REBROADCAST: Poet Ross Gay focuses on everyday delights

Sometimes a flower or a bird or an overheard snippet of conversation is enough to bring joy. Perhaps especially in a year like this one, focusing on the small things is important. That’s something poet Ross Gay spent a long time doing for his latest collection of essays, “The Book of Delights.” Gay’s definition of delight is expansive and palpable, and his essays range from the smallest of natural wonders to the largest of societal problems. This year, Multnomah County Library encouraged everybody to read “The Book of Delights” in 2021. Today, we listen back to our conversation with Ross Gay about his book.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Ross Gay is a celebrated poet and essayist who was chosen as the author for Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads Program earlier this year. The book that everyone was encouraged to read started out as an exercise that Gay gave himself. For a whole year, he would pay attention to and then write about the things that delighted him. The delights accumulated and bloomed in his essays. He captured moments of solidarity, connection or communion, generosity and wonder, mystery and familiarity. He universalized the personal and personalized the universal and in the process he erased the distinctions between the two. “The Book of Delights’' came out in 2019 and it was already a sensation and a best seller before the pandemic turned our world more inward and more seemingly delight deficient. But in the last year the book’s central message has only become more urgent. Pay close attention to this often heartbreaking world because there are still delights in it. When we spoke to Ross Gay in April, I had him read from the preface of the book.

Ross Gay: Yeah, for sure. Preface: “One day last July feeling delighted and compelled to both wonder about and share that delight, I decided that it might feel nice, even useful, to write a daily essay about something delightful. I remember laughing at myself for how obvious it was. I could call it something like “The Book of Delights”. I came up with a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year, begin and end on my birthday, August 1st, draft them quickly, and write them by hand. The rules made it a discipline for me, a practice, spend time thinking and writing about delight every day. Because I was writing these essayettes pretty much daily, confession: I skipped some days, patterns and themes and concerns show up. For instance, I traveled quite a bit this year. I often write in cafes. My mother is often on my mind, racism is often on my mind, kindness is often on my mind. Politics, pop music, books, dreams, public space. My garden is often on my mind. It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study. A month or two into this project, the delights were calling to me: write about me, write about me! Because it is rude not to acknowledge your delights. I’d tell them that though they might not become essayettes, they were still important and I was grateful to them. Which is to say, I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss, but more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows much like joy and love when I share it.”

Dave Miller: Do you have an explanation for that last realization? Why sharing delight increases it?

Ross Gay: Yeah. I don’t know. No, but maybe I’ll try. I feel like, actually the sort of inclination of the gift, like the way that the gift... the true gift actually happens is when we give it away. Maybe that’s a measure of how that’s a measure of what kind of a gift something is actually. In the process of writing this book, I did notice two things. I think how often the thing that delighted me would be some kind of exchange of sharing and and how often my inclination, almost immediately upon witnessing the exchanges sharing, which is the exchange of gifting, is to immediately tell someone else. It wasn’t like I had to think hard about it. It was just I was inclined to be like, yo! you see this thing happening?

Dave Miller: And not necessarily in a proselytizing way. I mean, would it have mattered to you if the person that you’re telling this to didn’t experience that delight in the same way?

Ross Gay: Yeah. Because I don’t think I was trying to convert anyone. I don’t think I was doing that. I think I was just moved, and the process of writing the book I learned many things. But one of the things that I learned is that, sharing, for me, sharing, noticing what delights me, and then naming it, recognizing it, and then sharing it, is a kind of profound way of connecting. To be like, I love, look at this, look at this that I love. Maybe it’s a beckoning, even. It’s definitely a reaching and it’s a way of probably being like, do you love this too? We might love this thing together.

Dave Miller: The poetry book that you published before the “The Book of Delights’' is called “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude”. Is there a meaningful difference between gratitude and delight?

Ross Gay: Yeah, I mean they’re totally tied up with each other. I think all of that to me, all those words are kind of tied up with each other. But let me see if I can stumble through this a little bit. I can more readily do gratitude and joy. But gratitude and delight, delight to me is such an interesting sort of experience. One thing I’ll say is that in the process of writing this book, I’m like, I’m a poet. I write poems. I’m into etymology and stuff. I like the whole histories of words and all that. I never once looked up the word delight. It was the last day actually of my writing the book. A friend of mine told me what the etymology of the word was, which I can’t quite remember right now. But anyway it seems interesting.

Dave Miller: Can I ask you, before we hear about that, was it a conscious decision on your part to not look it up, to maintain that level of mystery, or did it just not occur to you to look it up?

Ross Gay: It kind of didn’t occur. I kind of liked the idea that I was doing a more organic definition, like over the course of the year I was going to be defining the word. I was sort of exploring what the word meant.

Dave Miller: So what does it matter what the OED said, you were doing this for yourself?

Ross Gay: Yeah maybe it didn’t exactly matter. It’s funny, in one of these essays I talk about delight. I do a kind of false etymology and say that delight means both of light and without light. So I’m sort of playing with the meaning of the word but whatever the OED says was not quite in my wheelhouse.

Dave Miller: I guess what I was wondering about with gratitude and delight is.I mean the gratitude, it implies this, it doesn’t imply, I mean it is deeply about an acknowledgment of thanks, thankfulness, saying I am thankful for this thing. I’m wondering if that is inherent in describing and experiencing delight, that even if you don’t say it, that there’s absolutely some kind of gratitude and thankfulness embedded in it, for that thing existing in the world?

Ross Gay: I think that’s beautiful. I think that’s the connection that in a way, you did it. In a way, I think the acknowledgment of what delights you is an expression of gratitude, because it’s an acknowledgment. It’s an acknowledgment also of what nourishes you and what nurtures you and what, in deeper way, that without which you would not be. I think that’s great. I think about this a lot. I have occasion to think about this a lot because I talk to people about this quite a bit. I think of delight and curiosity being very much tied up with one another. Delight and unknowing. That part of my experience of delight feels like the experience of being surprised or being reminded of something that I forgot that I knew. So curiosity is foundational to delight for me. But your question and your answer to your question...

Dave Miller: Well, it was meant as a prompt, not an answer. I apologize for that.

Ross Gay: It’s so good. But it makes it clear that yeah, of course, like that. And that’s one of the reasons... it’s a good reason to attend to what you love because attending to what you love is an act of gratitude.

Dave Miller: When you say attend to, do you mean to listen to it or to take care of it?

Ross Gay: Both. Tend, yep. And attention to, for sure.

Dave Miller: Could you read us one of your short essays? I like that you call them essayettes. This is one that’s called ‘Sharing a Bag’?

Ross Gay: Yep, ‘Sharing a Bag’: “I adore it when I see two people. Today, it was from the looks of it, a mother and child here on Canal Street in Chinatown, sharing the burden of a shopping bag or sack of laundry by each gripping one of the handles. It at first seems to encourage a kind of staggering as the uninitiated or the impatient will try to walk at his own pace, the bag twisting this way and that, whacking shins or skidding along the ground. But as we mostly do, feeling the sack which has become a kind of tether between us, we modulate our pace, even our sway and saunter, the good and soul rhythms we might swear we live by, to the one on the other side of the sack. I suppose part of why I so adore the sack-sharing is because most often this is a burden. One or the other could manage just fine solo, which makes it different from dragging grannies armoire up two flights of steps, or wrestling free a truck stuck hip deep in a snowbank. Yes, it’s the lack of necessity of this act. That’s perhaps precisely why it delights me so. Everything that needs doing, getting the groceries or laundry home, would get done just fine without this meager collaboration. But the only thing that needs doing without it would not.”

Dave Miller: That’s the writer Ross Gay reading from his book, “The Book of Delights”. It is this year’s Everybody Reads selection for Multnomah County Library. Do you think that you could make a delight, somehow, about just about anything?

Ross Gay: I don’t know about that. I mean I think I could probably in the circumference of our experiences. I think there are many things around, but I don’t know about that.

Dave Miller: I guess what I’m wondering about is that the kind of attention that you’re bringing to bear. So in that moment seeing two people sharing a bag, but in so many others that they could be moments that any of us see in the course of our days and barely even acknowledged, don’t really, as you said, attend to, but the experience I had reading the book is of somebody who had given himself this job of paying attention and to some extent it was that attention which created the possibility to be delighted and I’m wondering if that’s what it felt like or if it felt like the delights were striking you by themselves.

Ross Gay: Yes. So there would be times for sure when the delights would strike me by themselves. You know, there’s one I loved where I’m working in a coffee shop and this kid is standing next to me with their hands raised and I’m like, ‘Why are you standing there?’ And she wants to give me a high five and tell me I’m doing a good job for doing my homework, which I wasn’t. That’s the kind of thing. I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s amazing’. Or like seeing a bird in an airport or something, that to me is always a delight. But there are definitely experiences where I think over the course of writing this book and being, as you said, studying and giving myself the task of, of studying and noticing and attending to what delighted me for sure made me more inclined to be like, oh something’s happening right there, and it could just be as simple as someone just held the door open for someone and they waited a long time and the other person trotted to get in on time, those tiny little interactions that are happening constantly, constantly.

Dave Miller: That kind of double dance where it’s the trot that makes the held door a little bit less of a burden and its two people doing that dance together without probably even saying anything.

Ross Gay: Without even saying anything, that it’s constant. And mostly invisible, that’s I think that’s part of what’s interesting to me that it’s it’s mostly invisible or it’s often invisible and the practice of seeing, of noticing it, sort of, not sort of, it enriches our lives, it also sort of more fully to me makes me understand what our lives are constituted of. You know what I mean?

Dave Miller: I think I do, but I want to hear more to make sure I do. What do you mean, what are our lives constituted of that’s related to that kind of a moment?

Ross Gay: Well, I mean, so I’ll just say in the opposite our lives are constituted in our telling of them and are sort of narrative notion maybe, of grand events, you know? And the fact is also that our lives, moreso, that our lives are constituted by someone holding the door open. Someone reaching out to me, someone saying ‘I can help you with that.’ The literal thousands and thousands and thousands of people in my body who have said, who have brought me forth, that we are constituted by a kind of, among other things, by a kind of care. And part of my curiosity is witnessing the ways that that is so. Does that make sense?

Dave Miller: It does. I’m wondering about what happens if we don’t, because I love the notion that just as much as these big geopolitical movements and forces and news happenings make up our lives, maybe even more so, these little moments do. What happens if we’re not paying attention to them, do they still make up our lives?

Ross Gay: Yes, absolutely. But I think, to me, what is interesting about noticing that they make up our lives makes me more inclined to participate in the making up of each other’s lives. In these sort of tender, caring ways.

Dave Miller: To try to create more delight in the world for other people.

Ross Gay: Well, just the more I understand that, oh, the actual fabric of my living is care. The actual fabric of my living is care makes me more inclined to care, it makes me more inclined to share, makes me more inclined to what I have, makes sense that you ought to also have.

Dave Miller: This reminds me that that one of the big themes running through the book is, at least as far as I read it, a sense of transformation in yourself roughly from your adolescence to where you are now in your early to mid forties of becoming more tender, more emotionally available and less worried about being perceived as soft or insufficiently “masculine”. It felt to me that that was a prerequisite. That kind of transformation was a prerequisite for a lot of the delights that you were able to eventually identify. Does that ring true to you?

Ross Gay: Well, I think, yeah. I mean it’s really a good question because I think part of the- so one of the things that I do what I teach now, I will ask people at the beginning of classes or also when I go around and visit other places and visit classes elsewhere. I teach college for people who don’t know, I will ask people what they saw that was beautiful on their way to class or something. Or I might say, ‘What is something that you realize you love in the last two or three days?’ It is very difficult for people, often very difficult for people to say, ‘I saw the most beautiful thing’ or to say, ‘I love blah blah...’. It seems like there’s a difficulty, in sort of, it’s a commitment, but like I’ll say vulnerability and actually the word maybe is moveability.

Dave Miller: Do you use that in a gendered way or in a generational way? I guess what specifically, what I’m saying is, are the young men that you’re teaching less likely to point out things they find beautiful than the young women?

Ross Gay: I don’t know directly, but I think a feature of patriarchy is that sort of the brutality that the myth of unmoveability inflicts on the world. But it’s hard across the board, I noticed, for people to be like, because that’s kind of a profound vulnerability to say ‘I love something’. We know this, it’s a profound vulnerability and to say that something really moved me, I’m really moved by this, because it is also a kind of it’s an offering and in a way it’s an offering for someone, you know what it is, It’s like a offering for someone to care for your moveability, to hold it as opposed to be like, well, why are you telling me that or I don’t care or I’m not interested, which is I think how we often feel. I feel like we probably often feel that our moveability and we’ve been taught this, our moveability is not is not to be shared. And furthermore, it’s to be ashamed of, you know.

Dave Miller: Why do you start with this often as one of your questions? What are you trying to instill in your students?

Ross Gay: My kind of pedagogical ethos is that we make beautiful stuff together. But I don’t say stuff usually, because we’re on the radio, and that’s really if I were to write one thing at the top of every syllabus that I make or whatever, it would be let’s make beautiful stuff together. And part of that exercise in gathering and being with each other requires that we’re able to sort of identify even with what we find beautiful. But furthermore, I think I’m sort of thinking through this now, it’s a good question, is that when we are sort of articulating what we find beautiful, I think we’re starting to open a space of care, I think. So that the classroom is not a place of competition or standing out, but it’s actually a place of some kind of mutual vulnerability.

Dave Miller: That mutual vulnerability, it’s interesting because clearly you choose every one of your words carefully and if the core teacherly idea, your ethos is let’s make beautiful stuff together, it seems like that together is really important and that needn’t be, or my guess is that that wouldn’t be a word that every writing teacher would emphasize. It might be let’s make beautiful stuff, let’s make important stuff or whatever. But it seems like the ‘together’ is a key word for you. Why is that?

Ross Gay: Together is the most important part, and in fact the together, I think, is the most beautiful thing that we can make, is the together. Basically because I believe in the practices of making each other’s lives possible. I believe in that as a practice and that as a kind of as a truth and as a thing that we do not study in isolation, that our lives are in fact, studies, practices and studying for how we can be tending for each other, which is to say how we can be together, better or I don’t want to say better, I want to say more truly or more completely or more lovingly or more, more together. I teach writing and I’m interested in metaphor, I’m interested in the making but that togethering is really the making we’re up to too.

Dave Miller: This reminds me of what seems to be one of your favorite aspects of the natural world and that’s saying a lot because you have many of them, aspects of the world we live in, the natural that you’re just fully in love with and so excited to share. But there’s this part of it which is also in your words, a kind of metaphor for human connection is underground fungal connections. What’s the lesson that you think we can take from what fungi are doing in the dirt?

Ross Gay: That sort of shuttling of in that in the essay that you’re referring to, the shuttling of nutrients between all of the components of the healthy forest, this sort of constant communication of nutrients and information etcetera. It feels to me like such a beautiful expression of care, that need is actually, we are constituted of our needs, and we’re made of our needs. And that we might share our needs and share our surpluses like a healthy forest;, that seems interesting to me.

Dave Miller: It’s interesting, I’m thinking back to the essayette that you read earlier about the two people sharing the bag. And then in the context of this question about needs, I mean, the point you’re making is that often the two human beings, one of them could carry the bag in question. And so the need, there, isn’t to halve the weight. The need is to be close as people and to share not the physical load, but the social load and to be close to each other.

Ross Gay: That’s exactly it. I remember I was sitting there in my car that day and I was like, oh it’s beautiful because they’re working it out together. That’s what’s so beautiful, that’s it and they have to figure out how to get their gait right and get their pace right, because one person walks quicker than the other person or whatever and it’s just like, oh they’re learning how to work it out together.

Dave Miller: We’ve got to take a quick break, but we have a lot more coming up with Ross Gay. Stay tuned. From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, This is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. If you are just tuning in, Ross Gay is our guest for the hour today. He’s the author of three books of poetry, including “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude’'. His collection of essays, “The Book of Delights” is this year’s Everybody Reads selection for Multnomah County Library. I wonder if you could read us another essay. This is one that’s from near the end of your year of delights. It’s called, ‘Still Processing’.

Ross Gay: Yes. Still Processing: “Unraveling, bindweed from the squash and buckwheat and onions and zinnias. I was listening to a Still Processing podcast about Whitney Houston. The hosts were discussing Whitney’s early career, her royal family. She’s connected to both Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin and her relationship with Bobby Brown, which some channel decided ought to be a reality television show in which, from the sounds of it, a lot of people thought made good TV. As I understand it, they were not having an easy time, which yes, is a euphemism for they were a train wreck and we do love a train wreck, especially if all the passengers on the train are black. I imagine you have to pitch a show like that. I imagine you have to have meetings and secure producers or directors, get a budget, things like that. Many decisions and agreements have to occur, probably many handshakes, some drinks, plenty of golf, trying to figure out how best to exploit, to make a mockery of a black family, the adults in which have made some of the best pop music of the last 30 years. I never saw it, but it’s old hat. The commodification of black suffering. If I had a nickel for every white person who can recite lines from the wire. I have no illusions by which I mean to tell you it is a fact. And one of the objectives of popular culture, popular media, is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering and suffering from blackness is to conflate blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness. Blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness, which is clever as hell, if your goal is obscuring the efforts, the systems, historical and ongoing, to ruin black people. Clever as hell if your goal is to make appear natural, what is in fact by design. And the delight? You have been reading a book of delights written by a black person. A book of black delight aily as air.”

Dave Miller: I should just say for people who don’t have the book that that part near the end when you say, when you talk about this American project of conflating blackness and suffering, the way it’s written in the book is super powerful. Where you write blackness and suffering over and over and then literally they’re printed over each other. So by the end of that paragraph, it’s unreadable because the two words are triply, or whatever, superimposed. It’s a really powerful visual representation, too, of the words. I wanted folks to hear you reading that because if they haven’t read your essays or your poetry, and were only going by the titles, they might get a very wrong sense about your overall project, because delight can seem Pollyanna-ish. But your essays and your poetry absolutely address, as in this case, anti-black racism, as in some of your other essays, environmental degradation. So even while you’re talking about joy, you’re absolutely addressing the most serious issues affecting humans. What’s the connection for you between these, I don’t even know if they’re two poles, but these two things, great suffering and injustice and delight?

Ross Gay: I’m gonna take delight to joy. I’m gonna take delight to joy because to me, I talk about this some in the book, and I think about it a lot. Joy is really to me an interesting and powerful emotion and what the emotion is, what it holds in it is the understanding that profound sorrow is part of our lives and that suffering is part of our lives, and that brutality is probably part of our lives, and joy, that’s why I always say joy is a grave emotion because joy is informed by our passing, by dying, by sorrow. But to me joy is the way that in the midst of or as a way through, not as a way beyond, because I don’t think there is a beyond to sorrow, but there is a way of reaching towards one another in the midst of sorrow which constitutes this thing that I identify as joy, so that I don’t actually think that I understand joy until I also reside with my sorrow and furthermore, I don’t think I understand joy until I reside with your sorrow, actually. And that the joy, what’s interesting to me about joy is that it is the ways that we reach toward one another in the midst of our sorrows and then what sort of shines through, which then, to me kind of comes back to that forest metaphor, which is that is a kind of mutual care that is profoundly moving and changing, I think.

Dave Miller: If my calendar math is right, you wrote this book in the final months of the 2016 presidential election and then the first half-year or so of the Trump presidency. But there is almost no overt discussion of electoral politics in the essays you wrote. How do you think that time where electoral politics, a new administration- it was inescapable in human life, not even just in this country, but all over the world- how do you think it affected the essays you ended up writing even if we didn’t see very much of it, the words, say Trump or Clinton in the essays?

Ross Gay: There’s definitely reference, but you’re right, not a ton of name stuff, but there are these moments that to me are kind of interesting, and the thing with these essays is that they’re dated, they have dates. So the day before the election, I’m on a flight and black dude kind of taps me, there’s one called, ‘Tap Tap’, this essay, and..

Dave Miller: I almost had you read it and I just, I thought I have so little time, but would you mind describing that moment? It’s actually an important one. And the timing as it is, it seems significant.

Ross Gay: Yeah, it’s just that I think it’s the day before the election and I’m flying home from Philly maybe and the steward on the airplane just, it’s just a little extra sweetness, a little extra tenderness as he gave me my seltzer water or whatever and kind of tap me on my forearm or whatever and it, to me, that was a moment in time, and the essay itself, like to me is to point out that this is a moment in time that there’s a particular sort of radiance to this moment, this exchange.

Dave Miller: There are a number of times when it’s, I think it’s basically a category of delights for you, pleasant public physical interactions with strangers. I think those are your words for it. They include high fives, hugs, handshakes, a hand on your back, a pat on your shoulder, a tap tap on your shoulder, an Italian garbage man flexing his muscles and then smacking your biceps. It seems that you crave and value and welcome different forms of public physical interaction, all of which right now have been shut off, I assume for the last year. What has that lack of physical touch been like? Not everybody likes these things. I don’t even think I need to point it out, but I’ll say it, you do. So what’s it been like to not have them for a year?

Ross Gay: It’s a profound sorrow and on a cellular level, what is that happening to those of us, my neighbor, my beloved friends here who, when we see each other, we, I’m doing my best not to curse because I want to be emphatic, like you grab each other. We hug each other, we love on each other. And to not have that is, it’s just like, that’s what it is. It’s a profound sorrow, but when you said it, I kind of felt it kind of moving through my body and made me wonder like, wow, that’s a sorrow that you carry with you.

Dave Miller: What has the last year been like for you in terms of the lack of travel? As you mentioned in the preface, you used to travel a lot. You were in and out of airports and hotels. You were doing readings all over the country. The self or the home quarantine for you, I imagine may be a little bit different than for some people who used to go, say to work or leave their house more, but didn’t leave their city as much. What has that been like for you?

Ross Gay: It’s been many things, I mean, it’s definitely sort of- gosh, I don’t even know. I mean, I feel like my partner and I have been working things out in these other ways, deeper ways because we’re so present with each other. So with each other. I feel like I’m, it’s hard to say, I mean, I don’t know. I don’t exactly know, is the truth., Just like you’ve been home. No, okay, okay, so I can actually tell you better. So early, this is interesting, this is a little bit vulnerable- move, moving, get ready! When I first was just home, I was sort of just spending time at home and I did start to realize not long after, I don’t know, a few, maybe a couple of months that I started to feel actually bad, like just bad, not just sad and not just anxious, but I felt bad and I remember I got with my therapist and I was just sort of talking about that feeling that I just feel bad and I think in part what I was experiencing was that I was not only lonely but I was sort of being reminded that I am again, to kind of come back to this thing, I was being reminded that I am really dependent on interactions. I’m a dude, I kind of like solitude and stuff, but in a certain kind of way I do, but in a certain kind of way I’m like deeply dependent on these little, big like hugging your neighbor kind of interactions, but also the interaction of like being in kind, banal company with strangers.

Dave Miller: Or being at a book reading or being in person with your students.

I guess the list goes on and you were feeling that lack.

Ross Gay: Yeah.

Dave Miller: So you were talking about that in the past tense, that I mean, so what changed for you?

Ross Gay: One is just to sort of identify it as like this feeling of lack is in fact a feeling of lack, it’s not just that you’re not just feeling bad, you’re feeling bad because you’re lonely, because you’re longing, and to sort of understand that I think is a useful understanding, like the way when you’re sort of having a feeling and I just feel bad, I feel wrong. I feel like all this stuff like I’m a bad person, like everything is terrible, internally, to be able to sort of work through it with someone to be like, well, you’re lonely, you know, lonely.

Dave Miller: This feels maybe too easy a way to think about the complexities of human life, but did the discipline that you had worked on for that delight-seeking and elucidating year, did that help you at all over the last year?

Ross Gay: I think it probably did because part of that practice of attending to what you love in the midst of your life, the fullness of your life, and attending to what delights you in the midst of the fullness of your life to the best that you can, it sort of gave me some sort of ground or practice to even continue in my work and my writing, which I was still in the midst of, but also to sort of remember something that I did real early on, when things shut down, was I found myself wanting to collaborate with people. I always like to collaborate, but I found myself wanting to collaborate even a little bit more, so some folks, some students and I kind of started writing poems together, some other people and I started having these other kinds of collaborations and I think that basically was just an understanding that the form of our sharing might change, but the sharing is still the thing.

Dave Miller: You were a very conscious fungal, reaching out for nourishment. I mean that’s really what it sounds like.

Ross Gay: Yeah. I realized I was doing it and then I realized, Oh yeah, yeah, this is, this is the right thing to be doing.

Dave Miller: You could feel it, you could feel it nourishing you?

Ross Gay: Well, I saw that I was doing it. At first, I just found myself collaborating. And then I, so before I was like, this is going to nourish me, this is gonna take care of me. First, I was just reaching out to folks and was like, hey, let’s work on a thing together, let’s just do a thing together. And then as I started to do it and do it in a few different ways. I was like, oh, you’re figuring out how to still be togethering with people.

Dave Miller: I don’t know if I’ve ever heard that verb, it’s a great one. How do we get better at togethering?

Ross Gay: It’s probably different for all of us, I guess. But I do want to say, I think it’s cool to start with love and to be like, what do you love, what do we love together? What might we love together? I think that’s kind of fun.

Dave Miller: I’ve just been thinking, I’ve been doing this show from home for a year and a couple weeks now and I’ve gotten used to it for the most part, but there are some conversations where I feel acutely, it’s more of an imagining, how different it would be if I were in a room with the person I’m talking to, breathing the same air being, maybe even under six ft away and seeing each other in person. How different do you think it will be? And what are you thinking about when you think about the next times?

Ross Gay: You know, I don’t know that I’m thinking of the next times. I’m curious. I’m thinking of this times quite a bit.

Dave Miller: We’re still in it. Yeah, fair enough. A lot of your essays are about your garden. What’s happening in your garden right now?

Ross Gay: Oh the garlic’s coming up, the kale, some of this curly kale made it through the winter. We’re doing a lot of prepping the garden to get stuff going and we’ll be, we’re a tiny bit behind but we’ll be seeding stuff here in the next probably week or so, getting some greens and everything in and the pawpaws are budding out. The Goumi is a bush that we grow, is budding out, the gooseberries. We’re trying to take care of this peach tree that often gets a rot but we’re trying to take care of it. It’s so fun. It’s so fun and it’s just starting to become spring out here, so it’s time.

Dave Miller: So for you, this is a time of planning and prepping and I think excitement for a lot of gardeners. What are you looking forward to in your garden this year? This season?

Ross Gay: Well, I’m always really excited when those first, the first big planting starts to come up. So like when the rows of the collards and the kales and the spinaches and when they all start to emerge, that always really delights me. But I’ll also say we planted a handful of these fruit bushes last year that we weren’t sure if they took. And they all look good. And some of them, some of these bush cherries that we planted are already sort of making their flush of flowers, they’re very early blooming and I’m curious to see what all of those do. I’m curious to see what all of those do this year. I love fruit. I really love fruit. I love veggies, too.

Dave Miller: You could do a whole book of delights about fruit, I get the sense.

Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah, easy.

Dave Miller: Ross Gay, it was a real honor talking with you and hearing you think through every single question I asked you. Thanks so much for joining us.

Ross Gay: Thank you. It’s really good to talk to you.

Dave Miller: Ross Gay is the author of “The Book of Delights”. We spoke to him last spring. Tomorrow on the show, months before the uprising that would bring Portland international attention, Portland-based anti-fascist, Sean Kealiher was killed on the street. OPB’s newest podcast goes in search of answers for his still unsolved homicide. We’ll listen to the first episode of The Fault Line, Dying for a Fight. If you don’t want to miss any of our shows, you can listen on the NPR one app on Apple podcasts or wherever you like to get your podcasts. There’s also our nightly rebroadcast at 8p.m. Thanks very much for tuning in to Think Out Loud on OPB and KLCC. I’m Dave Miller. We’ll be back tomorrow.

Think Out Loud is supported by Steve and Jan Oliva, the Rose E. Tucker Charitable Trust and Ray and Marilyn Johnson.

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