Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Every year the MacArthur Foundation announces a new class of MacArthur Fellows. Known colloquially as the Genius Grant, the foundation grants a substantial no strings attached award to about two dozen exceptionally talented individuals every year. Kiese Laymon is part of this year's class. Laymon is the Libby Shearn Moody Professor of Creative Writing and English at Rice University and author of Heavy: An American Memoir. Thank you for joining The Takeaway.

Kiese: [laughs] Thank you so much for having me, Melissa. It's dreamy to be here with you. I appreciate it.

Melissa: Listen, I was scanning list and I screamed when I saw your name, so I just got to know where were you and how did you feel when you got that call?

Kiese: Oh, you'll appreciate this. I just finished teaching my morning class and I had to do another presentation on campus in the evening, but I came home to try to take a nap.

Melissa: [laughs]

Kiese: I was in my bed and my phone rang and I don't know about you, but usually, I don't answer the numbers I don't know because there's always-

Melissa: Never.

Kiese: -somebody asking for some money.

Melissa: It's always a bill collector every time. [laughs]

Kiese: I'm so gullible though. It'll be some sort of scam and I'll fall for it. It was a Chicago number, so I was like, "Man, this might be one of my cousins," so I picked it up. The person started saying something, something, something about MacArthur, and honestly, I was just like, "What? Stop playing on my phone. Who is this?" Then the person told me again and then they read the description of the work I do and I just didn't believe it. I'm going to be honest with you, fam. I didn't believe it and I didn't believe it real talk until yesterday. I just didn't believe it.

Melissa: Can I just say, Kiese? That in every good way that is the Blackest Genius-

Kiese: [laughs]

Melissa: -Award story I have ever heard.

[laughter]

Kiese: I'm like, "Why you playing on my phone?" I was just like, "Please stop playing on my phone because if you keep talking, I'm going to start believing this. If I believe it and you lying, it's going to hurt my heart." At the same time, because I'm a writer, I was like, "If this is a joke," and I literally thought Original Best was playing a joke on me because we talk about this stuff. I was just like, "If it's a joke, it's a great joke, but I'm going to need you to stop doing this because I got to go teach." That's what it felt. That's what happened.

Melissa: Okay, so many things I love about that. In part also, that it came in the middle of a teaching and lecturing and events-

Kiese: Yes.

Melissa: -day. That's the life of an academic. You're doing this creative work, but then you got to pause and go talk to some babies about like, "Here's how you bring a story out of yourself."

Kiese: That's right.

Melissa: How do you connect those pieces of who you are in any given day?

Kiese: That's why I love you asking me that question. I think it's about accepting who you are. One of the things I loved about Melissa Harris-Perry's show was, again, the way you talk. I'm a teacher. I write because I need to teach and I teach because I need to learn. It's poetic and it makes sense that if I were to get that call, I would get it again in between classes, but nothing about this is sensible. Do you know what I'm trying to say? For me, it was just like I didn't accept it, but I had to go do this other thing, and then I got very panicky. I got panicky thinking, "What if it is true?" Because if it was true, I'm a big, big fan of self-sabotage. I probably would've found some way to self-sabotage it if I actually believed it, but I didn't actually believe it until yesterday when it really went out, and then I was just like, "Okay, so [chuckles] I got to recalibrate some things."

Melissa: Can you say more about your experience of self-sabotage?

Kiese: Oh my goodness gracious, [chuckles] yes. That's been a big part of my life or pushing that back. You can see it with this, when I did accept it yesterday, one of the things I do when I self-sabotage is instead of thinking about what it took to do what I did, I think about the people who made it hard. I foreground them. Then I foreground the people who I think deserve something more than me. I think those are both kinds of self-sabotage because it stops, it halts your ability to accept and sit in a psychological, physical and emotional space that this new thing has given you.

I don't know how to sit in a space that somebody said, "Here's $800,000 to do whatever you want because we love your work." I need to accept that that was given and I need to accept that somehow I earned it, but it's hard because it's easier to be that person who didn't [chuckles] have $800,000. I'm not complaining. I'm just-

Melissa: [chuckles]

Kiese: -saying that I'm not complaining. Please get me. I'm just telling you emotionally, psychologically, it's just hard to carry that stuff because I don't think we have a lot of models of how to do it. People who do it, I think, self-sabotage in another way by being private about the failure. I'm private about my failure, so I try to write it out. Yes, this is a wonderful, incredible thing for me and my family, my community, my friends. I think Black writing in general, but I think we also have to accept sometimes the self-sabotage comes with a lot of these so-called gifts.

Melissa: What you just said, that sometimes it's actually easier, at least easier in that we know the story of how to not get it. I am very good at holding up in petty corner and being like, "Look, now see no one's ever invested in me. She got, he got," right. Not that I even would do that out outwardly, but in my own spirit that it's easy to either see and amplify your own fault or see and amplify the blocks. I'm wondering because as you're speaking, I was like, "Well, that's heavy." Then you said, "I do try to write it out." Talk to me about how you have been writing it out.

Kiese: For me, the thing I do lean on, that I know is not going to ever fail me, is my writing practice. I do it every day. I know it's not going to be good every day. I revise every weekend hardcore. When I wrote this book called Heavy, ultimately, I knew I had to write it to my mama because she was a person who I think saw me for the longest and also saw me in ways that I didn't want to be seen. I think I saw her in ways she didn't want to be seen. Honestly, we had just gotten to a place with different forms of addiction that was untenable. Meaning one or both of us wasn't going to make it because we were just giving away every quote-unquote blessing we had.

I just wanted to use the art or the gift that she gave me, which was writing and revision to write into that relationship and connect that relationship to the nation's obsessive need for so-called progress. Often that obsessive need for progress comes in the way of like shrinkage for like different kinds of Black bodies. I used to be very, very anorexic, incredibly body dysmorphic. I just wanted to write into that, but also just talk about how when you write into the body, especially if you're writing into the body via a direct address to someone who loves you or loved you, you're going to sit in things that you were afraid to sit in.

Honestly, I wrote to my mama because I needed somebody to go on that journey with. I needed to hold my mama's hand through that book. A lot of people were like, "Oh, it's so brave of you." I'm like, "Fam, I couldn't have written that book if I hadn't written to my mama because I was too scared to." That's the truth. I never said that actually, but that's the truth.

Melissa: One of the things we share is being Southerners, I've been in New York all week and we'll be here through much of the rest of next week. My team said to me this morning when I walked in, they were like, "Oh, how you enjoying your week?" I was like, "Oh, I just need to go home." Right?

[laughter]

Kiese: Yes, indeed.

Melissa: I was like, "I need to go outside. I just need to be outside for a second." Talk to me about the ways that your work reveals something about Black Southernness and what that rootedness in Black Southernness is for you.

Kiese: Yes, that's a wonderful question. I think my root in Black Southernness and particularly Central Mississippi Black Southernness that was created and cradled by Black women, my grandmas, my aunties, and my mama. For me, it's just like a sight of absolute paradox. The most horror in the world I think I've experienced in different parts of the South, but by revelation and absolute joy come from living in the South. I don't want to live anywhere else but the South. I live in Houston now. I was living in Mississippi for five years. Before that, I was in New York for 15 years before that, but it's also tied to that thing we were talking about how sometimes we can hide from ourself.

It's harder for me to hide in Mississippi because I think that the culture and the history and the people actually see you and literally say "Hey," to you and I think sometimes want to hear the stories. I think that's it. I think sometimes we need to accept that we come from a place where people actually want to hear stories. When you pass them in the street, and I actually want to hear stories. New York is incredible, some of the most incredible people in the world, to me, live there, but there's so many people, you just can't look at people in the eye and listen to them, or people think you want to fight them or step to them or mac on them or something like that.

I just like being home, fam, where you can breathe and you can see out. I'm not trying to idealize it, but it's familiar, but it's also, I think like the cradle of direct action. A lot of what we do is about direct organized action, whether it's literary or actual action.

Melissa: Yes, no, it's not idealized and the comfort goes in and out, and perhaps it doesn't feel this way for everybody, but as a Southerner it just feels like, "Oh, this is mine." I think it can be tough for Black folks in America where the land isn't ours. Where there is always that sense of disconnection and yet, for me, the South is the place that feels most like, "This feels like mine."

Kiese: Yes. The thing that I really love about our South I'm just going to say, and I might not be speaking just from me here, but I love that I was born in Jackson. Every Black boy, girl, gender-queer person I know born in Jackson has one foot in Jackson and one foot in the rural community that their grandparents or uncles are great-grand. We literally are straddling these country supposed rural-urban lines. As a storyteller, I think that makes some much, much more lush storytelling. It's not like the story of the city versus the country.

Yes, you can get that, but most people straddle, you know what I mean? Most people who leave the deep South in these little country black tales, inspired not to go to New York or Chicago. When I was coming up, they aspired to go to Jackson.

[laughter]

Kiese: To Birmingham, maybe Atlanta.

Melissa: Maybe.

Kiese: Maybe, but for real feel like I just think that straddling of the rural and the urban can open up some lines literally that I think I don't see open up a lot of other places.

[music]

Melissa: We'll be back in just a moment. More on The Takeaway.

[music]

Melissa: Welcome back to The Takeaway, and I'm still here and straddling some critical lines between urban and rural, between Southern and non-Southern with Kiese Laymon, author, professor, and one of the fellows of the newest MacArthur Foundation Class. I want to talk about something that you did that's astonishing. You got your rights back to two of your previously published books, Long Division and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and rerelease them. You did it in 2020. Why?

Kiese: [chuckles] One, I got my money up and I had the money to do it from hustling and selling these books and going all over the place talking. Two was because I signed one of those no limit literary deals. I gave my first book away to the publisher for $1,000, it's called How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and then I gave my novel away for like $4,000 and I gave all the rights away. I had to buy my books back because I wanted to do something more with those books. Those books were never published the way I wanted to, and after five years, I thought a lot about different things and came to a lot of different conclusions, and I wasn't comfortable with my name being attached to some of those conclusions.

Some of the things that I said about Kanye, in the first version of my essay book. I couldn't sit behind that. Some of the stuff I said about Michael Jackson. I wasn't about those people, it was literally about my changing. I was a different person who no longer wanted to have my name attached to a literary artifact that was connected to some of what Kanye West was doing for example. I didn't want to be connected to that person who bought my books for $1,000 and $3,000 anymore, so instead of giving me the books back, the person was like, "Oh, you can buy them back," and I was mad as hell.

Then I just bought them back and put them out the way I wanted to, so I could control the film rights, the TV rights, international rights, and it actually, that's what rappers do, so I was just like-

[laughter]

Melissa: Yes.

Kiese: -I always wanted to be a rapper so this is the most rapish thing I can do, get in a terrible deal and by myself out and then brag about it, so that's what I tried to do. [chuckles]

Melissa: Okay. I love that you said that because I was about to be "Well, now you sound like a rapper." [chuckles]

Kiese: You're old. [laughs]

Melissa: There's something else that it sounds like, so here we are people who are creatives, right? We create this thing that we put out into the world and it exists far beyond our reach and control and even our capacity to revise, which is terrifying, but also because the thing that we make isn't a thing. It's not a widget, but by owning the rights, again, it feels very Southern, it's like you bought some land, son.

Kiese: Yes. That's exactly what it felt like. We come from people. My grandmama, she finished high school through correspondence courses. Worked in a chicken plant her entire life. Worked as a domestic, but she had land and a house at 18 or 19 from working around and getting some money from the church. She brought the man who she chose to mess with into that house, and to that land, so we didn't have a lot, but what we did have was ours and I didn't. Those books were in the world and that's how I got my start and thank goodness people read any of them, but they weren't mine, real talk. I was renting those books. I think that's a terrible feeling once you accept that, especially if you come from the kind of Deep South that we come from.

Melissa: All right, here's my final question. You got your money up a little bit, you got some books, you got some rights, you bought some land, son. Now with this honor with all the things that it is, including the resources, any ideas about the use of those resources?

Kiese: Yes, I'm about to spend the next year getting my head right, fixing my body, and hopefully, trying to be here for a little bit longer. I had excuses before this to make work really my only hobby, and for the next year, I'm going to use some of this MacArthur money to making my body not hurt so much. Making my head a little less cloudy. I'm just going to give a year to just trying to get some sense of joy back into the joints, and into my head. I'm going to take care of myself for a year, take care of my family, and then I'm going to get back to work.

Melissa: Kiese Laymon is about to discover the joy of the nap ministry. [chuckles]

Kiese: Yes.

Melissa: [chuckles] He's a writer, professor, and 2022 MacArthur fellow. Kiese, thank you so much for joining us.

Kiese: Oh, thank you. You're a wizard at this, fam. I appreciate it.

Melissa: Thank you.

[00:15:57] [END OF AUDIO]

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