[ Music ] ^M00:00:12 >> Sponsored by the James Madison Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. ^M00:00:17 ^M00:00:21 [ Music ] ^M00:00:34 >> Everdeen Mason: Hello and welcome to the 2021 National Book Festival. I'm Everdeen Mason and I'm here with Roxane Gay, the co-author of the Sacrifice of Darkness graphic novel, which I have right here. Welcome Roxane. >> Roxane Gay: Hi Everdeen. It's so great to be in conversation with you. >> Everdeen Mason: I want to get started with the theme of the festival, which is open a book and open the world. How have books really opened the world for you? >> Roxane Gay: I've been reading, like most people, since I was a little kid and books have always just shown me just how big and how small the world is and it has always been a thrilling thing for me to, whether I'm reading fiction or nonfiction, learn about new people and new places and new possibilities, and to this day I still get that thrill whenever I read someone's novel or a memoire and I learn about some aspect of culture that I was not previously aware of and my understanding of the world expands just a little bit more each time. >> Everdeen Mason: Yeah, and I'd love to hear you talk about taking that concept and you as a writer, your work is really sprawling across nonfiction essays, short story collections, graphic novels, comic books, you know. How have you, sort of, opened your world up to everybody else through your writing? ^M00:01:55 >> Roxane Gay: You know, one of the things that I-- one of the things that's so exciting about writing and so necessary is that, as writers, we can open people up to different ways of living. And so, in my writing I always try to write from a black feminist perspective and I'm certainly not the only person doing that, and so it's important to recognize that no one person is the singular authority on any kind of experience, but I love to, in addition to writing from a place that is research and fact based, I do think it's important to introduce readers to subjectivity and what it means to live in your shoes. And I have always understood that nobody will understand the world the way I do and I think that's important for every writer to recognize in themselves. And so, whether I'm writing a memoir-- one second, I have a Cuckoo clock. ^M00:02:57 Whether I'm writing a memoir about what it means to live in a fat black body or I'm writing a book or an essay about living in a world where the phrase rape culture exists, I'm just opening up my experiences in the hopes that someone out there is going to connect with it in some way and feel seen and recognized, and maybe even understood. >> Everdeen Mason: Yeah, it's interesting that you use the word subjective, because as a journalist, something that I grapple with as a, you know, as a black queer woman in this industry, is sort of the term subjective and objective, where the work that you're writing, that-- to a certain extent, that's your objective truth, but the world that's often presented that's most sort of lotted as the status quo is the objective truth of often white men. I'd love to hear you talk about, you know, kind of how you grapple with subjective and objective truths in your work. >> Roxane Gay: Mm-hmm. You know, I don't think that there is such a thing as objective truth, and the objective truth, as you point out, that most people in journalism in particular, are elevating is the truth of the white heterosexual patriarchy and that doesn't really serve most people, and I think that subjectivity can only make journalism better. I do think that there are things that are incontrovertible and that there are truths that need to be established, especially in the wake of the Donald Trump presidency, where truth suddenly became mutable and fluid. But this idea that we should not embow reportage with subjectivity all does us harm, because context is so important and sometimes we do need to understand the context to fully understand a situation, whether it is, you know, looking at today's news, the Israeli Palestine-- Palestinian conflict, which is so complicated and so fraught, or whether we're talking about police brutality in the United States or we're talking about the governmental instability in Haiti, like objectivity is not going to serve any of these situations well, and so I do think that subjectivity is far more important than we give it credit for. And I think that a lot of people hide behind objectivity and they do so so that they don't have to grapple with messy and complicated things that don't have easy answers. ^M00:05:32 >> Everdeen Mason: Yeah and, you know, I think it's interesting because I see this reflected in the Sacrifice of Darkness too, because you wrote this in 20-- well, you probably wrote it before then but it was published as part of your short collection in 2017, and it was a graphic novel and I couldn't help but see the parallels between, you know, these people existing in this new world caused by darkness and the reality we're living in with COVID and the way our lives had to change and our desires to go back to the way things were, even if, you know, they weren't totally serving us. I'd kind of love to hear you talk about sort of that context in regards to sacrifice of darkness, like what-- you know, what were you trying to explore and how do you think that sort of evolved since its published? >> Roxane Gay: So, the Sacrifice of Darkness graphic novel began as a short story that I wrote and was published in my short story collection, Difficult Women., and I wrote the story when I was living in Michigan's upper peninsula and going to graduate school and I was living in a place where there was a lot of poverty, a lot of rural poverty, which is not something that gets talked about a lot. When we talk about poverty in the United States, it's often in the context of urban poverty. And it really struck me that there were a lot of contributing factors to that poverty and one of the main ones was that there used to be a copper mining industry, and when the copper mines ran dry the mine owners picked up and left and all of a sudden, the primary form of employment in the area disappeared. And there were repercussions and there are all these sort of hauntingly beautiful industrial ruins that are a constant reminder of what happens when you prioritize profits over people. And so, I wrote this short story about a world in which a man who has been mining for his entire life is so consumed with darkness after the mine owners demand more and more labor from him that he flies an air machine into the sun. And so, I was really just thinking about inequality and the sacrifices that people make at the altar of capitalism, and I don't of course have any sort of elegant solution to it and I benefit from capitalism as much as anyone, but it was just an interesting thing to explore creatively. And then of course we expanded it into a graphic novel, which I co-wrote with my best friend Tracy Lynne Oliver. And it was really exciting to be able to expand the world of this story. ^M00:08:12 >> Everdeen Mason: Yeah, and I'd love to talk more about sort of the choice to turn it into a graphic novel. What does that form-- what do you think that form allows you to be able to do that you weren't able to do when it was just a short story just in prose? >> Roxane Gay: Well, one of the things that was most exciting about the graphic novel process was just making it visual and seeing a lot of the ideas on the page. It was, you know, something that I had always imagined sort of cinematically as I was writing it and that graphic novel format really sort of enhanced that cinematicness-- yeah, that cinematicness for lack of a better word. And the artist, Rebecca Kirby, did a lovely lovely job in taking the story that Tracy and I wrote and imagining it anew on the page, and it was a really wonderful collaboration between all three of us. >> Everdeen Mason: Yeah, the art was beautiful. I felt-- >> Roxane Gay: Yes. >> Everdeen Mason: It really elevated the world. And I love seeing writers like you kind of work across genres and work across mediums. I think it's-- it makes sense but it's kind of weird that some people stick in one zone. And I'd love to hear you talk about kind of how you weave between these different mediums and what it allows you as a storyteller to do. >> Roxane Gay: Yes, I have always, from early on, enjoyed working across different genres and part of it was because, especially as a black writer and a black woman writer, people want to pigeon hole you and suggest that you can only write in one vein, and I think that limits our potential and our creativity when, especially writers of color, have so many different kinds of stories that we want to tell and many of them have nothing to do with our identity. And the industry rarely affords us the opportunity to express that creativity. And so, I write across genre because I don't want you to ever assume what you're going to see from me next, it's always going to be something different. But at the same time, I hope that you're always going to know that you're reading something that I wrote. And I just love the freedom of that and I love the challenge of familiarizing myself with new genres and learning the rules of those genres, and then of course figuring out how to break them in ways that are going to be interesting to a reader. ^M00:10:35 >> Everdeen Mason: Yeah, and I love to hear you say that because it's something-- something I think about a lot is sometimes I think publishers want you to bring to the forefront your identity, but it's always in the subtext. >> Roxane Gay: Right. >> Everdeen Mason: Like it's just who I am; it's just like there. >> Roxane Gay: Exactly. I would never and I could never and nor do I ever want to separate my identity from who I am. My blackness, my womanness, my queerness, these are all things that are an integral part of who I am and I don't have to write about them explicitly for them to explicitly shape what it is I have to say, and I think that goes for all of us and I wish more people would recognize that, that everything I write is about identity, but it's not about identity in the ways that you might expect, especially as I get deeper into my career and I have more of the freedom to write what I want instead of to write what is expected of me, that most writers have to submit to early in their career. ^M00:11:36 >> Everdeen Mason: Myself and a lot of black people that I know, science fiction in particular, really appeals and comic books really because even if they were written by people who weren't thinking about us, they are inherently stories about the other and they're stories about possibility and what ifs scenarios that I think are really fun to explore, which is why I loved that you did this, I love that you did World of Wakanda. do you have any more plans to continue working in that genre or are there other genres that you're excited to work in? >> Roxane Gay: Yeah, I'm continuing to write comics. I have a comic book called The Banks, and that is out and available in the world, and I'm currently writing a comic book called The Ends and it's about a woman who finds out that she has an uncurable cancer and she's a police officer, a detective in Los Angeles, and at the same time she's also becoming increasingly frustrated with police brutality in the way that her fellow cops would probably shoot her before believing her about anything. And so, she decides to become a vigilante, and getting justice both for criminals who have manipulated the legal system and also rogue police officers who harm black lives, and black and brown lives, because the case that sort of sets everything off in the graphic novel is a young Latino man who is shot by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, which is actually based, of course, on a true story. And it's really exciting; I love working in the cra-- the graphic novel slash comic world and I'm learning so much about storytelling. And I'm also now moving into film and television, which is sort of, not the final frontier, but the sort of one genre that I've dabbled in but have not-- you know, I've sold lots of things but nothing has yet made it to the screen, but I think I'm getting closer and closer the more I learn about screenwriting and storytelling in a visual way, so, that's what's up next for me. >> Everdeen Mason: It actually sounds awesome and I don't know why but my brain immediately is like it's Regina King, like it's just Regina King. >> Roxane Gay: Listen, listen. You know, I have-- my team has approached her for a few projects and as you might imagine right now as a director, and an actor and I think even as a screenwriter, her talents are in high demand and so I certainly hope that someday I could work with her. I think she's just luminous. What she did in The Watchmen was so incredibly remarkable. And I also thought that One Night in Miami was really really well done and beautifully shot and I know she's done other things as well. She's done many other things, and I've been following her career since 227. And it's just great that she's getting her flowers while she's alive and that we have created, slowly but surely, an environment where we can create exciting and interesting art and unfortunately, of course, we can still sort of count the number of women, and black women directors in particular, who are getting these opportunities, but at least it's progress. It's incremental but it's progress and I think it's important to note progress when it's happening. >> Everdeen Mason: That leads me to a question I've been wanting to ask you about how you think about-- if you think at all about your audience because I think that kind of creative work that now people of color are being allowed to do is only because, you know, there is acknowledgement that audiences might want something different than my trauma on screen to validate them, you know. So how do you think about, when you're writing about things that are very like personal to you and bring it to the forefront, how do you think about your audience and how you are going to engage with them through your work? ^M00:15:41 >> Roxane Gay: I try not to think about audience too much when I'm writing because when I start to think too much about audience I start to compromise, you know, sort of what I want to say to the pressures of what I think people are expecting me to say. That said, I'm well aware that I do have an audience no matter how much I try to pretend that no one's ever going to read my work. And so, especially, again, now that I'm in a place in my career where I can take more risks and where I can do more of sort of what I want to do, I just try to be as truthful and to put as much excellence on the page as possible. You're not going to get perfect work, but you are going to get work that was well considered and worked on with a lot of intent. And certainly, I have written about my personal life, but within some very firm boundaries. I have written about trauma, but that is not what defines me in any way, and that is not the only thing I have to offer the world. At the same time, why should I not write about it, like to sort of like spite the devil, it doesn't make sense to not write about it simply because that's what people expect, because that constrains black creators also. You know, it's such an impossible position that we're put into. And again, I would say it's all marginalized creators, but I'm speaking primarily of course to the black experience as a black woman. And so, these are just things I'm thinking about a lot because-- and I talk about this regularly, especially at events, like telling younger writers you don't have to cannibalize yourself or commodify your trauma to write and to have a career. But at the same time, that doesn't mean you shouldn't write about these things if that's what you feel called to write about, and it's a fine balance in many ways, but I do think that there are plenty of people who are capable of negotiating that fine balance. >> Everdeen Mason: Yeah, and speaking of that, you know, thinking of younger creators and writers who may look up to you, you know, you've had a long career, you went to grad school. Could you talk a little bit about, sort of, your journey to get here and kind of what you wish you'd known or what you would impart to others about kind of choosing art as your path and like doing the work and the study to get there in this world? ^M00:18:12 >> Roxane Gay: Yes. You know, I think almost every creative path involves a lot of time, a lot of rejection, a lot of struggle and a lot of hard work and a lot of luck. You know, it's an alchemy. It's not sort of like here's this one thing you can do and voila you're going to be able to live an artistic life. For most of my life I've had a day job. I quit my job two years ago and I may take another day job again in the future, but I just was underpaid and I wasn't going to tolerate it anymore and so I could leave and I did. But one of the many reasons I was able to do the kind of work that I did, especially early on is that it wasn't pay ng my bills and I don't think we talk enough how stability makes creativity possible, at least for me. When I am not scraping by and living paycheck to paycheck, which like most people I did for most of my 20s and 30s, it's so much easier to create when you know the rent is going to be paid and the electricity is going to be paid and things like that. So, I went to grad school, but I had normal jobs and, you know, I bartended and I've done retail and I've done telemarketing. I worked for a student loan company consolidating loans for a while. I worked for Gallop Polls for a while. And I'm talking about like in hourly jobs not fancy jobs. And then when I went back to grad school I was living in Michigan's upper peninsula and there was not much to do outside of class and teaching and so I would just write, and I had always written but I just started taking myself even more seriously than I already did and it was a lot of persistence and putting myself out there and I started writing on my own blog. And then someone from HTML Giant, a young man-- well he's-- we're the same age I think but a man named Blake Butler invited me to write for a website called HTML Giant, which was this really sort of interesting contrarian literary opinion website. And then I started to write for The Rumpus from there and then Salon, and then The Guardian, and then now I'm at the New York Times as a contributing opinion writer. And so, it really was just moving forward and getting the right attention at the right time. And the same with my agent. I-- my first agent is a great agent named Sarah LaPolla and I was looking for a newer agent at a very established literary agency and I sent her a query letter and I got lucky. She liked what I had to say and asked to see more of my book and that book ended up becoming Difficult Women and it was in fact my third book, not my first book. And then my current agent asked if she could represent me a couple years in and this was before I had published a book, for whatever reason, you know it just wasn't the right time with Sarah. But with Maria-- but with Maria Massie, my current agent, things started to fall in place and so again it's you just have to work hard to have luck find you and that's where I am now is just sort of trying to make the most of it. ^M00:21:41 >> Everdeen Mason: Actually, you just said something that I hadn't thought of before but that's the t, which is that you started to take yourself more seriously and I think that's something that is hard for a lot of young creatives is like earnestly pursuing that thing that you want to do and taking it seriously like I am good or I'm going to get good, you know. >> Roxane Gay: Right. >> Everdeen Mason: Get good. >> Roxane Gay: And it's okay if you don't believe in yourself as a writer. Like most writers, I tend to have crushingly low self-esteem about my work and that's okay as long as you keep doing it. I meet so many writers who talk themselves out of writing and talk themselves out of claiming that space and trying to have a career because they get rejected once or because they haven't published anything yet, but if you write you're a writer and no one else is going to call you a writer before you call yourself a writer. And I think it's so important to just, you know, own it. I've taken myself seriously as a writer since I was 15 and it doesn't mean you take yourself too seriously, but it's okay to be earnest and I wish that we had never gone through this phase where it's cool to be like dismissive of the very hard work that we do. Like I wrote this thing. I wrote this thing; it's kind of trash but I want you to read it. I'm like well, with a sales pitch like that I don't know if I'm going to read it, but good luck. You know, I just think it's, earnestness, I agree, I'm glad you identified it as earnestness. I think it's underrated. >> Everdeen Mason: I also wanted to ask you about, you know, we've been in-- do we call it quarantine anymore? I'm still calling it quarantine. I know we're not quarantined. It's been more than a year. do you think that this time has sort of changed your relationship with literature, with reading or writing, and if so how; how do you think it's changed that relationship? ^M00:23:36 >> Roxane Gay: I think that because I immediately had to stop touring, which is something I've done since 2014 pretty much consistently. I finally had the time to write in a way that I hadn't in many years, and more importantly I had the time to read just extravagantly. I read-- I have been reading so much over the past year and a half, and of course now quarantine is lifting and we're starting to go out again and fortunately everyone in my family is vaccinated and-- at least the adults, I should say, and it's so great to be back in the world, but I know I'm going to be taking some things from the past year and a half forward with me and one is like I always read a lot but like now I've really been like dedicating an hour or more a day to it. And it's just gratifying to just sort of return to the route of what put me on this path. >> Everdeen Mason: Mm-hmm. And what's something that you've really enjoyed reading recently? >> Roxane Gay: Oh yes, I've recently finished the novel The Five Wounds, by Kirstin Valdez Quade and it is a novel that rose out of the short story The Five Wounds and her collection Night at the Fiestas, and it's about this family, Yolanda, the matriarch, Amadeo her son, and Angel, Amadeo's daughter, and it's about a year in their life and it is powerful and beautifully written. It is tender and it is real and she's an extraordinary writer and I think she is one that everyone needs to be reading. >> Everdeen Mason: And it's interesting because one of my favorite things about books, about reading, is I actually find it really interactive, like I get to take this work and these words that people put down and play with them in my mind and imagine the scenario and imagine the people who are going to populate it. But as a writer it's really difficult to like let your thing go out into the world and be open to interpretation. >> Roxane Gay: Oh, it's so hard because there are always going to be people who are going to engage with the work with integrity and honesty and they may like it, they may not, they may take issue with things, but they're doing it for good reasons, like they're being honest. But then there are the people that read your work in bad faith and misread your work in bad faith and that lack of control that you have as a writer over how people engage with your work is incredibly, well, humbling for one, but it's one of the more helpless feelings because you can't stop it. It is the sort of part of the surrender of publishing your work. ^M00:26:23 >> Everdeen Mason: Yeah, I've-- I've been wondering recently if sometimes maybe it's because Twitter is its own micro chasm, but it feels like more people approach-- I think that for an artist, like intention is everything. But then it seems like more and more people just always assume the worst intention, like the bad intention instead of the good. And I've been trying to figure out how that's been coloring my perception of the world or how I'm reading things. It's something I haven't really wrapped my head around, just how do you get people to just remember that most people mean well and are just trying to live, right? >> Roxane Gay: I'm [inaudible] through that right now. I'm writing an essay called The Anatomy of an Online Argument, and I'm trying to figure out how did we get to this place where we are right now online where nobody ever gets the benefit of the doubt, where none of us give each other the benefit of the doubt, and I absolutely include myself in this. I think it's very easy, especially on a medium like Twitter, to be incredibly reactionary, and I've been, especially for the past year, trying to sort of get away from that and to just-- partly it's my wife who's a really good influence and is like why are you letting these trolls upset you. And you know, I think it's important for us to really take a step back and ask ourselves like what are we doing because we are not able to have functional conversations about anything, and I'm not talking about sort of like reaching across the aisle to talk to that racist over there. No, they're going to do what they're going to do, and they don't see us as human; there's nothing to talk about, like at all. But like how do we talk amongst ourselves about people who may not agree on everything, but who at least have a baseline of politics in common and we can't even have those conversations. We can't talk about international conflicts without it immediately devolving not only into name-calling but into suggesting that sort of you're either with us or you're wrong. And it-- these are big issues that are not going to be resolved in one day or one essay but I'm certainly thinking a lot about it, because it's everything seems so incredibly fractured and I don't know that that's healthy, and I also don't think that what's happening on social media is representative of what's happening in the world beyond, but when you look at our elected officials and what's going on in Congress right now, I start to wonder, it's not only on social media; this stuff is absolutely bleeding into the larger culture or, you know, maybe it was the other way around. ^M00:29:08 >> Everdeen Mason: Or at least it influences people's choices, which have real world impact. This brings me-- I can't wait to read your essay but it brings me full circle back to The Sacrifice of Darkness where something that really struck me was there was a passage where they talk about how the people who are in power, the people on this council are older and they remember too much of the way the world used to be and they can't adapt and like move forward. They can't bring themselves to almost disempower themselves by actually making the right changes in the world. And I'd kind of love if you could leave us with sort of, you know, how you're thinking about us moving forward from this pandemic and the last presidency that we just survived, you know, and how do we start to kind of move past it and maybe leave some things in the past where they belong? >> Roxane Gay: Yeah, well I think that it's important that we do exactly what you say and that is move forward. A lot of times-- and I try to always catch myself saying this, like when are things going to go back to normal? Like things cannot go back to normal because the way the world was before the pandemic was not serving anyone particularly well, except I think of course the extraordinarily wealthy who continued to become wealthier and wealthier and wealthier at the expense of everyone else. And so, I think it's a question of figuring out what kind of world do we want to live in and how do we get from where we are now, having learned all of these lessons over the past year and a half to this better place, which is not a eutopia but simply a better place, a more equitable place? And I think that's an interesting conversation to have and I think it's time to start having it because there's no going back to anything. It's a question of how do we create a new and better normal. ^M00:31:02 >> Everdeen Mason: Yeah, I love that, Roxane. Let me make sure I didn't leave anything out. But yeah, I'm so happy that I got to, I guess, digitally meet you. I've learned a lot and your work is wonderful. Thank you so much for talking with me and I can't wait to read what you do next. >> Roxane Gay: Thank you. Likewise, Everdeen. ^M00:31:27 ^M00:31:29 >> LeVar Burton: We hope you've enjoyed this conversation and now we'd like you to hear more from the library's own experts on this topic. ^M00:31:37 ^M00:31:40 >> Megan Halsband: Welcome to the Library of Congress. My name is Megan Halsband and I'm a reference librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division, just home to the library's comic book collection. Graphic novels, and illustrated narratives in general, have been around for arguably hundreds of years. Even if you haven't heard of William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress or the illustrated works of Randolph [inaudible], chances are you or someone you know has read Raina Telgemeier's New York Times best-selling books like Smile, Drama, and Guts, or the late Congressman John Lewis's award-winning trilogy March. The precise definition of graphic novel can vary depending on whom you ask. Some people prefer the term comics, while others use sequential art. One thing that remains the same is their use of images and words to tell a story. And when done well, this combination of words and images creates a more powerful and compelling work than either could on its own. These narratives range from superhero tales to nonfiction or memoir, from science fiction sagas to young adult stories and everything in between. In this interview professor and writer, Roxane Gay discusses her graphic novel, The Sacrifice of Darkness in the process of visualizing her story of marginalized people and otherness. Gay has previously worked in the comics field, having written Marvel comics 2016 Black Panther spinoff, World of Wakanda, with poet Yona Harvey, making them the first black women to be lead writers for Marvel. She also talks about her additional comics work and writing across genres as a queer black woman and her journey to get here today. Like The Sacrifice of Darkness, many well-known graphic novels started in another format, short story, mini comic, or serialized in newspapers and comic magazines. The Library of Congress's comics collection includes all of these formats and more. In addition to our traditional comic book collection, which is one of the largest in the world with over 150,000 issues and counting, we also collect mini comics, web comics, graphic novels, collected editions, comic strip reprints, newspaper comics, as well as original comic and cartoon art. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of other materials like maps, movies, photographs, books and manuscripts that have inspired or been inspired by comics and graphic novels, and it's all here at the Library of Congress. ^M00:34:24 [ Music ] ^M00:34:45