Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: We're here today with Farah Jasmine Griffin, who is the author of Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature. And I am so interested in talking to you about this book, particularly because I love the origin story about this, so if you could share that in the story about your father, I think it is just so profound and uplifting.
Farah: The book actually starts with my father, who I consider my first teacher, and my father was basically a self-taught man, a working class man, a welder who loved books and loved history. He was a very gifted teacher, and he made those things very exciting to the young people in his life, and he would tell these fantastic stories that were based in history. I grew up in Philadelphia, so he would take me to all of the historic sites, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written and signed and he taught me to read and shared his passion and love for books and history with me. Unfortunately, my father died prematurely, he died when I was nine, unexpectedly. He had not been ill, it was a bit of a shock and a trauma, but he left behind a household full of books, some of which he shared with me. But many he had not yet had the opportunity to share with me, and I just started reading through his books, I think, in an effort to get to know him better, and also because I thought this would make him pleased. And so that's this sort of origin story that one finds in the book.
Mindy: It's so powerful. I'm fortunate to still have both of my parents, and my father too comes from a long line of workers, people that are working with their hands. He was a farmer. I do genealogy and my family have been farmers since Ireland, that's what we do. He is a farmer, that's what he does, but he went to college, he was the first person in our family to go to college and get a degree and ended up farming anyway, but he just believed that education was important. And when my sister and I graduated from high school, he was like, You guys are going to college. I don't care what you study, I don't care if you don't use it, I don't care if you choose to get married and raise children and work at home. If you educate the parent, they will educate the child. And I just think that's so beautiful.
Farah: Yeah, it's so true. My father sought education. As you said, you know, working class man, but he went to college, got an associate's degree, loved architecture and construction and all of those kinds of things, and similar to you, our father always said to me that I would go to college. Never a question in my mind. When I look back on it, I thought, how would we have afforded it? It truly is a gift.
Mindy: I love what you're saying about looking back, there was never a question, it was like, You are going to college. My parents were going to make that happen for me, and that's right, that is just a privilege that I did not understand was a privilege, it's a gift.
Farah: And they decide, You know, even before your have the understanding, perhaps even before you're really in the world, that this is something that's going to be a given to their children and it's an investment in you and also a belief in your capacity, that if you have the opportunity you will do just fine.
Mindy: So I wanna talk about Read Until You Understand. So this came out from WW Norton in September of this year, and I am just really drawn to this book because it combines literary analysis, lyrical storytelling, but also political thought into a three-fold genre. So talk a little bit of the book and like how it came about and how you went about pulling this all together into a cohesive tome.
Farah: I'm a professor of English literature and African-American studies. I teach American and African-American literature in particular all the time. I love the literature and my students love it. I always felt like this was not a body of work that was written for people who were sitting in a college classroom, it was written for everybody, it was written for people who might not make it to a college class. It didn't place those limits on itself, and so I thought, there are people outside of my classroom outside of the university, even, or people who may have gone to university and are no longer here, who are interested in what these writers have to say. Who would learn from them? Who would benefit and actually appreciate and enjoy it? So I wanted to do what I do, which is teach and write about literature as a literary critic, but bring it to a broader audience. Books resonated with me long before I began to study to become a college professor. And I ask myself, what were those reasons?
And so part of the autobiographical parts of the book are trying to explain the reasons why the literature that I write about spoke to me, even outside of an academic context, the way that it helped explain my life in my community, our history as a people and as a nation. And then I think the political thought part of it was - I'd been thinking of it, but I started writing it during the 2016 presidential election, and I just thought this literature is beautiful and it's aesthetically pleasing, but it also has a lot of political wisdom that I think all Americans should have access to and understanding of as we try to live in a democratic society, particularly a multi-racial democratic society. And so those three strands that are three disparate strands, all came together and made sense. I hope bringing them together makes sense for readers as well.
Mindy: And what was that process like? I'm really curious because they are disparate, but at the same time when I read about the book, I was like, Oh, that makes perfect sense. Yes, they are disparate though. So I'm just curious what that process was like for you.
Farah: So sometimes the starting point would be a kind of political idea that I would then trace back through the literature, that I would then trace back through something personal. And then other times it would be the exact opposite. So the parts of the book that are memoir, and I say memoir, not autobiography, 'cause I don't pretend to tell my life story, I don't even pretend that anyone would be interested in my life story. It's a section of my life that is around learning from my father, kind of a father-daughter relationship that develops intellectually, but also personally, allowing and sharing with my readers the impact of that loss, so that you get to know my father as I knew him through my eyes. And then you clearly have an understanding of the loss of him, how I lost him and what that felt like, and how my family and my neighbors and community embraced my mother and myself and just kind of surrounded us with love and support, and they say it takes a village... Well, that was a village that pulled itself together in spite of its own problems and contradictions to support this young widow and her child, and so that's the story, that's the personal story.
Then the years leading up to my father's death, his death, and the years immediately following them, my education, both formally but also informally during that period, and then the ways that I made sense of that loss. I made sense of some of the things that I believed were injustices in our lives, I made sense of them through the literature that I was reading, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Frederick Douglas, I made sense of them. And as I got older and began to study this literature formally, I saw the way that these authors spoke to each other through time, and the way they offered thoughts and ideas about driving political questions and also spiritual questions. And so that was the process. You know, sometimes I'd start with just a concept and other times I'd start with a story from my family that I try to make sense of, and one way of making sense of it was through literature, and then through philosophy or political thought, the threads all came together.
Mindy: So with those threads, how did you go about choosing what to include from other people's work?
Farah: That's such a great question. There were so many more books and I thought, Okay, This isn't an encyclopedia, you've got to narrow it down. And there were some people who I had in the first draft and I took them out. I chose, just like I do for my classes, I chose authors and books that seem to speak to each other, that I could maybe put in a conversation with each other. So for example, there's a chapter on the ideal of America and Black people's freedom in relation to it. There are many people I could have written about. I chose Frederick Douglass, Malcom X and Barack Obama, because they were all political figures, the last one, a formal politician, the first two activists. But in addition to that, all three of them were really good writers, and all three of them were people who made contributions to American writing as much as they did to American politics. All three of them were orators, very great orators. And each one of them undergoes a kind of development and change over the course of their public career where they distance themselves from mentors who have been very important to them, so that helped me narrow down those three.
And what really was sort of the icing on the cake was Douglass is the first one. And it's clear that Malcolm and Obama read Douglass, and then it's clear - and Barack talks about this in his autobiography - that he read not only Douglass, but that he read Malcolm X. Those two figures shaped his thinking and his way of being in the world, so that really helped me. It’s like having a piece of marble and sculpting, sculpting. And it helped me figure out which of a huge body of people I could have written about, who are the people who seem to be in conversation through time about these ideas? And that's how I did it.
Mindy: That's fascinating to me. I love the concept. Love everything about it. I think it is very interesting too, that one of the origin points for you was the 2016 election. So many people that I know had a creative fire lit underneath them by the election and everything leading up to it. I was actually promoting my book that came out in 2016, it is about rape culture. I think it came out like the week after Trump made his comment about grabbing women by the pussy. And I was just like, well, I mean, there couldn't be a better time.
Farah: Right, and it couldn’t be a better time. It could not be a better time if anyone asks if there’s a need for your book. There it was.
Mindy: Exactly. I'm like, Well, we have this man and then he won the election, I'm like, Okay, so it's now even more relevant, right? Of course, the days that we're living in have just set us back. I don't know how many hundred years. But badly. I also see the pushback and in the creative communities, the ways things that have come into creation and achieved a physical life because of the push back and the, Hey, no, this is not okay.
Farah: Exactly, I'm working on something else, and one of the phrases that keeps coming up for me is crisis and possibility, and I do believe crises open up possibilities. If you can see the opportunity, because we're in crisis, I think sometimes people are more willing to listen 'cause they're like, How do we get here? Wait, how did this happen? Whereas before, they might not wanna hear it if everything is just running smoothly. And if you look throughout history, some of the most critical points in history have produced some of the smartest, most interesting, most creative work, Tony Morrison, who says that her friend, the director Peter Sellers would tell her, she would say, It's just overwhelming. I can't even do my work, and he would say, No, this is the time when artists do their work. This is not the time to sit it out, this is the time when you gotta do it. And I think that what you're describing about that period leading up to his winning, but even before - it was the time to do the work. It was the time for you to get your book out. And people who might have said, rape culture, what's rape culture? Well, they weren't gonna say that anymore.
Mindy: I had even had a young man say to me that rape culture doesn't even exist, and I was just like, Well, you get to live in a world where you get to believe that I don't. To have it then broadcast publicly for everyone, writ large... I was like, yeah, say that again.
Farah: What's important is it wasn't just an individual who did something awful - 'cause he did something awful - but it was in the defense of him. The defense that it wasn't that bad. Or boys will be boys. And then he gets elected. It's not a deal breaker.
Mindy: I know, of course, obscenity has kind of become the word of the day, we see these just absolutely unparalleled moments of just ignorance and racism and sexism and homophobia and all of these things just blatantly on display. I'm sure being in a university setting that you are aware of the new censorship wave that is hitting.
Farah: We're talking about banning books and burning them, not understanding or caring that that is a huge threat to this democracy we claim to cherish. And this is why I liked writing about the books that I wrote about, is that I wanted to give people a sense of history, to a sense of perspective. History is not always a straightforward linear progress, and it's not just a given. If it progresses, it progresses because people fight and lay their lives on the line for it. Their ideas that are their tools have been bequeathed to you can help make the arguments that you need to make, because they've needed to make them before. And so just to give a sense that struggling and fighting with ideas and with art is part of a tradition, and that we can't take anything for granted.
Everything is hard won. Everything. And it can be taken away from us. I realized that intellectually, I understood how fragile democracy was, I understood that intellectually, but I didn't really understand it viscerally until these last few years. Freedoms can be taken away. And the guard rails are so... They're so weak, you know? The guard rails are based on people saying and being willing to do the right thing. That's what the guards us. Then you get someone who says, The hell with that, I don't care about doing the right thing.
Mindy: The right thing is sometimes the hard thing, a lot of people don’t want to do that.
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Mindy: I very recently, this past week, I'm promoting a book and I was traveling and a group had asked me to speak about dystopian literature and why dystopian literature is popular. I live in Ohio, and I live in a fairly conservative area, and I was moving through a fairly conservative area while I was doing my presentation, and one of the things that I talked about was dystopia and how it is never really gone away. This is not a new wave. This has happened before, and I talked about Sinclair Lewis’ book, It Can't Happen Here, which was written in 1935, suddenly hitting the bestseller list again shortly after the election. And I don't know that people wanted to hear that, but I was like, You know I'm gonna say it. And here's my PowerPoint slide, and you're going to look at this because I want you to think about this. 'cause you're right, things can be taken away so easily and pretending things are okay… I love your point about literal trauma of the past few years helping us kind of wake up to that, and pull together too. I think that that is very true. It lit up a fire under a lot of people, an awareness that things can be lost and like you said, it's more fragile than we ever thought. Which is why I bring up Lewis’ novel, because it is important to just even think about the title, It Can't Happen Here. That is an ironic title.
Farah: And there you have it again, you have a writer who thought through it, really took the time to think through it and spoke in such a way that it becomes relevant decades after he wrote it. One of my favorite novels that I write about in the book is Toni Morrison's A Mercy, which came out in 2008 just after the election of Barack Obama. But what I love about that novel is that she goes back to the period before we're the United States, when people are coming over from the colonies, when the roads still have their Native American names. And everything is in flow, everything is possible, racial slavery hasn't been consolidated yet, and certain forms of Christianity haven't been consolidated as dominant yet, and so there are all these things that are possible and we forget that that was the case. And then it reminds us that certain choices were made that did not have to be made, but they were. And we live with the consequences of those choices today. Historians do it beautifully, but I think that creative writers especially do it well because it's an invitation and it's a story for you to kinda put yourself in and live with during the time that you're reading it. And it doesn't seem so far in the past. Suddenly you're like, Oh, I get it, I see how that happened now.
Mindy: Yeah, and it makes you think about your actions today and how they're gonna echo into the future.
Farah: Exactly. I was talking to some friends about something recently, and I said, Okay, you know, This makes sense - you're just stating your opinion right now and it makes sense, I said. But think about how what you're saying is going to a wear. Are you gonna want to associate with that opinion, as history moves on, with anything that would deny people their rights? History teaches you, you don't wanna be on the side of denying rights or taking rights away that have already been given to people. That's not a good move.
Mindy: That is a bad place to be. You mentioned Toni Morrison, and I wanna go back to the censorship question, we were talking about politics obviously, but one of the things recently that caught my eye, the list of books that politician from Texas has that needed to be questioned or should not be in schools and it was so blatantly racist and homophobic. It was just bad, I was looking at it. I worked in the library for 14 years, and of course I'm a writer, but I was also an English major, so it's like I'm familiar with obviously names in the canon, but also contemporary writers and books and everything, and I was just scrolling through it and I was just like - You're not even presenting, you're not even trying to couch this, this is just blatant racism and homophobia, and if there's no way to look at this and not see that.
Farah: Book Banners are not readers. Most of the people who are banning books haven't even read those books that they're banning, they haven't read them really. They might have read a paragraph. Because people who read books and love books would never come up with the idea of banning a book no matter how much they disliked it, no matter how much they thought it was wrong. It's an opportunity to talk about what's wrong with it. So those people who are banning books, it's always about something other than the book itself. It's about control, it's about not wanting to get certain information out there, not wanting to make certain ideas available. Like you said that in this instance, it's mostly homophobic and sexist, its racist, all of those things, and you can tell that these are people who haven't even bothered to read the books that they are banning.
Mindy: Like I said, it was a librarian and whenever we had a challenge, which was rare, but we would have them. And whenever we had a challenge, that was always my first question, usually it was a parent, and my first question to the parent would be, have you read the book? The answer was always No.
Farah: There you go.
Mindy: Okay, Well, go read it and then come back, and I'm happy to talk about this, But read it
Farah: I think about when I was a kid, my parents, my father, he bought this old second-hand encyclopedia and he wanted it in the house for me. And even after he died, I would read it. And it was the most racist, I mean, it was so racist. But I was so glad to have it and to read it because then I could understand things, I could see that it was racist and why it was racist. And I'd much rather do that, than not have it at all. I would much rather say, Oh, this is why we've gotten into this mess because look, this was the encyclopedia and these are the ideas it was peddling. I think that the parental teaching moment is to sit down with your child and talk about the problematic book. That's what you do, but yeah, these people who are banning, they stand up and they're so self-righteous about it, not really knowing what it is that they are against.
Mindy: No, not at all. One of my books recently was challenged, it was upheld by the school board, thankfully, but it is about the opioid epidemic, and it is a sympathetic look at addiction and addicts, and people didn't like that. And so I had a moment because it was the first book of mine to be challenged, that I'm aware of. But by far, it is also my tamest book. It’s almost funny that this is the one that gets attacked because of drug use, but also I was like, You know, I have talked about - there's rape and there is consensual sex, there is violence and there's language, and there is drinking, all of these topics are across my books because I write about reality and I write about the real world, and this does happen. Someone asked me, they were like, Why do you think all of a sudden this book, one of your new releases, is the one that is getting caught up in this? Why not your book about rape culture, which is by far the one should be, if anything should be challenged, it would be that one. It is simply because I have flown under the radar of such things for a long time because I'm white and I'm straight, I'm just considered, I guess, safe. Or I'm never falling under the eye of someone that would be like, wanting to stop my voice, because I'm white and I'm straight/ And when I said this as a response, people were somewhat surprised, and I'm like, No, that's the reason.
Farah: You know, this book, I also write about addiction, one of the things that I write that I'm struck by, is that now, because so many people are falling victim to addiction, across-race, across class, and you would hope that there would be greater compassion and sympathy than there has been in the past. And clearly we know that there are still people who don't have compassion. It's unfortunate. It's really unfortunate. And we write anyway, we write... And like you said, because you write out of truth and you write out of a reality, and it's a reality. This is what I'm always thinking about, is that somewhere in those places where there are people who are banning books and people who are trying to challenge those of us who write them, there's some kid or some adult who is trying to deal with their own sexuality or dealing with the fact of molestation and abuse, or dealing with the fact of addiction of themselves or a parent or a loved one, and they're sitting there feeling alone, and so silenced in a place that won't allow room for those discussions. And so I'm like, You know what, those people are reading us too. They are reading us too, and I'm grateful to be able to hopefully give them something that provides information or support or something that says, I see you.
Mindy: Yes, absolutely. And that's who I write for. I'm proud to continue doing it and people can have a problem with it all they want. I had a Zoom earlier today with a teen book group, and someone said, How do you respond emotionally, internally, how do you feel when your books are attacked or challenged, or just flat out don't like your books or what you write about? And I just said, I've come to a point. I don't care. I didn't write it for you. You can hate it. It doesn't matter to me. You’re free to hate it, that's fine. It's not for... It's not for you, it's not for everybody.
Farah: I was a precocious reader, I think about the girl that I was, reading, thank God I had access to the books that I had access to, because they basically showed me another world, they showed me another way of being, they showed me that the very thing that could be the source of your difference that made you the object of all kinds of bad things were also the source of what made you potentially wonderful. And that would be appreciated. I imagine those readers, someone stumbling upon something I've written who hasn't been exposed to what I'm writing about, and it just turning on a light bulb for them, and that just opening up possibilities and doors. And even those who disagree with me, if you genuinely disagree, if you disagree because you've actually tried to engage it, and you think I'm wrong... I respect that, and I welcome that.
Mindy: Absolutely, yeah, me too. I feel exactly the same way. Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find your book, Read Until You Understand.
Farah: You can follow me on Twitter, although I'm not as active as I should be. You can follow me on Instagram, I’m pretty active on Instagram. I also have a website, Farah Jasmine Griffin dot com. My books are available at your favorite independent book store, the independent bookstores have been extraordinary.
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