— Ross Gay,

author of The Book of Delights (Algonquin Books, February)

“I believe in so much! Things visible and not. Epigenetic delight and joy and care. Structural tenderness. I believe in hollering about what you love. Or pointing is good too. I believe in sharing, I’m saying.”

Why do you write? I write because I have questions; because I love books; I love the human voice; others have been so kind as to have written things I have been moved by and feel compelled to talk with; I like to talk with; I like to move; it is so fun; semicolons; the mysteries. What has changed you as a writer? My actual life, of course: the incredibly mundane daily, common, wonderful, and shitty. Also, the writers I am introduced to—everything I know as a writer I have learned and, at least mostly, stolen. And teaching! Goddamn I am blessed by wizards galore semester after semester, people with whom I study how to make supportive, noncoercive, wonder-full, cherishing laboratories for imagining, making, and collaborating. I mean, how lucky to witness beautiful art and community being made and cared for, c’mon! And coming to the realization that I do not want to care if my work “lasts.” That something will “stand the test of time” strikes me as among the most boring and dumbest of all critical assessments. Who do you turn to when you feel like you’re losing faith? I try to rewitness the everyday kindnesses our lives are made of and made possible by. I go to town. What would you say to the ten-year-old you? No advice, just lots of jostling and hugging and kissing. Lots of nonjudgmental chumming around, some of which would happen at the crooked basketball hoop in Middletown Trace Apartments. I’d put my hand time to time in his halfro too and would probably yank his little head around some. Oh—I’d tell him to cherish his tenderness, to let that be the truest thing, though I don’t know if he’d understand that. So maybe I’d just say, be as tender as you can, which is advice after all.