The Complicated Nonverbal Ways We Love Each Other: A Conversation with Kiese Laymon, Part I
On love, dogs and cats, loving everyone including mass murderers, the complications of self-love, non-verbal communication, and the safeness in touch.
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
I’m over the moon to share this interview with Kiese Laymon. To my mind, and heart, Kiese is the GOAT. I remember clearly when his staggeringly wondrous memoir Heavy was published (and later made the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list), I did something I rarely do: I wrote to tell him that although on the surface we appeared to have nothing in common, and in fact, were even opposite in many ways, I felt he was “writing my soul and my struggles onto the page.” He wrote back and said “I'm more certain than ever that the same ingredients are part of all of us. They're just shaped and distributed differently.”
I’ve since read everything Kiese has written, at least twice. The gentle, fierce wisdom held in his collection of essays, How To Slowly Kill Yourself And Others In America reoriented how I saw the world. As did his deeply-loving, deeply-funny, deeply-anti-racist novel, Long Division. I also follow him on social media, from which I’ve learned a fair amount about basketball, men’s and women’s, good writing, good music, and how to be decent, kind, insightful human causing the least amount of harm possible whilst also standing up to the wrongs in this world. His writing has appeared in countless magazines and anthologies. And Kiese co-hosts host Reckon True Stores alongside
.Kiese’s latest book, City Summer, Country Summer, is an illustrated children’s book pulled from the essay he originally wrote for the New York Times in 2020. In it, a group of young Black boys, some from New York City, some from various parts of Mississippi, meet up in the Mississippi woods, staying with grandmothers, and share their adventures, their fears, and their love without really saying a word. As with all of Kiese’s writing, I feel these worlds he calls up deep-deep in my bones. It’s an ancient wisdom he conjures. The wisdom of love: bright and alive, but weighted with the complications of being a human.
In addition to being one of my favorite writers, Kiese is one of my favorite humans. I was lucky enough to interview him in 2021 for LARB on Easter Day, no less. Both times we’ve spoken, the size of my heart has increased tenfold.
Kiese was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022. He currently lives in Texas and teaches creative writing at Rice University.
We got on such a roll talking that it was impossible to fit all that love and laughter and brilliance into one twenty minute interview, so I’ve split it into two. Part II will post tomorrow.
I hope you enjoy!
xJane
⭐️ Kiese is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of City Summer, Country Summer! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “SUMMER” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, April 21st and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️
I wrote out about fifty million questions then realized all I wanted to talk to you about is love. I feel like everything you write — your fiction, your memoir, your essays, your social media posts, even when they're about basketball —everything's about love in one form or another. Does that ring true?
Absolutely. In that way, I'm a one-trick pony. I don’t even know what it would feel like to publish something else. I’m definitely always trying to explore the different shapes and colors and momentums and frequencies of love. That’s it.
That comes through! There're two phrases that you say variations of a lot. One is that we have to “love each other,” and the other is that we have to “love in the right way.” Could you talk a bit more about this, especially in light of everything that's happening in the world right now?
First of all, I’ll just say I don’t know what loving in the right way is. I know what loving in the right way feels like for me. I lost my grandmother about seven months ago, and she was someone who loved the land, loved human beings, and loved me responsibly, meaning that I never felt like she was trying to hurt me. I also felt like she loved me enough to show me that she was worthy of pleasure.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’m writing this other book. My grandmother worked hard. She worked till her back damn near broke. She worked in the gardens, she worked in the kitchen, she worked in white people’s homes. But the thing about how my grandmother loved is that she allowed us when we were at home to scratch her head. She loved her family scratching her head. In her latter years, she had these huge knots in her shoulders from working in a chicken plant and being bent over and tense her whole life, she loved me massaging those.
She never was afraid of asking someone who loved her to come help her immediately feel better. That is also important when I think about responsible love, because I tend to often think about the “selfless” shit that my grandmother did, that’s the thing that makes it responsible. Every act that I’ve seen her do was not selfless, it was full of self-worth. She just never diminished anybody else’s self-worth.
My grandmother was the only person in my family who, if you were eating and she could tell you liked it, would say, “Oh, baby, you want some more?” That sounds so simple.I was talking to my friends about this the other day, and they were like, “So?” and I was like, “Oh, you grew up with people who offered you more food?” To me, that was so loving.
We can love people but not put the person's needs or wants on level with our own. I feel like my granny loved herself and loved the people around her enough to raise both loves up to the same level. I mean, she just died so I'm sure I'm being romantic. But that's what I feel.
I don’t think you’re being romantic. I know how much she meant to you. You’re so thoughtful in the way you see the world. Is your mind going all the time?
I can’t sleep, so maybe. Over the pandemic, like a lot of people, I was trying to find new rituals because some of our patterns got disrupted from the world dying. I started going to the dog park. I was in a place where gummies were legal, so I started taking gummies at the dog park. It was literally one of the few times ever in my life that I was like, “Oh shit, this is what it feels like to not obsess.” I was just watching those dogs.
I mean, I was probably just high, but it was the first time in my life I felt like my brain wasn’t trying to see what’s on the other side of something, or wasn’t trying to practice word patterns or silly stuff, or wasn’t wondering if I’d done right by somebody.
Do you think it was also the dogs?
Oh, absolutely the dogs!
I know you’re vegetarian but you never write about animals. Are there animals in your life?
No. We had a dog for like a week when I was a kid. We found him at Battlefield Park and took him home. Bad story — came home one day, my mama was like, “Benji ran away.” We went out looking, and we didn’t find Benji. On the way home, we saw a dog on the side of the road that looked like Benji that had been hit. My mother was like, “I’m not stopping. I’m not stopping.”
Ever since college, I move a lot, so I’ve never had the lifestyle for one. But after Heavy came out, I was really, really wanting one. That’s when I started going to dog parks. I was really in need of whatever kind of comfort caring for a cat or a little dog could bring, but I never went and got one.
Could you go out when we could finish this interview and adopt a cat or a dog?
No. I’m in Houston now. I haven’t gone to dog parks in Houston at all. Just trying to figure out where I am in the world. It’s so different than any place I’ve ever lived.
I could see you with a nice little doggy or kitty or two.
I can, too, as soon as I figure out where I want to settle down.
Circling back to how to love in the circumstances we're in now, with all this hatred and bigotry going on, what’s it like to continue this commitment to love? Does it take a toll on you, or is it a balm in some way?
That's a great question, Jane. This other book I'm writing, Good God is at its root about that. I think City Summer, Country Summer is, too, but I'm not taking the bruising part of it on directly in that book.
My grandmother used to have this word. She was saying “sensitive,” but it sounded like “sensive.” She always was like, “Key, you got to be careful because you were born sensive.” When I was a young person, I didn't know what the heck she was talking about, but the older I've gotten, I get it. I don't think sensitive people are necessarily nicer in the long run. I think some very sensitive people can explode and be terrible and abusive, both to themselves and the world.
But there was that point during the pandemic where it seemed like we had decided to be better people. Part of that was a lot of people were dying around us, which means we were killing a lot of people, and we were trying to live. There was a point where it felt like we had decided to be more loving and more caring and more committed to alleviating the burdens of people who had been burdened unfairly.
If you're a studier of the world, you know that that shit was going to have a backlash. But the titillation that comes with seeing that it actually is possible to be collectively better, even if it came at the expense of everyone dying, but we were better. Then people literally were like, “Fuck it. We got to choose capitalism over people. We got to choose greed. We got to choose consumption. We got to choose all that shit over people.”
That shit breaks my heart. I think writers like me like to believe... not that there's a place we can go back to that's better than where we are, but that there's a place that possibly we've never gone to that is a much more responsibly loving place. We have the capacity to do it, because we've all gone there. We've seen people go there. Then when you see people obviously choose to decimate powerless people, to put profit over human life, and to never have to talk about their relationships to love and tenderness and life and care, for a lot of us, that shit is very heartbreaking.
Does that ever make you want to stop your commitment to love?
I don't know how to. It sounds like I'm some crusader, but that's what I'm saying, I literally don't know how to. I was born caring about, like, the toys. Not just toy girls and toy boys, but if it was a ball and you kicked it too hard, I would always be worried that the ball was messed up. Similarly, if it was a wall or paint chip or acorn... I don't know, my whole life I was always just like, “is that shit okay?”
I can stop trying to make art out of it, but in terms of just living in the world, and sort of not giving a fuck, I don't know. My friends always be like, “You’ve got to trust everything's going to be how it's going be. You can't be worrying.”
Well, okay, I don't know how to do that.
I did the same thing with toys! I'm still like that with stuffed animals. If I see a dog toy on its face, I have to flip it over, because I’m afraid it will suffocate! Or if I give a child a stuffed animal as a present, I can't wrap it for the same reason.
Absolutely. 100%
I didn't know anyone else was like that! Meanwhile: Everything is so fucked up. Do you think we can love our way out of this?
I do. I mean, I think at the core has to be part of the tension. But I think we can. I feel so anti-intellectual and so anti-radical when I say that, but I do. We probably won’t, but I think we could.
Does that mean loving Donald Trump and loving Elon Musk and loving J.D. Vance?