Ross gay partner
By Lucian Mattison
Ross Homosexual is the creator of Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down. His work has appeared in several literary journals, includingAmerican Poetry Review, The Sun, and Ploughshares. He is an orchardist and kettlebell instructor. He teaches at Indiana University and in the Drew University low-residency MFA program.
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Lucian Mattison: I thought to commence off the interview I would seek you about a specific poem. I got my poem-a-day email from poets.org and you were in my inbox the day you were set to perform at ODU. Tell me a little about “To My Best Friend’s Big Sister.”
Ross Gay: You know, this poem emerges from bumping into this person, this “Best Friend’s Big Sister,” in a SuperFresh supermarket in Philadelphia, probably about 12 years after the scene. It was just one of those weird—really weird, and really human—events that slip away, for whatever reason. My sense, as I share at the end of the poem, is that it slipped away as a memory for so long because it was, in a way, shameful—the way things can undergo shameful that we don’t at all categorize as maltreatment or violent.
I construct the poem comical, because it’s compassionate of funny—I was a big ki
a garden of delights, with writer ross gay
THE WORDS delight and delight figure prominently in scribe Ross Gay‘s function, and so complete moments he spends in his garden and descriptions of his relationship to plants. Now is that a coincidence that the garden is a main character in his books, books with the titles “Inciting Joy” and “The Book of Delights” and the latest, “The Book of (More) Delights”?
As a longtime gardener who finds both bliss and delight in my life outdoors, I don’t believe so. It’s no surprise to me at all that from garlic-and-sweet-potato harvest times or devouring fresh figs from a friend’s plant, Ross Gay finds himself positively delighted.
I wanted you to meet him and hear about his work and absorb what he’s up to in his Indiana garden.
Ross Gay’s four books of poetry and three of essays include won him much praise. He teaches writing at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he also gardens. (Above, self-sown sunflowers and castor bean in his garden.)
Plus: Enter to win a duplicate of “The Novel of (More) Delights” (affiliate link) by commenting in the box near the bottom of the page.
Read along as you listen to the Sept. 25, 2023 edit
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Ross Gay has made it a daily practice to hunt out joy and delight in even life’s hardest moments. And he’s discovered that there’s actually not much search involved: it’s just there. Another daily practice: to express gratitude for all that is. All of it. Even the stuff we’d select not to be experiencing. If this sounds impossible or unrealistic or just too Pollyanna-ish, understand that he does not nervous away from suffering. In evidence, to his mind, suffering and joy are inseparable. So in addition to the birdsong and the bobbleheads and the trees taller than you and the helping each other cross the street there’s climate change, bigotry, misogyny, death, fear, and so on; it’s all on the page.
And what pages these are! Unbounded reverence for the instinctive world, and a dogged celebration of humanity. And such exuberance for language. The sound of each syllable ringing through: the rhythm, the cadence, the twinkle, the mischief, the glory. An essayist and a poet, Ross wants you to feel. He’s not telling you what to feel, rather providing the fodder for heart-shifting awakenings. Or at least, it’s been that
Ross Gay is the composer of the poetry collections Against Which (2006), Bringing the Shovel Down (2011), Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Be Holding (2022), winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award. As an essayist, he has published The Book of Delights, a 2019 New York Times bestseller, Inciting Delight (2022), and The Manual of (More) Delights (2023). Gay is founding co-editor of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin’ and an ardent gardener and founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project.
Visit the Toni Morrison homepage for the complete program: https://www.monmouth.edu/department-of-english/toni-morrison-day/
Co-Sponsored by the Department of English, Intercultural Center , Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Social Operate, Leon Hess Business University, History & Anthropology, Guggenheim Memorial Library, Monmouth Review
Special thanks to group partner Project Write Now
Questions can go to english@monmouth.edu
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