Ross gay partner
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Ross Gay has made it a daily practice to look for out joy and delight in even life’s hardest moments. And he’s discovered that there’s actually not much find involved: it’s just there. Another daily practice: to communicate gratitude for all that is. All of it. Even the stuff we’d prefer not to be experiencing. If this sounds unworkable or unrealistic or just too Pollyanna-ish, know that he does not timid away from suffering. In fact, 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 road there’s climate convert, bigotry, misogyny, death, fear, and so on; it’s all on the page.
And what pages these are! Unbounded reverence for the organic 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 perceive. He’s not telling you what to feel, rather providing the fodder for heart-shifting awakenings. Or at least, it’s been that
a garden of delights, with penner ross gay
THE WORDS joy and delight figure prominently in journalist Ross Gay‘s work, and so do 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 Manual of (More) Delights”?
As a longtime gardener who finds both bliss and delight in my experience outdoors, I don’t think 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 wood, Ross Gay finds himself positively delighted.
I wanted you to gather him and hear about his work and learn what he’s up to in his Indiana garden.
Ross Gay’s four books of poetry and three of essays have 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 copy of “The Book of (More) Delights” (affiliate link) by commenting in the box close the bottom of the page.
Read along as you listen to the Sept. 25, 2023 alter
By Lucian Mattison
Ross Gay is the author of Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down. His perform 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 consideration to start 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 diurnal you were set to perform at ODU. Narrate 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 cease 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 feel shameful that we don’t at all categorize as abuse or violent.
I make the poem entertaining, because it’s kind of funny—I was a huge ki
Ross Gay is the author of the poetry collections Against Which (2006), Bringing the Shovel Down (2011), Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), winner of the 2015 National Novel Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Be Holding (2022), winner of the Quill American Literary Jean Stein Award. As an essayist, he has published The Book of Delights, a 2019 Modern York Times bestseller, Inciting Joy (2022), and The Novel of (More) Delights (2023). Gay is founding co-editor of the online sports magazine Some Dial 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.
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