Mindy: Today's guest is Rueben Tihi Hayslett who confronts identity politics, racism, and homophobia in his debut short story collection, Dark Corners, which has been selected by Kirkus reviews as best book of the year for 2019 Hayslett's characters, most of them black, brown, and/or queer have their personal problems complicated by their outsider status, by ominous politics, and by occasional eruptions of madness and the macabre. Tihi joined me today to talk about writing and art as a form of protest.
Mindy: Let's talk about your short story collection, Dark Corners. You wrote this immediately after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and a lot of this books centers on queer people and people of color as protagonists. A lot of this is reactionary. So if you could just talk a little bit about some of the impetus behind this book.
Tihi: I had been working in electoral politics for about four years before the Trump election. But I went to school for creative writing. I always considered myself a writer. And in that moment of realizing, you know, that Trump was gonna win, it was sort of like a, a crisis moment for me. The thing that I really held onto was going back to the roots of like what sustains me, what is the thing that I like wake up everyday excited to do? And for me that's always telling stories,. Thinking about the political time that we were in, you know, the most of the nation, you know, except for like 40% of us were like shocked that Trump had won. And I decided, you know, it's now or never, and it's more important than ever to tell stories from folks on the margin. For, you know, stories about queer people, stories about people of color, stories about queer, people of color, our lives matter and our lives matter even more now because they're going to become under attack. It was definitely now or never for Dark Corners. I sat down, I didn't really know what I was writing and figured out along the way that I was writing a short story collection and it really just came together. It was, I wouldn't say exciting, I would say it was like life sustaining, writing Dark Corners. It was the right thing to do at the right time when I really needed to do something.
Mindy: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I know a lot of literature came out of that, you said it - shock - of the election, which I will never forget. I stayed up, I stayed up watching the returns come in and I gave up at 2:00 AM I went to bed. But the person that I was seeing at the time had already gone to bed just assuming that the right thing would happen. And I had been with that person for about 10 years at the time and it was the only time I saw him cry was when he woke up in the morning and saw that Trump had won. So that was impactful. And I know a lot of people that used writing and use literature to help themselves cope with, I don't know, just the, almost the betrayal of our society.
Tihi: It does very much feel like a betrayal. And I think that, you know, that's a natural reaction when we feel these intense moments of betrayal is we do have to go back to like sort of our, our inner source of worth, our inner source of like where we find redemption and value. It was kind of funny anecdotally to see how many more people are into astrology post the Trump election as opposed to, it just really opened a lot of eyes for people. And that's what I was trying to do with Dark Corners too, is hoping that in writing these stories, I could open other people's eyes, like people who might not have a lot of experience with queer people of color, with folks who augment their income through sex work or folks who live with HIV. There are other experiences. They're very specific experiences that folks on the margins go through and that our perspectives are different but necessary.
Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. And I find it so interesting what you just said about astrology. I, I've been known myself in times of trouble to turn to taro or the cards or the stars. I think there's a, there's a little hint of desperation there maybe, but whatever it is, I mean, if we can find hope somewhere, I don't care where
Tihi: Exactly. If you can find hope, you're already blessed. So just hold on to it.
Mindy: That's the truth. That's the truth. So while this book was very much a reaction to a political event, you had already worked in the political arena. So was this kind of the catalyst or were there writings kind of knocking around in your head even before that, that were political writings, leaning towards using your creativity to kind of outlet some of this political interaction with your life?
Tihi: I, I think I go back to this idea that I got from you know, creative writing programs, which was to write the kinds of stories that I want to read. So like, you know, I've worked in politics for a long time. There are so many massive tomes about the theories of politics, the theories of political change and they're good reading. Maybe not for me because I'm a narrative person, so I want a story. One thing that I was really thirsty for that I wasn't seeing a lot in literature is that literally everyone is a political creature, right? The, the political forces of whatever country we're living in or whatever country we came from, they do creep into our lives in very intimate ways. And when we talk about politics as a society, we tend to talk about it in generalities, when in fact it's, it's very personal.
Tihi: Like I take that saying I think it's from Angela Davis. The personal is political. The way that these political forces interact my life as like a queer black man are very intimate. You know when somebody like Trump is decimating LGBT rights destroying immigrant communities, hunting down immigrant communities when he's emboldening ICE to do these things. These have like really intimate effects on my life because they affect me and the people I love. And I think a lot of writing that we would consider like political or even a lot of media like House of Cards and stuff like that. While while I love all of that stuff, it doesn't hit right. It doesn't hit under my skin. I think that's true for a lot of people. So I wanted to write those kinds of stories in Dark Corners that are like, these are our stories, they're stories are about interesting flawed characters, but they're also very political in hopefully surprising ways. Those moments when we get politically activated, we get politically like challenged. They usually are very surprising ways. That was like one of the intentions of the book and sort of showing how the personal is political.
Mindy: Mmm. Yeah. You know, I, I love what you're saying about House of Cards in particular. But any political show, so like West Wing House of Cards, you watch those. And I feel like as a consumer we watch them to get the same experience we do when we watch like ER or a show about firefighters. Right? And it's, you're not watching it because firefighting affects you. Like that's not part of your experience of the fiction. But you're right, in that truly political movements affect us, all of us. So for example, something I have brought up before on the show is the tariffs have now caused paper to be so expensive that it is more costly now for my publisher to print physical arcs. So I don't have as many physical arcs to give out to readers and to bloggers and reviewers. And so it's like there's, there's a simple thing that happened and it affected my life personally, my career anyway.
Mindy: And then to go to a more personal level, I live in Ohio and we're starting to see rollbacks of women's rights. Abortion rights are really starting to feel the squeeze here in Ohio. And it's something that I also, as a teen, we had an amazing government teacher that was always trying to make us see, this isn't just something that's happening on the TV. It's not something that just the adults are playing at like this affects you. And I had a great teacher, but I don't think really felt that until here I am at 40 years old going, Hey, wait a minute.
Tihi: Exactly. And it's, it's really terrifying. I've been slowly following it. I can only watch the news so much before I start panicking. So I'm like, what on earth is going on? There's an interconnected thing that's happening. They're like, when these rabid right-wing Republicans go after women's rights, like, you know, that queer people that immigrants differently abled their next, right? Like all of these things are intersectional and you know, women are also these things. Women are immigrants, women are people of color. Women are differently abled. So they're all kind of like intersectional, which I was hopefully trying to get that across with Dark Corners as well as trying to show like characters whose lives are inherently intersectional.
Mindy: Let's talk about that. Let's talk about the intersectional characters you have in your book. For example, one of your stories is about a prostitute. Another is about a gay man having an affair with a drag queen and you've got a wronged wife who's beginning a bizarre metamorphosis. And so there are all these different things going on in these stories that are intersections of different emotional states, lifestyles, all of these different things. So if you could talk a little bit about that, how you're kind of coming in with guns blazing.
Tihi: For me, when I sit down and start to write a story, I really do think of a person can start with me and then I try to like fictionalize it several different degrees out. But a lot of the characters sort of had their initial germs from people that I did know. I know a lot of people who live with HIV and over the years just seeing what their life is like. It gave me a different perspective that I was like, I don't think that your average person who's never met someone who's living with HIV actually knows these kinds of things. The over pity or the over shaming of people with HIV and in this collection in Dark Corners, I was like, but the romance story, the story that's like really hopeful about finding love, I decided I was like, that character has to have HIV. We have to have more narratives out there that say like it's not a death sentence.
Tihi: You can go on to have a rich life and you can go on to like fall in love and that there are people out there waiting to love you regardless of what your status is. It was important intentional decisions to try to find these intersections. The story with the prostitute or the sex worker she gets really politically activated by having the news on in the background while she's working and that's how she hears about Tunisia. That's how she hears about Libya. That's how she hears about Egypt. And you know, all of a sudden it's the Arab Spring and she, you know, makes this bridge of connection between being oppressed by men in power, which is exactly what her sex work is like. And then from there it's, you know, it's an immediate leap into solidarity with people on the other side of the world. That to me makes sense in my brain. Like I was, as I was writing it, I was like, Oh yeah, like this. I could see this happening. But I'm, you know, for a lot of people it's kind of unexpected.
Mindy: Yeah. Well I believe me as a fellow writer, I can say very often I have banged out a scene and been like, yeah, that's really hit the nail on the head. And then my editor is like, I don't know what you're doing here. So yeah.
Tihi: And then it definitely happened a couple of times with Dark Corners once it was all done and I was sending it out to different publishers and they were like, we don't know how to sell this. We like it, but what? It's so it just became like, okay, that's not the publisher for me. I just have to keep going until this book finds a home
Mindy: Coming up. Looking inward to step into your power before taking your work outward for a broader audience.
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Mindy: So we talked a little bit about hope and how that can be very hard to find right now. When you were talking about watching the news, feeling inundated, feeling overwhelmed, and one of the things that I personally think is wonderful is that these stories aren't necessarily providing nice pat answers. They grapple with what it's like to be trying to understand the world that we're living in right now. At the same time, coming to terms with the fact that it's not a logical world. If you could talk a little bit about that. I think it's a fascinating conundrum.
Tihi: I'm only 36 years old. So I don't have the big answers. What should we be hoping for? What is the solution to Trump? I hope with every fiber of my being, there is a solution to Trump. When I was writing Dark Corners, when I was sitting down and thinking about these stories, these characters, the solution was not the path out in the world, but the path inside to yourself. You can't really start to fight against the system of power that's disenfranchising you until you get to a point of strength. So there's a lot of characters that are in very desperate situations and sometimes they resolve in the story and sometimes they don't. But what happens in every one of these stories is these characters find power somewhere or they find acceptance somewhere. That's often the precept which I, and I know this is somebody who's worked in politics and worked in political activism for like seven years. You haven't found that path in word first. If you can't step in your own power, then you're, you're not going to be effective. You're not going to change the paradigm. That was definitely a goal with Dark Corners.
Mindy: So then back to the politics of it, and as I said, a lot of my friends, people that I know really turned to writing or to art in whatever their form was to help them personally get through fallout essentially of the election. Using that, of course, is a form of like personal therapy and taking that path inward. Then it becomes a question of giving this to others, letting other people look at it maybe as a symbol of hope or a feeling of power. But if you could just talk for a little bit about creative arts, books, music, whatever, film being used as a form of resistance.
Tihi: Yeah. I think that part of the creative life cycle that we often forget about as an audience, a lot of people turn to art and a different creative outlets and you get to a point where the story can't really go any further until there is an audience. And until you get that feedback cycle, after a couple of weeks polishing the stories, realizing I had a manuscript that became the next thing, it's time now for an audience, it's time to get out there, which I think is natural and I think we shouldn't fight against that. You know, if you invested all your creative energy into something and then you're like, maybe someday someone will see it. No, that's not what art is. Art is meant to be seen. Like music is meant to be heard. Stories are meant to be read, right? They have to get there.
Mindy: Art is meant to be consumed and when you put it out there, if it is inherently political, it is by some going to be seen as a form of resistance. So if you could talk a little bit about how that work makes that transition from being therapeutic to being a form of resistance maybe for others,
Tihi: Art can become resistance when the essence of what you are communicating reaches an audience and not just any audience. I would say like a new audience. You know, people have been asking me since the, since Dark Corners came out, like did you write this for queer people of color? Did you write this for other people? And to an extent, like I wrote it for everyone, but I really hope that people who don't have these identities pick up this book and learn a lot and see a different perspective and think like, Oh yeah, there is the same kinds of oppressive cycles. Men in power that affect whole other countries on the other side of the world are intertwined with sex work and prostitution in America. It's the same kind of ideology of like men with power who feel like it's just natural to oppress people with less power.
Tihi: We can build a resistance by building the consciousness that comes from hearing people's experiences that are outside of yours. I've been super political and I've been a feminist my whole life because I was raised by a single mom. So I saw how men treated her in the world and was like, no, you know, but like not, not a lot of young boys grow up with that easy access, you know, to seeing how men see women in the world and that particular way, the thing that you see that you can't unsee. And I, I think that's where art becomes resistance.
Mindy: Yeah, I agree. And I think too, because a lot of my books are very feminist and not necessarily aiming to have a message of course, because I don't enjoy being didactic, but just by dint of who I am, the art then becomes feminist. I think what's interesting, what you're saying on a more personal note about people who are raised by single mothers, especially men, they're honestly my favorite. I had a wonderful experience. Oh, at the gym that I go to where I have a class that usually only has women in it. We were doing squats and I said something, I was like, great. You know, I hope my tampon doesn't fall out. And then all of a sudden I realized that one of the guys was with us and I was like, Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry. And he was like, I was raised by a single mom. I don't care. She's like, you menstruate I already knew that. And I'm like, Oh, all right. That's awesome. Thank you.
Tihi: It's a natural process. It happens. Yeah, it's funny because I ended up being that guy for like the majority of you know, my female bodied friends where they're like, can I just tell you, you know, they have some like anecdote about their, their menstruation. It's like, well, I'm like, yeah, I had a single mom. I had three sisters. Like, this is not a weird conversation for me. These are conversations I've been hearing my whole life.
Mindy: Yes. Well, I guess we appreciate that. We really do. We need more of that in our lives.
Tihi: We really do. There's, there's a lot of men out there who don't know anything.
Mindy: Oh, Oh my goodness. You're so right about that. To take it more personal. The last person that I was with, I was with for a very long time. He did have three sisters yet somehow managed to get through life without knowing a whole lot about that. And at one point when we were living together, he was like, Hey, do you think when you're menstruating, when you come to bed, could you like wear something so that you don't get blood on the sheets? And I was like, dude, I am wearing something. And he was like, he's like, but there's still blood. And I'm like, you know what, I can come to bed like free bleeding one night and you can see what that looks like. You might like get a better idea, dude. Come on. I mean, he was very cool about it. He just, he literally did not realize we don't just say flow like we're, it's truly, there's a flow.
Mindy: Anyway. so let's go back to writing. So talk to me a little bit about your writing before Dark Corners because I know that you've had fiction and nonfiction published in quite a few different literary magazines. The Splinter Generation, the Oregon Literary Review, the Surreal South anthology, Trans Lit Magazine. So if you could talk a little bit just about your writing journey and some of the experiences that you had before Dark Corners.
Tihi: I was one of those kids who knew I wanted to be a writer, like really early on. I think I was in like second grade. And then I think by about fourth grade, something in my brain was like short stories. Great American novel is great. Like everyone else who's a writer. I would love to write the next great American novel, but I know who I am. I like to get in and get out. Like I think like a good short story will stick with you so much longer because it's like, it's like a good song or it's like a good scene from a play. Whereas like a novel is kind of like a banquet. And I've been doing the like nonfiction essays that are pretty short, and short stories for a long time. I was really inspired by, and it wasn't, I didn't get introduced to her until college, writing by Amy Hemple when I started reading Amy Hemple's Reasons to Live completely decimated me. It was just so enthralled by like how much emotion she could pack into really short stories like stories that are like four to five pages. But then I'm like crying on the floor by the end of it. And college I just became like a scientist of Amy Hemple. I was like, how is she doing this? I want to do this part of the writing process. The drafting is just sort of getting everything out onto the page. The revising the editing is about getting really intentional about every single word, every single place where there's punctuation. It's as much about what your characters aren't saying as it is about what they are saying, what it means when they're not saying X, but saying Y instead and what the audience can then dedeuce from that, which were all things that like, you know, I learned from her and like many other amazing women writers like Flannery O'Connor and lots of like Southern Gothic folks who do that stuff, I feel like really, really well. So that's been sort of my writing style. Short stories are just my medium. That's, that's where I shine.
Mindy: I think shorts or more difficult to write than novels. I have my ninth novel comes out next week and if you said to me, Hey, sit down and write a novel in six months, I would say sure I can do that. And if you said to me sit down and write a good short story in six months I'd be like, can I have a year?
Tihi: Yeah, I would have the absolute opposite sort of situation because most of Dark Corners, like these are really short stories, but most of them got written in like the first two weeks after the election. I had like two weeks paid vacation. Once I start getting started because I know with short stories you don't have as detail. Like every time I've tried to write a novel I get lost in the world building of it. But like with a short story, I know that like, Oh, I don't have to fill in like the whole world of which this takes place because I have five pages, so I can just like get to like, what's really important, like where is the heart of the character? Where is the heart of the conflict? And every time I've sat down to write a novel, I just get lost about like, describing the furniture. Like the house is someone's grandparent and I'm like, wait, no!
Mindy: I write very succinctly myself. Yeah, I'm weird. I, I can crack out a novel and I can write really good flash fiction. But the short story, man, I think it's the most difficult medium. I really do.
Tihi: It's, it's definitely a challenge. I like to think of it as like this floating angel through someone's life. And so it's just like you just land to places, you're just, where are you landing and why are you landing? And then once you've made it, like, then you just, you know, evaporate and you're done. And like, hopefully what's left is a short story. I like the weirdest way. I've ever described my process,
Mindy: But it was cool. I mean that's a pull quote right there.
Tihi: Yeah. Sometimes things just fall out of your mouth.
Mindy: Oh, believe me, I know I've said some things on panels where I was just like, yeah, I did. I said that. I said that, and there was no rewinding.
Tihi: You have a, you're like, was it on tape? Was it on tape? Good or bad?
Mindy: I literally like, I scan the audience. Let's see how many phones are out. And I'm like, SHIT.
Mindy: Lastly, the art form of the short story and how sometimes being succinct is how you allow your reader to fill in the blanks.
Mindy: Back to the idea of the short story, you said you're the type of writer that wants to get in, get out. I agree with that and the one thing that I always keep in mind is that you're supposed to always leave your audience wanting more and I think that that is very true. I know a movie is good or a play, if I haven't looked at my watch, if I'm not wondering how long this thing is, and I feel the same way about books. I am reading something right now that is just a brick. It could easily not be a brick and be a better book, but I'm going to finish it because I'm invested now. But that's how I feel too about art and especially books. If you are going to do this thing, I think you should do it in the least amount of words possible so that your reader can fill in the rest like with water color to make it more personal.
Tihi: Exactly, and I think it's also about what's at stake. Whether your reader or your audience can even verbalize what's at stake. As long as they feel what's at stake, they'll, they'll not put the book down right or they're not. They won't, they won't check their watch in the theater. And it is really about that sense of tension. Growing up as like the only basically Brown queer kid in rural Iowa. Like I know a lot about tension.
Tihi: So it's helped quite a bit in the process of writing short stories, but you're absolutely right. It's, it's as much what you leave out. I like to think about this too, like readers are not stupid. Your audience is not stupid. You can give them detail, but they can also do, they can make connections. They can do some heavy lifting because that's what all humans do. Like we look at the stars and we made constellations. Like we just like to make order and patterns and associations. So a lot of times you just have to get close enough so that they can take it on in their own brain.
Mindy: You know I reminded of, did you watch on Netflix last Halloween? The Haunting of Hill house?
Tihi: Yes.
Mindy: Okay. Me too. I was watching it and I kept, Oh, such a feeling of dread, just constant dread. And I'm like, dude, I can't shake it. I was like, why do I feel this way? And I ended up looking up some things about the show and I was reading about how, and maybe you already know this, but the director actually put people in scenes. They're just standing there. They're not part of the scene.
Tihi: Yes.
Mindy: Your eye doesn't go to them. You don't even know they're there, but you feel it. And I really think that it worked on a subliminal level because I walked away from the TV just feeling disturbed, feeling violated, like emotionally in some ways. And I really think that that is why, because they had people in the scenes that you weren't looking at, but they were looking at you. And I just think that it was so powerful to me when I realized what they were doing with that show. And I think that short stories can do the same thing when the reader isn't even really aware of what you're conjuring or making them conjure inside of themselves by leaving those gaps.
Tihi: Yeah. One of the things that The Haunting of Hill house did really well. It was the middle episode in the season where finally all the siblings are together and they're in the funeral home. If you watch this episode, it is three enormously long takes where the camera just keeps moving and never, it never cuts away. And they'll even do things like swap out all the adult actors for all the children, actors, you know when they're trying to tell the story through the father's perspective, which was all just physical camera work that I thought was amazing and also ratchets up the tension. I love long takes and movies. I love like single take music videos.
Tihi: In Dark Corners, the story that's about the housewife who's been cheated on and she kind of starts to become something supernatural. I tried to do this with sentence structure where there's so much of the, that story are just really, it's like five or six incredibly long run on sentences that just go and go and go until they're like stream of consciousness, but they keep getting like more circular and circular and circular to the point where it's like it's a lot less like human stream of consciousness.
Tihi: Yes. That's one of the things about flash fiction and short stories you have to think about form because like that story is only really about five pages long. You got to do everything and the right intention while you have the audience and you know, use every tool at your disposal to get the feeling that you're kind of going after.
Mindy: Have you heard of this novel called Ducks, Newburyport? Okay. You'll have to check it out. It's by Lucy Ellman and the entire novel. I'm going to check the page count here. Give me one second. The entire novel is 2.6 pounds. That's not helpful. Okay. The paperback is 1040 pages and it is all one sentence.
Tihi: Ooh, yeah. I've heard of different people trying this. And I, I feel like at that point they just get a PhD in linguistics.
Mindy: Right? What you said reminded me of it because it's all, I haven't read it yet. I bought it. Another guest mentioned it and I immediately went out and bought it. And of course it went on a stack of books, but it is all the internal, just stream of consciousness of a, a housewife in new England.
Tihi: This actually sounds like right up my alley too. One of the things that, the new book that I'm working on, which is a short story collection, sort of like a novel in series is that I'm tricking myself into writing a novel is in six interrelated science fiction stories and one of the challenges like with the, with that story and in Dark Corners, the one with like the really long run on sentences was for me the challenge of like how long can I make a sentence last? I'm in this new book that I'm working on and I'm still toying toiling through, but the challenge was like how long can I make a gay sex scene go for it and really try to like plot it out? Like I have some stuffed animals at home so I've been doing blocking,
Mindy: Oh my God.
Tihi: Because like you know, if you're going to do it, you got to take it seriously.
Mindy: Absolutely. Yes. You need stage directions. My mother managed to skip having the talk with me by just giving me like Danielle Steele books and so I would get these books and it would be something that I knew my mother had read and she got it from my grandmother. And so I would be reading it of course as a teenager and I'm just like, Oh this is interesting. And like, you know of learning a few things and feeling a little like riled up. And then I'm like, Oh my God, my grandma read this book.
Tihi: Oh it's ruined. Yeah, at that moment. But like in a way it's a little beautiful that there's this whole lineage of self discovery that you share with all the women in your family. Cause there was like as a queer person, like not only did I like, you know, like maybe I got the talk a little too late in life, but it was the, it was the completely wrong talk. Mom, you really don't have to worry about me getting anyone pregnant.
Mindy: Oh my God, they just counted on the books to educate me. And Danielle Steele was not necessarily the best. I mean, you know, my whole life has been a disappointment.
Tihi: I mean, I feel like I can't get much better as like the queer teenager who is out there in the world because it was either porn or it was like sleeping with men who are much older than me, which I did a little bit of both. Like that's how I really learned how to be a sexual person. And I'm like, man, a talk like the queer birds and bees would have been amazing. But you know, I'm 36. What happened, happened.
Mindy: We're just, we're all scarred and we're moving through it.
Tihi: Yeah. And some of us write books along the way to help us out.
Mindy: Is there anything else that you want to, that you want to talk about here in our last few minutes?
Tihi: Of course there's like places where people can follow me online. I'm on Instagram. My Instagram handle is T underscore rizh. And if you can figure out how that spelled, they can find me on Instagram. I'm on Facebook as Ruben T Hayslett. And you know, I haven't had a chance to really explain this in interviews. Reuben is my like given government name that I grew up with. But Tihi sort of become like my name as I've grown into adulthood. If you ever meet me in person, I'm Tihi I will follow Tihi, I'm like starting to like no longer associate Reuben with my day to day life. But it is great to see it in print. And I felt like part of that is like, you know, my mom, I have a mom, she's proud of me. Like I couldn't publish a book with my name on it. That's where you can find me. Reuben T Hayslett on Facebook, @tihi_rizh on Instagram. The name of the book is Dark Corners. It's also, it's available anywhere you buy books online or in person. And I like to tell everyone to please support local independent bookstores. If Dark Corners is not there, you can ask for it. Dark Corners by Reuben Tihi Hayslett and it should be there in a day or two.