Have you ever considered the profound connections between rest, memory, and the stories that shape us? This is the heart of our conversation with Cole Arthur Riley and Tricia Hersey, two luminaries in African-American literature and culture. In this episode of MahoganyBooks Front Row: The Podcast, we are thrilled to escort you through a realm where literature serves as a beacon, illuminating the importance of narrative in our personal and communal identities. Our dialogue traverses the landscapes of emotion, memory, and spirituality, unearthing the ways in which they weave into the fabric of black storytelling.
During this conversation, Cole and Tricia unravel the intricate tapestry of the writing process, from the push and pull of deadlines to the ethereal influence of our ancestors and spirituality in creating art. We are also treated to the personal experiences and strategies they implement for honing creativity, even amidst life's relentless pace. The episode is laden with anecdotes and insights, including Cole's journey of completing a book in just 42 days, which reveals the sheer grit behind the graceful art of writing. Their words serve as an invitation to find calm in poetry, the therapeutic embrace of journaling, and the grounding practice of reading transformative works like "Beloved" and "The Salt Eaters."
With every story shared and every insight offered, we're reminded of the indelible mark that literature leaves on our souls. This isn't merely a conversation; it's a sanctuary for those who find solace in the written word and a testament to the enduring power of African-American literature. As you listen, may you be inspired to honor your own narratives, embrace the sanctity of rest, and continue the legacy of storytelling that has been, and always will be, a cornerstone of culture and identity. Join us as we celebrate the books that resonate, the words that heal, and the stories that bind us together.
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Welcome to the Mahogany Books Podcast Network, your gateway to the world of African-American literature. We're proud to present a collection of podcasts dedicated to exploring the depth and richness of African-American literature. Immerse yourself in podcasts like Black Books Matter, the Podcast where we learn about the books and major life moments that influence today's top writers, or tune in to Real Ballads Read, where brothers Jan and Miles invite amazing people to talk about the meaningful books in their lives. So whether you're a literature enthusiast, an advocate for social justice or simply curious about the untold stories that shape our world, subscribe to the Mahogany Books Podcast Network on your favorite platform and let African-American literature ignite your passion.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everybody. I am excited. I am a Ramunda Young co-owner of the amazing Mahogany Books Amazing in my Eyes along with my husband, derek Young. I see everybody in the chat. I see DC in the build in Minnesota, memphis, atlanta, australia. But I just want to say one thank you for joining us tonight for this beautiful conversation between co-author Riley and Trisha Hersey, affectionately known as the Nat Bishop. I see people in the chat earlier was like the Nat Bishop in the yes, and they're both here to discuss Cole's new book, black Liturgies.
Speaker 2:But really quickly, a little bit about Mahogany Books. We have actually been in business about 16 years. We're based out of the Washington DC area and have a couple of locations here at National Harbor, washington DC, and then recently in September at National Airport. And so 16 years in business, 21 years married. My husband, derek, will be in the chat as well, and so but a little bit about Mahogany Books. 16 years and our whole premise was how do we make black books accessible?
Speaker 2:A little bit about me. I grew up in Tulsa, oklahoma, just blocks from Black Wall Street, and, believe it or not, I never knew Black Wall Street was there. I never was taught about it in our school, in my school, in my history books it was never taught. I never knew. It was just blocks from my home. And so when we talked about what business opportunity and how do we can create community books was the thing that really resonated with my husband and I. So for us, I never wanted someone to be in the same position that I was in and not have history be accessible because somebody else thought that that history was not important. And so now we've created Mahogany Books and people can order from all over the nation and we're just thrilled to have you all here and thrilled to be part of this conversation. So really quickly. Thank you to Tricia, thank you to Cole for making space for us tonight. So I just want to say thank you for that.
Speaker 2:The other thing is, I wanted to say just a couple of housekeeping things. One, we cannot see you audience. I see you in the chat, but we can't see your faces and we can't hear you. So that's a big plus because you can grab a good big cup of tea. I've got my tea over here. You can grab some tea. You can curl up under a blanket, but it's just an opportunity for you to breathe and to relax and be part of this conversation too. If you notice, there's a little box that has a question work in it. If you're on an app, it's probably at the bottom of your screen, but you can put your questions there. We won't be pulling them from the chat, we'll be pulling them from the question. So find a little question mark there and then in about 30-35 minutes I'll go there and pull some questions from the audience there. So I just want to make sure you knew that.
Speaker 2:Also, at the bottom of your screen, you need to get your copy of this amazing book. Let's be clear Get your copy. I have the ARC copy, but at the bottom of your screen it says get a signed copy. We do have a few signed copies left and after those are gone we have the standard copies on our website, so at mohotneybookscom. So get a signed copy. You click there to go straight, directly to the book so you can grab it. Also, the other thing I was going to say post your questions, order your book. Those are the two things there, so let's get into it. I want to make sure I wrote down the notes because I want to make sure I get all the good stuff about these amazing women that you're about to hear tonight.
Speaker 2:So first up is our moderator. Our amazing moderator is Ms Trisha Hersey. Let me see if I can pull the right button up here to bring her to the screen. There she is. Our moderator is Trisha Hersey, author of the best selling manifesto Rest is Resistance. Honestly, you all, that book just changed my life. It changed how I choose to lead our teams here at Mahogany Books, how I show up for me, and I'm just grateful for you, trisha, for creating this book.
Speaker 2:Trisha is an artist, poet, theologian, community organizer and, yes, a New York Times best-selling author. We're going to add that in there. She's also a dear friend in my head and my heart. She is the global pioneer and originator of the under the movement, the liberatory power of rest. So let's be clear where this started and I want to just pay respect and homage to where this Rest is Resistance movement came from. So thank you for joining us, trisha.
Speaker 2:So drop some hand claps in the chat for Ms Trisha Hersey, aka the Nat Bishop, and then next up is our amazing author for the evening. I see some hand claps. Thank you, our amazing author of the evening, I guess of the evening. So we have Ms Cole Arthur Riley posting powerful digital community in 2020, and the wake of the pandemic, she created Black Liturgies to connect spiritual practice with Black Emotion, Black Memory and the Black Body, which is a poet also and an author of the New York Times best-seller. This here Flesh, which we cannot keep on the shelves at Mahogany Books along with Rest, is Resistance. Her writing has been featured in a host of publications. She currently serves as the curator of the Center for Dignity and Contemplation.
Speaker 2:My notes I got a typo in my thing here. Please help. Welcome author Cole Arthur Riley to the stage. But thank you all for joining. There will be a recording of this available after this ends, and I see a couple of people asking about captions, so I'll see if that's an option for us, but if not, we will have the captions on after this as well. But thank you all for joining. I see people have ordered the book and I'll turn this conversation over to you all. Thank you so much for joining Mahogany Books, but before I do that, I have my clapper, because we are celebrating here tonight. We're celebrating the wisdom, the gift, the blessing that is on these pages here. So, cole, you have done it, tricia you've done it too. But, cole, this is your night and I just wanted to make sure we made some space to celebrate that. So congratulations on this book that is now out into the world. I appreciate you.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 4:Cole, I'm so excited about this. I'm excited. How are you You're so excited? What's your sign? May I ask? I'm a Virgo. What are you? Gemini? Oh yeah, I love that. That makes sense that you're a Virgo. But I want to just say thank you for everybody for logging on. I'm so glad you are here, everyone who is here. This I hope to be a very slow, enrooted conversation you know just the slowness of life and a really connected conversation. And I just want to say that everyone needs to get a copy of this book for their libraries.
Speaker 4:I imagine this book in people's home libraries, in school libraries, in churches, in cathedrals, and really it is the book in a lot of ways that I feel like is an anchor for our lives and for this idea of being human. And so, cole, a storyteller, thank you so much for this work, thank you for birthing it. I want to start with just like giving you your flowers and just like telling you, like when I was reading the book and kind of engaging with it, the things that kind of came to me, like about how it felt, your process, like as a poet and writer myself, I was just like heartbroken so many times, but it was like it was like a heartbreakingly good. It was just like so much heart medicine for me, and so this work feels like you're shaking down spirit. You know, it feels like spirit is here and you're shaking it down for us, and it feels like spiritual defense.
Speaker 4:I feel like it's what needs to be read in a prayer closet. You know, when I think about my grandmothers and my mom talking about, go to your prayer closet, get on your knees, and I feel like this is the book that you would take into a prayer closet with you. It's like so much darkness and light. It's like these two balances of darkness and light in there, and it really, in a lot of ways, feels like a manual on how to not be afraid, like how to, how to feel the fear but to keep going, and so I just that's really what it felt like to me, and I think I really would love to just start with a question just to ground it, like how is your heart feeling? And I can answer that well as well, but I want you to just right now how is your heart? What's if it was your heart right now?
Speaker 3:Um, my heart is feeling well. It's complicated now that I'm talking to you. We've spoken, you know, not face to face, but, yeah, now it's gratitude. A lot of gratitude is mixed in, but it's complicated. I think it's a complicated time to release a book Maybe it always is but I feel very proud of what I created and the season that I wrote it in and the season of grief that I wrote it out of. And still, of course, you have all. You have the moments where you confront the things that you wrote that maybe you wish you would have said different, and so I have all that in there as well, all the anxiety that I typically have, I guess. Yeah, but I'm also feeling grounded. I took a page out of your book and I just woke up from a nap.
Speaker 4:Nice, so you're in the post nap.
Speaker 3:Sleepy eyes, sleepy face, and I was like this is the way to do it. You know, all the nerves and questions awaken me. So I feel a little bit closer to myself, a little more grounded, which is good.
Speaker 4:So good. Yeah, I'm feeling I was just thinking about this earlier today, like when I woke up like how I was just trying to ground myself and like what's what's going on today with Trisha and I just really feel I feel so much hope today, which is interesting because sometimes I wake up and I feel I feel very little hope, but I go through the world in my life and I never not. I always feel like hope to me as my only weapon that I have to hold deep. I won't let this take hope away from me. I won't let. Yes, if I have hope, I'm good and I feel like as long as there's blood pumping through me, I there is hope, and so I hold on to hope. Sometimes it feels like it's on a little thin, little string, but I'm still hanging on and I'm crawling towards hopes. I really, I really feel hopeful today and I felt like, as I was engaging with your book.
Speaker 4:This isn't a book to be just. This isn't a book that's going to be in a reading challenge. This isn't a book that you're going to be needing to rush through. You know people on these reading channels. They want to get through a book a weekend. This isn't that book. This is a book that is a book that is going to be a part of your library, a part of your liberation practices for the rest of your days. It needs to be in a home on a shelf, to be picked up at all times and then also to be left alone a little bit and then to come back to it. So I feel like that's what this book feels like, and I just wanted to ask you, outside of the heart, what do you feel like when people call you a storyteller?
Speaker 4:I really been into this idea of storytelling how are we going to save us and how storytelling has saved us. And I want to read this quote to you that I think you may like. Maybe you heard it, but it's by the Nigerian artist Chinawai Achebe, who wrote Things Fall Apart, this really beautiful thing about storytelling, because I want to talk to you about this. It says storytelling helps us survive history's rough patches the power of the storyteller. But you also have the storyteller who recounts the event, and this is one who survives, who outlives all others. It is the storyteller, in fact, who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that survivors must have. Otherwise, surviving would have no meaning, and this is very, very important. Memory is necessary if surviving is going to be more than just a technical thing.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:I've never heard, I haven't heard that, but it's beautiful and it resonates, I feel. I think I feel closest to that kind of description of me as a storyteller. It makes me feel close to my grandma, who could weave stories together in beautiful and kind of unexpected, subversive ways. But I also, I think, really, in the past five years, I'm in a place where I just become more and more convinced that collective memory is really is one of the clearest portals to liberation we have.
Speaker 3:I think, so often when we're talking about liberation, we're trying to look forward, we're trying to vision cast, we're trying to practice imagination, which we have to do. But it's really in looking back that we have any semblance of who we are, any semblance of self. And I mean, you know, in a world, in a country or in a society that is hell bent on amnesia, and a willful amnesia, a very strategic, willful amnesia it's all we can do to remember. Well, in moments with us, you know, in moments like this and letters and diaries to you know, our ancestors had to keep their own memory and had to believe in their you know dignity to a certain extent, to believe they had stories worth preserving which.
Speaker 3:I find miraculous and I want to tap into that as much as I can in my work.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you do such a brilliant job of it. Yeah, it's like this heart message. I just kept feeling like as I was reading your work and this idea of memory. I really agree with that, the idea of cultural memory and not forgetting them.
Speaker 4:I think a lot of times, when I think about my work as well, I feel like the idea of resting, how exhausted we all are and what that does to our brains, what that does to our bodies, and how we literally are not, we're not moving in a way that actually feels human. You know so this book, you know the subtitle, prayers, poems and meditations for staying human. That's what I think resting provides. And then when you think about how resting and memory come together, so that's why when I think about a storyteller and how important it is, this quote, I can't stop thinking about it. But as I'm reading your work, I'm like what a brilliant storyteller you are, Like what a master storyteller Like you can't write your ass off. Like you, you literally your. Your hands are blast, your pen is blast.
Speaker 4:I'm reading your work and I'm like this work is brilliant. It is so vulnerable and so intimate as these bath of emotions. It feels like an ocean you're in, and so the idea of memory. I think, the more that we rest, the more we tap into what has happened, what we don't. We can't even have the words, sometimes the right language, to be able to express memory, but it's held in our bodies. Our bodies are this beautiful technology, this memory keeper. In a way, it's a archive, you know, and so I think that's important.
Speaker 3:And I think you've said this before about how it's it's in rest, it's in our dreaming states that memories are actually solidified, and so what?
Speaker 3:does it mean if we're trying to hang onto our stories out of a deeply exhausted state? You know it's both mystical and it's just the science. The science says what it says that we need to sleep in order to, you know, cultivate and retain our memories. And you know it's nothing to say about the. The wage for trauma affects our memories as well, and knowing what we've come from it's even more of an impulse to know. Okay, trauma it steals the imagination, but it also steals the memory. Things become foggy, cloudy. It's even more of this kind of collective imperative to keep on, to keep an archive, keep record.
Speaker 4:Yes, what we remember. Yeah, you've done a brilliant job. You know I'm a vivacious letter writer. I'm a pen pal letter writer. I just came from New York a couple of days ago and I went. So I went over the top of the stationary store because I was like I have to have every piece of thing to send letters and so I send tons of letters. I just wrote seven yesterday to friends. I've been pen paling with a friend in Chicago for 10 years, had boxes and boxes of letters, and so when I saw the letters weren't here and that you're like uplifting the beauty of letters, you know, that really was like, oh yes, I love this Letters poetry, it's like all blended in. I think I want to this part.
Speaker 4:I really was into this idea of dignity, like that really resonated so much with me and so I want to read, if I may. This is a book to be read aloud. You know and it's also interesting that you know in seminary I was also a liturgist at this Presbyterian church. As part of my studies I did contextual education for two years at a Presbyterian church and I was a liturgist and so I would have. I wish that this could have been. You know, things I was reading from. I was like the only black person in the entire church, the only black preacher in the entire church, and I would be up there preaching every day about Alice Walker and like black liberation, I just kept going. I didn't care who was, I was like we're going to talk about black liberation and so this book. It's like I love that it's liturgy and so, seated in that I want to read from page four, where you are talking a little bit about what you think dignity is or isn't.
Speaker 4:I don't know what dignity is, not cognitively, but I know what it feels like to be loved, to receive honor, to be encountered as a human, not because of any demonstration or performance of such, but because, in mystery, your very being is a miracle, your existence a delicate stitch in the cosmos. Dignity will never depend on anyone's belief in it, certainly not your own. It is not born of writing, even excellent writing, or excellent research, or beautiful architecture or good parenting. It is inherent. If I never write another word, my dignity cannot be diminished. And yet the world has a choice to honor or not to honor. The toll this choice takes has very real implications on our rights, on our wealth, our justice, our children and even our perceptions of dignity, but never dignity itself. Wow, I mean, I feel like you can just sit in that for like days.
Speaker 3:Well, I can't believe that is the thing that you chose to read. So that line. If I never write another word again. You probably don't even remember this, but I think it was maybe a year and a half ago. I was, I live with depression, I was in, I was in it. I was in it and I had, for the first time, stopped posting on Black Liturgy's Daily. I had posted something just saying you know, you all go through it and I don't know when I can come back to this and you sent me I think you sent it in a DM and you said if you never post anything again, you've already done it, you don't need to do it. You said you don't need to post one more thing.
Speaker 3:And so it feels like a real, yeah, a real full circle moment. That that's the passage that stuck out to you, because those are the words of affirmation you gave me when I was feeling like this is what I need. To keep grinding, I need to keep and just to think, no, what you've already put out is is enough, can it be enough, you know? But yeah, that point about not proving your dignity or not believing in it, I'm I hate. I don't know how you feel about this, but I hate the kind of rhetoric of you have to love you in order for someone else to love you. I hate it.
Speaker 3:I'm like what do you want from me? I'm expected every single day, on my own, to resist everything that history has told me about myself. Yes, we've been trained and indoctrinated into these systems of self hatred, of embodied hatred, and you want me alone. It's my responsibility in order to and I always felt a resistance toward that, and the more and more I think about dignity and just kind of rest in what it means to possess dignity. I think about that. You don't. Could it be something that doesn't need to be proved? It doesn't even need to be affirmed, not by me, not by you. It's inherent and mystical, and if I believe it some days, obviously that's the goal. Right, we want to have a self possession, but if I do, it doesn't nothing wanes. Nothing wanes in me.
Speaker 4:No, it doesn't Wow Like this. This is such a deep. You know we need to talk about dignity more. We need to really get inside of it and, you know, examine it Like I love that. You said you don't know what it is, not cognitively, and I think that is so beautiful. Our shared work is that we both understand that this is not a cognitive thing. This is, this is not. You can't understand your way that it is. You can't reach your way to this.
Speaker 4:You can't like people are like how do I run, how do I go Like you can't. It's just in you, you are it's, it's, it's breathing, it's not anything that you have to explain. It's without words, it's without language, but our culture teaches us in the idea of written language being everything. You know the white supremacy culture is. One of its characteristics is that the written word is over everything. We have to be perfect. The written word is reign supreme.
Speaker 4:If you don't know that, you know nothing. I say the opposite, and I'm sure you do as well as that. No, there is things that language just cannot hold and it's just is. You know it's, it's body is here, it's in us, it's in our heartbeat, it's, it's the it's. Before we were even born, we were in a womb, it's already here, and so I just love that. Not knowing that mystical nature of your work, you know, yes, it's so tender, but at the same time, it's very, it's very powerful. I really love that. I want to ask you a question about the writing process, because, as a writer, I just need to know like I want to know, like how long, what was the beginning, what was the process to imagine this work Like?
Speaker 4:can you recall the first heat or first glimmer that bloomed in you before? I remember writing in the book that you were talking about, writing, you know, from your bed during one of your depression moments and you were under the laptop. The laptop was in your bed, you wanted to be at your beautiful desk you know, I'm at actual vintage Sears desk that I got. I'm like you want to be at your desk but you were like just in the bed trying to like eat in the bed and thinking about washing your hair. And so this is such a comprehensive, it's so much, it's such a comprehensive thing. Had the writing already started before? Because I know you are a writer, you always write was this already researching things that you had started to develop? But that you started at a certain time? How many months? What was kind of the first visions and imaginings about it? Yeah, I.
Speaker 3:it took me a long time to start Like I got the book deal and it didn't. I waited, and I waited, and I waited, and I was just going through a lot of my personal life and having it just seemed like everything else was a priority.
Speaker 3:And the only writing I could do was journaling, and I really needed to write things that no one else would see in that season, and if I was going to be honest about anything, I knew it needed to be in my journal. So I was doing a lot of journaling but I it took ages for me to start the project and by the time I went to start I was it was bad. I was in crunch time. I wrote the book in 42 days.
Speaker 4:Wait, stop, stop. You wrote this book in 42 days, called yeah, my gosh, and it was.
Speaker 3:I would open the doc. I would close the doc. I'd open the doc, put the curtain, close it. And then I got to a point where I'm like you, quite honestly have to make this. You have to make a deadline. I'd push the back.
Speaker 4:No, no, no, and it was fine. They call him. They email me like what's up? Yeah.
Speaker 3:You need to write this book. And so I remember I kind of came to when was like wait, how much time do you actually have if you need to make this deadline? It was 42 days. Okay, my first draft was due and I went and did the outline and I don't think I think it would have been a different book if I would have forced myself any time sooner. I think it. I don't think it would have been honest. I think it would have been, yeah, just really far from me, but it kind of all, when I was ready, it spilled out and it spilled out quickly and I just kind of went into the cave and did what I love this New channel, ancestors and and this is so.
Speaker 4:Yes, I love that you call it the cave. That's what I call. My writing, too, is the cave, the writing cave. I go in there, yeah.
Speaker 3:And yeah, and beautiful things are born out of that. And I mean, of course, I edited it after that, after the full drafts of edits, but it happened quickly and it happened in bed in the middle of the night. I'm having a very hard time writing in daylight right now. I don't know something about everything being awake, I think, does into my mind, but I would write in the night, sleep in the day and do what I could. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Found the system. The system found you. You just were open to it. I love that because a lot of people that's how my first book came out, my first book.
Speaker 4:I was writing in the cave and it was like you have 15 months to write this and then you start like two, three months out. You know, it's like I just couldn't sit down every day and be like I'm gonna sit down in seven hours a day, I'm gonna sit at the computer. I couldn't do a writing schedule. I literally was just trying to. Just I just wanted it to come to me. I didn't want to outline really quickly. Outlining really would turn off the antenna. I will really do a lot of this. Dreams, downloads. I would say 60% of the rest of the resistance I wrote through voice notes. I will be in the back of soaking and something will come, a story, something from my dad. I remember what come. I would just say it on a voice note and then go back and transcribe. So it was really a lot of embodied vocal dreaming. I needed to just hear how it sounded by speaking it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm not trying to give you work, but I would want to read something by you about rest and writing, because I think a lot of people think of writing at the desk but so much of writing is just sitting, is thinking, is laying in bed, and I don't think people understand that. So 32 days to write it, but I was laying in bed, you know not being able to do much. Obviously, you go to places in your interior world that you can access when it's finally time to pick up the pen. Totally, it does that, yeah.
Speaker 4:That's good. Yeah, I mean I wrote a lot of this book in the tub. I would take these long salt soaks and just being it's like whenever my body touched water, writing ideas would just come from the book. It was something about maybe a transference of the energy. I just kept praying that the ancestors collaborate with me on this right and so I feel that energy. How you uplift the ancestors in the book, like in the beginning. You talk about how the book is kind of held together and that for each section you're uplifting, you know, ancestors and you're, you know, really speaking a word. You know you got Nikki, giovanni Zornio Hurstain and you know all of the ones we love, and I just love how beautifully it's laid out and how it just is. So it just gives so much the more you read it.
Speaker 4:I wanted to, I think I want to read a little bit from this prayer on page 27. I also want to talk to you about the idea of degrading. You know I always this degradation and the idea of what it means to be degraded, and I talk a lot about how I feel like white supremacy attempts to degrade our divinity, you know, through these ways, and I'm always talking about the idea of standing on you are divine and in that way our work is shared. So much of a, so much of a pull and a thread. This prayer here on page 27 for the walk home. I want people to hear these words because every you can just sit with it. Read a prayer, go, sit down, go pray, go into the prayer closet, go journal. It's so generative. It feels like this book really allows you to be really inside of it and work with it. You know people would say a workbook, but I would say it's even deeper than that. It just feels like a companion piece that really can be with you through some real dark times and some real joyful times as well.
Speaker 4:God of the street, you know by heart. I know these steps. They're etched with memories reminding me I am made of story. As I pass each building, each door, travel with me into my former selves, keep me from the nostalgia which claims me to the past, but help me smell and taste and listen and feel and observe all that has made me. Help me become curious how my sense of home is responsible for my formation. But may I do so with self-compassion, never daring to travel streets. My inner child is unsafe or unprepared to encounter. As I turn corners and peek down alleys, as I speed up and slow down, may I at last make my way home. And if that home be entirely new, safer, kinder, thruer, may my inmost be being find the rest and comfort I was made for. Amen. So good, thank you. When is home for you? Where do you find home?
Speaker 3:I find. Well, I'll answer in two ways. I find home in solitude, a lot in myself, and not the kind of solitude that's isolationist I think that's been a kind of captivity for me but a kind of solitude that knows who, that's connected, that's connected to the earth, the ground, that knows that there's other people in the house but is okay with being by myself. I think a lot of freedom is borne by that, the things that you discover about yourself and who you are. So solitude In a literal sense.
Speaker 3:I was born and mostly raised in Pittsburgh, pennsylvania, and it's a city that has a lot of pride, a lot of cities. Do you know Steels City, bluecaller, and I live in upstate New York. I live in Ithaca, new York now, and every time I go back home I kind of remember different parts of myself. I remember that me leaving there's no escaping, nor do I want to, that there's terror there. There's certainly bad memories, but there's also beauty. There's me as a little girl, me walking down the boulevard for the first time by myself and walking with my dad. He used to say walk with your head up. You know he's nervous and shy, yeah, so I go back and I remember those moments of calling in that way, calling to self, and I believe that we're formed by place. You know both in a yeah, in every sense, but in a literal sense I think that the places that we're in absolutely form us and remain with us, even if we try our best to leave them in the past.
Speaker 3:They live in our bodies for better and worse and it serves no one to try to forget, you know, to make that journey at least once back home, yeah, I love that.
Speaker 4:I wonder, you know, sometimes people ask you know as a writer. They're asking when you're writing the work, are you thinking about where it lands? Are you, do you have a vision of what you wanted to be for people? You know, do you like? A lot of times, sometimes I'm doing, sometimes I'm like I'll birth it and, you know, let it. You know it's for the world. So do you have? When you wrote this you know this book is so put together in such a beautiful way Did you have a idea, a visual ever come to you, or what you wanted it to be for the world, what you wanted a person to hold and how they would feel with it? Did you have an energy around like, oh, I'm writing this book and I hope that someone feels less alone, or someone feels that their loneliness is okay? Like, did you ever that that ever come into your writing process? Or, now that the book is out, what do you think?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I pictured. I pictured two things mostly while I was writing. The first was this young woman I'd met when I was touring this year Flesh. I didn't even learn her name. She raised her hand in the audience, asked a question and I don't really know what it was about that encounter exactly, but her face just has stayed with me and I really thought about her. I really imagined her face. I love reading this.
Speaker 3:When I wrote this year Flesh, I thought about my grandma. I tend to think for one person with one person in my mind. Meet me personally. So this year Flesh, I was really just thinking about my grandma wouldn't be able to hold these pages but this book. I thought a lot about that young woman, young black woman, and imagined her holding the pages, being alone, with some of the sections in part one. But then I also imagined this book club that I can't believe. I'm forgetting the name of this book club, but it was a group of black women led by a queer black woman that they invited me into their digital space and it was just a different kind of harbor. And so I was imagining these kind of pockets just in someone's home late at night, people kind of encountering it together and putting it down, maybe eating, making it back up. And so I have a dual imagination for the individual and kind of a small collective encountering it as well. At least I hope and I want it to be for people who I don't know.
Speaker 3:Black people have such a rich interior world and Toni Morrison talks about this, how it's not always translated on the page, especially in our fiction and our novels. She's criticisms of this in the source of self regard, that all of these at a time when enslaved people, enslaved black people were showing up in text for the first time. She criticizes okay, they're there, but they're showing up with a complete void in their interior life, as if there's nothing, if nothing challenging happening. And she talks about this practice of imagination for the black interior of her ancestors and says you know, they are my entrance, they are my entrance into my own interior life. I thought about that a lot as I read. What does it mean to kind of live in the world where you're not always recognized as a complicated, complete human, with all of these different stories awaken us. And how can I? I don't know if I wanted the book to do anything. I would want it to be kind of a portal into people's interior. It's our collective black interior.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's so good, yeah, that's so beautiful, and so I'm thinking about it. It goes right back to how we started the conversation about the power of the storyteller and the power of memory and our cultural memory and how this idea of storytelling helps us survive history's rough patches and if anybody has had some rough patches in the history of this culture, it's black people, you know. To survive these rough patches, we go to the storyteller, the orator, the one who remembers the. I think about my mother, the archivist, who's kept every photo. Anytime someone dies in our family. They come knocking on my mother's door and she opens up the door and leads into the garage with her 15 boxes of you know, these beautiful photo albums she's kept and they want pictures. For those pictures where my mother she got baby pictures to, they like wouldn't even know you had this bitch, I didn't even know I took this picture and my mother has it. So I think about this, the keepers, the people who keep the memory and the people who keep the stories and continue to share the story.
Speaker 4:So what a gift this book is to the world. I'm so glad that it's out in the literary canon, I'm so glad that it's out in the world Like. It's adding so much to the literary canon of beautiful liberation work. It just feels like deep, deep medicine. It feels like medicine, it feels like a heart massage. I'm just so proud that it's in the world Like. Thank you for writing it, thank you for birthing it, thank you for imagining it and for, like, giving us space to go into our interior world. It is brilliant. I want everyone needs this book, like. If y'all don't, basically if you don't listen to nothing in that Bishop's say, because y'all sometimes do, you sometimes, you know, depends on the day. Like, listen to me about this book. It is a beautiful bomb, it is a gift, it feels like a spiritual defense, it feels like something that's just gonna hold us for a long time, and so thank you, cole, so much for writing it. Thank you, of course.
Speaker 2:Thank you both. Yeah, I mean I could go back off camera and just listen to the two of you go on and on, but I do see lots of questions. Okay, yeah, so we won't may not be able to get to all of them, so I'll just try to go through a few of them. Right now I'm trying to get over Cole. But anyway, first question is it says Cole, thank you so much. Your first book has helped me so much as I've struggled with my own spirituality during a time of transition, a recent disability. Your writing on health and body and intersectionality especially touched me. Could you speak about disability and how it relates to your new work?
Speaker 3:I mean I didn't say this explicitly, but part of the reason it took so long for me to get writing is because I was in pain. If you read my first book, I have a number of issues with my eyes and it makes it. I'm very sensitive to light. It can be hard to look at screens, and so I think this was really born out of a kind of fidelity to my body and a refusal to sacrifice it for even you all, people that I love and have supported my work, my livelihood. I had a choice to make leading up to the 42 days I actually wrote. I had a choice to make and I chose my body and I'm proud of that.
Speaker 3:And I think, in a time where so many of us are asking questions about the body everyone is catching on to Trisha's work about rest. Some of you all are co-opting it and claiming you started it. But in a time when so many people are kind of catching on asking questions of the body, I think we need look no further than the disabled community as a kind of guide, a guide out of the kind of enslavement of capitalism, of the altars of productivity and utility that this country wants us to kind of lay ourselves down at. I think disabled people, people who live with illness, chronic pain they can't afford the same disembodiment that some of us have grown accustomed to and their survival depends on a certain connection to the body of protectiveness over it, however hard or complicated that protection is. So, yeah, I think we have to look to them really to. If we want, if we have any hope of getting out of this kind of bondage, we have to look to them. Yeah, thank you for your question.
Speaker 2:The next question is from Felix. It says, cole, how has Trisha's work impacted your own work in your book or your path? How has it impacted?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, you know, I quoted her in this year Flesh. I quoted her in Black Liturgies and Courts. When I first started the Black Liturgies account, a number of people were DMing me about Trisha's work and saying, oh, do you know the ministry? And so then I started following you and I don't know how long it was before you followed me. But the day you did, when I tell you, the group chat went. What I was, what's happening? I looked at my phone and I'm like what you know? So many messages.
Speaker 3:People are like the Nat Bishop followed you and I think so. I mean, so many of us are indebted to your work. I believe that I'm not really not just hyping you up. I feel like I'm walking in your wake, that there are choices you've made and I think about just to say this quickly when Trisha's book came out Rest is Resistance by it it blew up, it did amazing, it was doing amazing all this momentum. Everyone wanted to talk to her, everyone wanted a seat at her table and I don't know how long it was, trisha, before you. You went dark. You were like all right bye, what's the publisher saying? What are the agents, what are the editors saying? But if you're not a writer. You have to understand how completely subversive that is to model that in a time where writers are in such fear. You know you want your work to do. Well, you want to keep the momentum, trisha. That's good. I'll be back and honestly, I have to think.
Speaker 3:I know I wrote, I told you this in a letter, but I don't think about that so often, about not just saying it, because there are a lot of people out there that are leading, and claiming to lead, movements of rest at a deeply exhausted states and you can tell, you can tell a shallowness and their work in their own interior worlds. You can see that. And so when you encounter someone like Trisha, who at the well I don't want to say it's the height, because I think you're going and going, but in this massive moment, where you just wanted to produce more, do more, be seen by everyone, make the most amount of money.
Speaker 3:You did the most subversive thing you could do to model the black woman lay down. Not even for this, not even for this am I going to sacrifice my body Completely has guided my own work. It's why. It's why NAPT, you know, half hour before we started this call, when I know I have people I need to call back and things I laid down and I channel that not just, it's not the words, it's the embodied practice that she lives in. The world that I don't think. I think people are only beginning to understand.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much. That means a lot.
Speaker 3:Yep. She said my books out, All right.
Speaker 4:I told my editors, I said the book is going to be a best nationwide New York Times global best seller and they said, Trisha, you have to get out there and make it happen. I said no, I don't. My ancestors told me in a dream it will be so bye. They couldn't say nothing because I went dark, I wouldn't answer any calls, I went off email. So it was like trust me. And it was true. The answer did lie, Very true. So yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 2:So the next question is do you have a favorite letter, poem or prayer from the book that you that resonates with you the most?
Speaker 3:Yeah, my two favorite poems are I don't know what section this is, it might be in the secret section there's a poem called confessional and it's about being sensitive to noise we love, and then the poem in the lament section. It's called translation. I've grown love. When I first wrote it I didn't really think much of it, but my editor really affirmed me in it and it kind of made me go back and look at it with different eyes and admire it in a different way. So translation and confessional, I think, are my favorites.
Speaker 2:So awesome. Thank you for sharing that. This next question is from Janet. This says let me see here. Oh, it says I'm grateful for your statements about the Palestinian people and their current horror. How has this writing guided your prayer around this time, this horrible time?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I wish I could. I have to be honest and say that I'm not really praying these liturgies right now. I think prayer in the kind of cognitive, written sense feels a bit far from you right now. I'm in a bit of a season of doubt and a little bit of disillusionment and it makes it hard to approach some of these. I know that's not true for everyone, but I think the breath practice feels close to me right now to think of. I feel like prayer as breath, prayer as body, feels really near to me in this season.
Speaker 3:Even if I can't convince myself of particular truths or statements that I wrote, I find that just those breath practices are really grounding. That's mostly what I'm doing and I think the poetry, which I've said I was most afraid to include, but now that it's out and I've been reading I find out when I get to the poem something shifts in me and I'm calmer, I'm more grounded, I'm not over analyzing things, I'm not reading what I could have done differently. When I meet any of the poems in the book, I really just feel peace and connection and fragments of meaning and that's enough. So the poems and the breath.
Speaker 2:Thank you for sharing that. And then the next question. We have just a few more. Says Cole, your current night writing process is similar to mine, but I've struggled to write because of structure of my life. Do either you or Trisha have any recommendations on how to write while meeting the demands of our jobs and in life, etc. Or how do I break out of those traps of capitalism, life capitalism, capitalism's life design, so I can release this pent up writing urge? How do I?
Speaker 3:I'm going to answer that first, trisha.
Speaker 4:You know, first, you know open up with saying don't force yourself. You know, like I understand if it's a struggle, like sometimes sitting up, sitting in the struggle of it. You know if you feel like there's something pent up in, you trust the body enough to know that when it's time to come out and we'll come. I guess that's an overarching answer, but I think, looking at other ways you know to get words out. You know I'm really into voice speaking things. You know, like as a writer, it saved me that I was able to do voice notes and just talk some ideas out and hear verbally what I'm saying and then go back and transcribe it. The technology is there to actually put that up to the computer, have it come out, transcribe in Microsoft Word and then go and edit. Which is like my favorite part of writing is editing. I think that's really the heart of writing. So I will just say don't force it, don't push it. I would say you know, go to sleep.
Speaker 4:I would say, actually, sometimes what helped me write is reading poetry. So I will read a poem before I went to bed every night. Just a poem from a favorite poet I love Nikki Giovanni, lansing Hills, ruth former. I will just read a poem and then try to lay down for a nap and sometimes the act of hearing words and the act of being like embodied around beautiful language and writing can help to spark a word in you.
Speaker 4:Sometimes, when I was having a writing slump similar to yours, I will just write a word. I have a word dictionary word jar that I keep and I'll just a word that really sung to me, that felt beautiful to me. I will just write it down like imagination or whatever the word was, surrender, and I would just that will be my word for the day I wrote. You know that's writing beautiful. So I think we sometimes get too caught up in the idea of a complete project and it has to be perfect. And I love what Cole said about that. She journaled before she started. She couldn't really get into the right and she just was journaling because no one else was going to see it. So journaling is a beautiful process to yeah, yeah, I agree, if you're.
Speaker 3:I think sometimes the like roadblock is you know it's for someone else and you hold yourself to a different standard, which is good and bad. But whenever you start journaling and kind of encountering things in a way where you don't have to worry so much, it's surprising what it shows up on the page. I also think, yeah, I just echo everything. Just said don't force it. And you know you can still try to have a schedule. You know I set timers and when that goes off.
Speaker 3:It's like if it's there, it's there, if it's not, it's not. I know I sat. I sat for 10 minutes. I tried to see what, what came to me and I think, depending on your schedule, that could be a five, five minute timer, that could be 1020 an hour. But I think more important than you know actually getting a word down, is that that's sitting, that that that resting with yourself, that connection to to yourself in your own thoughts, and if you're doing that, you know, I think you should be proud.
Speaker 2:Yes. This next question is from Reggie. His question is it is said that Dr King carried a copy of Jesus. The disherited with with him went. This year flesh has been that book for me. Is there a book or piece of writing that either of you like that's for that for you, that you carry around, that you keep close Any book that you guys have, like that.
Speaker 3:I have two books on my nightstand for years now and it's Beloved by Toni Morrison and the Salt Eaters by Toni K Bambara. I mean, beloved goes without saying really, but when I think of any kind of spiritual landscape I want to cultivate. It's the clearing that Toni Morrison writes about in Beloved, that kind of embodied, emotional, intergenerational, almost theater, this theater in the most beautiful way that plays out in the clearing. And then the Salt Eaters by Toni K Bambara.
Speaker 3:I mean, if you want to talk about the collective black interior life, if you haven't read it, first of all, it's the most beautiful first line that I've ever encountered, which is are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? So even the dedication is one of the most beautiful dedications. The second book is the Salt Eaters by Toni K Bambara, but in it it's the story, it's a healing that's happening, this mystical healing that's happening. But Bambara kind of travels in and out of black consciousness, these different people that are witnessing the healing. In the room you're going from the person being healed to the healer's interior life, to the old man witnessing, and I think it's just masterfully done if we're trying to imagine kind of the black inner world.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's beautiful. It's interesting when I heard the person say the Howard Thurman book, because that's one of my books, Jesus and the Disinherited. Like that book, Howard Thurman, is the reason I went to seminary. I've carried it and read it For 10 years. It's been a book that really has grounded. I didn't know why I went to seminary, I just knew that it was a calling on my life. I thought I read Howard Thurman's book. I was like I want to get into this. So that book. And then also Niki Giovanni.
Speaker 4:I couldn't say which poetry book, every single one of her poetry books but I've been really into the one that she wrote called Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. That's one of her first ones. I've been holding that book. I actually stole it from the school library when I was 12 years old because my parents couldn't afford books and so I stole it because I just fell in love with this book, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, Poetry by Niki Giovanni.
Speaker 4:And I met Niki Giovanni and told her that I stole the book and I was like I feel so bad. She was like don't worry about it, I'm glad you took it. They got enough money to buy another one. So Niki Giovanni Day by Niki Giovanni and Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. Those have been a really deep part of my life and I buy them, I reread them, I give them as gifts. It just really pulls me together from a spiritual sense and I think I'm a poet because I fell in love with Niki Giovanni's work in the school library in Chicago when I was 12 years old.
Speaker 2:Well, I want to honor everybody's time. It's supposed to end at eight. But I do have one question. It says the owner. Look, I'm just taking over, Right.
Speaker 4:I love it.
Speaker 2:I'm in my business out there. No, I love it. Thank you, it was just an honor to have you in DC for our regular business. We had a blast, so I'm so much fun, yes we did, and so to be here tonight is just an honor, like I said, to have both of you. But my question is what does self love look like for you? What does it mean, rather, to you, what does self love mean?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think self love is best practicing community out of a sense, out of a deep communal practice of love and mutuality and taking care of each other. I, yeah, for a long time thought I could kind of sustain love, love of self, on my own. I think it's unreasonable, I think it's just insincere to think that anyone can. But in the right communities and with the right context and the right people in your life, I think it's possible to kind of yeah.
Speaker 3:I think it's possible to love yourself. Well, there's Jamaica King. She has this line of in one of her novels that basically says I'm paraphrasing it says it more beautifully but that self love is wonderful, but it's exhausting, it's not the only way and you need to be held by someone.
Speaker 4:And so.
Speaker 3:I can't sustain any kind of self love. I need to be in the right company.
Speaker 4:I'll echo that, since my entire everything is about community, communal, the collective I don't. This idea of self is really hard for me to get into, you know. That's why I always push back against the self care industry, and this idea of people calling my work self care makes me rage filled, because this work is not about this rest, rest, rest movement in this rest idea is not about self care at all. It's about deep community care, it's about the collective, it's about radical community care. Community care will save us and so within the bless you, within the confines of the collective, that's where deep, deep love is embodied, where it's cultivated, where it's experimented, where it's held, where it's shaped, and so without it we have nothing.
Speaker 4:So it's really interesting because I started this work just by trying to save my own life through resting. But immediately when I saw what was happening, I immediately said this is a collective rest experience. I have to bring this to the collective. I need the collective to hold this with me. I need others to feel that, and so my self love practice is really rooted in a womanist practice, a womanist idea, the idea that we aren't alone, like if I save myself, then I have two others going to be saved because there are others attached to me. I am not alone. So if I'm saved, my son is saved, my husband, my mother, we all, my neighbor, like, we're all in this moment together. So I definitely echo the idea of self love being radical, community care, radical, communal in the collective.
Speaker 2:Well, I just want to say I'm so cold. I just want to say thank you, thank you to both of you for sharing space, for putting these amazing books out into the world Again. At the bottom there's a green button that says get a signed copy of Black Liturgies. I have a book, get that book. Yes, read the book, sit down, get.
Speaker 4:Black Liturgies, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:But just thank you. You all are busy just living and doing life, and so I'm just honored that you make space to come here tonight and there's about 800 people on here. I can see the numbers on my side. I don't want to scare you cold, I have to go now. But yeah, so many We've been doing these virtual.
Speaker 2:We haven't done one in a long time, but since 2020, this is the third. Out of all of them we've done, this is the third highest attended in all of them. So I just want to say that a lot of people are here to hear we'll have to say that feel compelled and led by your work. So I'll just thank you to both of you for being bold enough to speak out, to step out and to live your truth and put that on paper so others after you will be able to live through that and benefit it as well. So thank you. Thank you for everybody coming tonight. I saw you in the chat blowing up a chair. Thank you, but that's it for Mahogany Books, front Row. Have a great night. The replay will be available. I did see a lot of people asking about the replay. The replay will be available, probably later this evening or tomorrow. This takes a few minutes for this system to upload, but thank you all for coming. Thank you, congratulations, and thank you, trisha. Good night.
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