Training Up Champions with Julian Randall

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_01]: Trigger warning. This episode contains an extensive conversation on anxiety, depression, and suicidality.

[00:00:09] [SPEAKER_01]: Please take care of yourself if choosing to listen.

[00:00:13] [SPEAKER_01]: Be blessed.

[00:00:15] [SPEAKER_03]: You can't write a book like this and be talking to yourself like you are a failure every five seconds.

[00:00:22] [SPEAKER_03]: You will not survive it.

[00:00:24] [SPEAKER_01]: What's good? I'm Nikesha Elise Williams and this is Black and Published,

[00:00:29] [SPEAKER_01]: bringing you the journeys of writers, poets, playwrights, and storytellers of all kinds.

[00:00:36] [SPEAKER_01]: Today's guest is Julian Randall, author of the essay collection, The Dead Don't Need Reminding,

[00:00:43] [SPEAKER_01]: in search of fugitives, Mississippi, and Black TV nerd shit.

[00:00:47] [SPEAKER_01]: It's a collection that uses pop culture as a tool to evoke collective memory,

[00:00:52] [SPEAKER_01]: while also mining Julian's own remembrances and ancestry that led him to actively choose to live,

[00:00:59] [SPEAKER_01]: when at times, all he wanted to do was die.

[00:01:03] [SPEAKER_03]: I came from a long life of brothers who had escaped death at the last minute.

[00:01:09] [SPEAKER_03]: They survived all these threats to them and I still am trying to process the shame that I am the biggest threat to me there is.

[00:01:18] [SPEAKER_01]: Author of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize-winning collection Refuse, Julian got their start as a slam poet.

[00:01:24] [SPEAKER_01]: In making the transition from the stage to the page, they say talking to themselves instead of an audience was difficult.

[00:01:33] [SPEAKER_01]: What they miss most about slam and sports when moving into the book space.

[00:01:39] [SPEAKER_01]: Plus, the violent question one editor asked that triggered their suicidality.

[00:01:44] [SPEAKER_01]: And the three ingredients they had to have to write this essay collection on the great escapes from death across multiple generations.

[00:01:52] [SPEAKER_01]: That and more is next when Black and Published continues.

[00:02:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Alright, Julian, when did you know that you were a writer?

[00:02:12] [SPEAKER_03]: My origin story is that my best friend in the world, Noel Quinones, lived upstairs from me in my dorm so we're talking 2011.

[00:02:22] [SPEAKER_03]: And this amazing poet named Jamal May was featuring at this slam.

[00:02:26] [SPEAKER_03]: I'd never been to a slam before, but Noel had been to many slams.

[00:02:30] [SPEAKER_03]: So I said fine, I'll come to your little slam and then I came to the slam and Jamal killed it.

[00:02:37] [SPEAKER_03]: He was dusting folks left and right.

[00:02:40] [SPEAKER_03]: But what was really important about that open mic was that I saw these other Black and Brown kids,

[00:02:45] [SPEAKER_03]: like people who also wrote poems like they were children of hip hop, who like wrote poems and made it sound like they called their grandma Abuela too.

[00:02:52] [SPEAKER_03]: So I ended up getting onto the college slam team and I felt like that was the moment that I was like, OK, I'm like, at least one of the better writers on this campus.

[00:03:03] [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe I could be one of the better writers in this country.

[00:03:06] [SPEAKER_03]: And then my goals shifted, of course, but that was how it started.

[00:03:10] [SPEAKER_01]: I love all of the initial confidence and just like the bravado like, oh, I can be better than everybody in the country.

[00:03:17] [SPEAKER_01]: But then you say the goals shifted. So then what was the shift and why and what happened?

[00:03:24] [SPEAKER_03]: Slam gave me a culture and a family and artistic community that I felt accountable to.

[00:03:30] [SPEAKER_03]: But I think that around the time that I stopped slamming is when the goals started to shift a lot in terms of what became my metrics, right, of how I was measuring my own personal growth.

[00:03:39] [SPEAKER_03]: By the summer of 2015, I just didn't like the person I was turning into.

[00:03:43] [SPEAKER_03]: It used to be like you lose a slam. Like it sucks because you don't want to lose careers in jeopardy.

[00:03:49] [SPEAKER_03]: My personal is not safe. Like I don't have a future because I'm not moving forward in this.

[00:03:59] [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it's not wrong to say it's a bar game. Like slam is a bar game. Slam is many things. It is a subgenre of poetry.

[00:04:05] [SPEAKER_03]: It is a important part of how American letters like does what it does. But also at the same time, it is at its roots of our game.

[00:04:14] [SPEAKER_01]: I've never heard anybody break down slam as a bar game, but the bar game, a crapshoot. Yeah, I guess.

[00:04:22] [SPEAKER_01]: So then what became the new goal?

[00:04:25] [SPEAKER_03]: The new goals just became like what is the most expansive version of the writer that I wanted to be that I could be?

[00:04:30] [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, so folks in my group chat keep calling me genre Thanos because I just try to make as many different writers as I can be.

[00:04:39] [SPEAKER_03]: But it's really like I keep coming back to that Morgan Parker quote of I'm trying to be as many people as I can until I can't.

[00:04:46] [SPEAKER_01]: So you were making a conscious effort to go from stage to the page. Did you find that transition difficult?

[00:04:51] [SPEAKER_03]: So my slam period generally begins around 2012 and ends, I'd say, like late 2016 is when I stopped slamming officially.

[00:05:05] [SPEAKER_03]: When I moved down to Oxford, that time period is a very distinct page versus stage kind of beat for how folks were talking about things.

[00:05:13] [SPEAKER_03]: It was definitely one that I had as I was moving into doing more things that were like more like page oriented in terms of like how does the body of this poem, how did the line breaks and the enjambments like move across a bunch of different stuff.

[00:05:26] [SPEAKER_03]: What was maybe difficult was more just like learning how to talk to myself because the slam is both the best and the most challenging way that I think like a former athlete can get in contact with the way that they are creating.

[00:05:43] [SPEAKER_03]: And what I mean by that is when you're an athlete, you get immediate feedback.

[00:05:49] [SPEAKER_03]: Right? For me, I go off to college. My first big slam competition was the National College Slam, Cupsie College Union's Poetry Slam Invitational.

[00:05:57] [SPEAKER_03]: And suddenly I was like, hey, you're getting immediate feedback. Do the poem, you get a 10 or you're not.

[00:06:02] [SPEAKER_03]: You are watching your teammates get immediate feedback on their thing.

[00:06:07] [SPEAKER_03]: And then you transition into other elements of your artistic life and that immediacy of feedback just disappears.

[00:06:14] [SPEAKER_03]: And I was not very good at talking to myself like I would talk to literally any other person with kindness and respect and forgiveness and like a general grace for the measure of growth.

[00:06:26] [SPEAKER_03]: And so when I came up against like, well, how I don't know how to put together a book, I feel like I had a really blessed experience compared to a lot of other Black folks I know, which is not to say that it was not without conflict, not without challenge or anything like that.

[00:06:40] [SPEAKER_03]: But it much more became I am alone with the isolated feedback of how do we win?

[00:06:46] [SPEAKER_03]: And that's not really the way that literature be working in the vast context of things.

[00:06:53] [SPEAKER_03]: And it took me some time to get ready for that. That was a really long answer to your question, my bad.

[00:06:58] [SPEAKER_01]: It was a really long answer. And I have one immediate question, but I want to dig in just a bit because you talk about in the book that you have an injury from football and your leg and in your hip.

[00:07:13] [SPEAKER_01]: So like you had to stop playing ball, but you were used to that immediate feedback of sports.

[00:07:18] [SPEAKER_01]: So I want to challenge you a bit because you chose this.

[00:07:24] [SPEAKER_01]: You chose to leave what was immediate gratification because it wasn't giving you the same high as you got the first time that you ever hit the stage and got a 10 and won a slam.

[00:07:36] [SPEAKER_01]: And you wanted to stretch yourself and to grow and to challenge yourself.

[00:07:40] [SPEAKER_01]: So there has to be a reason why that even though you don't like sitting with the feelings of looking and talking to yourself that writing requires that you continue to choose it because the dead don't need reminding is not your first book.

[00:07:55] [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, no, not at all. To be clear, I don't regret taking this little book path.

[00:07:59] [SPEAKER_03]: Because like, for instance, the first book that ever came out was Refuse and that was the Cape Canaan Prize.

[00:08:04] [SPEAKER_03]: And that was cool winning in this way that was very competition oriented in this way that over time, the more time I've spent with books, the more it has helped me move towards a mentality of being able to turn that instinct in a positive way towards myself.

[00:08:25] [SPEAKER_03]: Before it would just be like, well, if I don't feel like I'm winning, then I must be losing. Right.

[00:08:29] [SPEAKER_03]: And now it's like, I'm trying to be better than I was on the last book.

[00:08:35] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm trying to take some lesson that I learned from the last book and import it into now that I know how to do this thing.

[00:08:41] [SPEAKER_03]: What more can I do at the same time? And that has like kind of methodology of improvement.

[00:08:46] [SPEAKER_03]: But yes, no, you're absolutely right that I do keep choosing this even though we are on page 30 of book six right now.

[00:08:53] [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm like, why did I do this? Why don't I have a normal job?

[00:08:59] [SPEAKER_03]: Why don't I have a normal job like a person?

[00:09:02] [SPEAKER_03]: But I love what I do.

[00:09:04] [SPEAKER_01]: Okay. So then let's talk about the movement from poetry to prose.

[00:09:11] [SPEAKER_01]: What was that transition and why did you feel that you needed to make that transition?

[00:09:16] [SPEAKER_03]: So during the time period that I was down in Oxford, I had an uncommonly good experience.

[00:09:21] [SPEAKER_03]: There's no way to talk about that without lifting up the name of Derek Harrell, the name of Kiese Layman, the name of Amy and Zuka Matadle.

[00:09:27] [SPEAKER_03]: Those three were my professor's note and deepest merit when I was out there.

[00:09:33] [SPEAKER_03]: And so Amy and Derek were both on my thesis committee.

[00:09:36] [SPEAKER_03]: Kiese didn't get to be because you need to have an academic person on there.

[00:09:39] [SPEAKER_03]: But Kiese was always somebody who saw more for me than I was able to see for myself.

[00:09:46] [SPEAKER_03]: I wanted to poem until the end of time.

[00:09:49] [SPEAKER_03]: And I came to him with this idea for a TV show, but I'm like, I don't understand the narrative of the TV show.

[00:09:56] [SPEAKER_03]: Like, how do I do that?

[00:09:57] [SPEAKER_03]: And he said, well, have you tried writing it down as a novel?

[00:09:59] [SPEAKER_03]: And I was like, no, I don't know how to write fiction.

[00:10:02] [SPEAKER_03]: And he said, well, just try it.

[00:10:03] [SPEAKER_03]: I wrote like 16 pages and I turned it into him.

[00:10:06] [SPEAKER_03]: And I pulled up to his office to get feedback from him thinking like, OK, maybe he's gotten the chance to read like a little bit of it.

[00:10:11] [SPEAKER_03]: He has read all of these pages twice.

[00:10:14] [SPEAKER_03]: He's got like a bunch of feedback.

[00:10:17] [SPEAKER_03]: So that gave me so much confidence in terms of what else can I do?

[00:10:22] [SPEAKER_03]: And then the semester after that was when Kiese was finally teaching the nonfiction workshop that had been being asked of him constantly every day for four and a half years.

[00:10:34] [SPEAKER_03]: And I wanted to come into the workshop doing the things that I always thought were important in terms of being a good workshop member.

[00:10:42] [SPEAKER_03]: And so I was like, yeah, I'm going to assign myself two, three essays.

[00:10:46] [SPEAKER_03]: And so I know what my profligates are, what I tend to lean towards, what are my tendencies.

[00:10:51] [SPEAKER_03]: And that was became some of the first essays in The Dead Don't Need Reminding.

[00:10:54] [SPEAKER_01]: So you started what became The Dead Don't Need Reminding while you were in your MFA program.

[00:10:59] [SPEAKER_01]: Shout out to Derek Harrell, who was actually on the show last season with his poetry collection Come Kingdom.

[00:11:07] [SPEAKER_03]: That's behind me.

[00:11:09] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:11:09] [SPEAKER_01]: So you started it then.

[00:11:13] [SPEAKER_01]: But in the book, I can tell that you were a poet from the way that the book reads, especially like the first sentence in the first chapter.

[00:11:20] [SPEAKER_01]: I was like, well, damn, that's a way to open a book.

[00:11:23] [SPEAKER_01]: But you started it then.

[00:11:26] [SPEAKER_01]: But the book has taken the form of part memoir, part cultural criticism of like contemporary pop culture, obviously.

[00:11:38] [SPEAKER_01]: And so over the years that you were working on it until now that it's getting ready to come out, how did you formulate what it would be that would ground this story?

[00:11:48] [SPEAKER_03]: I think the first task with any book is like coming into it with your understanding what it is.

[00:11:55] [SPEAKER_03]: And then the second and like quieter, much harder task is accepting what the book wants to be.

[00:12:04] [SPEAKER_03]: And for the first like eight, nine months that I was working on this book, it did not want to tell me nothing because I hadn't given myself permission to be like the narrator of the book in a lot of ways.

[00:12:18] [SPEAKER_03]: I think that I wanted to prove that essay Julian and poetry Julian were like such different Julian and so I was denying a lot of parts of myself that I felt like needed to that needed to show up in the book.

[00:12:33] [SPEAKER_03]: And because of that, I knew that there was a conversation to be had about what it is to be like black and suicidal, what it is to be a black person who is from the north, who is from Chicago,

[00:12:46] [SPEAKER_03]: but has roots in Mississippi. I knew that there was the like central cog of that story, but I thought that that was one essay, not the whole book.

[00:12:56] [SPEAKER_03]: So it took a lot of shopping the book around and a lot of revision, a lot of revision, like giving myself space to turn it from like, yo, look how smart I am to like, OK, I want to put you directly in this moment.

[00:13:12] [SPEAKER_03]: And I thought that it would be distracting if I did this like a poet, but I'm gonna try it anyway.

[00:13:19] [SPEAKER_03]: And so bringing, I think the kind of narrative sensibility that I developed across the course of working on novels and bringing the poetic sensibility of linguistically what is this collection feel like?

[00:13:30] [SPEAKER_03]: The secret third thing that I was missing was accepting that this is a story about me and also a story about my great grandfather and his escape from Mississippi and how that seeded my grandmother who begat my father, who begat me, and how any of those things go wrong.

[00:13:46] [SPEAKER_03]: This was the other thing that was messing with me about it is that I had a thesis project that I was working on because refuse got picked up and that book became this project called Flex, which I don't know if it's ever coming out or not.

[00:13:58] [SPEAKER_03]: But it was about the confluence of what had gone on with my great grandfather's story, what had gone on with my abuelo's escape from DR and how do those things come together into an understanding of strength and musculature when you are experiencing chronic pain, when you are experiencing like a suicidality that is like deeply linked to that pain, deeply linked to that anxiety and that depression.

[00:14:21] [SPEAKER_03]: How do you kind of uphold that lineage? And so for me, but the book that Flex was so separate from this other project of trying to like think through like TV and identity and stuff like that.

[00:14:36] [SPEAKER_03]: And then I realized that both of these books were like, I fought it for so long because I didn't want Flex to be for nothing, but it was all important.

[00:14:46] [SPEAKER_03]: It just didn't matter the way that you originally planned for them to, but that doesn't mean that they were failures.

[00:14:50] [SPEAKER_01]: And having read the book, it's almost curious to know how you did survive it when there is a heaviness in the focus on not wanting to live and maybe doing so to initially please your parents.

[00:15:13] [SPEAKER_01]: You said, just we'll get there.

[00:15:16] [SPEAKER_01]: But you said a lot of that kind of thought in bringing those three pieces of the book together happened in revision and shopping it around.

[00:15:25] [SPEAKER_01]: So I do want to ask you about your publishing process.

[00:15:28] [SPEAKER_01]: Did you try to write this and go on proposal and do all those things before you had all three of those parts together that you needed to merge to really write what became the Dead Don't Need Reminding?

[00:15:42] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we did.

[00:15:44] [SPEAKER_03]: Because like we were on submission for like nine months and we were getting all kinds of the most frustrating kind of feedback, which is folks being like almost but not telling you what wasn't there.

[00:16:01] [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of folks playing in our face. A lot of folks playing in our face. I'm not gonna name them, but I would hope that they know who they are.

[00:16:09] [SPEAKER_03]: Well, a lot of folks playing in our face.

[00:16:12] [SPEAKER_03]: But also just it was I think the thing that was most frustrating is that folks would say this is almost there, but it needs editing and I was like that's what we came to do for.

[00:16:20] [SPEAKER_03]: We got an opportunity to pitch to a different person who did some very harmful things, but also asked a useful question that helped me give myself permission to do other things, but also then followed it up with one of the most wildly violent interactions I've had in the whole course of my publishing career.

[00:16:43] [SPEAKER_03]: I hope that brother's having a terrible day.

[00:16:45] [SPEAKER_01]: Can you explain and expand because like we're being real evasive, but I mean you don't have to name names, but like I'm really curious because to be wildly violent with the author and their project is really harmful.

[00:16:58] [SPEAKER_03]: No, that's fair. So the thing is brother commissioned me to do like a radical revision on a bunch of other things like yo you got like one month, like retool these essays and we'll see what's good we'll see what's poppin' and me having already kind of been

[00:17:15] [SPEAKER_03]: on the precipice of a number of things I was like all right cool doing this for a month like just wake up revisions go to sleep revisions like totally reimagining all this stuff right.

[00:17:24] [SPEAKER_03]: This brother calls me at 830 at night on a Friday, and I'm thinking this must be good news. Why else would somebody call my personal phone?

[00:17:34] [SPEAKER_01]: If it's not good news why are you calling me at 830 at night on a Friday?

[00:17:38] [SPEAKER_03]: Why else would someone call me at 830 at night on a Friday?

[00:17:43] [SPEAKER_03]: And he talking about yo this is cool, this is good, da da da, like you know we got we gotta do it a couple other little revisions and we gonna be good but like you know asking me about like why does this matter?

[00:17:58] [SPEAKER_03]: I was like alright so I explain it and I'm talking about like yeah you know there's gonna be like a suicidality essay in the back end of the book.

[00:18:06] [SPEAKER_03]: Why did this brother feel like he was cool to say that train that you wanted to throw yourself in front of might not have killed you, it might have just made you wish you were dead?

[00:18:19] [SPEAKER_03]: Why did he feel like that was an appropriate thing for him to say in that moment?

[00:18:25] [SPEAKER_03]: Why did that what what would that have been? It was one of the most wildly violent things anybody's ever said to me and like I said I hope that brother is having a terrible day.

[00:18:35] [SPEAKER_01]: At that point that he said that to you, were you, do you think that you had fully come out of the depression that grounds this book?

[00:18:48] [SPEAKER_01]: Are you out of it now?

[00:18:50] [SPEAKER_03]: No, no I don't think that I had. The thing is it's like people who experience suicidality don't really have access to chronology in the way that non-suicidal people do.

[00:19:00] [SPEAKER_03]: Like there's not really an out or another side.

[00:19:03] [SPEAKER_03]: Like what I say like I've never been so triggered.

[00:19:06] [SPEAKER_03]: I ain't never been so triggered because I was like if I say anything in this moment, if I say anything in this moment, this book dies.

[00:19:13] [SPEAKER_03]: It dies right in front of me.

[00:19:16] [SPEAKER_03]: Because I'm trying to put up a boundary.

[00:19:21] [SPEAKER_03]: And boy didn't even pick up the book.

[00:19:24] [SPEAKER_03]: End of the day, it still goes through the end of the day. So this is like I don't rock with you bro. I don't rock with you.

[00:19:32] [SPEAKER_03]: And that code ugly.

[00:19:35] [SPEAKER_01]: You so Chicago. When and who and how did you get your yes?

[00:19:42] [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so the yes that we got was because I wrote this article for the Atlantic titled gold teeth are beautiful on their own terms.

[00:19:51] [SPEAKER_03]: So that caught the attention of an editor at bold type and they reached out to ask, hey, are you working on anything right now?

[00:19:59] [SPEAKER_03]: I'd already moved on to like, okay, let's just put it in the vault and like just let it keep being a story that I can't stop telling no matter where I go.

[00:20:07] [SPEAKER_03]: And it will come back eventually. It is going to come back. And then that came down like a couple days before me and my agent were going to send out the emails to everyone saying, hey, we're pulling this off a submission.

[00:20:19] [SPEAKER_03]: We're going to do some work on it on our own.

[00:20:24] [SPEAKER_03]: So we say yes to that. And yes, I've been signed to both type books ever since. I really want to shout out my incredible editor Molly McGee who came on a little later in the book and like just really helped put it back together in a way that is pretty analogous

[00:20:37] [SPEAKER_03]: to where it is now. But I really cannot say enough good things about Molly McGee was also the author of Jonathan Abernathy, You Are Kind. She is an incredible editor and she should.

[00:20:47] [SPEAKER_03]: She deserves all the freelance work that she wants and all of the benefits and whatever snacks she asks for. She is a trainer of champions.

[00:20:56] [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's the name for the episode, trainer of champions. Okay, will you read something from the did don't need reminding?

[00:21:04] [SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.

[00:21:05] [SPEAKER_01]: Julian Randall's essay collection, the dead don't need reminding, braids memoir with pop culture criticism to unravel the tale of their white passing great grandfathers escape from the South mixed with Julian's own escape from suicide while also addressing the harmful impacts of code switching Kanye West and seeing black death on autoplay on social media.

[00:21:31] [SPEAKER_01]: Here's Julian.

[00:21:33] [SPEAKER_03]: Alright, this is the first paragraph in the book.

[00:21:36] [SPEAKER_03]: Oxford.

[00:21:38] [SPEAKER_03]: Well amen.

[00:21:39] [SPEAKER_03]: Mississippi is all beginnings.

[00:21:42] [SPEAKER_03]: The first time I arrived in Oxford, Mississippi, it's mid July and swelter jewels the kudzu with frenzied summer rains.

[00:21:49] [SPEAKER_03]: This is the zero country, I think, as the kudzu swirls over itself like waves of water.

[00:21:56] [SPEAKER_03]: This is the zero country.

[00:21:58] [SPEAKER_03]: This place that is home to some and strange to me.

[00:22:01] [SPEAKER_03]: This is the zero country, Mississippi, and I am about to take my first step into my new life by chasing down one that ended decades before I was born.

[00:22:11] [SPEAKER_03]: At the start, the Oxford is riddled with plantation style houses American palaces with windows stacked upon window. Every column bone bright in the dark.

[00:22:23] [SPEAKER_03]: There are plantations everywhere.

[00:22:25] [SPEAKER_03]: And they are never the plantation I need.

[00:22:28] [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.

[00:22:30] [SPEAKER_01]: Do you think writing this book was a way for you to be kind to yourself.

[00:22:35] [SPEAKER_03]: I think it was a way for me to learn how I think that it, in a lot of ways it's been weird right now because I'm also the narrator of the audio.

[00:22:42] [SPEAKER_03]: So this is me doing my one and only product testing of listening to it as I'm like walking around the city I'm like, ah, first of all, it's good audio the team made it sound my voice sounds so nice.

[00:22:57] [SPEAKER_03]: Normally I hate this.

[00:22:59] [SPEAKER_03]: I hate it.

[00:23:00] [SPEAKER_01]: How do you hate the sound of your own voice and you're a slam poet or at least we're trained as a slam poet sir.

[00:23:06] [SPEAKER_03]: I think that the thing is honestly I barely hear.

[00:23:09] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm just like, man, that nigga killed me.

[00:23:12] [SPEAKER_03]: But not most of the time I try to generally try not to take up too much space.

[00:23:19] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I try to take up too much space my own voice.

[00:23:21] [SPEAKER_01]: So you say on page 17, I go quieter the older my small body becomes, I am invisible in stretches I can never predict and negotiate and I trick and I pretend like my father, like a Nancy.

[00:23:34] [SPEAKER_01]: I learned to code switch some strange compromise between fight and flight. This camouflage becomes my voice. This mass becomes my face.

[00:23:42] [SPEAKER_01]: I go to school in Chicago and Omaha and Philly and Minneapolis, and always somewhere I don't belong somewhere where it is safer to be no one.

[00:23:50] [SPEAKER_01]: And so like you just discuss like how you don't like the sound of your own voice despite having done slam, but then you have so easily reverted back to what you learned from watching.

[00:24:05] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, your father, but also so many other black men women marginalized people of color of different types of backgrounds, making themselves small to not take up space as a way to be acceptable.

[00:24:20] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, one, but also to survive. You choose to write books where you have to take up space and make yourself big and think yourself worthy and deserving of inhabiting this type of arena.

[00:24:37] [SPEAKER_03]: Why do you do this? For me, I think that it was because like, I think there's a difference between not wanting to take up like a disproportionate amount of space and not wanting to take up space at all.

[00:24:51] [SPEAKER_03]: Right. I think for me, I've become more confident in the space that I do take but I also want to try and be more intentional about the spaces that I take right.

[00:25:00] [SPEAKER_03]: This is something that my partner is often helpfully and productively challenging right that my understanding of myself runs very much through the understanding that people look at me and they see a man.

[00:25:13] [SPEAKER_03]: They see like a cis man and that is not what I am. I am, I am a gender fluid and or like non-binary but depending on like, I've never fully felt couched in that language but I know that I am not cis and I, they are somebody who always feels confident in reminding me

[00:25:30] [SPEAKER_03]: yo, you're not a man but I don't have really heavy air quotes like the heaviest air quotes you can find a really conventional like non-binary look right and also I'm like super into sports.

[00:25:42] [SPEAKER_03]: Also something that made people feel like I was cis right and there is an awareness that I bring to my voice that is couched inside of that understanding of not wanting to talk over anybody because I have so much experience being talked over.

[00:25:57] [SPEAKER_03]: So I think that there's ways that can show up and be initially like metabolized like a kind of like timidness or like an unwillingness to embrace my own voice whereas like I see performance and like these books then the performances that they bring along as opportunities to be really intentional about

[00:26:16] [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, I'm going to turn my personality up to 11 and it's going to happen at a point in time when I decided that I was a part of and everybody was also super on board with this and I feel comfortable and they feel comfortable and I'm not talking over nobody.

[00:26:30] [SPEAKER_01]: I understand you, but I wonder and I hope this doesn't come off as harmful and I really don't want it to. But I wonder if you move that way and trying to make sure you don't take up too much space because of your experiences with suicidality.

[00:26:50] [SPEAKER_01]: You don't want to be too seen or you are still uncomfortable in your living and doing what you do.

[00:27:00] [SPEAKER_03]: I think it can definitely be partially that.

[00:27:02] [SPEAKER_01]: All right, so then I want to let's get deep into that portion of the book. I talked to someone else who last week who also was very affected by the years of mass black death being televised and I guess I have a remove from it or maybe like a hardness of heart about it because I was working in television news so that was the job.

[00:27:29] [SPEAKER_01]: And so I did have a breaking point, but I still have, I think, a distance from a lot of it just because that was the job.

[00:27:40] [SPEAKER_01]: But you talk about 2014 2015 2016 being years where you were seeing these black men and boys and women and girls being killed in their final moments recorded and that really affecting you.

[00:27:56] [SPEAKER_01]: And I know you say in the book that a lot of those years are blur, but then that also led you to miss an entire year of undergrad to where you had to go an extra year and came to the point where you were on that platform and considering throwing yourself in front of a train so that you wouldn't no longer be alive.

[00:28:15] [SPEAKER_01]: Can you talk about if it's not too difficult? What scene that televised lynchings did for your mental state which was already I'm assuming to be fragile while you were in undergrad.

[00:28:31] [SPEAKER_03]: First of all, thank you for the deep intention and the care that you showed in that question. I really feel that's an important part of the narrative that we can't afford to lose.

[00:28:41] [SPEAKER_03]: It's not even as it was framed often by school administrators who talked me out that I had been like going off seeking this imagery as you rightfully called them lynching.

[00:28:53] [SPEAKER_03]: Right. I wasn't seeking it out. I was just trying to be a normal 20 year old on Twitter.

[00:29:01] [SPEAKER_03]: Just trying to be a normal kid. So you'll have access to any form of normalcy and you're hundreds of miles away from home since 2012 already my mental state had been praying, I felt like I was dying all the time, and then suddenly, I can't look at a screen,

[00:29:21] [SPEAKER_03]: I can't overhear a conversation, I can't go 28 hours without hearing about another person who looks like me or is like me or is shaped like my sister or looks like my sister or my nephew or my cousin or whoever.

[00:29:38] [SPEAKER_03]: Each and every one of us is here in this suburb where if we knock on a door we don't know what's going to answer us.

[00:29:43] [SPEAKER_03]: Especially if you're in a depressed state and you can't leave your room. The panic attack knocked me out throw me off my sleep pattern.

[00:29:50] [SPEAKER_03]: Just like that I don't have the energy to make it to class. I wake up and I know that I don't have the energy to make it up this hill and this is all happening while I have these chronic injuries that because they've just been part of my life for so long because when I talk to people about them nobody does anything or says anything.

[00:30:07] [SPEAKER_01]: You mean doctors?

[00:30:09] [SPEAKER_03]: Doctors, but also friends. And like my family didn't have the money for physical therapy. Like we didn't have the money for that.

[00:30:17] [SPEAKER_03]: Like the dominant phrase of my early 20s and the thing that I had to take time specifically with two different therapists, with both of them, I told them, I was like you gotta look out for this phrase specifically.

[00:30:29] [SPEAKER_03]: Which is something I inherited of that's just gonna have to be okay. My whole 20s, my whole life up until I get kicked out of college basically was me looking at terrible situations and just being like that's just gonna have to be okay.

[00:30:45] [SPEAKER_03]: That's just gonna have to be okay. And this is when all that just gonna have to be okay finally had to be accepted as not okay.

[00:30:53] [SPEAKER_01]: And so then you talk in the book about not flinging yourself off the platform and in front of the train for a number of reasons, but then that being like one of those pivotal moments where you're actively deciding, even though, as you say, living is a season to do so despite the pain that you feel when you wake up and your knees are swollen and your hips ache and all of these different things.

[00:31:18] [SPEAKER_01]: And pleading to get back into school to finish your undergrad year that you missed.

[00:31:24] [SPEAKER_01]: And then having missed the deadline to apply for the MFA program and Oxford and Derek really being a champion in helping you get in.

[00:31:33] [SPEAKER_01]: And then that being the place where after Refuse won the Cave Canem Prize, where you had to write a new thesis that became FLEX, which is about your great-grandfathers and their escapes from both Mississippi and D.R.

[00:31:46] [SPEAKER_01]: To that being an interwoven part of this story of the dead don't need reminding.

[00:31:53] [SPEAKER_01]: Why did you think their story and their escapes were essential to this story about really your escape from death?

[00:32:02] [SPEAKER_03]: I spent, I think, like all the time that I was in Mississippi thinking about like if I had not made the choice that I did, if I had that day, every survival that had preceded me at some level gets undone.

[00:32:18] [SPEAKER_03]: To me, the reason these stories are braided is not just because a memoir kind of element of everything, but it is also just a central understanding that

[00:32:28] [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know that I know any Black folks who have gotten that chance to have their life be just theirs. That can be both blessing and curse, right?

[00:32:36] [SPEAKER_03]: That you are the byproduct of so many survivals and often if you grew up in Black community, however big or small it was, you had been told by somebody, some elder, some kin of yours has told you about unimaginable violence that was just Tuesday.

[00:32:53] [SPEAKER_03]: And I think that at some level, I knew that I had escaped death.

[00:32:59] [SPEAKER_03]: And I kind of like and spent the time that I was in Oxford thinking about how I came from a long line of brothers who had escaped death at the last minute.

[00:33:10] [SPEAKER_03]: How do you swear to the fact that I'm just like they survived all these threats to them and I still am trying to process the shame that I am the biggest threat to me there is.

[00:33:21] [SPEAKER_02]: Ooh.

[00:33:23] [SPEAKER_03]: A little bit of that in terms of just how do you braid the story of having like a really light skinned great grandfather who passed for white for a living and that great grandfather eventually being found out and all the people of that town coming down and telling him like, yo, you got 24 hours, pack up all your stuff.

[00:33:39] [SPEAKER_03]: We ever see you again. We will tar and feather you and everyone you love to death.

[00:33:43] [SPEAKER_03]: And that is the story of how my grandmother ends up leaving Mississippi at four years old and all of her memories for the rest of her life are in East St. Louis.

[00:33:52] [SPEAKER_03]: Then she becomes a bullet turner at a factory.

[00:33:55] [SPEAKER_03]: And that's how she met my great grandfather because he helped manage that plant.

[00:33:58] [SPEAKER_03]: He helped manage the HR of that plant.

[00:34:00] [SPEAKER_03]: And the two of them get married because James A. Randall hadn't actually had all that luck finding a wife and the lady of the church helped him find that wife in Dorothy Mae Leland who became Dorothy Randall who then began my father, James Randall.

[00:34:18] [SPEAKER_03]: And if the people of the town decided that they were going to do as racist moms are want to do the exact thing that they always do.

[00:34:25] [SPEAKER_03]: If they had decided today was not a day for warning shots without that bastard species of mercy, I don't exist.

[00:34:32] [SPEAKER_03]: I wouldn't have had the opportunity to die had they decided differently that one day.

[00:34:38] [SPEAKER_03]: How do you square that? That like at some level he escapes.

[00:34:44] [SPEAKER_01]: And so you braid these stories of escape from death into continued living with that of pop culture heroes and villains.

[00:34:57] [SPEAKER_03]: Three facts.

[00:34:58] [SPEAKER_01]: Heroes and villains. You've got Spider-Man and all his incarnations. We prefer Miles Morales around here.

[00:35:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Kanye West, BoJack Horseman, Odd Future, Tyler the Creator.

[00:35:12] [SPEAKER_01]: Why was it important? You talk about you know there's no black person whose life is their own and so you have that braiding of your great grandfathers and your family story with your own.

[00:35:22] [SPEAKER_01]: But then you also introduce all these other black folk whose story is not their own.

[00:35:27] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm thinking namely of Kanye West because he is from Chicago, because he is like a sad boy who doesn't know it and has too much money to be stopped.

[00:35:35] [SPEAKER_01]: Why was taking on these pop culture icons in some ways important to the telling of your story even if some of their stories were fiction?

[00:35:45] [SPEAKER_03]: For me, pop culture has always been like a useful bridge in terms of how to like explain and convey the emotions of a moment.

[00:35:55] [SPEAKER_03]: The only way that I can convey to the reader what my grandmother was like is through my own memories.

[00:36:02] [SPEAKER_03]: It's through my own obligations and that might not happen for the reader no matter how much intention I put into it just because a number of factors.

[00:36:10] [SPEAKER_03]: But I know that I can also put in another element here where I'm talking about the BoJack Horseman story.

[00:36:17] [SPEAKER_03]: BoJack is going to be streaming forever. If they really feel some type of way about it or want to understand that essay better, they can watch that Time Zero episode in half an hour and be done.

[00:36:27] [SPEAKER_03]: That to me has always been how I bridge what I'm feeling internally, what I am processing to readers, to audience members, to generally how people meet me honestly.

[00:36:40] [SPEAKER_01]: What do you want readers to take from this book that you've written?

[00:36:43] [SPEAKER_03]: I hope that whether you hate being alive, love being alive or kind of like just lukewarm about being alive, that it makes you love living more because you've got the opportunity to see some of the things that I'm passionate about.

[00:36:59] [SPEAKER_03]: And hopefully it reminds you of the things that you're passionate about. I hope the book, we talked a lot in wonderful and healing ways about the heaviness of it.

[00:37:06] [SPEAKER_03]: I also do want to say that I think the book is very funny. There are definitely a number of jokes and I think that's a big part of it, right?

[00:37:14] [SPEAKER_03]: Like I make jokes when I'm nervous. I make jokes when I'm not nervous too. But like I make jokes when I'm nervous and I also just like a way of taking temperature and whatnot.

[00:37:23] [SPEAKER_03]: But it's to spell things, right? And that's also a way to connect you back to the beginning of the interview.

[00:37:28] [SPEAKER_03]: That's a thing that you learn in slam and also a thing that I had to relearn how to do because my first poems in slam were like always had at least one joke in them.

[00:37:39] [SPEAKER_03]: And it was like a long stretch of time right after Mike Brown died where there's no jokes at all because both number one, country was falling apart, black folks would be murdered, it wasn't shit funny.

[00:37:51] [SPEAKER_03]: Second of all, but also equally important was the fact that jokes in slam are almost always setups for something else. That don't probably go in tragic.

[00:38:01] [SPEAKER_03]: And so I stopped learning how to trust my own humor. And part of that was because I didn't trust myself to be both funny and honest at the same time.

[00:38:10] [SPEAKER_03]: And that's part of why I wanted to have that pop culture element in there because I was like there has to be these elements of passion, these things that kind of keep us around.

[00:38:18] [SPEAKER_03]: I'd be lying if I said I didn't occasionally think to myself, well I can't die today. How will I know how succession ends? I don't know if they have HBO in heaven.

[00:38:30] [SPEAKER_01]: Stop. You're very unserious right now.

[00:38:34] [SPEAKER_01]: So I want to move to a speed round in the game before I let you go for what's becoming the afternoon. What is your favorite book?

[00:38:41] [SPEAKER_03]: Heavy, Kiyosei Laman.

[00:38:43] [SPEAKER_01]: Who is your favorite author?

[00:38:44] [SPEAKER_03]: Jesmyn Ward.

[00:38:45] [SPEAKER_01]: Who is your favorite poet?

[00:38:47] [SPEAKER_03]: Patricia Smith.

[00:38:47] [SPEAKER_01]: Name a poet that you think doesn't get enough shy.

[00:38:51] [SPEAKER_03]: Etiola Jones.

[00:38:52] [SPEAKER_01]: What is the difference between poetry and spoken word?

[00:38:55] [SPEAKER_03]: Whether you're speaking or not.

[00:38:58] [SPEAKER_03]: It's a very diplomatic answer.

[00:39:00] [SPEAKER_01]: What do you think is the best book to movie adaptation?

[00:39:03] [SPEAKER_03]: Ooh, The Godfather.

[00:39:07] [SPEAKER_03]: It's a cop out answer. I'm going to go with The Godfather.

[00:39:12] [SPEAKER_01]: Alright if money were no object where would you go? What would you do and where would you live?

[00:39:16] [SPEAKER_03]: I'd be right here on West Side Chicago. I don't want to be nowhere else.

[00:39:20] [SPEAKER_03]: If I had all the money in the world, I would absolutely want to establish a fund that helps cover the submission fees and overall writing opportunities and living expenses of Black gender minorities.

[00:39:34] [SPEAKER_03]: I would want to just create individual artists grants from that money and also like that.

[00:39:41] [SPEAKER_03]: My long term dream has always been to own a house in Mississippi that I am there for in the wintertime occasionally, but overall I want it to be a collaboration between me and the Mississippi Council of Arts and Letters and three quarters of the year.

[00:39:58] [SPEAKER_03]: It is a residency space for Black authors from Mississippi.

[00:40:01] [SPEAKER_01]: That's beautiful. Name three things on your bucket list.

[00:40:06] [SPEAKER_03]: Yo, I want to go to Japan. I have always wanted to go to a game in every NBA stadium and I want to take my partner to a two star Michelin restaurants.

[00:40:22] [SPEAKER_01]: Alright, what brings you joy?

[00:40:24] [SPEAKER_03]: Magnolias, Black kids just being Black kids.

[00:40:28] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, Black kids just being Black kids actually brings me the most joy out of anything.

[00:40:31] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm really lucky because I live next to a bunch of rambunctious little homies who are just like we are in the part before they're just setting off fireworks like every evening until it's September.

[00:40:43] [SPEAKER_03]: So they're just kind of vibing right now. They've named the neighborhood cat Felicia because she's always looking for food so some of our recipes are safe y'all.

[00:40:51] [SPEAKER_01]: What brings you peace?

[00:40:53] [SPEAKER_03]: Therapy sessions help me be in a position to accept peace. I think that one of the things that's been a growing process for me is that at some level, peace or the possibility of peace is all around us but am I willing to accept that and what is the exchange rate for that has always been my big stopping point.

[00:41:10] [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, so I think therapy sessions put me in space to accept peace.

[00:41:15] [SPEAKER_03]: But also putting TK by myself.

[00:41:18] [SPEAKER_01]: Alright so our game is called Rewriting the Classics. Classic is however you define it.

[00:41:24] [SPEAKER_01]: Name one book that you wished you would have written.

[00:41:28] [SPEAKER_03]: The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman is a classic. It's one of the books that was so important to me as a kid because I was able to finally find out that somebody else thought about all these alternate universe selves and all these other worlds that were close to anything that you can never touch them.

[00:41:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Name a book that you want to change the ending and how would you do it?

[00:41:50] [SPEAKER_03]: I love Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds. It's one of my all time favorite books. I think it's one of the best books ever written.

[00:41:58] [SPEAKER_03]: I just want to know what happened when he got elevated.

[00:42:01] [SPEAKER_03]: I only need two more pages.

[00:42:06] [SPEAKER_01]: I feel you.

[00:42:08] [SPEAKER_01]: Alright, so my messy question.

[00:42:10] [SPEAKER_01]: Name a book that you think is overrated or overtaught and why.

[00:42:15] [SPEAKER_03]: Riding Prejudice.

[00:42:16] [SPEAKER_03]: Because the thing for me is that I understand why people teach the book. First of all, I didn't like it.

[00:42:22] [SPEAKER_03]: With that being said, the vast majority of every person I've asked, what reason did they give you pedagogically for why we need to teach this book?

[00:42:30] [SPEAKER_03]: It's important that we listen to women writers not about the history of this is one of the first women novels that really caught a bunch of traction.

[00:42:36] [SPEAKER_03]: I was like, okay, then we're Sula. If we're talking about women moving through a society that actively does not want them to make their own choices.

[00:42:47] [SPEAKER_03]: Who is the more badass element of that than Sula?

[00:42:53] [SPEAKER_03]: I would ditch Pride and Prejudice in a heartbeat for Toni Morrison.

[00:43:00] [SPEAKER_01]: I think everyone would.

[00:43:02] [SPEAKER_01]: Alright, final question. And given all that we discussed, I hope this is not triggering.

[00:43:07] [SPEAKER_01]: But when you are dead and gone and among the ancestors, what would you like someone to write about the legacy of words and works that you've left behind?

[00:43:17] [SPEAKER_03]: I hope they say they wrote towards a world of free black children, and I hope they found it.

[00:43:24] [SPEAKER_01]: Amen.

[00:43:25] [SPEAKER_01]: Big thank you to Julianne Randall for being here today on Black and Published.

[00:43:29] [SPEAKER_01]: Make sure you check out Julianne's latest book, The Dead Don't Need Reminding, out now from Bow Type Books.

[00:43:37] [SPEAKER_01]: And if you're not following Julianne, check them out on the socials. They're at JulianneThePoet on Instagram.

[00:43:45] [SPEAKER_01]: That's our show for the week. If you liked this episode and want more Black and Published, head to our Instagram page.

[00:43:52] [SPEAKER_01]: It's at Black and Published, and that's B-L-K and Published.

[00:44:00] [SPEAKER_01]: There I've posted a bonus clip from my interview with Julianne about the one characteristic they say matters most in the publishing industry.

[00:44:10] [SPEAKER_01]: Make sure you check it out and let me know what you think in the comments.

[00:44:13] [SPEAKER_01]: I'll holler at y'all next week when our guest will be Ariane Nettles, author of We Are the Culture, Black Chicago's influence on everything.

[00:44:25] [SPEAKER_00]: So many of these Black stories are the backbone of what makes Chicago Chicago.

[00:44:30] [SPEAKER_00]: And then I would realize that, oh, these stories are not just what makes Chicago Chicago.

[00:44:35] [SPEAKER_00]: They are what make certain industries what they are.

[00:44:39] [SPEAKER_00]: And so I realized, like, oh, not only do some of us not know these stories, but people around the country and sometimes around the world need to know these stories too, right?

[00:44:52] [SPEAKER_00]: Because there's this great influence.

[00:44:54] [SPEAKER_01]: That's next week on Black and Published. I'll talk to you then. Peace.