A common way to articulate the essence of being a creative writer is to describe it as a way of seeing the world. Writers don’t simply see the world as built upon language, but see language as a method of creating, shaping, and changing the world. That’s pretty boilerplate. What is more rare is when a writer’s agile imagination is also able to help others see clearly. Dr. Tara Betts is such a writer. Tara Betts is a poet, editor, educator, and activist based in the Chicago area, and I was excited to talk to her about how writers find work, how they stay active in their activism, and how all of that feeds the lyricism many folks strive for. Practical and inventive, warm and insightful, Tara’s approach toward the tough questions in poems and toward the tough questions in employment and education always find a way to intertwine. She is a sage of synthesis that doesn’t leave the reader twisting in the wind.
The Practicum (these are the tough questions I took away from the interview)
How often do you let the written and oral literary history of where you are inform your poetics?
What does longevity as a writer look like?
When do you need to be patient with your timeline for success? When do you need to amend it or speed it up?
If we, “all need to pick an issue…how does your issue relate to other issues? And what are you gonna do about it?”
How are you opening multiple revenue streams for yourself as a writer?
How do you pick your lyrical starting points for your writing?
If you look closely you'll see what you've become
—Lauryn Hill, "Lost Ones”
(Edited Transcript - Steven Leyva and Tara Betts)
Steven Leyva: Well, Tara, thank you so much for being a part of tough questions with Mason Jar Press. And I'm really excited to talk to you about some of the things that you're doing now and some of your most recent work. I wanted to ask you a question about Refuse to Disappear—this is your third full-length collection of poems, yes?
Tara Betts: Yes, it is!
SL: Well, first of all, congratulations ’cause I know getting the first one is tough, getting the second one is even tougher, and then who even knows about the third! So that's a really big feat.
TB: Thank you.
SL: You’re welcome.
But, I wanted to ask how you think Refuse to Disappear’s poetics or its craft is different than the previous two books that you wrote? How do you see your work either growing or changing or shifting? Do you think that Refuse to Disappear offers something, beyond just a lovely title, something that is different than readers have read and what you've written before?
TB: I feel like my first two books, they had a lot more of a personal edge. I feel like this book was trying to embrace some of the themes that have kind of preoccupied me outside of my own life, and then somehow answering back to some of the things that I'm thinking about now as a poet that's matured a little bit. And I always think about that, like when I talk to and see how instrumental particularly women writers of color have been, and then they get disappeared the most easily, right? Or if you're older, it's like you lose relevance because you're older, even if you stay in sync with what's happening right now, right? It may be some challenge in terms of, you know, how you articulate it, but even if you're like, “I'm down for this,” or “I waited for this moment,” then all of a sudden everybody's concerned about poets who are under thirty. Everybody's concerned about the next new, young face, and we see it a lot in the media. So I don't particularly bash younger poets for that. I get a lot of inspiration from them. So it's just that whole thing of the larger culture is obsessed with youth, and I think we forget that sometimes experience can teach us a lot, too.
SL: Come on, now!
TB: I mean ’cause when I was a young poet, I really loved hanging around older poets. Almost everybody I knew was at least ten years older than me, who was a poet, you know? Or I think about particularly for poets like us here in Chicago, a lot of us new people like Baba Haki Madhubuti.
SL: Third World Press, right?
TB: And more intimately, I think about Kent Foreman, who never really published a book. He's published in a few anthologies like Spoken Word Revolution and A Broadside Treasury that Dudley Randall did I think in the seventies, so he's in a few places. But his daughter, Pier Gabrielle Foreman, has published a lot of scholarship, so probably more people know his daughter than know him, and he was a poet who was really inspiring for people like me and Tyehimba Jess and Reggie Gibson just by being around. Being around, he would recite poems. He would talk about books. He was the person who kind of told us about books like The Tale of Genji. You know? Like stuff that people now they’re like, “Oh…” You know?
SL: Mhm, mhm.
TB: Or I think about that and how I see poets now, and they're more concerned with hanging around with their affinity group, which I'm like, “Yes, we need that,” but you also need to diversify your affinity group, right? Like, you need to find people who have a variety of experiences, who aren't all trying to do the same thing, who don't all have the same goals or the same experiences, the same aesthetics, the same influences. You're gonna all sound alike. You’re gonna sound like guppies in the same pond. And I think that was part of what I really loved about coming of age as a poet in Chicago. So doing a book like Refuse to Disappear feels like, yeah, I'm coming back to some of the same stuff I've always written about like hip hop, womanhood, race, and gender. Stuff like that comes up in the book. But it's definitely stuff like how do I play with form? How do I play with repetition? How do I hit it from another angle that I haven't done in previous books? And it kind of came at me like I wasn't intentionally writing a book. I actually was in conversation with Jill Petty, who was a book editor here in Chicago, and she just told me, “Tara, I know you have a ton of poems. Just drop them all in a Word document. See what you get.” So that's what I did. And then when I sent it to her, she goes, “I think you have a book. Think about how you wanna arrange it.” Which I've never written a book that way before.
SL: That's so interesting to me because, Tara, it sounds like some of the thing you're talking about, about generational affinity groups or like being diversified in that way, involves a kind of mentorship. And I love what you were saying about maturity, like thinking about how maturity might be showing up in the work, maybe, particularly in craft and form—not that there's lack of maturity in the previous books—but thinking about how those things are related. And then, Jill, you know, kind of provides you with this kind of mentorship: “Hey, why don't you try this?” You know not mentorship in terms of someone who's like your grandmother's age or something guiding you, but just a suggestion, you know?
TB: Yeah. And Jill’s not that far off in age from me, so she’s just a more experienced person in terms of editing than I am. And that's the other thing, too. I feel like there's a lot of women who are always behind the scenes, who are encouraging and supporting everybody—Jill being one of them, and her sister, Audrey Petty, their third sister, Miriam—she's like a professor at Northwestern. So I call them the Trinity.
SL: Oh yeah, for sure! The Petty Trinity!
TB: Really powerful sisters born and raised on the South Side, you know? But in terms of just thinking about maturity, yeah, it's like there's that aspect of it that you're just gonna shift a little bit in terms of how you write, but I think I wanted to have that as the title, not just because of those particular aspects of thinking about how are we made invisible every day, which is a recurring theme in African American literature—from Ellison on down, you know? I kept thinking about all these other communities that have been valuable to me that get erased or made invisible somehow. You know, even if we look at hip hop now, there are people who are trying to rewrite that history in good and bad ways. If we look at the prison industrial complex, which now people are calling it the carceral state and things of that nature, it's like once you have people who go to prison, we forget about them. Or the larger culture forgets about them. And I really wanted to make that statement with the book, because at the time when I was putting it together, I was teaching poetry at Stateville Prison—and that was pre-pandemic. I taught up until about—in-person anyway—until March of 2020, and we had heard about Covid, like, my last day there. And we were like, “Oh, it's like the flu, right?” And then after that they said, “you can't come back.” Because they knew it was coming, and Stateville was one of the prisons that got hit the worst. If you're unfamiliar with Stateville prison, it's the one panopticon style prison that is still surviving in America.
SL: So it’s circular, right? Yeah.
TB: Yeah, they've actually closed it. There was a building called F house, and that's where they had that remaining structure. It was condemned, but now they're talking about doing “tours” of F House because of its historic significance. But, I don't know, they still do concerts and stuff at Joliet Prison. I think they just closed that down. So, there's a weird culture around prisons, but not the people themselves.
SL: Yeah, they become abstractions in many ways, right?
TB: Right. And then, too, a lot of people, what they do make visible, they make visible stuff like, “Oh, John Wayne Gacy and Richard Speck were at Stateville.”
SL: Right, right! These murderers.
TB: Or scenes from Natural Born Killers were shot there, you know? Which I'm just like, “Okay, there's a lot of people who commit murder…” But then it's like, “Do we know the circumstances behind the murder?” No. With the case of Speck and Gacy, we do know irrefutably. But I don't think by and large that's the case for everybody who is incarcerated.
SL: Yeah. I was kind of reflecting when you mentioned about rewriting some of the history of hip hop—thinking about Missy Elliott talking about being worried that she wasn't relevant anymore. And–
TB: She’s more relevant than ever, really!
SL: I mean, I mean! It just made me think, “Oh, my God! Like, is it possible this woman, who is revered as an icon of hip hop, that we are still underrating her?” We are right now still underappreciating how far ahead of her time she was.
TB: I mean and not only that but still performing, still writing, you know, before she was even big on her own, she was writing hit songs for other people.
SL: For everybody!
TB: And in terms of image making, like we're still talking about what she did for fashion, what she did to refute the idea that we all have to be petite or half naked. Like, if I see an artist like Tierra Whack, and what she does visually in a video and how they create concepts, I don't think Tierra Whack would be who she is if it wasn't for Missy Elliot. And I'm really happy that even though we're in the middle of the WGA strike, that Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop kind of prominently features Missy in that way where they give her her dues in terms of being an innovator. I mean, didn't she win like a Vanguard Award or something for that? If not, they need to give her one.
SL: No, for sure, for sure. Yeah, I'm not sure if she did or not, but I completely agree. I think there's so many ways in which—you're right—that the shelf life, to use a kind of crass term, is so short sometimes for Black women in particular. And the way that you're comparing it, it's almost like it shouldn't be that way for writers, you know?
TB: It shouldn't.
SL: It shouldn't mirror the way that we treat actors and musicians, but you're right. We're just so obsessed with what is new that can be branded and made money from.
TB: Right. And there's so many things that [Missy Elliot] was talking about. Like all this talk about how people talk about sex workers now, which I talk about that in one of the poems in the book, but she has that one line where she's like talking about, “Don't be ashamed, ladies, do your thing. Just make sure you're ahead of the game,” you know? So it was not a judgmental statement about what type of work you do. It's like, “how do you use that work as a stepping stone to become what you want to be?” And I'm like, “That language isn't really around now.” Like the thing that I do like is, you know, I think about somebody like Cardi B who was a sex worker. And she's leveraged that she's kind of done the thing, like, Missy gave her the advice to do it, which you know, I mean, that's a speculation. We don't know for sure. But she's the generation after, so you gotta wonder how much of that has permeated the consciousness. And I think that's how poems and literature work. It may not hit when you first put it out, but you gotta hope that whatever you write, it impacts the right person at the right time. And maybe you're ten years ahead, maybe you're twenty years ahead, or maybe the right scholar hasn't happened upon you, or the right teenager, or reader hasn't happened upon you yet.
SL: Yeah, in that way, it's like sometimes poems are like extended-release medicine, right?
TB: Yes!
SL: You know, [poems] don't hit right away when you take them or their form, but they live in the system of our sort of collective bodies for a long time and they do their work.
So, I'm interested too—since you brought up scholars—of hearing a little bit about some of your reasons why you decided to get a PhD, and how your work as a scholar has informed your work as a poet—I know those Venn diagrams overlap, you know, quite a bit. But I think often people are thinking, and I often get questions from my students about, “hey, I have an MFA, do I need to get a PhD too, or should I skip an MFA? Should I get a PhD?” And we know that there's no one-size-fit-all response to that. But I am interested in people's personal stories about why they decided to pursue that.
TB: Can I say I have multiple reasons?
SL: Sure. Yeah, of course, of course.
TB: Well, first off I moved to the East Coast probably about twenty years ago. And back when I was still in Chicago and teaching teenagers, that was kind of a dream. It wasn't really solidified yet. I just knew, I said, “You know, I kind of would like to be Dr. Betts.” And that's my earliest recollection of really having that crystallized thought in my head. But when I moved East I was finishing up my MFA, which I think a lot of people don't realize the MFA you almost always end up paying for unless you go to a school that gives you a full ride.
SL: Right, right. That was my experience as well, yeah.
TB: Yeah. And I had some scholarships and financial aid that I got so I was able to do it. But I know everybody's not able to do that, and then if you go to the PhD level, you are fully funded. So I said, “Well, do I want to be in school six or seven years?” ’Cause everybody had me believing it’s six or seven years. Now by the time I wanted to go, I found out that because I had an MFA they would accept that in lieu for the Master's degree portion. So I was able to do it in less time, and I finished in like record time. They were like, “How did you finish so fast?” I said, “All I did was go to school.”
SL: How long from when you entered the PhD to when you finished?
TB: Three years.
SL: That is record time!
TB: I was trying to get out ’cause one, I wanted to get back to Chicago; two, I wanted to get closer to my family, who most of them are still here in Illinois, and I wanted to be back before I was forty. So I was like, “We getting this done, we getting this done.” And for the first time in my life I was able to go to school and not have to work other jobs. I did anyway ’cause I was used to it, so I taught some at the community college, I taught on campus, I did some readings—I was a few hours away from New York, so sometimes I would just bop into the city, do a gig, and come back. But for the most part, I was reading, writing, taking walks, cooking dinner. So in that way it was good. But I do think there was that, and you know I had left a relationship where I wasn't encouraged to do my PhD—actually, I was actively discouraged. So by the time that relationship ended I was ready. It was so synchronicity, because I had talked with Maria Gillan, who was still heading the program at Binghamton University—she called me out of the blue.
SL: Oh, really?
TB: I had talked to her two years before about, “You know, I've been thinking about doing a PhD,” and literally, after the person had moved out like two weeks later, Maria calls me out of the blue and goes, “Are you still thinking about doing a PhD?” And I just sat there and my mouth almost fell open because I hadn't talked to her in two years and she just hit me up at the moment I was thinking about it. So I was like, “Okay, this is a sign.”
SL: That's amazing.
TB: Right? So when she hit me up, I said, “Actually, yes, I was thinking about it. When's the deadline?” And she goes, “Oh, the deadline is such and such.” And then I found out they had a fellowship, I applied for the fellowship, and I got the fellowship. So right after that I just packed up and I jetted. I didn't even think about it, because I mean it almost fell in my lap. Versus before, you know, I feel like I've had a lot of resistance for things that I wanted and needed to do, whether it was academically or otherwise. It's like I've always loved reading. I've always loved kind of creating and putting together ideas. But for it to come so easily, I said,
“This is what I'm supposed to do.”
SL: Yeah, it's hard to sort of ignore that kind of prompting from the universe.
TB: Yeah, yeah!
SL: What did you do your dissertation work on?
TB: Actually, I did a creative dissertation, and that's what became Break the Habit.
SL: Oh, wow! Okay.
TB: I did propose a critical book and I wanted to look at the roles of Black women in terms of how their activism has influenced literary theory, and nobody wanted to do it. I was just like, “Okay.” So I said again, “It's this resistance.” And I actually wrote a chapter that was an essay about representations of police brutality in the poems of Audre Lorde, Jayne Cortez, and June Jordan ’cause they were all written very close together around the same time. And at the time when I was working on the essay, I think Rekia Boyd had been shot, and I think Trayvon Martin had been shot, and I wanted to go back and look at those poems and think about what did those poems have to offer us. Because Audre Lorde in particular, talked about Clifford Glover, and each of them had these very different approaches. Like Jayne Cortez, of course you know, she operates a lot in the realm of performance in terms of the litany or the praise poem. So when she does Give Me the Red On the Black of the Bullet it feels like she's doing an incantation. But when you read Audre Lorde's poems like Power, it's just this indictment. She takes the term where she's brutal and goes in, and goes and talks about the cops and what they say on the recording and what she would like to do to the people who spectate. It's very intense, which feels like, “Okay, how often do we hear that poem when people write about police brutality?”
SL: That’s true.
TB: They don't write about it in that very direct way. They write about it in a way that's like you're watching the scene instead of engaging in it.
SL: Yeah, and there's something, I guess for me the best word I could say is troubling, about how in recreating that scene or watching that scene, are we getting very close to something exploitative, right? Are we moving towards a kind of trauma minstrelsy? And I'm like I have so—and this is just personal, you know, I'm not suggesting this for anyone else—but I'm so afraid that if you take one step beyond the sort of line there, you just fall into a kind of caricature of yourself.
TB: Exactly.
SL: And I’m like “I refuse,”—because refuse is the theme, right?—“I just refuse. I refuse to become something reductive in an attempt to do something that would be in the name of justice,” you know? I don't know, it gets complicated.
TB: Right. And I think if you're moving in that framework of thinking, these are the poems that we have to write because they're political poems, and they're the necessary poem, and we should be talking about all that stuff. We should be—irrefutably. It's like how we talk about it, right? Like even, I didn't mention the June Jordan poem, but the title of my essay takes a line from her poem: “for every Black boy they kill”. And in her poem, she's positing, “Well, what would happen if for every Black boy they kill, we kill a cop? And to me, I'm not saying, “Go out and kill a cop.” But the idea that there is retribution against the State, that there is retribution against the people and consequences for those people—it's something we're talking about right now. Like to be in Chicago—and young people pushed very hard for this—to indict and convict the man who shot Laquan McDonald—that's never happened here in Chicago. And so to have us thinking that in the public imagination it is possible, even if it's a short-lived punishment, that there are consequences, there is punishment, there will be some form of retribution, that's a whole new conversation. And there's a poem in the book that I wrote called Open Letter to the Voyeurs, and it's because I kept seeing this. Like even when I think about as indispensable as the phrase “Black lives matter” has become. You talk to some Black folks, they're gonna tell you, “Well, we've always mattered. Why do we need somebody to create a hashtag to tell us that we matter? We are human beings, we've always mattered.” Everything about us getting to 2023 in America, it's like, “we matter!” So when you think about it that way, it's like, “Okay, what else? Tell me something new. Complicate it.” And I think I found myself, when I looked at some of these poems, like that's what I was trying to suss out. Like some of them are very pared down, but some of them are also like, “Can I complicate these things so we're not just saying the thing everybody wants to hear or that everybody expects?”
SL: Yeah, I was reading your poem, Think, Think, on the Poetry Foundation website earlier today, and what I love about that poem is how its syntax is all framed around how we consider the air becoming toxic. How do we consider these things that are happening? How do we look at them with either new eyes or new language or new clarity? And I find that sort of swimming in a lot of the poems that I read of yours is that the thinking is so important. Like we've gotta get the thinking right, otherwise the art don't matter, you know?
TB: Absolutely. And then, too, I was actually thinking about that when I write the poem, there's a reason why I picked that starting point because—and I was talking about it with my friend Renaldo Hudson who does a lot of work here with the Illinois Prison Project—I was like, “You know, Renaldo, when I sat down to write that poem, I thought about the baton whistling in the air before it hit someone when they're attacked by the police, and how we hear that image all the time. And we think, ‘that's how we're gonna die,’” I said, “but there's poison in the air. So even if they don't get us that way, you get got the other way because somebody's not being environmentally responsible.” So what are all these forces, systematically and violently, that come for us every day? And we're not even trying. Like you could be in your house, your bills are paid, and your water's gonna kill you, or the air's gonna kill you. And it's not because of a natural cause of death per se. It’s because people are being ethically irresponsible. People don't care about that. They care about like, “Okay, we'll be able to breathe, so everybody else can figure it out,” you know?
SL: For sure.
TB: “We’re gonna make this money.” And there’s a problem in that kind of thinking.
SL: Yeah, I mean you could be Skip Gates trying to get into your house, you know?
TB: Hey… Broke into this house, put up pictures of his family!
SL: I mean it’s wild! It is so absurd! It is definitely worthy of ridicule, except for the consequences are so materially present. It's like, “Yeah, it's all jokes, but he could’ve died,” you know?
TB: He could have!
SL: And that's bananas! But, Tara, what do you do with the hyper vigilance? Like what do you do once you become aware of the fact that if they don't get you with police brutality, the air might kill you or your water if you're in Flint, Michigan? Like that could put one in a state of paralysis, right?
TB: It can.
SL: How do you negotiate that?
TB: Well, I mean I think we all need to pick an issue. But other than picking an issue, how does your issue relate to other issues? And what are you gonna do about it? And I feel like I've done so much in terms of teaching that I'm like, “That's all well and good.” But it's also like, “Are we starting to think about sustainable practices? Are we thinking about how we vote? Are we thinking about what are initiatives we can do in our own communities?” I mean, I know the major bulk of my work is changing how people think and encouraging them to enact praxis. Even the job I have now at the university where I'm teaching, that's what they hired me for. They didn't hire me because I know African American literature and I teach poetry and composition. So now I'm kinda thinking about that. And then there's so many things that I find that younger activists have started undertaking here in Chicago that are what we should be doing. I think about Noname and this whole book drive that she's been running that's been amazing. She just had a benefit concert here and collected books. So she's like, “We really want copies of Toni Morrison’s Sula and George Jackson's Blood in My Eye, but we will accept other books by Black authors.” Or young people who are creating spaces and mutual aid spaces. One of my friends, Emerald Green, runs the Sandwich Ministry on South Side. So since the beginning of the pandemic, they've been making sure that if you can come by, you can get toiletries, you could get lunch for your kid, you could get books. In the wintertime, they've been doing coat drives. So it's like, I think there's a lot of people who are doing a bunch of different things. You just have to be in the know of where they are in the community, who's doing it—I think that's another type of work that I try to do. We need connectors. People who bring people together. So I haven't done as much with my nonprofit that I'd like to do. Well, hopefully, once I get a space, and it looks like we will probably have a space soon that's not the space I originally envisioned, but we can try to do some of that connecting work. We can do some of those classes where it's like I've been wanting to do a critical race theory class that’s based in the community and talk about that, or teach some of these writers that even if you are in a university, you don't get the chance to teach, which has often been the case with Black history. And why we're having these CRT debates. It's like we had to teach ourselves, you know?
SL: Did you find that—enacting that kind of praxis you're talking about—do you find it easier to enact it while you're in academia or did you find it easier while you were working in nonprofits?
TB: Easier when I was in nonprofits, without a doubt. I started my teaching career at Young Chicago Authors, and I extended that work into working at Urban Word NYC. So for me, they let me create my own curriculum. I did all kinds of stuff. I did poetic forms from communities of color, an author study on Pablo Neruda, a class that focused on the documentary, The Black Power Mixtape. Like, I could just do whatever I wanted. And now that I'm “Doctor” Betts, I do that in flourishes but usually universities have a set curriculum. And if you're at a certain ranking in a university, you usually find that adjuncts or people who are not full-time faculty, or they're considered “contingent faculty,” or they're non-tenure track, they often teach the requisite courses that no one wants to take. And you usually get paid less money for that, and you don't get to design your own class. You may have to teach a required textbook. So it's a little bit more of a straitjacket. You can find ways around that, but ultimately you're still teaching the basic kind of classes.
SL: So it's that flexibility and that autonomy.
TB: There’s so much flexibility in nonprofits. Or you could more directly address the need of your population or your community that you're working with. Like I remember when I was teaching at YCA and we started to see that there were more kids coming out—remember, this was like the late 1990s, early 2000s. And before, that really hadn't been much of a conversation.
SL: You mean coming out as queer?
TB: Coming out as queer, yeah. And you know, I didn't care. I love my students. I'm just like, “Oh, you're dating such and such? Okay.” But I was also like, “Okay as a cishet woman, I can't speak to some of that.” So I would incorporate some of the writers into what I was doing, ’cause some of them were already people I loved and adored like Essex Hemphill and Audre Lorde and James Baldwin. Like, I was already teaching them twenty-something years ago. So I'm just like, “Okay, now everybody's got a James Baldwin meme on their page or whatever.” But also I pulled in other people. I was like, “Okay, I know this queer writer. Maybe they can do a class. Do you want me to show you how to outline a class? Or do you have an idea that you want to do?” And I think there's something to be said for that. Like, not that you need to make the circle smaller to protect yourself, but how do you make the circle larger so that everybody's a part of the picture?
SL: Yeah, that's so smart. I mean, I think about how it's kind of got that Whitman sort of like adding to your multitudes, you know, inside.
TB: Yes!
SL: But I do wonder, why do you think that more people, or writers who are coming out of MFAs or coming out of PhDs, don't see the kind of opportunities in nonprofits or the flexibility that you're describing? Why is there sometimes the kind of fixation—and maybe this is just my assumption—that the best pathway is to be a professor or on a tenure track line at a university?
TB: I will say this, I don't think I chose the easy path. And that idea where I was talking earlier about feeling resistance, I felt so much resistance the entire time. And there are writers that I came up with who are tenured, or they've won all the awards, they've gotten all the fellowships, and we were peers. And I can't say that's been my path. Now is that frustrating at times? Of course. But then, also, too, I have to ask myself, what do you pay to get that? You pay something for that. And maybe I wasn't supposed to pay that cost. I had to pay a cost somewhere else, right? I also feel like in terms of tenure track jobs, I think academia in a lot of ways is imploding on itself. And English departments are notoriously conservative. They're very slowly turning. They're probably turning more slowly than a lot of other academic disciplines and I don't say that lightly. You know, I pose that question in my MFA program.
SL: What question is that?
TB: That, “Okay, since all of us aren't gonna get university jobs, what do you think we should do in terms of looking for work after we finish this degree?” And literally everybody on the panel at my MFA just looked at each other and started murmuring. They really did not have an answer. And that was in the early 2000s for me, so I knew that was the sign. I was like, “Oh, snap! What am I gonna do?” And I got an adjuncting position right away, so I taught at Rutgers, for I think it was anywhere from five to seven years, I can't remember. So I was there, enjoyed my time there, made really good money as an adjunct, but it wasn't enough money to live on.
SL: Not in New Jersey!
TB: Right. And then you know, the truth of the matter is, you don't have insurance, you don't have benefits, you don't accumulate money to prepare for your future or your retirement. And you pay for that. You pay for that. I think because I've had such a crazy work ethic, I've worked down my debt, which even some people who have this flex where they're out, you know, they have a lot more debt than I do. I don't own a lot, but I don't have a lot of debt. So now I think what I've started telling young people, I tell them, ”Okay, I can give you the writer advice, but I can also give you the non-writer advice. Would you like the non-writer advice?” They’re like, “What?” I say, “First off, take care of your teeth. Brush and floss, go to the dentist, get regular cleanings.” And they laugh every time. And I had to tell them, I said, “If you knew how many poets that I know who they have to do GoFundMe campaigns or fundraisers because their teeth are so messed up and they can't afford to get it fixed, you’d understand.” And then they go, “Oh, snap.” And then I'll be like, “Are you investing money? Are you saving money?” ’Cause nobody has that conversation with you, particularly if you're from a marginalized community. We're just now having conversations about financial education and how do we plan for the future. So I'm like, “Look, you better get that little Acorns account. You better go.”
SL: Look, I have a cousin and he—he did a bit of Junior College, and then he never really finished—but he worked as one of those like Ozarka water carriers so he was delivering water for people. But as soon as he could—he's from New Orleans—he bought a second home and rented it for Section 8 housing. So all of that stigma that people have about that, he was like, “Look, you know, this is the way that I can become financially stable.” And we laugh because we got a whole slew of cousins and my brother is a high school teacher—I'm a professor at a university—and then my cousin has his own trucking business now. And he's like, “Steven, you and your brother are the only people who have never asked me for money, the only cousins.” And I think about that a lot, too, because we aren't having those conversations about financial stability, but then we see somebody who is financially stable and then everybody wants to draw from the well, right?
TB: And that’s not how it works.
SL: Nope.
TB: That’s not how we build generational wealth.
SL: Nope.
TB: It bugs me, too, how everybody wants to be like, “Well, Black people don't have generational wealth. And generational wealth. Generational wealth.” Like they say that, but it's like, the key question is—it’s not, who doesn't have it? It's, how do we build it?
SL: Yep, how do we get it?
TB: ’Cause that's power. We've already done the electoral process and the electoral process is not cutting it. Like, what are other ways we can start to build our autonomy and our independence? And that's gonna have to be through our finances. ’Cause we're not gonna topple capitalism, that's not gonna happen.
SL: No, and as artists I think financial stability can free you from the anxiety of how am I gonna eat? I mean I'm a very much—forgive my being crass—but fuck starving artists, ’cause you know how much work I can get done with healthcare? A lot. You know how many poems I can write with a steady paycheck? A whole lot of poems.
TB: And I'm so glad people are talking about mental health. ’Cause we all know many, many artists are dealing with depression, anxiety, various mental health related disorders. And we're starting to have all these public conversations about trauma, which who gets impacted by trauma the most? People on the margins. I'm just like now people want to talk about trauma-based response teaching. And Oprah's doing all these books like, what happened to you? Or we look at the ACEs theory. They're not easy conversations to have, but they're necessary conversations. And I think it's giving people language to deal with some of these problems.
SL: Yeah, I agree. And that resonates so much with me, because I always think language is the battleground. We gotta find the words for it before we can think through the idea. Like, our syntax is ahead of our imagination in some ways. But you know, I also think about how we can start simply—and this is kind of a personal thing—but I had an aunt that passed away, worked for the post office her entire life, forty years, and died on the job. Should have long since retired, but was taking care of her grandkids—my cousin's children. And my cousin, who's right at my age—never really a steady job, so on and so forth. And when my aunt passed away, I just thought about the way that my cousin spent the money that she got from that, and all I could think about was a line from A Raisin in the Sun, and when Walter leaves like, “Don't tell me this. Don't tell me that they ran off with the money. That money is made out of my father's flesh.” And I'm just like, “Cuz, how can you? Like, that money that you went and bought that Spyder with, that money is made out of your mama's blood!” You know, but it's not my place to tell another adult what it is.
TB: No you can’t.
SL: But it's a sadness because some financial stability could have started just right there. Like, here's this tragedy, here's how you could have turned it around to not have to live the way we've lived before.
TB: Well, and I think that's kind of the hard part, too, right? Like I was talking to one of my older friends, Miss Lydia—she's a writer, too. She writes mystery novels—and so she was like, “Dead people money don't last.” And I think there's something with that when she says that like, because of where it comes from, sometimes we just don't hold on to it. But I also think it can be really complicated. When you get money for when somebody dies, how do you respond to that grief? If you grieve at all. Or maybe you're mad at that person for one reason or another, and I mean, I don't know, I'm not in anybody's head, so I try not to judge, but I do agree with you on the other hand, ’cause it's like if you get a windfall, no matter how you get it, what do you do with it? It's really a basic decision. And I feel like that with poetry, too. It's like, okay, if you have the opportunity to immerse yourself in a discipline that you love, what do you do with it? Are you just trying to become part of the institution? Are you just trying to win certain awards or appear in certain journals? Or are you trying to write something that really speaks to the people you care about? And I think now we're in a really interesting intersection, because I feel like I've watched a lot of my former students go on to be like rock stars, and I'm so excited for it every day. I saw recently Elizabeth Acevedo came to Chicago to read from her novel.
SL: Family Lore!
TB: Family Lore, yeah! So she came to read from Family Lore, and she was in conversation with Eve Ewing, and I went and I got to the front—you know, got my little seat in the front—the auditorium is full of people, and they came around the side where I was sitting, and they both saw me, and they're just like, “Tara!” And I could just see their little teenage faces again, even though they're grown women. And I was like, “Wow!” It just blows me away. I was just sitting there for half the conversation in awe, like, I had some small part in inspiring and motivating these women who are amazing! They’re fucking amazing! I think that's been part of my joy of teaching that I get in my lifetime. I've seen some sad things, but some of the things that writers that I've had in my classes have done just leave me awestruck. And they're writing the types of books that I wanted to see, that I wanted to teach.
SL: Yeah. Yeah, I love that way in which you get to, as a teacher, plant seeds and gardens that you may not see grow. But then sometimes you do get to see them grow and it’s the greatest joy.
TB: When you get to see them grow, it’s like, oh my God!
SL: It’s so good!
TB: Like I almost want to cry a little bit. I be like, “Oh my God, it's so wonderful!”
SL: And I just love it. You know I was laughing ’cause I remember I was at Cave Canem with Elizabeth maybe like a year before The Poet X got picked up, and it was just amazing. I think something for me that kind of really stuck with me is how I usually respond very well to sincerity and to seeing people be consistent. And if there was ever somebody who I'm like, “the Liz that I know from the dance floor after the workshop at Cave Canem is the same Liz that's on stage talking right now, is the same Liz, I'm sure, with her new baby and her husband,” and everything like that. And that there is something there that's like, “Okay, even that small amount of fame has not chewed you up.” And I don't know her situation fully, and I'm not trying to speak to it, but I can see that she has remained sincere. And that's sometimes the great hope, for me, of the work—that people can hold on to who they are.
TB: Yeah and then, too, I mean, I love that she does exude that kind of kindness, ‘cause not every writer does, but when I think of all the things that Liz represents—she's a young woman who grew up in New York City, she's an Afro-Latina sister, she's Dominican. I remember when I was teaching in the Bronx, and I went to a middle school—and you know middle school kids are rough.
SL: Wild!
TB: They are rough! Like they could make me cry, I am not kidding. But they were all young Dominican kids. And I remember asking them, I was like I said, “How many of you have ever read or heard of a Dominican writer?” And none of the kids can name anybody. Not a single kid. And this wasn't twenty years ago. This was probably maybe ten or fifteen years ago. So those kids would be grown now, but the point is they didn't see any reflection of themselves. And I started bringing in stuff, like I found stuff by Julia Alvarez and a couple of poems by Pedro Mir and Rhina Espaillat. And I had to really dig for stuff that was accessible to kids. ’Cause even if you find Spanish-speaking poets, they're from different traditions. They may be Puerto Rican, they may be Mexican, Cuban—and I brought in some of those writers, too, that I could find that they could get. But I think it blows my mind that we have all this stuff about DEI and cultural relevance, and one of the main things that I've always taught is we don't just need what Rudine Sims and Lucille Clifton talked about where people have windows and mirrors, where they see reflections of themselves but they also see other worlds. But it's like we should be teaching from different traditions and about different cultures, whether it's literature or history or politics. All of those things impact how we understand the world and how we see ourselves in it. And it just blew my mind like, it's like, “Okay, this is another community where people don't see a reflection of themselves.”
SL: Yeah, absolutely. I think about a film scholar named Kristen J. Warner, and she talks about not only sort of like the frequency of representation, but the quality. And so she has a term talking about plastic representation that's really, really lovely. And so it's like, yeah, we have to do all that work at the same time, right? But nothing gets done if people can't imagine even another writer that might look like them.
TB: Right! And we have to do deep teaching, too. Like, I agree with that whole idea of—I may not understand the term completely of—plastic representation, but I know what it could look like. Because I've been in schools where it'd be in a predominantly Black neighborhood. There's pictures of Black people everywhere. The school be named after a Black person. And then you ask kids, “Do you know who that person is?” And they don't know.
SL: They don’t know.
TB: And it's such a fundamental question. I even ask it to university students now, I'm like, “What's the name of the building you're in right now?” “Blah blah blah.” And then I'll be like, “Who's it named after? Why do you think they named it after this person?” I said, “More often than not, it's because either this person gave a lot of money, or—and this is the deeper one—they contribute to a way of thinking that they want their community to represent. So you should know whether or not this is a person who believed in eugenics or do they believe in education.” You know, I teach at DePaul, and even though I have questions about every university, the Vincentian mission—I kind of rock with it. ’Cause they talk about, “You are supposed to stand with people on the margins. You are supposed to be about social justice and include other people in the picture.” So I'm like, “Okay,” even though universities don't always adhere strictly to their missions, that says something to me if you're trying to be like, “Okay, I'm naming it after this person.”
SL: Yeah, yeah. Tara, can I ask you a little bit about your work editing some of the anthologies that you've been involved with, particularly The Beiging of America? I think that was one of the first times I met you in person at the CityLit Project festival in Baltimore. But I'm very curious about how did the work on editing that anthology introduce you to a large network of people, or like what would you see is the repercussions of the work that you did on that for yourself, personally, professionally, artistically, anything you want to speak to regarding that?
TB: Well, I mean, honestly, I gotta tell you I was generously pulled into that project. And I say that because I was talking with Gabrielle David, who's the publisher at 2Leaf Press, which is a small press run out of New York City. Since we've known each other for so long, and she just really has always shown me this uninhibited love and respect as a writer, I was just like, if she asked me to do something, I'll usually do it. And I had written an afterword for this book called What It Means to Be White. And they asked me to do it because in some situations, if you don't hear me talk or you don't know me, you might be like, “What is this white woman doing here?” Which I'm not. I look a lot like my Black grandmother, I’m just the same color as my white mom. So that's been a sticking point, I think, for a lot of people throughout my writing career. They're like, “Why is she doing all this Black stuff?” And I'll be like, “’Cause I'm Black!” And for the most part, those are the people who raise me and love me outside of my mother. And I just, I thought it was really interesting to write that afterword and talk about, what does white privilege look like? What does light-skin privilege look like? And because they liked what I wrote so much, she and the editor for the anthology, Sean Frederick Forbes, asked me, “Can we go a little bit deeper with this? We were thinking about doing more books where we tackle issues of race and maybe do something about mixed race.” I said that would be great because the conversation is more complicated now. We can look at Afro-Latina. We can look at people from different racial and cultural communities and think about how their cultures get together. Because I think a lot of people make the supposition that it's white and Black couples—those are interracial couples. But you can have somebody where it's like they're Japanese and Irish or something that nobody's thinking of.
SL: Jackson Bliss, right?
TB: Yeah, absolutely. And the funny thing is I knew Jackson when we were in undergrad, and I didn't know it was him at first ’cause he had a different name then. So I was like, I said, “Yo, he looks like a dude I went to college with.” And I just wrote to him, and then he was like, “Oh, my God, that was me! I do know you!” So it's like we kind of rediscovered each other. But I remember even when I met Jackson back in undergrad, we ended up being friends because we talked a lot about mixed race identity—What are some of the complications with that? And I didn't know that he was really sussing through things with identifying as hapa. ’Cause if you had met Jackson, he was just like very eloquent, kind of cute—he had the skater boy hair—and we would just have great conversations. So I was like, “Dang!” to discover him all over again. I was like it was just great to see him. But the book in general, I mean, there's been a couple of books that have come out around [the language of mixed race], but it's still so charged and so controversial. I think a lot of people didn't want to talk about it. And there's several mixed race writers that I invited to the book who just didn't submit or wrote to me and said, “I don't want to submit.” And I don't know if maybe it's because we're in a cycle where—I mean I don't know how old you are, Steven.
SL: I'm forty.
TB: Alright! Keep moisturizing! We're gonna be holding it together. But we would probably be that generation where it wasn't like a bad thing to call yourself mixed. And now it's like I feel like that's not cool to say that. But I'm like, “interracial” sounds too sterile.
SL: Like a government census.
TB: Right. And then “biracial” sounds inaccurate to me, too, because it's like, we can all take the swab test and we are not two races. I just feel like “mixed” felt like the term to me because that's the term I understood growing up. That's the term my family understood. So I don't take it like it's an insult. Like I've heard other stuff, like I heard somebody saying “mixies” and I'm like, “No!” That sounds like a puppy. I ain’t no damn puppy.
SL: Yeah, and it's like we were saying before about language being the battleground, how do you—so you know, full disclosure, my dad is Latino. My mom is African American from in Creole, from New Orleans, so I would be someone who's mixed as well—but I often have struggled with how do you find a language to identify yourself that doesn't seem like you're running away from Blackness, if Blackness is a part of your race, or doesn't have you talking like the language of colonialism? So to say “mestizo” it introduces something.
TB: Yeah, it has particular connotations.
SL: Right, it introduces a colonial context, which we sort of live, but do I need to take that into my mouth? And I often don't have answers, except for to tell my children, whose mother is white, “Whatever it might be, y'all are Black.”
TB: Right, and that's a perfectly valid answer to me. But I'm also like, “If you know you move through the world in a certain way where certain situations impact you differently, you gotta figure out how to articulate that.” Like, I don't mind “mixed” but you can't call me “mulatto” in 2023 and not expect me to want to fight you.
SL: Oh no, no.
TB: And I've heard people say that. I've heard people say “mulatto”,—and not white people— “quadroon”, “octoroon.” Or they think that's funny. But then we also have representations, like we look at the rapper Latto and we all know what her name is short for. And I'm just like, how do you find ways to let that go and still acknowledge that you don't want to be distanced from this community that you are definitely a part of? I think that's very important. And it's a conversation that makes people uncomfortable. So especially if one, you think, like you were saying, is it a community that they wanna check the census box that is more favorable, supposedly. Or we don't want to identify with Blackness. That's a problem to me. I identify with it because that's home. That’s home.
SL: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, I do, too. I feel that way, too. I think about Toi Derricotte saying in The Black Notebooks, “You're Black because of who you loved first.”
TB: Mm, yes!
SL: It is both I find that Blackness to be kind of accepting, like it is one that sort of synthesizes—you can be mixed in a bunch of different ways and still be Black because of the history of colonialism—but it also is the term that I have because I can't say Yoruba, or I can't say Zulu, because I don't know. ’Cause I just don't know.
TB: Yeah, and I would go deeper than that, even. It's like, okay, we all know Blackness at some point has been touched by Africa. It's inescapable. But I always think about who are the people that I felt safe around and in the sense of like, even if you don't like me, I don't feel like you wanna terrorize me. Even if you don't want to hang out with me, I know how you feel about me, and you let me exist and just be. And I feel like Black people really do have a sensibility where they do that. Whereas it wasn't until I got older, and I knew I could maneuver in certain ways, that I could have white friends in a real deep way. Like I had a couple white friends when I was growing up, but in terms of being a person who had friends across cultures, it took me some time to do that because I just was like, “I know what Black folks gon’ do. I don't know what you gon’ do.” And I just always move with that level of suspicion or just apprehension where I felt like, “How is this gonna go?” Or I had instances from when I was very young where I would be with some other white people and as soon as there was a tell that I was Black, they would stop talking to me, or they’d treat me different. So I'd be like, “Wow, okay. So you thought I was in the club, and I'm not in the club.” You know Black people will just tell you, “You know what? Get your yellow ass away from me,” and I'd rather you just tell me that. I'd rather know you don't like me because of this superficial thing rather than you pretend. We don't have to make nice, but you will respect me, or just tell me you don’t wanna mess with me.
SL: Yeah, there's something so interesting to me, too, I'm often thinking about how that plays out or how that's informed by region. I often find it's so funny that as an adult—in my thirties on—I can usually tell when I'm meeting a white person or family—you know me and my wife are meeting a family for the first time—who has had experience with Black people before. Like do they talk to just my wife who is white, or do they talk to us both, or are they nervous or weird in a way that may or may not be because of race, but I usually have a pretty good sense of it. And it is so funny to me how often folks who grew up in the South, whether it's just a different kind of proximity—like, obviously, many people understand the whole history of that. But they've also spent time closer to Black people, so often I find Southern white folks either have had greater experiences talking to Black folks without hesitation or without some kind of weirdness.
TB: And that’s so strange, right, that it works out that way.
SL: ’Cause you would think it might be the opposite. There would be these greater, ingrained kind of social separation queues. But it’s like, “Man, no, look.”
TB: Well people from the South have a much smoother way of addressing each other, I think, in general. But I think people from the North are hyper vigilant about all sorts of things. And it definitely impacts the way you communicate. It does.
SL: Yeah. Yeah, so that's very interesting to me.
So, I wanted to wrap it up here a bit and ask if you had any advice that you would give to younger writers, whether they be poets or another genre, who are thinking about how to be employed, how to make their work meaningful, how to put into practice the ideas that we've been talking about. What advice would you give?
TB: Well, I will say you can only cut down how much you spend. You can always make more money. That's the adage I'm thinking about a lot right now. So be very innovative and open to thinking about multiple ways to make money and not just being in the way of gratuitous stuff like, where you can spend money to go to the Beyoncé concert. I mean actually planning with the little bit of money you do have. Like, how do you minimize your debt? How do you invest and start small with your investments? How do you save even if you start small with the savings? 'Cause it adds up over time. I do feel like in terms of teaching, you want to be versatile. You want to have things that you know you can pivot and change for certain circumstances. Like I get so many random gigs that I don't really talk about. Like you'll see a lot of people, they book all these gigs where they do all these universities, and they put out their little e-flyer with all the dates like a tour calendar, which is cool, but not everybody gets those gigs all the time. And again, those are either very celebrity-centered or youth-centered, and if you don't hit in that network it's very challenging. But I think you can still get gigs. I've been teaching for so long, but I've also developed areas of expertise, like I do a lot of stuff on women writers of color. I've done some stuff around science fiction. I've done stuff around poetry and essays. I'll kinda take on new challenges of things I haven't tried before. One of the things I've noticed is a lot of poets will be like, “How do you submit?” I'll be like, “Well, you gotta cold submit. But if ever an editor or a publisher contacts you and asks you to submit, you send them the work.” Because more than likely they're predisposed to publish you. Now, I know some people wanna be strategic. They wanna aim for certain houses, ’cause they know that can provide other opportunities later. I say go for it if you can do that. But also be open. I mean William Stafford—who was a poet who published prolifically, but he wrote every day and he sent out, to the chagrin of some people, he sent stuff out to like little fly-by-night presses. But he also sent for the big presses, too. And you know something's gonna stick. But in the meantime you gotta do what you can to take care of your health. You gotta try to eat right. You gotta exercise, which I think that's the deadly thing for writers. Our job is too sedentary. And I know it's been a challenge for me. I'm trying to be like, “Okay, I gotta start exercising.” But also do things that are healthy for your spirit. Do you meditate? Do you have friendships that are outside of your writing community, because writer friends are not the same as your friend friends.
SL: Whoo! That could be a whole other interview.
TB: Yeah, which I'm not saying I'm not friends with some writers, because I am, but I do think it's important to have friends who are grounded outside of your realm of your word. And you know, just constantly reassessing what do you need to work on. Or what is the campaign that you want to address in terms of not just your political life, but your personal life? So I hope that's good advice. I know it’s kind of all over the place. Usually, I tell people you need to read prolifically. Don't just read your friends. Read across generations, different time periods, different countries, different aesthetics. And that can impact you in some really surprising ways, too. But hopefully it's a nice little triage of different bits of advice in there.