The Framework of These Delights: 5 Questions with Ross Gay Author of The Book of (More) Delights

What made you want to write a follow up to The Book of Delights?

A few things probably, and one of them was that my buddy asked me if I was going to keep writing delights as I was finishing the first book. I talk about this in the introduction. But I also am really interested in serial projects, things that go on and on — I love Robert Motherwell’s series of paintings, “Elegy for the Spanish Republic”, that kind of thing.  Embedded in that probably is that I’m interested in change, how people change, myself included, and I thought it would be nice to be able to witness that change inside of the framework of these delights.  

You talk a lot about joy — what it is, how to find it, trying to understand it. What first drew you to start ruminating on joy?

After I wrote my third book of poems, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, a lot of people were talking about the book as being about joy, or being joyful. That was interesting to me because I wasn’t really thinking that explicitly — I was thinking of it as being about the garden or the orchard or my father’s death or my neighborhood or my murdered buddy or memory or desire or a bunch of other stuff (all of which it is “about”). But when people related to Catalog like that, I started thinking about joy in a concerted way. I think that’s how it happened anyway.

You focus so much on connection and the moments that make us feel a part of something. In between The Book of Delights (2019) and this year’s The Book of (More) Delights, we’ve had a major disruptor to connection coming in the form of a pandemic. Did that change the way you appreciated life, community, and daily wonders?

If some of us didn’t know before how vital, life-sustaining is touch, and gathering, and eating with your beloveds, and playing ball, and being in rooms with people, all the indispensable sharings touch makes possible, well, maybe now we know.  

So often we think of joy or delight as a standalone emotion, but your essays juxtapose these with difficult moments and the routine of everyday life. People might envy your optimism in these moments — how do you maintain an appreciative mindset even in the harder moments of life?

I’m glad you used the world optimistic because I’m not. Nor am I pessimistic. I am cultivating the practice, and the ability, to describe things that I see. So when I see a guy in terrible shape stopped mid-stride and folded over on Market Street in Philadelphia in what I imagine was some kind of opioid stupor, and see a woman standing next to him for five minutes — five actual minutes — holding a five dollar bill out to him, waiting from him to emerge from wherever he went, I’m just describing what I’m seeing: profound suffering and profound care right next to each other.  It’s not a proclivity or a bent, it’s just a description. 

What are the things in life — large or small — that bring you delight/joy?

That’s a trick question, right? Too many to say! Though this second there is a teeny butterfly or moth or something rocking in the breeze on a tithonia plant almost within arm’s reach.  The butterfly, the breeze, the flower, the collaboration between them all, within reach: there’s a handful.