of this prison castle in Florida is the site of the first European colony in the in the contiguous United States, in St. Augustine, Florida. And it’s my tribe, it’s my tribe is at the heart of the Indian boarding school system. We were half of the prisoners there, that the blueprint for the boarding schools was based on and I just, I didn’t know how it was going to work with what I was working on for the for the follow up. And eventually I found a way for them to work together. Because while I was doing research, but I already decided on this title wandering stars, I started writing a narrative that starts with the Sand Creek Massacre, because it’s a family story that my dad told I was writing a character named Star. And I find out that the prison is shaped like a star. And there was an actual prisoner there named Star and another one named Bear Shield. And that was a family from There, There. And I realized I was gonna write something that connected through a family line, this historical narrative to the aftermath.

Roxane, you also write fiction, which I think sometimes people don’t remember as much as I would like.

I just say briefly, yeah, of course. You have to go read all of Roxane’s fiction.

I’m going to borrow him as a bookseller.

It is unbelievably powerful. And I and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Honestly. You are missing something in your life. So please, all of your fiction.

Thank you.

But I want to start with Untamed State for a second because that opening right, once upon a time in a far off land, and if you haven’t read Untamed State, some really awful things happen. There was a purpose to everything that happens in the story, but what I’m wanting to do is it’s set in Haiti. Your parents came from Haiti to the US when they were teenagers. They don’t speak Creole though, right?

Of course they do.

You okay, sorry, I, what I want to do is bring us all into a conversation about language, right? Because one of the things that Tommy’s characters wrestle with right? In There, There and again and Wandering Stars is whether or not you have language, right? You’re forced to speak English. Your own tongue is taken away. Did you ever speak Creole as a kid.

Absolutely.

But at home now? Same, ok.

We speak a mix that is hard to follow if you don’t speak English, French Creole and Spanish. But it’s easy to follow if you do. And my parents do speak English. But I find that the older they get, the more they returned to French and Creole. And especially when it’s just us and my wife is actually learning French now so she can understand when we’re talking about her. But we’re no, we’re never talking about her. But she’s actually learning French. And it’s great to see her starting to get some of the inside jokes that are communicated in French that really don’t translate well. But yeah, it was interesting to grow up and have these different languages to draw from and not know that everyone did not grow up speaking multiple languages.

And grew up in a place where hi, I was the only kid for miles who spoke any Japanese, It was wild. But Tommy, you did not grow up speaking any native dialect, right? Like your dad just kind of never got around to teach.

It’s the same thing as what you just said. My, my dad’s fluent, it was his first language. He’s one of the last living fluent language speakers in our tribe for Southern Cheyenne dialect. But my mom’s white, and she did not speak Cheyenne and he worked a lot. So it was also a time of this idea among some families that assimilation was better for survival or like, easier for the kids to not stand out or whatever. So it was a couple of different factors. But he but he spoke, you know, at dinner, like he would call us to dinner in Cheyenne, he would pray in Cheyenne, for way too long, it was like 20 minute long prayers. And we knew like the selection of words like bread and salt and fart and like, you know.

the important stuff. Yeah. language that was so much a part of who we are now as adults, right, not just how we move in the world, but how we engage with art, how we engage with music. And when I watch your characters, and I do say watch, I mean, obviously, when you’re reading Tommy and when you’re reading Roxane’s fiction, both of these, they’re so immersive these experiences, right? Like, it’s not just like, you’re not just kind of sitting there reading words on the page. It is full body. I am in here, I am in for the long haul, I am holding my breath. And maybe I should stop doing that, because I’m gonna give myself the hiccups. I do it all the time. But there’s a beauty to the prose, and there’s sort of a ferocity to the prose. But you seem to have mellowed out with this book, a little bit, Wandering Stars feels a little gentler, it feels a little softer. And I don’t know if it’s because you’ve decided to split, right, we’ve got prequel sequel in a way. Or if it’s, you may be getting mellow with age, getting older.

You know, I definitely didn’t want to write the same book. And I think the natural energy of a book that is set up as there’s gonna be a robbery, here’s a gun, we’re all going to the same place. There’s a natural energy that the reader even brings to the expectations of what’s going to unfold that I think sometimes the writing wasn’t even necessarily doing all of the work that sometimes it’s described as doing. It’s the context, but I am older, maybe slower. I hope I’m not more than that. I’m already a very mellow person. If I get more mellow, I’m just gonna melt. I think I wanted to write a different book. And this goes back in time. And I wanted to challenge myself to do different things. Stylistically, I just didn’t want to write the same book. And I did keep reading the same book. And my editor was very good about pointing it out to me when I was and I wanted to write something that was standalone and not necessarily like leaning on the first book in a in a way that that it couldn’t stand alone. And that’s a tricky, it’s tricky territory. To write something that works is both things. So I think I’ve become a different writer and I hope I keep doing that. I think that’s what every right ever wants to do is to, to work with new material and with new voices and, and not just keep doing the same thing like, you know the nightmare of musicians is the only way they can make money now is to tour and that’s essentially just singing the same songs on the album’s over and over. I mean, they’re performers and they love it and like as writers we’re like, we’ll do what we have to do. And that’s, that’s a different part that feeds them. But everyone wants to you know, working with creative work, you don’t want to do the same thing.

Roxane, your new book, Opinions is collected works from out and about and around. It is very fun. I am not going to do my Madonna imitation singing to Roxane because I did that the last time I saw her on stage and we were not being taped. So hi. But more importantly, you do flip between fiction and nonfiction. You also flip between novels and short stories and Difficult Women. Specific as it is a really spectacular collection stories really sharp really smart like you just but when you’re flipping though, between writing a novel writing stories, writing nonfiction writing opinion pieces, writing an advice column, you are the only advice columnist I read. Where’s the switch happening? I mean, is it? Is it a language switch? Is it an idea switch?

It’s mostly an idea switch. And like Tommy said, I never want to do the same thing twice. And there are a lot of reasons for that. But particularly when I was younger, as a writer, editors would often say, you know, why isn’t this story set in a place where they would have expected a story about Black people to be set, for example. And they were often trying to pigeonhole me and that, you know, people like repetition, but especially people who suffer from the bigotry of low expectations. And I love trying new things, and it doesn’t always work. And that’s okay. I think experimentation is important, and it’s good. And so I’m always just trying new things because writing is writing. And the fundamentals are very similar across genres and projects. But I’m always stretching myself and I, you know, the question I always ask is, Can I do this? And the answer is, Well, it’s complicated. You know, it’s something to try and yeah, I hope I continue trying different things.

1MM

Okay, shall I’m gonna work in some audience questions as we go, because I don’t like to hold them to the end, because that’s boring. So growing up, who influenced you to write and tell stories?

I’ll be quick. No one. I was not an early reader or writer. And I didn’t have anybody like putting books in my hand. The only Native book that I knew about is a book called The Education of Little Tree. I hope none of you out there love that book. I think I saw somebody not in a way that indicates that they like it. It was written by an ex KKK member. And then a person who committed ethnic fraud, and said they were Cherokee, and wrote this Cherokee book that was based on no knowledge, or making up Cherokee words in it. And that was the only book that I knew about. And I didn’t even like it. And not because I knew that information. I just, I wasn’t a reader. So I came to reading really late. And in, in sort of, on my own grounds, I was working at a used bookstore. And I had to move the fiction section from the back of the store to the front. And I just, you know, just started reading, you know, I was raised in a religious household where, like, God was the most important thing, and I eventually decided that wasn’t for me. And so fiction filled this thing for me.

We’re gonna come back to influences in a second. But I want to ask Roxanne the same question because you had a slightly different experience.

I was a reader. Because I was very quiet. And I was very shy. And books really were my friends and stories were my friends and I could lose myself and forget about my actual life and just pretend something else was happening. And I loved it. And nobody in my life was a writer. I didn’t know that writing was a thing that was possible. I just knew I wanted to write. And my parents were flummoxed by it a bit, but they never discouraged it, which was incredibly important. They gave me my first typewriter, they took me to the library every week. And that really helped even though I had no model for what writing could be like, I just thought, well, I’ll just do this on the side and you know, become a doctor. like I’m supposed to, and kind of work that out, but kind of didn’t. And it was just great to have access to the library. And every week I would just marvel like, wow, I get to go and take books away for free and then read them and then do it again. And so I had access to all kinds of stories and my parents thought that if it was in a book it was appropriate and so I read a lot of Clan of the Cave Bear at like nine years old and learned a lot about what happens.

And yet you survived. I mean, this is the thing like read whatever you’re going to read, right? Like I read a lot, I mean, VC Andrews, Flowers in the Attic, like…

Tell me about like, when I look back on Flowers in the Attic, you young people probably don’t. That was mainstream, and everyone was like, Yeah, brother and sister no problem. And then they have kids.

All of it, all of it. 70s, our parents had so much to explain, they did not get away, but Saramago and Kafka. And later you came to Louise Erdrich, but I mean, you could, Clarice Lispector also, like, when I think of your influence, I love this sort of list that you have, The Bell Jar was big for you. I mean, that’s a book I remember being a little snotty about when I read it at 13, because again, reading too early, I was super snotty to about Catcher in the Rye. I was wicked snotty about that, but I was I Boston standing on a hill, you know, smiling people, whatever. But I love the idea that you’re pulling from all of these places. And people Borges, Bolaño. What made you pick those?

It’s a weird thing to discover fiction on your own. And really, I had no, I had no one telling me what to read. And I had no idea of like what the critics liked. I was just picking up books and seeing if the voice got me. And I was led, I was led through, you know, this weird winding path in bookstores. I got a book through Amazon. It was called Epitaph of Small Winner, Maria de Assis, Amazon’s algorithm gave me Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector. And it was a revelation for me like, like, what can you do with writing. So there’s a lot of that discovery and just, you know, figuring out that I love new directions as a publisher, or, or NYRB. And like all these worlds, these worlds from around the world that I otherwise would never have known about Robert Walser, like finding him on my own and figuring out what my voice was with, you know, I don’t know, in concert with this reading experience that I was finding completely on my own. For nine years. That’s, that’s all I did was try to find the voices I liked and try to find what voice was mine until I entered the MFA. That was just a different experience. But that was my formation was, was just figuring it out.

I was a history major. Like I never studied English. Roxane, you have a PhD though. So I mean, when did you started doing the whole sort of formal reading but you you’ve pulled influences from everywhere. I mean, television, film poetry, like, can we talk about some of the writers that are some of the books.

I was and remain very omnivorous as a reader. And one of the things that got me through graduate school, graduate school was fine. I didn’t actually have any sort of bad experiences. It’s just graduate school. It’s challenging and it’s overwhelming. And I decided to get a PhD in a field I knew nothing about. So I was learning this entire new thing. And so reading was my comfort. And also growing up reading was my comfort. And so I would read as a child, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I mean, it was a different time, but…

We really didn’t know a lot. Okay? What we weren’t taught, right? Like, how many of you have read Ned Blackhawk’s book that just won the National Book Award?

It just came out on Tuesday, right?

In paperback, but the hardcover came out last fall and like the things I know now, because of Professor Blackhawk, I am so deeply grateful. But I was walking around on the planet for a really long time not knowing enough about the place where I live, right. So that’s all so you know, when you’ve been around for a while you do end up reading stuff where you’re like, oh, Who?

Yea, you pick up a few things. Oh, yeah, hindsight is very helpful in that way. And so I read a lot. And also in high school, I discovered Toni Morrison, which was very late, but because my parents were immigrants, and I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, I didn’t read any Black authors because I didn’t know they existed. I knew about Haitian authors, but I didn’t know about African American authors. And then in high school, thankfully, Dolores Kendrick was this incredible poet and teacher. And she put Toni Morrison in front of me, and it was life changing, because I read Beloved. And I didn’t understand it at all. I was like, I don’t know what is happening here. But I like it. And I just love being challenged like that. And so I was always drawn to work. That was strange. Speaking of Saramago, Blindness, which is an incredible, incredible novel, and so intense, and so like to write about something horrible, so horrifying and, and to be like one person in a world where no one else can see and the way that he wrote that on the page, and Zadie Smith’s NW which actually reminds me a lot of Wandering Stars, because each section there are four sections, each section has a different narrative style. And I just tried to take something useful from everything I read, whether it’s this is what I want to try or let me never ever do that. And it’s been really helpful. And I still read every day for pleasure. And sometimes it’s five minutes, and sometimes it’s five hours, but I don’t think I could ever write well without reading.

Nostalgia, though, is something that both of you kind of wrestle with in your work, partially by ignoring it, the new, right, like I mean, and Roxane, you’ve got some characters who occasionally get cornered by nostalgia. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I just interviewed Hanif Abdurraqib, for his new memoir and nostalgia obviously plays a big part in that piece as well. And it seems to be sometimes when we get caught up in these conversations about identity and authenticity, and nostalgia is always going to color it and you somehow managed to say I’m just not going to do that. And I want to talk about that for a second. Because it feels very you it feels very true to the work. It feels very true to your voice, your characters voices. I mean, you’ve talked about how you audition voices until you know you’ve got the thing, right. I mean, is that how we did because you use nostalgia in a totally different way? In a powerful way too. But like nostalgia can be a pain. Let’s put it that way.

Yeah, I mean, I think nostalgia is always tied to memory. And memory is very tricky, and complicated. And I think thinking about personal history. And actual history is something that I have my native characters involved with. So there’s a scene in Wandering Stars, where character’s name Opal and Jackie, they’re walking around Lake Merritt, and taking pictures with their phones. And one of them loves to look back at pictures taken from their life. And like that will find themselves just doing that. And that’s a form of nostalgia. It’s like recent nostalgia, I don’t know when it’s still just starts when you’re allowed to be called nostalgia, but like fondness of memory, and trying to revisit feelings from the past is like a very loaded thing. Because if the past wasn’t good, then why would you revisit it?

What if you weren’t taught your past?

Well, there’s another piece.

How do you connect when you haven’t been taught the thing? Yeah. And that’s, I mean, and Roxane, I sort of feel like you’ve been wrestling? I mean, yeah, there’s the whole Midwestern piece too. But then Haiti, like, I mean, there are still plenty of people who don’t even know that Haiti is half of the Dominican Republic, the same island. But there’s the other half is the Dominican Republic. And that makes me sad that people don’t recognize that.

Yeah, I mean, when you come from a place like Haiti, which is wonderful, it’s beautiful. And it’s also very complicated and very challenging. And Haitians actually are masters of nostalgia and people will often wax poetic for the better days but the better days that they’re sort of being nostalgic for were under a dictator who used to pull people from their homes in the middle of the night. And so it’s really relative as to like, who had it good and under for example, Duvalier or Baby Doc and who didn’t. And I think oftentimes nostalgia is a yearning for, in for fallible memories for memories that are generally self serving and rewrite history. And that’s human. I try not to judge it at all, but I do think it’s interesting to think about that when writing. And my favorite novel is Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which I think is a perfect book. And it is one that does some very interesting things with nostalgia, because Newland Archer is nostalgic for old New York, but he is old New York is actually nostalgic for the life he’s living, simply because he can’t find the courage to make a different decision to have a different kind of life. And I love that complexity. And this not romanticizing of nostalgia, but sort of directing this critical lens to it. And I find that to be a rich place, both in fiction and nonfiction.

What do you both get from writing? What itch is it scratching for you? What’s it doing? What’s it giving you?

I mean, I think it’s a lot of things. There’s always a palpable, if I wrote a significant amount, that doesn’t necessarily mean for hours, it means like I put in quality time, I always feel better, just overall, as a human being and feeling like some kind of groundedness and some kind of like, an ease to restlessness that is just kind of always there. It’s also like, brings me hell, and brings me restlessness and brings a lot of challenging things. So I think it’s, it runs the gamut. But in the end, I know if I’m doing it, and if I’m engaging with it, I’m a better person overall.

But writing and thinking for you, didn’t you? I think you told, Morgan told you this. Like, if you’re not thinking, you’re not writing, and if you’re not writing, you can’t figure I I’m paraphrasing you really poorly, but I’m going to ask you to riff off of that for a second.

I mean, I think it’s an extension of thinking, okay, with thinking you’re, you know, most people, it’s just like, it flies into your head, you know, a lot of it’s unconscious, a lot of it’s like, habit, a lot of it’s learned from parents or people that you are around a lot or TV or you know, what you read, thought is a really strange thing. And a lot of us sometimes are like, I’m gonna let you drive anxiety, I’m just gonna think and worry all day about this set of things that’s going to make me feel uncomfortable all day. So there’s a lot of unconscious aspects to it. But with writing, you know, you can refine what the thoughts that are coming out. Or you can think about a character who’s being processed through your feelings and thoughts. And it really clarifies things that otherwise stay in this muddy unconscious area that just like shoots things up at you. And you’re sort of like, at the whim of, of sometimes your worser selves.

In general, in general, writing is very pleasurable. I’m not a tortured writer, I love it. It relaxes me. I think it’s self-medication in many ways. But I’ve been struggling with writing in recent years. And I think it’s in part because writing as a Black woman, in this current climate can be very fraught, right. And I never anticipated when I started writing, that I would have to deal with death threats, and harassment, and doxxing and things that put my family in danger. And so it makes it scary to do the work that I think I’m probably best at. And so now every time I sit down to write, I just think, well, what is this going to do? The older I get, the less interested I am in paying that price. It’s just like, I don’t know, I’ll just keep my thoughts to myself. And it’s a shame because like, I miss it. And I also need to do it because my book is so late. My actual book, and I will get it done. I I’ve been like working on it in therapy. And it’s been actually helping, as I sort of figure out like, what am I really worried about, and what can I do to allay those fears? And also, am I just being lazy? And so that’s been helpful, but hopefully I can if not, hopefully, I will get back to it. I feel like I feel like I’m within spitting distance, which I haven’t felt for a while. And I just also love being able to write at this time. I think every I hope every generation of writers feels as lucky as I do to be able to write with contemporaries like Tommy, Kiese Laymon, Tressie McMillan Cottom. I mean, it’s an embarrassment of riches to be writing in with these voices. So that’s also something writing brings me it’s just wow I get exposed to the most incredible minds and to see what people are capable of. It’s humbling and also just thrilling.

One of the things Tommy has talked about in other interviews, too, is this idea of a voiceless community, right? Like, Native stories have not been told. At all, particularly well, I mean, there’s, there’s stuff missing from, like, I remember chasing down both Japanese American and Chinese American and the stories when I was younger, and like, a lot of it was like, sort of self published or was lots of people from Boston explaining Asia to me. And I was like, Hi. So to be in that space, where you know, and Roxane, you just said this to you were growing up in Omaha, you knew Haitian writers, you didn’t know African American writers. And I just I feel like we’re in this moment with books where we’re just really lucky. Because you’re writing Tommy Orange stories. Yeah, they’re Native. But you’re also, I mean, I love your characters. I love their voices. They constantly surprise me. Charles, can we talk about Charles for a second, we’re going back in time. There’s a character you’re going to meet in Wandering Stars, who comes to the Bible, he comes to Western literature? And he says, Oh, this is my canon. I mean, he doesn’t know. Right? He has no idea. And then eventually, we’re gonna get further along in the stories. I mean, are you writing to read the things you wanted to read? Or are you writing because you’re just telling the truth of these voices?

I think there’s some of like, you have to be writing the things that you want to be in the world. I think you write the kinds of books that you love, and also the ones that aren’t there. I think that’s a big part of it. I think sometimes voicelessness because, you know, when I first published There, There and did interviews, I think I even said, like reading from a voiceless community. And I think sometimes that’s, that’s actually the wrong, it’s a wrongheaded thinking, like the voicelessness it should be put on the people not listening to the voices that are definitely there. Right, rather than like them not having voices. So I definitely think I’m, I’m writing what I would want to the kind of book I would want to read, for sure. And Charles is a weird case. Because he’s like, a lot of nomadic from the 1910s and 1920s. But he’s a writer, and I wrote that, that part, that character, from a deeply personal place, but like, we don’t have very much in common.

Now, but I liked the little slap at Jack London, when he realized he was like, Well, I liked Jack London, and I started reading him. And I was like, I mean, going back to our moment of, oh, you have what’s in front of you.

I was recently in Jack London square in Oakland. And I was with my son and our dogs. And I was wanting to tell him like where we were, and like, who Jack London was, and we went over to his statue, because the statute right next to this restaurant called Scott’s in the hotel we were staying at. And somebody put like a bread and empty bread bowl in his hand, because he’s like looking at the ocean. And we were kind of making fun of him. And I was like, you know, he’s a writer from a different time. And he wrote about Native people in a really bad way. But, you know, he’s sort of important, and Oakland doesn’t have that many people to choose from. And all of a sudden, my dog, who’s the sweetest, doesn’t ever bark at anybody. All of a sudden, he starts wildly barking at the Jack London statue. And then my other dog does. And then several dogs from around, they all start going crazy. And I’m like, the spirit of Jack London right now. They’re barking directly at the statue. And I just would just leave anyway. I don’t know what that was.

I’m going to enjoy it. Okay, but Roxane, you too? I mean, you write amazing stories about amazing women who don’t always get their turn.

Yeah. You know, I do write a lot of the kinds of things that I enjoy reading. And that means complicated characters and complicated situations. And I love to give the reader about like 80 to 85% of what they want, so that you feel a sense of closure and satisfaction, but you also want more and I think that’s a really interesting place narratively, and I just love to explore that and sort of just figure out okay, what does it feel like to sort of have closure but also know that there is no such thing as closure really, and And, yeah, that’s the way I tend to write and so far, so good.

Okay, I’m gonna use an audience question to set us up. Because we’re bumping into time. I knew this was going to happen, this always happens. What’s your favorite part of the writing process? So let’s talk craft for two seconds, because we are going to get to Kaveh Akbar tonight.

So when I first start writing, and I’m excited about a voice or an idea, I love like, first drafts, and the experience of like, being excited, that is often paired with the next day after I’m like, this is the best thing I’ve ever written. The next day being like, Oh, this is horrible. How am I going to continue with this thing I’ve been so excited about, if I’m writing this badly, so it’s paired, it’s always paired with that, but I still love. You know, the new writing, it’s one of my favorite things about writing is, like, just, you know, finding out what I might have to say about a thing.

I tend to do a lot of my writing in my head. So when I sit down at my laptop to write, I generally know already what I want to say and how I want to say it. And so I write fast. And I love that feeling of it just pouring out and like just riffing on myself. And just like high fiving, myself, girl, yes, you are in your bag tonight. And also that sobering morning after where you’re like, huh, the bag ripped. But I just love that act of generation. And, you know, oftentimes writers worship at the altar of revision, and I’m very happy for writers for whom that is their process. That is just not me. Like I believe in a first draft. I think that our and I tell my students this too. I think those initial instincts mean something. They’re not always right. But they do mean something. And so I just love that act of generation when the words are coming. And I’m not sort of staring at a screen and the cursor well, we don’t really see the cursor anymore, but sort of staring at that screen. Just begging myself to get in the zone. Like I just want to be in the zone. Fair,

Totally fair. Tommy, lots of people are going to ask you to tell the story. And I’m still going to ask you because I got Kaveh’s half of the story a couple of months ago, you had a very cool writing exercise that you were doing with Mr. Akbar, as you were writing Wandering Stars and he was writing Martyr and if you are in the audience and have not yet read Martyr, please do yourselves a favor. It is very funny. It is wild. It is life affirming. It is amazing, that book, but I want to talk about two dudes exchanging poems over email after a meeting in Indiana.

Yeah, so I was I was at Purdue. And my dear friend, Teres Maya taught there at the time. As Roxane, I was hoping to meet Roxane. But I got to meet Kaveh at a dinner. And we were driving from the dinner to another social thing with Purdue people. And he said, at this point, I had read his poetry. I was already a fan of him. But he also had read There, There. And at this point There, There had been out for long enough that it’s like it success was sort of a thing. And he said, what’s the craziest thing that’s happened because of the success? And I said, I did a Simpsons table read, and actually, actually went with my best friend is in the audience. We got to sit around with all the actors, and we did a read. And he said in this way, that was like, Oh, he loves the Simpsons. And, you know, a lot of people love the Simpsons, but it was just this moment of like, Oh, I like this guy. And in the same car ride over his wife, Paige, she has, they have a book called star struck, that they were telling me about, and I thought it was space truck, right. And we ended up exchanging emails. And this is embarrassing. But I sent him a poem called Space truck about a space truck. And it was like tongue in cheek. But it was, you know, it was a poem that I wrote. That’s the embarrassing part, to a poet that I like, deeply admired. But because there was this sort of humorous buffer or whatever, it allowed us to have this exchange that then turned into eventually we’re writing our books together. And that’s what happened.

Roxane what’s next? Can we talk about the Channing Tatum thing?

Oh, is it he’s really talking about crazy things that happen. I

know, but it’s a great story. It is. So I

I enjoy Channing Tatum It just is. I don’t know, he’s just thick and meaty. And I’m from Nebraska, so it’s genetic. And I guess I mentioned him one time too many in an interview and a journalist in Australia, told him Hey, did you know that the feminist writer Roxane Gay has a crush on you? And he was like, oh, no, that’s so cool. And she was like, So are you a feminist? And he’s like, I don’t really know a lot about it, but I guess I should read about it. And so he read Bad Feminist. And I don’t know how this happened. But he called his people called my person, my incredible agent, Maria Massey. And Maria Massey was like, Are you sitting down? And I was like, No, I’m good. Like, what possibly could she tell me that would require me to sit down? And she was like, No, really. And so I sat down and she said, Channing Tatum wants to write a book. Oh, my God, I’m so glad you told me to sit. I was just dumbfounded. I kind of still am. And but we’re writing. together. And I actually have to turn it in on May 1, which is likely because anyway, and it’s coming out on Valentine’s Day or Valentine’s week 2025. And it’s called down to you, it’s about a couple, two best friends who when they turned 40 marry each other because they made one of those pacts. And then they fall in love, because they have to figure out like how to be married. And it’s I needed something fun and sweet. And I just needed something that was not fraught and full of importance. And I mean, romance is important. Don’t mystery that I just needed something fun. And this one is fun. And it’s low stakes in that. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out and I’ll be okay no matter what. And it’s been a joy to work on. And he’s been a joy to work with. He smells like a pine forest. And I didn’t ask him to do this. I didn’t even consider it or think about it. But he insisted that we got paid equally, which, for me, it was life changing. And for him was pocket change. But he didn’t have to do that. And so it has made this project. Lovely both behind the scenes and on the page.

What I really, really want is for both of you to both, just keep writing whatever you want, because clearly I will read whatever you write, but that’s that. This is the moment we’re living in, right. You get to write the thing you want to write and you get to make people’s heads explode. And I love that. I love that for all of us. And I’m gonna thank all of you for joining us. This is Poured Over, Tommy Orange, Roxane Gay.

Poured Over