A Sky Full of Elephants: Cebo Campbell on Pushing Boundaries in Literature

Foreign.

What'S good family?

Welcome to another episode of the Reader of Black Genius podcast where we learn about your favorite writers.

Favorite writers.

I'm your host, Derek Young, super blurred and co owner of Mahogany Books.

I can't front y'.

All.

I am.

I absolutely love what I do and the opportunities that are born out of this work never cease to amaze me.

Today is another example is another treat.

For example of what I mean by this, I'm getting to sit down for a conversation with a brother who has written one of my absolute favorite books in recent years, which I might add includes Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

I'm so grateful that I had a chance to run.

I had a chance running with this dude a few weeks ago in Harlem.

However, before I introduce this gentleman to you, I have a bit of business to attend to.

The Reader of Black Genius podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, Mahogany Books.

Discover a world of literature featuring black stories@mahogany books.com with the world's deepest collection of books written for, by or about people of the African diaspora, you can enhance your reading experience with their curated collection of culturally enriching books.

And by using our coupon Code Genius, you can support black owned businesses and promote representation and literature.

Visit mahogany books.com today and let your imagination take flight.

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So with all out the way y', all, I got CBO Campbell on the line with me today.

A poet, a storyteller and a creative visionary whose work stretches across continents, mediums and emotional truths.

Born in North Carolina and I need to find out where.

And now living between Brooklyn and London, C Bo has spent recent years has spent years crafting stories that explore the black experience with honesty, depth and radical imagination.

As a co founder and Chief Creative Officer of the hospitality marketing agency Spherical, his voice has always been rooted in purpose, whether on spoken word stages or not.

With his debut novel, Sky Full of Elephants, Sibo enters the literary world with a narrative as bold as it is necessary in the speculative story, y'.

All.

So just, just a premise, just give it to you.

Bear with me.

Every white person in America disappears overnight.

That's it.

Story done all right.

Forcing a nation and a father and a father daughter duo to reckon with what's left behind.

It's a novel about identity, grief, justice and reconstruction.

And today we get we get to meet the mind behind the book that has impacted so many, while also learning about the books that made him feel just as Deeply.

Today we're welcoming to the reader of Black Genius podcast, brother Sibo Campbell.

Give it up, y'.

All.

Welcome, man.

Welcome, man.

I appreciate that.

That's really beautiful.

I'm really, really happy to be here.

Mahogany is just so.

You know, Mahogany Books, when I was.

When I was just getting into the literary space, and they asked me about bookstores and people who sort of are the guiding light for literature right now, where do I want to go?

Where do I want to have sit down and conversations?

And they gave me this list of all these, you know, bookstagrammers and what not to follow.

I was following all these people, and then one of them just came up on my screen and was Mahogany.

And I was like, why didn't they send me this one?

And I started looking.

I was like, yo, put this at the top of the list.

This is it.

This is when I imagine sitting down and having conversations.

This is the type of space I want to be in.

So I'm glad to be here with you now.

Hey, bro, I appreciate that.

And that.

That speaks to the heart of what we're trying to accomplish and create that kind of experience, that kind of space for people.

And I saw your face when I said, they're actually watching God, and you was like, oh, Lord, don't.

But, you know, and I say that with.

Because for me, what books represent is a challenge to look at things differently, right?

I'm a very introspective dude.

I'm always analyzing, reanalyzing, and then hopefully starting to move to act upon those things.

And books, for me, has been the way for me to grow, evolve, and mature myself into the person I am today.

And I'm always looking to try to become a better version of myself.

And books have been that mentor for me in a lot of ways.

And reading your book gave me that chance to look at.

At myself in a very different way and to ask certain questions that, you know, it didn't change who I was, but it helped to just, like, re.

Solidify who I am, right?

My core.

And I think everyone needs to have that opportunity to be challenged on our outlooks and perspectives, because maybe you do need to grow from it, or maybe it just takes you deeper into who you are so you can't be shaken when people challenge, you know, your principles or core beliefs.

And, you know, that's what your book did for me.

So I'm constantly, you know, someone came to the store.

I think I was in there Thursday or Friday.

She's like, yeah, you know, I just need something for My son, you know, he's, he's home.

I want him to read.

He's not a big reader and know.

So I'm trying to figure out like, well, what does he like trying to figure out how to, how to suggest a book to him.

I'm like, well, look, just tell me this.

And I asked a few questions like is he open to fiction?

She's like, yes.

I said, okay, so I'm going to give you something and I'm just, it's going to be sort of a spoiler, but I'm going just give you the premise of it.

I told her about your book and she's like, bam, that's it.

And fantastic.

It's the way that you can just again get people to really think about something differently.

That it just, it means a lot.

Right.

And so, so that's why for me it's been absolutely one of the best books I've read in the last few years.

And I'm excited to have you here and have this conversation with you for sure.

I really, really, really appreciate that.

I say to people all the time with the, with a book like this and other books like this that inspired me.

What I like the most is that we are naturally going to be analytical.

You read something and you respond to it with a sense of analysis in your, in the book and in your reality.

But when you can read a book that first begins with imagination and it goes, I want you to take your, your analytical mind, set it aside and I just want you to imagine something and then be analytical of the thing you just imagined.

That that to me is the difference maker because you go, it cracks you open and it gets you out of your day to day sort of thinking and you step back, you recess and you realize, wait a minute, I can see all this completely differently.

And then when you do and you start to analyze it, you're analyzing it as if you're using the muscle of your brain in a different way.

And I've always loved that.

And that's the space I wanted to try to write into that non narrative space.

And so it means a lot that you say those things.

It really, really does.

I mean, it's not a problem.

I mean it sincerely.

And you know, the people who've listened to this, follow this podcast, they know, you know, we get into your origin story and find out about, you know, how you develop to the person you are today and you know, what were the books that helped to mold and shape you.

But I just want to make sure I comment on what you just said, because the real time and importance of the act of imagining a new and different world from different perspectives is what helps to breed empathy.

And that's what this world right now is lacking, is the ability to see from another person's perspective.

And it's creating so much tension between people because we don't want to take the time out to actually imagine that someone's reality may be different than ours.

Right.

And we may have to take steps to kind of bridge that gap so that people all feel comfortable in their space.

Yes, completely agree.

Completely.

I have conversations about this all the time and how important imagination is to even language.

Right now, we are in a war of language.

I think.

I think the way things.

A simple word like woke or the simple phrasing like DEI all of a sudden is weaponized.

And you go, wait a minute.

Let me step back and let me.

Let me take language out of it and just feel it.

If I walked down the street today and I saw a police officer choking a man in the middle of the road, I would be like, this is wrong.

I don't need your language to try to negotiate with me whether or not this is wrong or not.

And I don't think we're spending enough time in the space of those emotions, which is completely and directly related to how we imagine things.

Like when you say it's empathy.

Empathy is the first emotion that comes out of imagination.

And so you start to work your emotions through how you imagine the world around you.

So when you actually encounter the world, you can do it without language as a prerequisite to determine whether something's right or wrong.

You feel right or wrong in your bones.

You know it to be right, you know it to be wrong.

That to me is.

I think we're at.

That.

We're sort of at the precipice of having to decide, are we going to decide what's good for us, what's bad for us because someone told us or because we know it?

Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.

100.

I'm right there with you.

So to.

Let's kind of get moving on.

On the story here, because I'm very interested in how you.

How'd you got to this place of analysis?

Right?

And we all have an origin story.

And I. I specifically use that language, origin story, because I want to make sure I'm calling out to all my fellow blurds out there, you know, as comic aficionados, as sci fi geeks.

The beauty about the idea, the concept of an origin story is that we all have one.

And whether you're a super villain or a superhero or somewhere in between, something shaped you.

And I love to get into that story, you know, as a kid, you know, high school, went to college.

What are the.

You know, who shaped you?

What was the environment?

What were the books, if there were any.

Just want to learn that story from you.

Yeah.

Well, one thing.

I grew up actually in Florida, not North Carolina, so I grew up in Panama City, Florida.

It's funny, it's because my wife is a famous.

She's a pseudo famous actor.

But we always get the.

The, you know, who's she married to now?

Kind of those little articles, and they always get my stuff wrong.

And so Google is just all over the place because of my wife.

So I blame it on her.

But I grew up in a very small town in Florida, in North Florida, on a beach.

And my family was.

We were, like, honestly, extraordinarily poor growing up, but there's a lot of us.

And so we had each other, and there was this natural sort of sense of unity.

My mother.

There were 10 of us, so my mother had five kids, and I had five stepbrothers and sisters, and we all sort of lived in and out of our house together.

And then my mother, my grandmother, she had 13 total kids, so my mother was one of 13.

And they all had kids, multiple kids.

And so you go to my grandmother's house in the summer, and there's 20 kids over there because everybody dropping their drink, their kids are.

And the range of ages.

Like, I'm in the middle in my family, but it was like, you know, everyone is within 5, 6 years of each other.

So we're all.

Everything we do.

If we're playing football, we're playing together, we're making up games, playing together.

And my grandmother had this house that my grandfather built and his father helped him build for my grandmother's little plot of land.

And she.

And it was old.

Like, we still had a well pump for the water in the house.

Like, it wasn't.

It didn't have traditional running water.

It was like a really old house.

And she would not let the kids inside.

When we get there, she goes, y' all play outside and don't come.

Don't come tracking mud in my house.

What she say?

And so she had this huge swath of land, and it was like a church on the other side of the land.

And on that land, there was plum trees, pecan trees, there was pear trees, fig trees.

And she goes, when you're hungry, eat the player, Eat the pears eat the plums.

So we sit out in the grass making up games.

Because after you play football a couple times, you're like, all right, what else?

What else?

And so we just.

We had the car game.

We had all kind of games that we just make up.

And then in between the games, we sit, lay in the grass, eat a pair, get up, make up another game.

And there were so many of us that you could create all sorts.

All sorts.

And I think that was the beginning of starting to, like, imagine story, like, imagine, like, ways of engaging with other people.

Even if I didn't understand it, you know, at the time, it was just like they would look around and go, all right, what are we gonna play next?

And somebody would have to conjure something to play, you know?

And so we did that.

I did that all the way up until I was maybe 10 or 11 and my mother.

We moved closer.

So where I live, there is like a bayside, and then there's this bridge, and the bridge takes you to the beach side and the beach side where all the rich white people lived.

And, I mean, it was.

Very few black people lived on the beach.

Also, side note, I've been saying this on every podcast.

I'm trying not to say white people, so if you catch me saying it, stop me.

What I want to say is the colonizing majority.

And I want to say that because I think when we call white people white, it absolves them of all of the ancestral harm, whereas a colonizing majority still gives you.

It identifies you as a category, but it makes sure that you retain the proximity to wrongs.

Right?

Which is important.

So they all lived on the beach.

We lived in town, and we could never go to the beach.

As a kid, my mom wouldn't let us go.

We couldn't even go to the Bayside because we had one of our cousins drowned when we were very young.

And my mom was like, you can't go.

And I remember this moment very specifically.

We decided.

We were playing like we always do, and we decided, let's go to the beach.

Let's go.

And obviously, everybody's scared, but my older brother, my older cousins are like, we going.

And to get to the beach, you have to leave our.

We lived on Martin Luther King Boulevard, but you leave the boulevard, go towards the beach, and as you cross the street, it all changes.

All of a sudden you go from, like, lamp posts to, like, those really nice street lanterns, and the roads are paved with nice painted nicely, and they start to curve down towards the water.

I've never been.

So I'm, like, figuring this out as I go.

It goes down the hillside, and there's a row of the most extravagant houses.

To me, they look like mansions.

I haven't seen them in a long time.

I'm sure they're not as big as I remember them.

They were huge homes, and they all were, like, gated, and they blocked the access to the beach.

So unless you lived in those homes, you couldn't.

That beach wasn't yours.

And so my brother and all them, they were like, let's.

Let's just go.

Let's jump the fence.

Jump a fence.

We go to the beach, out to the bay.

And I remember it so vividly, even young, how it made my knees weak.

It scared me to see that much water, to see the horizon with no obstruction, to just look and see as far as you could possibly see with nothing in the way of you.

I never experienced that in my entire life.

And it caught me so off guard that I wobbled.

It scared me so much.

And we go out and we're like, oh, my God, it's the beach.

We're splashing around.

And those people came out of those houses, and they were like, y' all can't be here.

This ain't yours.

And they literally called the police on us to come and get us off of that beach.

I remember being like, we can't have nature.

Like, that's.

That's like, I can't have access to nature.

I can't have access to a life in which I can look and see as far as I could possibly see.

Like, that's crazy.

Yeah, that's crazy.

And so I had that memory stuck in my mind, and obviously we get older, we start getting to football, But I never forgot that.

And I remember when we got home, my dad at the time, you know, obviously the police is there, and it's like a big deal.

And my mom and dad, they're mad to the police officers, like, you know, we want to talk to the kids.

But when they come back and talk to us, they was like, no, y' all go wherever y' all want.

And my dad.

My dad grabbed me by the shoulders and he said, I'm the best I know, and I expect you to be the best that, you know, don't ever feel like you can't go somewhere.

And I was like, all right.

So as I get older, I start playing football.

That mentality applied to me, the football player.

I was like, oh, I'm going to be the best football player, Be the fastest I'm be the strongest.

And I played football all through high school.

Never even gave a thought about literature.

So all of this is happening never once.

I mean, I read comic books.

You know, I had, I was crazy X Men fan, I was a crazy Spider man fan.

But I was more to draw the art, it was less.

I didn't even read them half of the time I was just like, look at that picture and I'll just try to redraw the picture.

I get to high school and I'm playing ball.

I'm so I'm in pursuit of becoming the best football player.

But it naturally applied to class where I'm in class.

I'm not really like thinking about it, but I'm going to be the best.

Like I'm not if you got an A, I'm getting an A just on, on, on gp.

But I wasn't really into the work, so I remember them giving us Shakespeare.

You know, we're reading Romeo and Juliet and as yous Like It.

And I'm like, yeah, okay, I'm reading it and it's all good.

Of course I can do reading comprehension.

I'll get an A.

And before I knew it, I was in advanced level English courses and I ended up getting dual enrolled.

So I had college credits going into college play all four years of high school, get a football scholarship and I go to St. Louis to play ball again.

Completely.

All I'm trying to do is be better than everyone else.

All I'm trying to do is go as far to the horizon as I could possibly go.

Never once thinking about it as a skill set.

And you know, there, you know, I was good at drawing, I was good at critical thinking, but I didn't know what I was doing.

When I get to college and I'll never forget, I was playing ball.

Scored a touchdown on a punt return.

And the announcer says, linden was sensational.

Freshman.

And I get to class on Monday and my professor, she goes, I didn't know you were a freshman.

You're the best writer in this class.

Wow.

I'm looking at them.

Look at this lady.

I'm like, lady, I haven't written.

I'm just doing, I'm doing what you told me to do.

Like I don't know what you're saying.

And she goes, no, no, you got away with telling stories.

And she goes, this is what I want you to do.

She gives me a notebook and she goes, I want you to write every single day in this notebook.

Put a date on it.

So you write whatever you want.

You can write journal entry, you can write a poem.

You can write whatever you want every day.

And I'll pass you in this class.

You don't even have to do any work.

And I was like, well, I'll bet.

And I started to write and I would write different things.

Initially it was just like, okay, I'm gonna write a dumb little story.

And I write a story about a little boy who's a vampire, or rather a little boy who's adopted by a vampire.

And they don't realize that he's a werewolf, so he eats them.

I was like, this is fun.

I was like, messing around with all these different stories.

And, you know, and it was based off stuff that I watched on tv.

I was a big Star Trek fan as well, so I was writing just dumb little stories.

But then I started to, like, you know, I'm dating girls and I write poems, or I write letters to the women that I was talking to.

Or I would, you know, draw sketches and try to describe the sketches.

At the end of the semester, I give her the book.

Like, she asked me to do everything I've written.

She extracts the poems, enters them into the school writing contest, and I win the whole contest for the school.

Wow.

Didn't know what I was doing.

And she's like, I told you, you've got a real talent, so we're going to change your major.

And they changed my major to writing.

And at that time, again, I've read, you know, just classic stuff.

I think I had.

I was the only book that was like.

The book that I was, like, in love with at the time was probably Kerouac's on the Road or maybe Self Reliance.

So I didn't have, like, a lot of literature.

And my teacher, my professor, she's white, she was one of the colonizing majority.

And she goes.

She goes, here, you should read this.

And I'm like, okay, I got football.

Like, I got a game.

Like, what are you talking about?

She goes, after your game, read this book.

And the book she gives me is sula.

Toni Morrison.

Wow.

I didn't know who Toni Morrison was.

I didn't know anything.

And I'm at this time probably 19, right?

I'm into my freshman year, so gives me this book, Play in the Game.

And I come back to my dorm the next day.

It's Sunday play on Saturday.

So Sunday I'm in my dorm by myself.

And I'm like, I'm sore.

I'm gonna sit down.

I'm read this book.

And I opened it and I Was like, first page, open it, read it, slammed it shut.

And I was like, what the hell was that?

Why do I feel all of these things that I feel?

What was that?

I thought maybe I was losing my mind.

So I opened the book again.

I read another page, close it again.

I was like, that's.

I've never experienced looking at language on a page that made me react throughout my entire body, throughout my.

Gave me chills, made me feel all these different things.

It took me six months to read this book because every.

Every page was like a language.

It was like a rhythm that I didn't know could happen.

And then that didn't even have anything to do with the story.

It was just writing alone.

And then I got to the story, and the story was.

It felt like it was unfolding something inside of me.

And I remember reading Tony taking me forever to read this book, talking to all my football friends, and they're like, bro, I don't want to talk about.

I don't want to talk about this.

I don't want to talk about this.

And I'm going to all of the kids in, like, my writing and theater classes, and they're like, well, have you.

Have you read, you know, Baudrillard?

And I'm like, no, I want to read.

I want you to read Toni Morrison.

Like, who is this?

Who is this person?

And no one could, like, I couldn't find anyone to talk to about it.

So I was just in the world of her language.

I was in the world of her story construction.

And I went, I want to do that.

I don't know what that is, but I want to write something that makes people change.

I want to write something that makes people read it and slam my book.

Shut up and go.

I need to process that.

I need to really process that.

Throw it across the room.

Right?

Exactly.

You feel me?

Slam it in the cell.

So that's where it all started, man.

Is that that moment of holding that book in my hand and being like, oh, no.

Everything I'd read prior to that, everything I experienced prior to that, she encapsulated my whole childhood.

The stories, the play, the trauma, the.

And put it in.

In a language that was both beautiful, compact and a narrative that made sense to me and that I could.

I could hold almost like I could hold a family member.

And I was like, I want to do that.

Yeah.

So I love that opening and explaining coming to.

Well, how one imagination was always rooted in your life, especially, you know, that connection with family.

That means a lot.

But a few like question, what's the word?

Questions of clarity for clarification for the audience.

So one, what year?

This was late 80s, so it was with my mom, my grandmother's house in, in the 80s, in high school.

I graduated high school in 99.

So it was like 97, 98, 99.

And then I graduated college in 2004.

Three or four, I think.

Okay, okay, so.

And what was your original, your original major before you?

I want to say it was sociology.

I think they gave.

Because when you, when you on a football scholarship, you arrive to school two weeks early, you get your two days in, they're not, they just give you a major and they're just like, you'll figure it out.

But right now, go, go get this ball.

Go play.

And so I think it was social.

It was these socialities of psychology.

And it was only because I also had dual enroll credits for both of those.

And so they just.

Okay, so, so this is the late 90s, early 2000s.

And you had never.

Are you saying you had never heard of Toni Morrison?

Never heard of.

Never even heard of.

And to be frank, there were no black books, no books by black authors in my periphery, in my radius at all.

So growing up, I have no memory of someone going, yo, you should read this.

It was always classic American or French writers and.

American, yeah.

And the standard was like, if they can achieve Shakespeare, this is glorious.

And I argued with anyone walking.

I live in London and I have this argument all the time.

Toni Morrison is the greatest writer he's ever lived.

I don't care what you say.

So argue with me, debate it.

Because there's no way that Shakespeare's language, though it stands the test of time, competes with hers on the line level and certainly not on the emotional one.

So like, let's talk.

But I think when I was a kid, that's what I was getting.

I mean, I was getting Neil Gaiman.

I remember a little bit in like the latter part of high school.

I think I'd never wear.

When I was like 17, but I was never getting any black authors and nothing that was a part of the curriculum either.

So it wasn't.

Right.

I'll take that back.

Langston Hughes was the only one.

And Langston Hughes is.

But it wasn't just like individual poems.

And the only reason I know it is because I use a Langston Hughes poem as my singer quote.

Just because I thought it was cool to be different than everyone else.

But it wasn't like imposed on me in any way until I got to.

I, I Relate with so much of that.

And so even before I, I, I, I go there, so hopefully I remember this.

I should have wrote this down.

The, the, the story you told about what, jumping, Basically, these folks owning a beach is essentially what it was owning, you know, this land, access to this water.

But even more than that, what was going through my head when you was relaying that story is owning the horizon, the perspective, the imagination of what is possible because it's now shut off to everyone on the other side of this fence.

I am the only one that can wake up and see the limitless potential of the world, which is what that represents.

Right.

You know, when you're looking at the, the breadth of the ocean and, like, just imagining what's out there, what's in there, like, all of it, we are the only ones that have ownership of this, that can wake up and enjoy this, this view.

Everyone else out of here, you can't.

You don't have access to that.

And that's the thing that people don't understand that is done to black folk every day in this country when it comes to limiting access to things.

It's the ability to view the impossible.

Right.

And when you run into those moments, I feel like it's important to call out what that represents in our life and what we have to push back against.

That's exactly how I reflect on it as I look back at it and just a sensation of going, like, taking over me and going, this is so big and gargantuan that it's frightening.

And you look at it every day and it's normal.

It's normalized for you.

And I don't even have access to it.

It's.

That to me is like, it's.

When I wrote sky, that's sort of what I was trying to get to.

It's like, how can I push us to the discomfort of the impossible, to the place where you go.

I'm going to normalize my ability to reach as far as I can reach.

Reach so far, it's uncomfortable.

And that, that is what I felt.

And you're right, the idea that someone could fence that off and be like, we got it.

It's ours every day.

It's ours every day.

And if you come anywhere near it, you go into jail.

Like, that's wild stuff.

It's power.

I mean, it's power.

And like, these are the conversations we have to have.

And this is why, you know, books and having these kind of conversations are important, because that's what we need to unveil and you talked about it when the colonizing majority.

Right.

Let's call it for what it is.

These words, this language is important, right?

And it's not just, oh, you know, we just.

We have these houses in this gated community.

That gated community means something.

It represents something.

And what it means for them to be able to view the impossible every day and have access to it, that inspires their imagination.

Where we started this conversation, it limits the imagination of everyone that's on the other side of this fence.

Right?

That's what it represents.

And we have to be honest about it.

We have to work against that.

We have to.

We have to.

And honestly, I think for us, for black folks, we have to be willing to do whatever it takes to make access for it by any means.

By any means necessary, even in the way that we think about ourselves, to go.

I'm deserving of that space, which is the prerequisite to say I have access to that space.

I should have that view every single day.

I should be looking out and imagining all the possible things that could happen.

And if you don't put yourself in a position to do that, because I find myself doing it all the time where I will talk myself out of something before I even do it, you know, and it's only because of those traumatic response.

I don't want to feel the discomfort of it.

But it's like, nah, we.

We have to see ourselves in that state.

And it took me a long, long, long time to do that.

It took me traveling the whole world and coming back to that beach and being like, yeah, I'm supposed to be the person that's staring out of this view every day.

Exactly, exactly.

So you run into Tony for the first time in.

Was this 1999?

This would have been 2000.

2000.

Either 2000, or I think it's 2000.

So it would have crossed over into 2000.

Yeah.

So the Matrix had just come out.

And I remember being like, this is the perfect time.

Like, everything.

I'm losing my mind.

So it was a lot.

It was a lot.

But it would have been 2000.

And so I got Sula, and then I went from Sula to the bluest eye.

And when I picked up the bluest eye, it staggered me as well, because the bluest eye.

The writing and bluest eyes are outrageously good.

But she talks about.

There's a sequence in it where she talks about the people who come from Mobile.

And that's why Mobile is in the sky full of elephants, partially.

And because they come from Mobile, they come from Clay Aiken.

And.

And when she says the whole line, but she goes.

When they say mobile, it feels like you've been kissed.

And I was like, good lord, this is writing.

When I met my wife, true story.

She was like, have you heard of Toni Morrison?

And gave me that quote.

And I was like, girl, stop.

We getting married right now.

So it's a done deal, right?

It's a done deal.

It's a rap.

It's a wrap.

It's a rap.

But that second book, I think it was Bluest Eye.

And then, you know, I started to meet other people in St. Louis who were reading and writing, and they had access to different writers.

And then I started to.

I think the next book that was given to me that was like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

What's happening here?

Was Chinua Achebe's was an arrow guy was the first Things Fall Apart.

Oh, part.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I was like, okay, this is wild.

I didn't even think about.

Tony is writing about the American experience.

All of a sudden, now I'm reading about the relationship to the African experience.

And I was like, you know, again, my brain is, like, cracking apart, and a fascinating thing happened.

Fascinating.

I look back on this as well, and it's mostly curiosity, but if I.

If there was ever a movie about my life, that would be the thing.

It.

Reading those books made me less desirous to play football.

It made me.

I feel like playing football.

I'm running fast on the surface, but I'm not going deep.

There's nothing underneath that surface.

And I find myself pulling back and, like, internalizing.

And I ended up the dorm that I lived in.

I had a roommate, and I went and negotiated with the housing person, housing director, campus, to give me a dorm by myself.

And I was like, I just want to be in the room by myself.

I just want to sit and I want to meditate on these things.

And she.

She does.

And I had this picture in my head, Derek, of, like, what an author is supposed to be.

And I don't know why, but it was like, you need candles, you need whiskey.

You need to.

You need, like, the lights low.

You need a computer.

Like, you need balls of paper everywhere.

And so I didn't know how to drink.

I didn't drink until I turned 21.

And so the only thing I knew, like, I went to the.

To the store to get alcohol.

I was like, can I get, like, whatever that is?

And it was basically like a wine cooler.

And so.

And I didn't have cups Because I was poor.

And so I just had a cup like this.

Like a cheap cup.

Yeah.

I would just pour the white wine cooler in the cup, and I would have, like, some cheap candles, and I'd be like, now I'm writing.

Like, now I'm Penny.

So I had this very, like, big shift in my life where I went from, like, wanting to be the best popular, wanting to be, you know, on the football team with everyone, to kind of going, nah, nah, nah.

I actually.

I want to be by myself.

I want to be in the sort of comfort of my own brain here with these.

I want to be with these other writers in my brain.

I want to sit with Chingua in my brain.

I want to sit with Tony in my brain.

And I want to.

I want to watch movies that stimulate me.

At that time, I was watching a ton of foreign films as well, and I was just like, I want.

I need to just be here.

And I didn't realize that that is also how writers become writers.

It's solitude.

I had no idea that that was.

That was a thing I didn't know.

When I imagined Toni Morrison sitting, writing, I never once thought she just sits by herself and writes a book until I was sitting by myself going, oh, this is how you get there.

You don't.

You, of course, interact with the world, and you're part of the world.

You're a contributing member of the world.

But ultimately, when you sit down and you go into an alternate dimension with all your other writers that you know and the story that you're trying to tell and them all sitting around you gathered around you going, yeah, actually, try this.

What about this?

You know?

So I shifted, and it was sophomore into sophomore year.

I went from, you know, focused on trying to play in the NFL to just going, I want to get the sentence right.

I just want to sing these stories.

I want to make the mistakes of writing a whole bunch and throwing it all away, I want to do that.

And so I knew I was going to become a writer then, but I also knew that the craft to perfect something, to craft to be good at something, isn't something that you do overnight.

I knew that because I played football my whole life, and you don't become good at football without practicing every single day.

And so I was like, I'm gonna become a writer, but I'm not gonna become a writer today.

I'm gonna start the act of becoming a writer today.

And this is why it took me so long to get to a debut, because I was writing and throwing it away.

For 10 years, just going, it's all right.

It's okay to keep practicing because you don't become Tony over.

You don't even try to become Tony, but you don't become that type of writer overnight.

You gotta really, really think of it like a craft.

And so that's what I did.

But it started in college, and I think I had.

On my dorm room, I had.

I had Things Fall Apart.

I had sula, I had Bluest Eye.

And I think it was either sophomore year or junior year, I started to get into Octavia Butler, and I was like, okay, now we cooking.

Now we cooking.

I started to see a range of the types of stories that one could tell.

And then I started to play, figure out what I like to write, what I like to think about.

There is a question here, and I don't.

Right.

I don't have the ability to ask it, but there's something that's sitting here.

I don't know what the words are, but I know there's a question.

And the thing that I'm feeling is there is a transition, so I may babble into it.

So just.

So I'm asking you to bear with me, audience, please bear with me, because I'm trying to process it in my head.

There's.

I'm trying to figure out what was it either about the work or within combination with where you were in terms of your maturity, your experience, something that began that shift in you to want to be both introspective, to sit with the words as well as to want to be as proficient as possible with the words and, like, so immediately to understand the importance of that.

Of that language.

Right.

And so I don't know how to frame a question around it, but it has me thinking, like, because those are some phenomenal writers, phenomenal books to be inspired by.

So I can easily, like, understand, well, of course, proximity to that.

But I think there's also in combination with something at the same time that prompts you to want to actually make that type of change in your life, Right?

Because.

Because now you actually have to act on it.

Right.

And not everyone is willing to do what's necessary to really kind of shift and change, Right.

Because, you know, big man on campus, you, football, you, all this stuff happening, Right.

But now I just want to be with these words and think and write, which is such a.

Like you said, a thing of solitude.

Like, I'm trying to think.

What.

Yeah.

What do you think was happening at a time for you?

Well, you know, when I go back to my Childhood with my grandmother's house, right.

We were always in a sort of quiet meditation.

When we weren't playing, I kid you not, we literally just lay in the grass and look at the clouds, and that was it.

We weren't.

There was a.

There was always a place of comfort in solitude or a place of comfort in a sort of quiet meditation.

And then on top of that, you know, my mother.

We have so many kids in my family, all my brothers and sisters.

My mom, if my mom was here right now, she'd met my mother's house on vacation with my.

Visiting my mom, she would tell you.

She was like, you were always the one that was quiet.

And I would just be thinking.

And it wasn't that I was in a bad mood.

I would just be like, oh, that's interesting.

And I would just process it on my own.

We went to church every Wednesday, every Saturday, every Sunday.

And I remember sitting in church and just quietly sitting there, looking at the Bible, listening to what he's saying.

And I wouldn't.

It was a lot of going on in my mind later in life when I met my wife, she.

She painted me something.

I make my wife sound super creative.

She's not.

She's fine.

But she.

She.

She.

She's painted.

I love the shady just a little.

She knows I love her.

She know I love her.

She.

She painted this thing, and she was like, this is you.

And it was an iceberg, and it was like.

She's like, this is how much of you I see, but this is how much is going on.

And she's like, you.

I need you to come to the surface of some of this stuff because you have all these thoughts.

And I.

But I didn't realize I was naturally like that.

Like, I naturally wanted to sort of be in my own head a little bit.

And so when.

When I was.

When I'm out and about, you know, going to college parties and trying to be out, I would feel a pulling towards just the solitude, just naturally.

And so when I got a reason to sit in solitude, it felt.

It felt like I was home almost.

And.

And there was.

You know, there was so.

There were these extraordinary writers that I love now that if you go on my shelf, they're all on my shelf.

But there was also the stuff, the curriculum I was getting in school and then other books that friends were giving me.

So I had, like, you know, I'm reading philosophy.

I think there's a ton of different philosophy books, but I think I was reading Society the Spectacle, which is a French.

I Think he's French.

Names debord.

This book of philosophy.

And then I've also got, like, you know, more Neil Gaiman books.

I got, you know, Dan Brown, like these crappy.

Not crappy, but writers that I go, they're not.

They're not Toni Morrison, right?

When you've got them all three happening, you're triangulating, well, what's the difference between all of this?

What's the difference between, you know, what Dan Brown is writing and what Toni Morrison is writing?

And on that spectrum, where do I exist?

And that is a question of both identity and I think literary execution is.

You go, who am I?

What is the story I want to tell?

And does it exist in the spectrum of this once it's on the page?

And so I would sit with all of them collectively in.

In my.

I'm kid, you not sit.

And my room be dark as hell.

Only thing beyond is the computer screen.

And I would just be like, what?

Okay, this line, this line.

How do these things match up?

There's a rhythm, there's rhythm, but he doesn't have this rhythm.

This is a story he's trying to tell.

But what's the art?

How do you.

How do you actually.

What is the composition of this type of story?

And I've got other books that I'm, you know, that were given to me by my professors that are like.

Like story structure, you know, like Campbell's Hero's Journey.

And I'm like, but that doesn't map to this.

So there was a real deep study.

And there's no better place, no better catalyst for study than being in college.

And so you just feel like studying.

And so I would go from my dorm room, we had this library.

It was an old, old, old church and all the way up in the.

In the attic.

I forget what they call it, but it's like the very top, like a steeple almost.

I would sit up there, knowing this place is haunted, but I would sit up there and I would just.

With these books, man.

And I would have, like, you know, anthology of English Literature, Anthology of African Literature.

And I would just be in a state of study on it.

And I wasn't writing a lot at the time.

I was trying to, but it was mostly like, playing.

Like, I would write a little bit and know it was bad, and then I write a little bit more and know that was bad.

And I would try some poetry, and I know that was bad.

And I would just keep playing with it, you know, and reading and absorbing all the way up until I was a senior.

And when I was a senior, my.

My professor was like, your.

To this last course of yours, they didn't have a curriculum for it.

So he goes, what we're going to do is I want you to write a work that's 50 pages or more.

And he's like, you could write a collection of poems, you could write a novel, you could write a screenplay, you could write a stage, whatever you want.

It has to be 50 pages or more.

And that was the first time I attempted a novel, which is a.

As a form, is the hardest.

And it was interesting to think I had been reading all these writers and they're all writing novels, but I wasn't thinking of myself as a novelist.

I just wanted to be writing.

But then I was like, oh, this is a whole other.

This is a specific form.

So I attempted my first novel when I was a senior in high school, in college.

And that's when it was like, okay, this is where I want to be.

This isn't just about inspiration, because inspiration can translate into a myriad of different things.

I could read a book and go, want to make a movie?

But I was like, no, I want to do what they do.

And that is the novel form.

And so, you know, I took all my books that I had.

I accumulated more at that time.

But then I had, you know, Baldwin.

I really went deep into Baldwin.

Who else was I reading a lot of back then?

Obviously, I just stumbled upon Alice Walker, Tony Cade Bambara, finding writers.

And I was like, this is great.

I took my books and I was like, okay, we're gonna try to figure out how to write us a novel.

And I wrote a novel that was awful.

Gosh, it was bad, but I did it right.

I got from one end to the other and it was like, I did it.

And my teacher was like, great.

And I was like, great, we did it.

And he was like, okay, now I'm gonna show you how to get a novel published.

And that was like, oh my God, this is terrible.

And so all the no's I got was astounding.

Like I.

So many no's.

But I realized that there is the way one crafts a story.

It begins with the ability to imagine it and the deconstruction of imagination into, or rather the synthesis of imagination into this three dimensional space.

And you go, how can I.

How can I bring something that doesn't exist into this space?

And that muscle, the muscle of going, I'm gonna imagine it.

I'm gonna bring it, I'm gonna imagine it.

I'm gonna bring ended up informing my whole career in and outside of being an author.

Because I was like, I can apply that to anything.

I can walk into an empty bedroom and go, I imagine this space as being calming.

What are the, what are the attributes of calm?

Are the attributes of calm the bright color red?

Of course not.

It's, it's earth tones.

It's, you know, it's, it's, it's thin veil curtains where the light can come through.

It's, it's artwork that exudes like natural, the natural world is creating.

I can create the story of calm in the room.

If I was going to make a movie and a movie is about, you know, is an action film, what kind of music is going to be playing in the background is definitely gonna be something that's fast paced.

And so story, I realized, could be connected to anything.

And that muscle that I had learned in college could now be applied to any job that I did.

And so when I left college, I went into marketing, which is way to make some money is going to marketing.

And so I ended up becoming a creative director.

It took a while, but I end up becoming a creative director and ultimately a creative director for hotels.

But I never lost the story.

And so I was always going, if I'm going to brand this hotel, and you say to me that your hotel is all about, you know, it's the best New York experience.

Well, what's a New York experience?

Let's get to the story, let's get to the essence of it and then we can execute that story into all the dimensionality.

So I kept working the muscle.

I 100 love that.

And I really hope people are taking that away as tactics to apply in their own life.

Right.

How do you and I get it as a business owner, as an entrepreneur of a bookstore, where we want people to feel a certain thing.

Right?

You have to now break down what are those things?

What are those feelings?

What does that look like, smell like, what does it sound like?

And then you begin creating the nuances of those things so that when people walk into it, they are feeling that story.

And I've, I never, I've always thought of that, but I never thought of it as like a storytelling like muscle.

Right.

And that's something that we are all doing like every day.

And you know, the benefit of that, of exercising that muscle is like, is awesome.

I've never thought of it like that.

And you know, you know, I might have to borrow that and use that in some workshops I teach.

You can have it.

It's a great way.

It's a great way to teach that concept.

So what I want to do real quick, before we jump into the next segment of your story here, I want to go back and make sure we highlight the few books however it is.

But what were.

So what would you actually say were the books during this time, this origin story of your life, were the books that shaped you, again, as a writer person?

However, what were a few of those books that you would highlight?

Definitely, you can kind of go through the entire catalog of Toni Morrison if you want, because that's it.

But in the beginning, it was Sula.

It was Bluest Eye.

And then I want to say right after Bluest Eye, I think it was Song with Solomon.

And then I got to Beloved, and I was like, okay, we need to go back to the lab, because she's way better than I thought she was.

But it was that there was fire.

Next time, James Baldwin, which is Big Giovanni's Room.

Oh, my God.

Giovanni's Room was extraordinary because that was the first book that I saw that I felt like he was writing, but not as a black man.

And I was like, that's insane.

Like, how he's able to do that.

Parable of Talents.

Octavia Butler, Things Fall Apart.

Ching Wah Che Be.

And then there was this sort of counterbalance of the stories that were not by black authors that were, like, helping me bridge my own writing relationship and I think helping me to understand what was different between how we approach story, how we approach language.

And that was on the Road with Kerouac.

Oh, don't forget on the black side.

Wretched of the Earth.

So I was also frantic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wretched of the Earth.

That was also one that I read.

And I was just angry.

I don't know how else to describe it.

I was ready for war all throughout college.

But he was great.

But on the other side, there was on the Road, Self Reliance by Emerson.

That essay, I mean, it's one of my favorite pieces in the catalog of writing.

But it's interesting to read it and think of it.

Imagine a black person writing that.

So if anybody's sitting here and you read Self Reliance, I want you to picture Denzel writing that.

Or like Samuel L. Jackson when you read it, because then it completely takes on a different shape because it's about, you know, like, believing in yourself, becoming who you are.

It's, you know, it's sort of that.

Like a bit of a manifest destiny, a bit of transcendentalist.

It's like that.

But just imagine As a black person, and you go, wow, I haven't been thinking about these things at all.

And this man in 1800s think about all this.

So it's that.

And then on that side was Neverware.

I was still reading some Neil Gaiman and Princess of Mars was a big one.

So Princess of Mars was when I was getting into my sci fi.

So Princess of Mars was my counterpart to Octavia Butler's works.

And so I quite liked.

If you've never read Princess of Mars, it's about this guy who's in the Confederate army after the Civil War, he decides to try to find this cave of gold to make money.

He's getting chased by the Union, getting chased by the, the indigenous people, and he ends up finding this cave.

But in the cave, he discovers this like, weird, like, panel thing.

And he sees this guy just appear in a robe and he does what Southern men do, he just shoots the man.

Doesn't even think twice about it.

And then.

But as the man is dying, he says a word and he drops this, what looks like a remote.

And the guy picks up the remote and he says the word that the guy was saying and he's instantly transported to Mars.

And now he's a Southern man on Mars.

And he's sort of like a superman on Mars because the bone density is different, the gravitation is different.

So he's literally like Superman on Mars.

And you learn all this stuff about science, all this stuff about races because there are multiple races on Mars and different religions.

And so he's writing about racism, he's writing about cultural structures, stigmas.

He's writing about religion in America while he's talking about Mars.

And I read that as a counterweight to Octavia Butler, and it was like, it was mind blowing.

So, yeah, that's.

Yeah, those are the.

There's more.

I just, off top of my head, can't think of it.

That was the beginning and, And I was off and running.

Well, no, that is.

That's an incredible list.

I'm trying to think honestly, right.

Things fall apart.

Is that wretched Earth.

Sorry.

Twice.

So what I'm curious is what do you think wretched of the Earth gave to you?

I was, I wasn't mad when I wasn't.

I was just like existing in like, as a black person.

You learned, right?

I was like, oh, my God.

I didn't know.

I'm ready, I'm ready.

Give me the gun, give me the gas.

Like, I was so enraged, but I didn't.

I wasn't thinking, you know, There's a degree to which we exist as particularly black Americans, and our reality just feels like a natural occurrence.

Right.

It doesn't feel like there are days I wake up and I lose sight and context for the fact that my ancestors were enslaved.

And I'm just going, yeah, I'm just moving through the day, just trying to get to work, trying to do my thing.

And everyone that I encounter, I don't think of them as like the descendants of enslaved people, I think are descendants of colonizers.

I just think they're just people.

And I just kind of move through my day.

When I go to the grocery store, I don't think of, you know, the things that are in this grocery store as being farmed by enslaved people many years ago.

And those farms became these corporations.

I'm completely disconnected from the naming conventions of stuff, you know, I'm just disconnected.

And I just move through my day.

When I read Wretched of the Earth, oh, my God, everything was like, oh, I got beef.

I got beef with that.

I got beef with that.

Everything.

You couldn't.

You name it, I was angry about.

It because this is why they banning books right now.

This is telling you.

I'm telling you, one is reading nothing right now, man.

Man.

I was like, oh, the color did all this.

Like, it was crazy.

And then it gave me like a.

It was interesting because the wretched of the arts is so like.

Certainly the first half of it is like, you, you, you.

You cannot defeat the colonizers being your nice, normal self.

And it challenged me, this concept of if, if I murder a murderer, I become a murderer, and we're challenged.

The challenge that we have is how do we defeat.

Not even defeat, but just hold back an enemy that requires us to become like them in order to defeat them.

And that to me is like, it's the paradox of our times.

It's the paradox of the last hundred years, which is to say either you are going to become a person of great violence, a person of unrelenting pressure, when that's not your nature.

In order to defeat this enemy, how do you do it if you don't become.

If you don't use those same tools?

And so the new book I just wrote explores this.

It explores the idea that we are all of us fighting a possession that is trying to claim you at every turn.

It is trying so hard to claim you.

You forget that the pressure is on you because it's on you every single day.

How do you defend against that pressure, pressure without exhausting yourself?

How do you Exercise it from out of you.

If indeed it's the concept of demonic possession, how do you.

How do you exercise it?

And I think it comes down to embodying something else.

It's not.

It's not about constantly fighting that off.

It's about allowing yourself the space to become what you always were.

And that, by definition, fights it off.

Because that's what they're actually warring against, right?

Warring.

Like you said, they're warring against you.

If you did have that view every morning to see the horizon, what would you become?

What have you became without it?

So you don't have that view.

And you still.

You still competing at every possible level, pushing the boundaries at every possible level.

What happens when you can.

That's the fear.

That's the fear.

And so I'm like.

When I read Wretched of the Earth, that was the question that happened.

That existed, like, after all the rage.

And I still.

When I read it, I'm like, still.

Now I go, okay, if he's saying the only way to defeat this enemy is effectively become that enemy to go to.

You can't beat it with trying to talk it down.

You can't negotiate.

You gotta fight it.

The concept isn't, like, literal, like, grabbing a gun and shooting.

It's the idea of concept confrontation to confront it with something else.

And I'm going, we've lost contact with the thing that we need to confront this evil with on purpose.

It deliberately disconnected us from the thing that we should be attached to.

And I do see.

Like, I see.

I see you.

I see many people like you who are like, actually, I'm trying to reattach to something.

I'm trying to reconnect to something.

And that's what I.

That's what I felt ultimately, when I read Wretched of the Earth is going to.

You gotta connect.

There's another book I read right after it.

It's called Of Water and Spirit.

So Of Water and Spirit is the name is Somal?

Something like that?

Yeah.

Maladoma Patrice Somme.

That's.

Yeah.

And I was like, oh, there's a whole other.

There's a whole other reality that I. I've not only been severed from, but I don't even think about.

And it's.

And this is what's interesting to me.

I had this in a conversation a couple weeks ago, and I talked to my mom about it a lot.

But when I was young, when I was growing up at my grandmother's house, we're all living our lives.

There was a different way in which she Viewed the world.

And it's really simple.

If right now you walk to anyone in the streets and you go, what are five senses?

They would say.

Say, you know, his taste, his touch is here and size.

All these things, right?

And if you.

If.

If you don't experience the world through those things, it's not real.

And so the interface with reality are just these five senses.

But my grandmother had a lot more.

Like, I remember her being able to just identify the weather coming, like, just by sitting there, right?

I remember her knowing the passage of time.

Like, she could tell you what time it is, or at least by the.

She tastes a quarter to four, and you'd be like, oh, dang, how do you even know that?

Watch.

She could tell you somebody's pregnant by smelling them, right?

Like that type of stuff.

So if.

If she's operating outside of these five senses, what reality is she in?

And what happened to that reality?

And am I in it?

And so I'm of the mind to be like.

Of the mind.

I'm in pursuit, I should say, of going.

I feel like I've lost something even in my childhood.

So not just ancestral, but something that's in my childhood.

I remember it feeling like.

Like there were more than 24 hours in a day.

And now it's like the day goes so fast.

Like, my God.

And it's the same.

It's the same 24 hours.

It's the same 24 hours I had as a kid, and it doesn't feel anywhere near the same.

And so I'm interested in trying to relocate and reattach some things that I feel like have been intentionally severed or we've been severed from, which is our greatest weapon against these sort of oppositional forces.

Dude, you're dropping.

Dropping.

Like you're giving us a lot.

100%.

I'm excited for it because.

And I'm excited for the book to come because what you're explaining as, like, something that you've taken out of the wretched of the earth is, you know, I don't think we all underst.

You know, the.

The saying ignorance is bliss is a real thing.

And there are people who intentionally pursue.

So I think I got a feedback now, once you took your microphone off.

Are you still getting feedback now?

Nope, I'm good.

That's okay.

Go ahead.

Okay.

All right.

All right.

There is something that you know so that the idea ignores this bliss.

People intentionally pursue that because to have to be.

For lack of better words, you know, just bothered constantly with understanding the truth of knowing what is Actually happening in reality.

You know, it forces you to have to choose to do something.

Either you choose to intentionally be blind and allow the suffering, or you choose to engage.

Right.

And this and both actions says something about you internally that you have to reckon with.

Yes.

Right.

So people will knowingly choose to be ignorant.

Because I don't want to have to identify like raise my hand and tell the world or tell myself who I am.

Right.

That I, I'm selfish and I just want to be focused on me, me, me, me, me.

But the other cohort, those who, who engage and recognize, understand and accept the rage.

Right.

Those people now have to learn how to live with it.

Yes.

Right.

They have to learn more specifically how to love with rage.

Right.

Because it is, it's easy to respond to rage with rage.

Right.

That's the easy based thing that we can all do.

But to live with the rage but know how to love people.

Yes.

While also, you know, having it in your, in your, in your belly and your heart.

Like that's a more difficult thing to do.

Right.

And you have to actively, consciously make different choices to do that thing.

So I'm excited that you, that you mentioned that about the book Wretched of the Earth because I think we all need to have that conversation again.

It's all about for me to.

Conversation.

Yeah.

How do we get into conversation with each other and with ourselves about what it means to, to live in rage, but to also love people, to love our community, to be of service to people.

Right.

That is something that is a skill set that has to be taught to people.

Yes.

And if we're not having that conversation, if we're not truly talking about it specifically like that, then we don't teach that to our kids.

Right.

And specifically in my mind, you know, our young men grow up with this rage and don't know how to process it.

They don't know how to move and mature with it.

And next thing you know, they have these anger issues when someone says something to me, oh, you stepped in my shoe.

Yeah.

Like it's a thing now.

Right.

My woman says something to me and I don't know how to process it.

Now that's the thing.

We have to learn how to understand that we're in a where we are in a fight, we are trying to survive, but there's a way to survive and do it in love.

Right.

And that's the thing that these words, these authors, Tony, for me, you know, Zora Neale Hurston, the words just help you to redefine and think of it differently.

So I'm excited about this, about the new book, because now that you've seeded that in me, I'm very curious to know what that new conversation is going to be introspectively.

Like, how do I personally continue to move and grapple with these.

You know what Du Bois says, that double consciousness.

Yes.

Right.

That we are existing simultaneously in this space on dual planes, but we have to somehow figure out how to make it work.

So I'm excited for that.

So I really wanted you to.

So I'm glad you broke that down for me.

So you graduated.

You're writing terrible stories, which I, I appreciate you that you're willing to admit out loud.

Everyone needs to accept it.

Like everything you do is not going to be awesome and it shouldn't be.

You got to work your way through it, man.

You got to work.

Yeah.

Gotta work your way through.

Yeah, that, that's an important thing for us to, to all understand.

So you graduate, you go into marketing.

I went into marketing and I thought I was gonna make six.

Six figures.

Guy told me, he was like, yeah, man, you need to go into marketing.

You make six figures.

You can do this, you can do that, man.

I ended up in direct mail marketing.

How the hell.

Like this.

That's the worst.

What I was trying to do.

Especially in the non profit world.

That ain't where you make your money at.

No, I don't even.

That's not marketing.

That's not the market I want to be in.

That's.

That's.

Dude, I looked up five years later, I was like, how the hell did I get here?

So I'm tracking with you there.

But you graduate, you enter the marketing field.

What was, what's your story there as you continue to pursue?

Because as you said, you know, it's been a 10 year process for you to get to this point now.

Yeah, it was interesting.

So I got, I get my first job that I had wasn't directly in marketing.

So I was working at front desk of a hotel.

Hotel.

And my.

And I, you know, I've written some stuff, but I couldn't get any traction on the writings I said working front us at this hotel in part because I wanted to have room to still write.

And so once you check people in, you're just sitting at this.

So.

And as I'm working at this, the manager, he's like, hey, I'm hiring for this marketing position.

Do you know anybody who's into marketing?

And I was like, what does it entail?

And he goes, well, we need Someone that can help us to get a website.

Now, this is 2004, no, maybe 2005.

And so people had, obviously, websites, but these hotels are so far behind, they didn't even have website at all.

And he goes, he goes, I need someone that can help us get a website.

And I was like, well, I, I can do that.

You know, my hands up, Derek.

I didn't even own a computer.

So, like, there was no way.

I was.

But he was like, okay, if you can build us a website, I'll give you the job.

I'll give you three months.

Because he was going off to Bangladesh.

Three months.

Now, again, this is that, that mechanism in me.

It's like, I'm going to be the best.

There's nothing you're going to do to stop me, because I'm going to get there.

And so I was like, all right, first things first, new computer.

So I went and bought a Dell laptop that was this thick.

I think it had like 12 gig, not even a gig ram.

Like 12250 megs of ram.

Like, it was terrible.

And then the first thing I downloaded was Limewire.

And I was like, okay, now I'm gonna use limited download to pirate me a copy of Photoshop and pirate me a copy of Dreamweaver.

And I had a friend who, I learned a little bit about this in college, but I had a friend who was like, I'll help you figure out how to design in Photoshop, but I don't know how to code.

And I was like, okay.

So I get to Photoshop and it takes me, you know, a few weeks and I kind of few tutorials and I figure out how to do a website, general website composition.

And back then you, you, you had layers, but you would cut your website, which is like crazy thing right now, but you cut it and it just be a composition of images.

I was tutorial in online and someone was like, if you, if you import your design into Dreamweaver, you'll get code.

And I was like, amazing.

So import the code or import the design and then I can see the code and I'm looking at the code and I'm like, okay, if I manipulate this, it manipulates that.

Oh, cool.

If I manipulate this, manipulate that.

And so I keep tinkering with it, tinkering with it and I kind of get a website, but now I don't know DevOps, so I don't know how to get it up on the Internet.

And so start researching about servers and like who can actually host this thing and what is it what type of speeds do I need?

And then I'm like, okay, I can get something up on the website.

Figure that out.

And now I've got a website on the Internet with the URL, but no one can actually book the hotel because I don't have any programmatic booking.

So I'm like, okay, how do I do that?

And so now I got to figure out programmatic code.

Like, how can I actually run any sort of query on this website into a booking system?

So I get a booking system.

I'm able to run the query in the URL, and all of a sudden, I'm like, okay, this works.

I got a website that you can actually make a reservation on.

It increased the hotel's revenue.

I built it, and it was like, June.

So I got done with it.

It was like, September.

So we're going into, like, fall increases at $250,000 before the end of the year.

Wow.

Because they didn't have any online revenue.

None.

Zero.

And so now they got online revenue.

And my.

And they gave me the job.

And I was like, okay, this is great.

Like, I can figure this out.

And I taught myself all of this in three months.

And so, obviously, I'm still terrible at code.

I'm so terrible at design.

But I keep learning, keep learning, keep learning.

And as I'm doing this, I realized very quickly, I'm like, we can.

The hotel pictures are terrible.

Like, we're selling people these rooms, and these images are whack.

So I was like, we need more room photos.

And they're like, well, we don't have money for a photographer.

And I was like, just give me a camera.

Give me a camera.

And I go shoot the room.

And as I'm shooting the room, I'm like, this room is ugly.

And I was like, actually, let's make it uglier.

Let's make the bed messy.

Let's put someone in the room.

Let's make it look like someone's living in this room.

Room.

Let's make a ball in this room.

And so I end up setting up a shoot where people are throwing a party in the bedroom in the hotel room.

And you can see there's a view of the beach.

All of it.

And then I post that, and everyone's like, this is the party hotel.

Book it.

Book it.

And I realize I'm telling a story on this canvas, the story of how you are supposed to live in this space.

And if you want to be in Florida, you want to be on the beach, you want to be having A good time.

This is the, the place to do it.

And so I was like, that's.

That's the key.

So I get this new site up with all these photos, and all the other hotels on the beach are like, can you do my website?

I was like, I guess.

And so before I knew it, I'm doing all these websites, I'm naming price.

I, like, back then I, you know, I did this for free.

So I'm like, I'll do it for 500 bucks.

And they were like, okay.

And I'm just like, oh, my God, that's the most money I've ever seen.

And it's.

And I was doing it for like a couple years.

I was doing it for like under a thousand.

Then I realized I could be charging like 10,000.

Like, it was.

I want.

Because I could charge it for the photos, I could charge for the copy.

And then I realized, oh, you need a business because you don't know what you're doing and you got taxes and they come in.

You need to figure it out.

And so I ended up starting my first business when I was 20.

I would have been 23 or so.

22 or 23, no idea what I was doing.

Just went to like, sunbiz.org created an LLC, got my little ein number, and I was like, okay, we're in business.

No idea what I was doing, but it worked.

And.

And I was able to, like, you know, feed my family on building websites with this little business I created.

It wasn't great, but it was, it was fine.

I was learning on the way I just so happened to, which is now as I reflect on, as an interest, it's like, fascinating how these things are full circle.

But I was trying to learn more.

I was among the people that I knew who did design and did code.

I was the only one who did both.

And so I was a bit of a.

An anomaly.

Like, I would go to design conferences and I would go to code conferences just trying to learn as much as I could.

And a friend of mine had thrown a conference in many places, but he happened to do the last conference in our hometown.

And he was like, let's.

Let's be like, I'm going to invite all of my tech friends.

Friends.

So I'm sitting in the audience and this guy goes up on the, on the podium and he's a keynote speaker and there's a big thing behind him on the banner, and it just says, there are no practice lives.

And he's Cuban guy, and he's like, this is It.

If you want to do something, if you actually want to accomplish something, you got to stop messing around.

This is it.

You're not gonna get another shot.

This ain't practice.

This is real.

This is the.

And it resonated with me so much that after his talk, like, I chased him to try to find him, and I end up meeting him in the after party on the beach.

And the fascinating thing is we never talked about design.

We never talked about code.

All we really talked about is Shakespeare and telling stories and how important it was.

And he was.

We're about the same age.

He's my dear friends, my best friends in the world still to this day.

And he was a Shakespeare fellow.

He was the youngest Shakespeare fellow.

He's originally from Miami.

He lived in New York his whole life.

Life.

And we ended up just becoming the best friends.

And he was like, we have to work together.

We have to.

And he, you know, he was starting a web business, but it was sort of branding.

And he also wanted to do events.

And I was like, well, I like telling stories and all these things, so maybe I can help you with this.

And he was like, you got to be my creative director.

And that was my first job as a creative director.

Like, coming off of my own, running my own business into being creative, record someone else's.

And we, we travel the world together for years doing humanitarian work, like campaign work.

And so I would campaign, figure out all of the things that need to happen in order to arrive to whatever the goal of the campaign was.

So if you were like, I want to, you know, sell 100 seats to this event, great.

Like, how do we get to a place where you have not only a reduction of your overall ROI to me, but your cost per acquisition for each person is cheaper because I've sold them on a story that they really love.

Right.

Started learning all these things.

And he was an extraordinary marketer, fantastic marketer.

And so us combined, I learned like, what really marketing was about in its execution, and he learned what storytelling about was from a creative lens.

And we sort of merged and we did that for like four or five years.

And then I met another friend who was like, he's like, you did all the hotel websites, right?

And I was like, yeah.

He's like, I got this hotel thing I'm trying to do.

Would you partner on it with me?

And that's when we started the agency that I run, which is hotel specific agency.

And we're all.

Three of us are all friends.

But that was my.

My different Adam.

And Adam, he Was like, I got this hotel.

It's a crappy hotel up in Vermont.

They just need a booking widget.

And I'm like, yeah, but they need more than a booking widget.

They need photos, they need this, they need that.

We end up, like, selling them on all of it.

And so.

And I wasn't even in the room.

He's just telling him what I just said to him, and.

Right.

And he calls me and he goes, yo, I need you to fly up to New York.

I've got a pitch, and I want you to help me on the pitch.

I don't pitch.

Like, at that time, I was just getting people coming to me, so I'd never pitched a sale.

And I'm like, okay, I'll come to New York.

I'm not a big city kid, but I'm gonna do it.

I roll up in my.

I still got on, like, my flip flops.

Like, I'm still very Floridian.

Shark tooth necklace on.

Like, I was like.

And I arrive, and it's like a Madison Avenue agent.

And they're like.

And I was like, what is this?

And he goes, I got five meetings today, and they're all.

With two of them were the two top hotel operators in New York City.

Another one was a top hotel operator on In New England.

Of the five pitches we do that day, I'm like, I'm just gonna say the same thing I always say.

I'm not gonna make a big deal out of it.

I'm scared to death because I've never been in these rooms before.

I've got on cargo shorts.

Like, I'm just gonna say what I'm here to say.

And so I do, and we end up winning four of the five pitches.

Fifth one, the person that we pitched ended up coming for working for the company.

And so we had this crazy trajectory.

Crazy where we ended up working.

I mean, I'll work with every.

Just by everybody.

But the thesis was the same since my very first build, was like, we have to tell a story.

If you're not a story when someone is booking a hotel.

And let's say, you know, the hotels that we do, they can be anywhere from 500 a night to $15,000 a night.

Let's say you book one is $500 a night.

You book it for, you know, a week.

You know, you wouldn't spend that money ever on something you can't test drive, you can't touch first.

You just not right.

Got to try it on.

But a hotel room, you don't get to do any of that digital, and then you fly out to that place and you stay.

So how do you get someone to choose you if they can't test you out?

And the only way to do it is through a digital identity and the story that you're telling.

And story should translate from being a point of conversion to a point of advocacy.

They should be talking about that story when they leave.

When someone, when they stay at your hotel and they go back home and someone goes, how was your trip?

They should tell you the same story I told them on that experience.

Yeah.

If I've done that, then I'm successful because they'll come back again and again and again and again.

So that proved itself to be true.

And once that started working, I bought myself enough space to get back to writing, you know, But I've never stopped using the muscles.

So I was always working the muscle of translating imagination into a narrative, into a narrative into which people can engage.

So I was like, okay.

I met my wife and she was like, you need to write.

And I was like, all right, sit down and write.

And then I wrote first novel or this novel.

I love that.

There's so many, like, interesting points in that.

And I, as a, you know, I don't get to talk to too many people whose background is marketing and then to talk about the experience.

Right.

So I understand a concept because my former self, I was a membership marketing manager.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And everything.

So I'm in a.

In the nonprofit world.

And, you know, my dreams of six figure income went out the door when I started working for nonprofits.

But what I loved about it was, you know, again, you have the acquisition and you have the retention of a.

Of a member.

Right.

Which, you know, I realized quickly is any customer.

Yes.

In the middle, though, is the member, slash, customer engagement.

Right.

How are you creating value for that person?

You know, you spend a whole bunch of money to acquire this person buying list or marketing or whatever you're doing.

The cost to retain a person is much lower, but if you invest properly in that middle piece, you can keep that person because they found value and what you provided them.

Yes.

And what you've just given me the new word for is that story you're telling, you know, in between.

And it's what we've been doing with Mahogany Books from the very beginning is how do we get, you know, the idea of going into a bookstore is an experience.

Right.

So we're talking how do you sell a book online when book readers really want to go into a store and browse yes.

They want to have some type of engagement interaction with, whether it's the bookseller or it's the actual book that they pick up and, like, crack it open and have some type of, like you said, visceral reaction to it.

That's what you're trying to create in this, you know, cyber.

Cyber space.

But you can't really do that online.

But it is about that story you're telling.

Yes, Right.

It's about the experience.

It's about the mission, is about getting people to buy into the broader vision for what you're trying to accomplish.

So, you know, it's.

It's a.

Like, we have this conversation after this because, like, there's.

There's so many different things.

Like, you know, so Ramunda, you know, my wife, my partner, she.

She works for business with black bookstore owners, trying to teach some of these concepts.

And we try to teach it and talk about it, but it's sometimes it's hard to get through because, like, depending on the word you're using, it doesn't necessarily connect.

Yeah.

But for every person, whether you're selling books like myself, whether you're, you know, building websites for.

And building, you know, brands for.

For hotels or, you know, you're working as a lawyer, as a doctor, everything you're doing is telling a story, right?

To.

To connect with a person, you have to build that relationship.

At the end of the day, right?

It is a relationship, and it's.

What are you doing to help mold it and give that relationship that special feeling, right?

Is what you're trying to do.

And as you're laying out, it is about the story, right?

What are the story.

What is the story that you're telling that brings them in, keeps them enraptured and want to ride for you?

Yes.

Right.

At the end of the day, they're now telling, oh, man, you gotta go and do this thing.

You gotta do that thing.

Because I had such an incredible experience with this, with this person.

Now that next person want to go and get that same experience.

Right?

And as a marketer, it works because I ain't pay for that.

Right.

It's just running on without you.

It's going to do the work for you.

You're not cost.

I mean, that.

That.

That's it.

I think when I've.

I've had a couple of times in my life where I've sat and I've sort of been able to teach marketing or teach storytelling as a form of marketing, and one of the things I try to do is to try to get them to think about emotion.

And it's.

It's interesting because you talk about how, you know, how the anger needs to process.

I don't think we.

I just don't think we've spent enough time in.

In the last 20 years as.

As a culture about how we feel.

And so when I sit with people and I go, okay, tell me about your brain, and they'll tell me about the brand, I go, how does it feel to interact with it?

How does it feel?

And if they can't articulate emotions, right?

Like, it feels this and that.

Like, if they can't articulate emotion, that has nothing to do with the brand.

It actually has a lot to do with them as a person.

Like, they haven't processed enough to understand, articulate how they actually feel.

But if you can, you could translate feeling into some sort of interactive space.

So if you.

If you came to me and you said, you know, I said, how does it feel to.

To interact with your brand?

Well, it feels.

Feels, you know, comfortable.

It feels warm.

It feels inviting.

All right, but how does it feel?

How does it make me feel?

It makes you feel at ease.

It makes you feel welcomed.

It makes you curious.

I can translate that into story, but if they can't distill it into emotion, it's very hard to translate.

I can also respond to it if they put emotion to it.

So if they say it's.

It's.

There's luxury experience, and it's supposed to make them feel elevated.

And I walk in, and you got a Mr. Coffee in there that's not elevated.

So I'm responding to your brand based on what you talk, but the feeling I'm.

That helps.

Helps tremendously, because now you can find every single touch point of the experience and ask, does it have the DNA of those emotions?

And if it does, replace it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I.

Is.

So, guys, you know, I'm nerding out on two levels over here.

I'm nerding out marketing.

I mean, it is.

I find it very interesting because, you know, it's a people thing, right?

All of this comes down to people and how do we engage and connect with people.

And that's the most important thing that we have, that relationship that we develop with each other.

It's what our memories and experiences are built off of.

So I absolutely love this.

But I'm curious because I do want to get to the legacy point here, because you buy the time to get back to one of your first loves of writing, Right?

And I definitely want to make sure I call this out.

The wife says to you, hey, you need to write.

And I know when we decided to go full time, I went to my wife and was like, hey, I gotta do this.

And she's like, go, yeah, right, this is what, let's do it.

Make a sacrifice, we'll figure it out.

But go.

So just always want to make sure, you know, we are acknowledging, you know, our ladies for supporting and, and helping us to get to where we want to be.

But were there, what were the books, Were there any books during this time specifically?

And I'll make sure.

I want to make sure I call this out.

Black books during this time for you that either kept that fire ablaze for writing and reading and language and the art.

What, what was, what was your interaction with books at that time?

I was, I was into, I was getting into some of the writers, modern writers at this point.

So if you think all through college I was like, I'm still catching up.

So I was in the classics, but I remember someone handed me the first time I got between the world of me.

I was reading this and I was like, you know, this is a non fiction book, but it's a collection of, you know, stories and, and, and messages he's sending to his son.

But it was, it was an exploration of the black experience in real time.

And that to me was like, okay, I, I want to identify the story I want to tell.

So when I do sit down and write, what do I want to write about?

And that was the beginning of that exploration where I was like, okay, I want to write something to us the same way, something to his son.

I want to write something to us.

And what does that look like?

And I didn't, initially, I didn't have, you know, I didn't have any concept.

So when I, I'm sure you've heard this story, but when I started to write Scott Full of Elephants, I.

It was based off of watching Ferris Bueller's Day off.

And yeah, this story about how I wanted to translate.

I want to replace Ferris Bueller with Trayvon Martin and see if the story worked and all the trauma that that conjured as to why I couldn't and why we can't imagine it like as a collective.

If you sit in a room with a whole bunch of black people and you go, I want to replace Ferris Bugler with Trayvon Martin.

They all do this.

Nope, that ain't gonna work.

And you go, how do we all feel that way?

And so I knew I wanted to do that.

And so then I started to go, well, what, what books are challenging, you know, our current, the dominant paradigm of our reality.

And.

And I end up kind of going back to Tony.

And at that time I read paradise.

And the opening chapter of Sky Full of Elephants is actually an opening line of Sky Full of Elephants is an homage to the opening line of Paradise.

Opening line of paradise is they kill the white girl first.

With the rest they can take their time.

The open line of scot filled elephants as they kill themselves.

Themselves all at once.

And so it's that I was reading that and I was like, I want, I want our paradise and I want it to be an homage to her attempt to create it.

And so I was reading that I went a little deeper at that time.

I had shifted from.

I went to Things Fall Apart or.

Sorry.

I went from Things Fall Apart to Arrow God.

For Chino Achebe's book I had, I was still on Phenomenon.

So I was white, white mass, black fate, black.

Was it white mass, black faces, white man, black.

White face, black mass, I think.

And I, I, yeah, I'm messing it up.

But.

But just ordered that book.

Yeah.

And then I started, I was like, okay, who's writing?

Who's putting it out there?

And I started, I found P. Jelly Clark.

Hope I pronounced this.

Yeah.

And a bunch of stuff that he had written all these short stories.

He wrote this one book.

Oh my gosh, I can't even think of the name of it now.

It was about Egypt and I can't remember the name of it.

It'll come to me.

But I read that and I was like, oh, he's challenging my reality.

He's going, you can write about stuff that is of this moment and beyond this moment simultaneously.

And he did the same thing that Tony did, which was to find the non narrative.

And I was super, super appreciative of that.

And then I started to do poetry, more poetry, because the poets were doing it.

And I was.

Tracy K. Smith.

I was reading Was it Life on Mars, won the Pulitzer for that.

And I was like, this is, this is extraordinary.

And it was helping me find language as well.

It was pushing me to find language.

Which Jericho's book.

Let me see, what's the name of Jericho's book?

Is the, Is it that like salmon color one?

Yeah, yeah.

Got it somewhere on my desktop.

Yeah.

So the, so the book is.

Is White Skin, Black Skin, White Mask.

That's it.

That's it.

And then Jericho Brown.

What is Jericho's book?

Oh, the tradition.

Yeah, tradition, which was extraordinary.

I also was Reading.

I'm gonna botch this name up.

Tochi Onyabachi.

And yeah, and I was.

And I was trying to just find writers who were writing, like, outside of the bounds.

Let me think.

Who else?

River Solomon.

I quite.

I thought River Solomon stuff was just like, oh, the book for PJ the Clark was A Dead Gin in Cairo.

That's the name of it.

Dead Gin in Cairo.

And it's a short.

It's a short book, but put the work on me, man.

I was like, this is amazing.

All of his work is amazing.

I really love it.

Said Denjin.

Dead Jin in Cairo.

A Dead Gin in Cairo.

Okay.

Victor Laval.

I started to read him, right?

I love that dude for Black Tom and I love Victor.

And so I was finding that this is important.

I was finding that there were a lot more writers than I knew and too few simultaneously.

Right.

All of a sudden I was like, oh, I didn't know there were so many of us writing.

But then when you get to the edges, you'd be like, oh, wow, it's a lot more of them.

Like, I don't understand what's going on.

I had a conversation with Franklin over at Blacklist.

Franklin Leonard at Blacklist.

And I was like, is there a black equivalent to Stephen King?

Is there a black author who has both produced that volume and had that volume adapted into film?

And he just went, yeah, that.

So there's simultaneously more than I ever imagined and still too few.

Right.

I was reading and sort of trying to identify what story I wanted to tell and what space I wanted to write into.

And then once I wrapped my head around, like, okay, the things that you love, the things that you were studying in college, was that.

That.

That non narrative space that Tony and James Baldwin, they all occupied.

And it was the ability to have someone read slam that book and want to go talk about it.

So what is your thing that you're gonna write about?

That whether somebody reads the book or not, they're still gonna talk about the non narrative, the part that exists in the premise.

It exists in between the page.

And I was like, after that whole moment watching Ferris Bueller, I walked out and I was like, yeah, what would this world look like, like if there were no white people in it?

And then I knew that was a space that I thought we can.

This is something important that we can talk about.

And I started to apply all of the stuff I learned over the years across this whole spectrum of different creative outputs.

And I was like, how do I want this to feel?

What is the rhythm I want this to be.

How do I.

How do I want people to engage with this work?

Do I want them to engage out of a place of fear?

Do I want them to engage out of a place of empathy?

Do I want.

How do I to react?

And that helped me to sort of take what is in my mind this huge thing and to consolidate it into a very human experience in Charlie, consolidated into a very human experience in Sydney.

And these characters that people literally respond to with their emotions.

The amount of DMS I get about how many people hate Sydney is overwhelming.

It's an enormous amount of dms.

And it's because they respond emotionally, because I put, try to put the emotion into the work.

Right.

And.

And I realized very quickly that I had been practicing all these years.

I have been all these many years of reading and tinkering and writing and branding and marketing was 2A days.

And now I was ready to play in the game with this book.

Um, and so I knew I was going, I knew right away I was like, this is going to get published.

I know I didn't have.

I got an agent right before that.

So I had an agent that I knew would be down for me to write this.

And I was like, okay, this is it.

And, and I knew that it was also kicking off the, my, the avenue that I wanted to take in my contribution to the literary space.

Right.

But it was all based off the same stuff.

I, I absolutely appreciate that.

And to want to keep that, that theme, that trajectory moving forward as you continue to write, I think is like super important.

And I thank you for that because again, it's that question of getting books that make you feel and do the kind of like internal thinking, reckoning that that needs to happen.

And you know, one of my constant criticisms, and I could be 100% wrong on it because I'm, you know, I'm on a book selling side, I'm not on a publishing side.

But it does feel like, like I said to a point, there are too few of these books that really push the envelope on asking the super urgent questions around what is blackness?

This.

What's the right word way of saying this?

What is it to be a black person without the specter of whiteness?

Because it just.

Now we're just talking about us.

Yes.

Now you're just talking about yourself.

And those type of questions are, you have to have them if you're ever going to become a full person.

Yes.

Right.

If you're always having this conversation with this caveat over here, then you can never truly Answer all the questions that need to be answered about yourself in depth.

So I, I'm.

I appreciate you that you even said that because it makes me want to look forward to, you know, all the next succeeding books.

Because that is the conversation I want to continue to have with the community of readers that I'm, you know, engaged with, but also with myself personally.

So I absolutely love that.

But, you know, as I listen, as I think of the read down as list of books from your second phase, the becoming phase, like, there's a lot of Afrofuturism.

Yeah.

In here.

Was that intentional?

Was that like, you know, I didn't.

Even know what afrofuturism was.

I didn't.

I never even heard that term until I was older.

And then I, I sort of went back and I was like, oh, I can see it now.

I can see these sort of Afro punk future and I can see this.

And I, and I, I just, I think when I look back on it now, there are so many books that I've read that were either futuristic or, or even, you know, dystopian in their futurism.

Didn't have us in it at all.

Like, none.

Like, I sometimes tell people, this is so funny to me.

When I watched Mad Max for the first time, right?

Like, even the new ones, I'm like, okay, so we're in a dystopian future where this, the.

The canopy of the earth is away and it's just a blazing sun and y' all got whiter.

Like, how did that happen?

That doesn't happen.

That's not physically possible.

You're not going to get.

But they have paint on their face, though.

They have, you know, pain and stuff on it.

I don't.

Listen.

There's no like to.

There was in the whole first movie, there was like Tina Turner and one of the black person.

I'm like, that's not happening in that sunlight, guys.

It's not happening.

So it's like I find that there's so many of these books that there's a projection of the future that doesn't include us.

That I think I naturally fell into books that had futures with us in them.

And I was like, oh, great, this is fun to imagine.

It's fun to picture.

And I think, you know, I suspect one day I'm gonna write.

In fact, I have this book in mind.

I have this book in mind to write a sort of Tudor's version of pre colonized African history.

Characters can see the present.

So there's like a dynamic between what's Happening today and what happened before and where everything in between.

And to carry that over the course of like a three book series of like the stories of the kings and the queens and their relationship to the enslaved people that now became us.

And so creating a bridge between Afro past, Afro present and Afro future.

I think I naturally fell into that space because that is the space of imagination is to go.

If imagination is an art, right?

So if we're on, if our trajectory today is modified even an inch, where does that land?

2 inches, where does that land?

I'm fascinated by that.

I'm.

And if you look for it so far, you go, I imagine something that couldn't possibly exist.

Then you go, what's the.

How many degrees do I need to change my art today to get to it?

So you go, I imagine myself on a.

On a mountaintop in, you know, in the continent somewhere, looking out over a village of very happy people.

How do I today create an arc that achieves that?

What changes do I need to make in my reality today to achieve that?

And that's, that's interesting to me, the bridge between the two.

And so I do think I naturally fell into that.

I mean, I'm still doing it.

I'm still doing like, even now I'm looking at stuff I'm reading.

It's all the same.

It's like, yeah, imaginings of the future.

I mean, and this, that, this, that space of Afrofuturism continues to expand because as we, you know.

Well, not we, I'm not a writer.

As writers continue to tell our story, they're constantly reimagining who we are, who we can be.

So even books that you wouldn't normally, I think, put into the realm of Afrofuturism.

Right.

Ends up firmly in that space.

Yeah, right.

Because we're in conversation constantly.

Again, we're living in this dual consciousness.

We're constantly having this conversation about who we want to be, where we want to be.

Right.

We're living in this moment.

But we're always trying to figure out how do we shift and get us to a space where we want to do and be more for ourselves and for our kids.

So I think there's that constant conversation.

So authors are always.

When I read something, I'm like, you know, we'd be talking a book club.

I'm like, does anyone feel like this is like Afro futuristic to you?

Like, because I'm just seeing how there's a.

There's that conversation that's always being had and how we can imagine and like, you Said if we change this just, just a slight degree, that puts us, you know, 12ft, 15ft, 20ft further down, down, down the road than what we were going to be if we don't.

So I, I, I, like, like, it's, I'm appreciative of that word coming into lexicon even more because, again, we can have that conversation about where are we in the future?

It's, it's a bigger conversation because I think, I think it's a question of where are we now relative to their future?

And I say this all the time.

I don't.

I know we're not a monolith, but I think at least for the time being, we should be thinking monolithically.

How, how do you define the circumference of who you are?

How do you define the elements that you want to make sure, pull forward if we look too far without at least knowing?

It's, it's a whole sort of anchor and kite scenario.

I got an anchor, but I also got a kite.

And the anchor retains my position.

Even I can go dance all at once.

And we are we.

I'm careful of going.

I want to imagine a future without simultaneously going.

I want to know myself because that future needs that.

I need to be able to draw a line from the, the elements of me into the elements of my becoming.

And if I can't draw that line, then I'm, then I'm, I'm.

The kite is separated from the anchor, and it's just up in space.

And I think that's important because if you're going to be both roots and leaves, then you gotta, you gotta dig deep and you gotta rise high.

I encourage people to go, okay, yes, I want to create a future that is like, beyond our wildest imaginations, but it cannot lose who we are.

Who are we?

Who are we right now?

What does it mean right now?

And then take that and go.

What does that black mean when it's completely free?

What does that black mean when it has all the resources that it could possibly want?

What does that mean when it's a full family unit?

What does that black mean when it, when it is in a state of full abundance?

It's the same black, like how we think about branding.

It's the same essence, but now that essence is actualized in its fullness.

But you can't lose the essence.

And I sometimes read stuff, and I do appreciate the experiment and the experiment in expression, but I can see that it's actually still a splinter in the mind.

It's still the whiteness in the mind, right.

It's a future that has a relationship to.

A greater relationship to whiteness than it does the concept blackness, the culture of blackness, because it doesn't have the culture.

A great example of this is you sit and read the Bible.

There ain't no drums in the Bible.

Like, ain't nobody beating on drums in the Bible, right?

Like, you go, that.

That is.

That doesn't sound like my culture.

And that isn't to say our culture is in heaven.

And I don't mean it as a religious confrontation.

It's more that the culture has to be projected into those spaces.

If the culture is indeed something that it unifies us and it is a sort of consolidation of who we are, pull it through in those places.

Ryan Coogler does the best job of this, of any of the film directors I've seen.

When he did a Wakanda, when he did Black Panther, the first thing that jumped off the screen to me was the architecture.

When that plane flew over the skyline, and I was like, look at these buildings.

This is how these buildings would look if colonization never happened.

It would take all of those elements of the way that they constructed their living domiciles, where they thought about their living spaces as communal spaces, and it would build them into high rises, and it would still retain all of that.

That to me, I was like, that brother's got it.

He's got it.

And that's what I mean when I go.

Defined elements of.

Now put your anchor in the ground and then let the kite.

Right?

Yeah.

There is something about.

And, you know, we don't.

The importance of.

Again, you know, there's a reason.

I think there's a strategic reason why books are being banned.

Because when we disconnect from our heritage, we lose those roots, that anchor, right?

And that's exactly what I think of.

I think of the Adinkra symbol saying Kofo, right?

You can't know your future if you don't know.

You know your past.

Right.

And you.

For us, that's what, you know, black folk has always been, you know, call to the ancestors, always being connected to who you are, even as you're imagining your future.

Right.

Those things are extremely important.

And I want to give you this as a. I don't know if you've read this book before, but as you think of.

Think of this Black Tutors type of book.

There's a book I read called the Destruction of Black Civilization by Chancellor Williams.

I have this.

I haven't read it, but I have it.

It's a big book, right?

Yes, it's pretty.

Yes, it's a pretty sized book.

It's incredible to read.

But one of the things that stick out to me from that book was he talks about at the same time that the.

And I forget, what's the word you used?

Well, Europeans from all the different regions began invading into Africa.

There was different things happening on the eastern side of Africa of the continent that he says prohibited kind of military support that these West African nations could have used to help keep these folks from invading, you know, these, these nations.

And one of the things he pointed out was there was a, if I remember correctly, there was a drought or something.

Like there was something happening with the weather that created, like, hardships for these East African nations that, you know, could have actually, if hadn't happened, if this wasn't happening there, could have provided.

Allowed them to provide the military support that East West African nations could have used it to keep, you know, these invaders out.

And when I read that, I never thought of, like, it was such a mind blowing, like, you know, section to read because I never thought of, wow, what this one change could have meant just in terms of weather, right?

Like, if it had played out as he's like, you know, postulating that we could have a completely different present right now, right?

So when you talk about the, you know, connection of, you know, our African past to our African present or African future, and how one little thing could have changed, right?

Playing around with that dynamic of if they know their future and they say, you know what?

Well, we're going to do this instead.

What does that now mean for you and me sitting here, right?

And so I just, I love that concept because there's actual history that is out there, research that shows that there were things that were happening that could have helped to support these people, these kingdoms to keep.

Of course there was the guns and stuff.

Like, that was still a major component of what allowed Europeans to be successful in that conquest.

But it's just again, as we imagine, as we think through stuff and these imaginations become.

Well, how do we prepare now for.

For stuff, right?

It's.

It just, it makes you think.

So I.

Let's, let's.

Let's skip ahead because I don't want to hold you in long.

I'm enjoying this conversation.

Have to keep doing this.

So.

And you kind of, you already touched on it a little bit here.

So, you know, where are you now?

Your legacy?

What do you continue to look to accomplish, to do?

And again, you touched on that a little Bit, but I want to kind of, you know, have you just kind of touch on that some more.

And then if there's something that you've read recently in like the last year or two that was just like mind.

Blowing for you, I think legacy wise, you know, I'm intent to create stories across different platforms.

So I want to.

I'm writing screenplays now, which I did a little bit in college.

I want to be able to do stage plays and events.

Of course I want to continue to write in the form of the novel, but I also want to write in the form of poetry, but go back to that.

And so what I'm thinking is I'm imagining story and I'm thinking there are so many ways to enter into a story, right?

Like if I, if I wrote a whole novel.

But let's say you didn't know anything about the novel and one day you went to dinner somewhere and they gave you a meal and it's delicious, you love it.

And you go, what is this?

And they go, it's inspired by Sky Full of Elephants.

Have you read it?

All of a sudden you go, well, what is this?

What is, what are these mushrooms having to do with scaffold of Elephants?

You have questions and those questions drive you to this, to the novel.

Novel is a big, it's a big creative undertaking, is a big consumption undertaken.

It's 12 hours of sitting there, reading, eight hours of sitting and reading a book.

And a lot of attention spans aren't always that, that like that and that's already.

But you can give people other points of entry.

And so I'm planning this event in D.C. as you know, in, in.

In the fall.

Going to be a collection of pathways to enter into narrative.

And it'll be know photography, it'll be film, it'll be paintings, be live paintings, it'll be dance performances, it'll be food.

It'll even be a virtual reality experience that you can have that enters you into the narrative in some capacity.

And so I'm interested in exploring.

I don't think I've ever been like my lane is.

I don't think I'll ever be on the level of like a anymore.

I don't.

And I never thought I would be, but I've always thought that what I could do is I could take the things that she did and help expand them, help think about black stories as something that exists on the page but beyond it and expand our ability to access it.

And so when I look back, you know, in 10, 15, 20 years, I'll have a volume of work that is that.

That will feel like an art gallery, you know, and all of it centers around telling a story.

Wow.

I like that.

I like that.

And I like how it makes your art specifically, but art altogether, if you think of it that way, more accessible to different people.

Yeah.

Because not everything is going to be.

Not everyone's going to be a book reader.

Right.

But you might get through it through art, might get through it through poetry, through music or whatever.

But if it leads back eventually to the book and.

Or to the concepts, then we're all now starting to have more of us having that same conversation.

Exactly, exactly.

So that.

That's where you.

You lose people, is we all need to be talking about these things.

But if the only way that some people can access this through the novel, then they're not going to be involved in the crime conversation.

When I think of blackness, it's three things to me.

I'm still studying this in my mind, but I think it's three things.

I think blackness is inclusivity, which is to say it's an enormity.

It's so big and it can include so many of us across different continents.

It's a race and ethnicity.

It's a culture.

It's all of us.

There's a scale to it that's enormous.

And so it's that.

It's that enormity.

It's a creativity.

Right.

It's a constant ability to make something.

And that translates into the third, which is in abundance.

It's the ability to create something out of nothing.

Forever.

Forever.

And you can constantly do it.

And every time you do it, you include more people.

And every time you do it, include more people.

And that cyclical energy, I think, is what for Europeans, where the colonizing majority is actually ultimately tapped into.

It isn't the things that we make is who we are.

Right.

And that's.

That has been what has built European nations on.

On our backs, is that we have a very special and unique ability to generate abundance.

No, any scenario, any.

You could put black people anywhere, and they can generate abundance.

So I think when I.

When I reflect on it as a.

As a writer, I go, I want people to feel that, but they can't always do it by accents into novel.

I'm not always able to include them in the novel, but if I can find them where they are and include them in the story, they're included in the conversation.

And now we're together in it.

And so I want to expand it and the book when you ask what book I'm reading now, it has a relationship to that concept.

I'm reading Larry Neal's collection of essays called Towards a Black Aesthetic.

And it is like my.

It's on my bedside, man.

I'm looking at it every other day.

I'm rereading it.

It's.

It's.

It's fantastic.

Has a lot of different layers.

It feels less like a book and more like him just exploring these ideas and these concepts.

It was written in the 70s, during this time of.

It was a Black Panthers movement, but then he also was creating an arts movement relative to it.

And how do we use art as a mechanism to.

To express these ideals that are coming out of.

Of trying to find equality and so equal rights in this country?

And in the book, there's a series of essays where he challenges what is the meaning of the black writer?

What is the purpose of the black writer?

And he takes.

I think he takes Ellison, he takes a Baldwin and takes somebody else, and he goes, look at their works.

What was the function of these works?

And he tries to extract from the works what does it mean to be a black writer?

Like, what does that actually mean?

And he arrives to something that I think.

I think it's becoming.

It's one of those things you find and you go, that.

That means something to me.

And I can't explain why.

But he says it's important for us to start to look at the knowledge, which is a really difficult form.

We have to.

We have to start to use the novel the same way we use music.

And he goes, you can listen to a song.

It makes you feel something, makes you react, makes you think.

You get into the rhythm of it.

He goes, we have to write novels that way.

He goes, think about poetry.

You read a poem, you can see the images, you can feel the words, but you're not feeling that in the novel.

And he goes, if you can get people to feel the rhythm, to see the images, to live in the novel the same way they live in your other art forms, they're going to live in that longer, and you have more space to get them to understand themselves and understand the world around them.

We have to treat the novel the same way we treated music, same way we treated, you know, painting.

You got to treat it like an art form.

So I'm on that, where I'm like, okay, the novel is going to be the center of the art form that I make.

But in order to make it more expansive, it has to have other access points because of its scale.

You Know, one of my favorite books is Philip's book, Ours.

Philip.

Philip.

What is Philip's last name?

Philip.

Why am I missing Philip's last name?

I think it's Williams.

He's gonna be mad at me because I totally Bob Lou's last name.

But Philip's book, I think of his book as a sister to my book.

It's, it's fantastic.

And his book, I.

It's 620 pages and people are scared of his book because they see this, they see the size of it.

And I'm like, that book got stuff in it, man.

It's got lessons.

And I, I think if I could take Philip's book one day and I could go, Philip, you know what I'm gonna do?

I'm gonna create an experience around your book.

I'm gonna make it a whole house that, that people can walk through.

And every room has a different dimension of what those book is supposed to be.

And over the course of the evening they get to have a dinner together and have conversations and everything they interact with is going to be in the book.

I want to make your book a three dimensional living experience and see how many people enjoy it.

That I think will give his book more dimensionality and it'll make it less fearsome than it, than it is now.

And it helps people to have access to something that will change them.

This is so.

Yes, Philip, I've seen this book and Philip Williams.

Philip B. Williams.

Okay, good.

I didn't mess up his name.

I've seen this book on our shelf and number one, I love the COVID So I've been drawn to it.

I haven't picked it up yet.

So now that you talk about this book, I'm gonna definitely have to grab it and peruse it and see if this is something that, you know, I definitely want to spend some time with.

Because I'm very interested in you calling it the sister to your book.

But what, what, what?

I was very interested because I'm going to close out with two points here was I find very like ironic.

Very interesting.

You know, kind of somewhat humorous is you.

Now you're trying to tell a story about stories, right?

Like you're getting like deception.

That's what it is.

Yeah, man.

You're like going like hella meta on people.

But I think that's the time we in.

That's the time we're in.

It is and is and I appreciate it because again, it's about accessibility, you know, it's about making stuff open to other people because you never Know how someone comes to.

Comes to.

Comes to things.

Yes.

And creating these new avenues as a bookseller is always exciting to me because ultimately I want you to get to the book.

Yeah.

And we do the same thing.

Whether it's book events, whether it's the new podcast network, whether it's the Black Books Matter Fest, all the different things, the book clubs, all the different things that we do is trying to figure out for us how do we use community as a way to bring people to books.

Right.

Like, that's how we go about it, but it's the same thing, Right.

You're telling a story to get somebody to the content, and hopefully the content has the transcending, transformational act on them as it's had on us.

And that's the way that we go about paying forward what's been given to us.

And what that leads me to is, you know, what does when you think about the concept, Right.

So I'm wearing a shirt now.

Black Books Matter.

It's something that we came up with back when, like, not soon after Trayvon Martin was murdered and, you know, the Black Lives movement got going.

And I kept seeing these, again, the same stories, but it's not reflecting us, right?

All these people talking about the Trayvon Martin situation, but it's not our voice, it's not our perspective.

Right.

So we coined black books matter to get to a certain very specific point to say our story matters, our voice matters.

For you as you're talking and thinking through this legacy and all these different iterations of the book and the new books you want to write and that you've read, what does.

When you hear the term black books.

Matter.

What does that mean for you?

Like, how does that resonate with you?

I immediately think of connective tissue.

Right.

I think there's a books that I've loved over my lifetime, the writers I've met over the last few years as I've entered into literary space.

Books bind us, right?

They bind us across time.

They bind us across space, distance, even cultural differences.

You know, I saw it not too long ago with Bolu.

I always mess up her last name, too.

I think it was, you know, these Nigerian.

Extraordinary Nigerian.

One of the many extraordinary Nigerian writers.

I think Nigeria is in a bit of a writing literary renaissance.

Right.

Next.

All their books are really great.

And I get to understand her and the way she sees the world and its relationship to how I see the world and the bridge between the continent and America.

It also gives us a space to access history, you know, in a way that classrooms don't.

It wasn't until I got to college and someone handed me SULA that I was awakened.

And I was like, what is going on?

And so it matters because I don't think we have that connective tissue.

Without it, I think it's too easy for our.

For us to be severed.

And it's fascinating.

Sometimes you cannot be thinking, like, reading Wretched of the Earth.

I wasn't thinking about any of that stuff.

As soon as I read it, it was like, oh, yeah, we.

We at war.

I don't know what I'm thinking.

And it's never left like that.

So I'm.

I think it matters because we are we.

It.

It is the.

The part of the binding agent that connects us all across time, across space, and across cultures.

And when I say black is.

Is a.

It's a.

It's a monolith.

I mean it to say black is a culture.

It's a race, and it's an ethnicity across this whole planet.

Whole planet.

And what binds us, I think we can find it in the pages.

So it matters.

And I'm lucky.

I'm honored.

I'm lucky.

I'm grateful to be able to contribute to that binding as much as I can.

That is fantastic.

That is incredible.

That, guys, has been our conversation for the day.

This is.

I really, really appreciate it.

This was definitely all that I hope for.

I enjoyed the conversation, and I got one and a half pages of books that I now need to read, plus the entire catalog of Toni Morrison.

Don't slip.

Don't slip.

I mean, all of it that you just laid out for us.

But no, I. I really do thank you for taking the time out to.

To talk with us.

I hope everyone out there has enjoyed this conversation as well.

There.

We've.

There's been a lot here, and I think this would be one of those conversations to people for people to listen to multiple times because there's.

There's a lot to.

To get out of this.

So, guys, with that, you know, we want to thank our special guest, Sibo Campbell, for being here with us.

Remember, please check out the show notes.

We will list all of the books that CBO mentioned.

It might go on for a little while, but they are definitely classic books, so want you guys to have access to those.

So we're going to list them in the show notes for you guys to access.

And of course, if you're interested in picking up one, you can head over to mahoganybooks.com or stop by Mahogany Books in National harbor to pick up one of these books.

Of course, as our sponsor, MahoganyBooks.com is the premier destination for new, classic and best selling black books.

Also, our show would not be possible without the hard work of the people at Shed Life Productions.

Lastly, the reader of Black Genius Podcast is a member of the Mahogany Books Podcast Network.

Check them out in our other great shows like this one focused on books written for by or about people of the African Diaspora.

Please like review and share wherever you get your podcast today.

And peace.

Remember guys, Black books matter.

Thank you cbo.

Appreciate you man.

Yeah, grateful man.