Hi, we’re Amirio and Kate.
Amirio is an essayist, interviewer, and editor who writes about Blackness, queerness, and plants. Kate is an editor, publisher, and community herbalist working at the intersections of culture and climate justice. We’re long-time friends and creative partners.
Our friendship was forged, in part, through a shared love of the footnote. We are both the kind of readers and writers who relish an addendum, a citation, a second thought. To us, a good footnote is a way to continue the conversation. Maybe this is a reflection of who we are as people, too: if you’re out dancing, Amirio is going to be there until the morning, and if you’re swapping stories by a fire, Kate will stay until the flame flickers out.
Over our many years of working together — both as first editors for each other’s passion projects and as co-creators of the Down to Earth Deck — we’ve patchworked an archive of underlined passages, screenshots, open tabs, and essayistic citations. Several years ago, Kate was paging through Inciting Joy by Ross Gay when she stumbled across a footnote on the significance of the cover song. Writes Gay:
“Erykah Badu’s ‘Hello,’ a cover of the Isley Brothers’ cover of Todd Rundgren’s song ‘Hello, It’s me,’ which might make it a double cover [...] is just more evidence (along with her live performances, breaking into covers of Lena Horne’s ‘Believe’ or her whole ‘Back in the Day’ video) of how she is, we are, resplendently citational.”1 (Emphasis ours)
“Resplendently citational” became a shorthand for the kind of work that we want to do in the world. We’re both interested in dissolving the narrative of making as isolated work. We want creating art to feel more like a jam session or a long walk with friends. Not just because it’s more joyful to create with others, but also because it’s truer to who we are as humans. Every one of us is shaped by someone else’s love and care and perspective; every one of us belongs to a people and a place.
Last summer, we were residents at The Strange Foundation in the Catskills. Over the course of a week, we worked on our own essays as well as a collaborative writing project we’ve been tending to for the past couple of years. On our last day, we went for a walk along the reservoir to shake some ideas loose: we’d been feeling pretty stuck on how to move forward. On the car ride home, “resplendently citational” suddenly returned to Amirio not just as shorthand for a way of art-making but as a project rooted in conversations with creatives and their “someone” with whom they collaborate. It wasn’t an answer to our shared project, but something else for us to pursue that might remind us of why we make.
Resplendently Citational is a conversation series that invites collaborators to reflect on how their art-making is joyfully interwoven, interdependent, citational, even derivative. We want to hear from creatives of all kinds about working with editors and other creative partners, honoring influences, and citing their (animal and ancestral and allegorical) sources. We hope this space can be an antidote to this era of scarcity and supremacy and separation.
For our very first conversation, we are honored to interview the luminous poets Ross Gay and janan alexandra.
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays — The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023.
janan alexandra is the author of come from (BOA Editions). The recipient of numerous honors and awards, janan currently teaches at Indiana University and in the Monroe County Correctional Center, edits poetry at The Rumpus, and curates MONDAYS ARE FREE, a Substack collaboration by BFF poets Ross Gay and Pat Rosal.
From Bloomington, Indiana, Ross and janan explore the joy of working together, the conditions that make their friendship and collaboration possible, the conscious and unconscious way artists internalize inspiration, and the creatives they’re currently citing in their work. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
KATE: Ross, this project was inspired by a citation of yours from Inciting Joy. Since Amirio and I first read that line, we’ve really continued to treasure that frame.
For us, writing is very much a collaborative practice. We are not here to individuate ourselves. We want to cite our sources and to draw inspiration from our kin, our ancestors, and our ecosystem — to truly be a part of a community.
Writing is often considered to be a very atomized and individualistic act. We’re curious to know how and why you think that perception has become so entrenched, and what we stand to gain as writers and collaborators by reframing writing as a resplendently citational practice?
ROSS: Bobby, you want to start?
JANAN: I think about the commercial and capitalist infrastructure that undergirds a lot of dominant channels, and about the ways that schooling can be really carceral and punitive. The West and dominant Western and imperial systems are hell-bent on consumption and extraction and production and competition and being the best and being the star and having the most and being the biggest. And it’s that ethos that leads to the idea of a writer as this lone wolf — [which as a conceptualization] is steeped in whiteness, in a certain kind of maleness, in a misshapen idea of what identity might be.
Just had a little thought off to the left, too: MFAs can be weird!
AMIRIO: Call them out!
JANAN: Have you all been through MFA programs?
AMIRIO: No, but we’ve heard the stories.
JANAN: They’re a mix of things. They can be such beautiful, incredible sites of connection and learning and transformation. But also the creative writing workshop had its roots in this staunchly anti-communist, American [propaganda project]. I’m not an expert on this, but my understanding is that the CIA basically co-opted the arts to try to infiltrate and shift the culture away from communism toward capitalism through the MFA workshop. That model has a lot of traces of individualism.
ROSS: It’s a sad, sorrowful, destructive misunderstanding that we might be discrete. It comes from all kinds of things, but it’s a misunderstanding and it’s just horrific — and lonely. It’s lonely because the bottom line is that it feels nicer to be like, Yeah, we did it, as opposed to, Yeah, I did it.
AMIRIO: I love what you’re speaking to, Ross. I think you’re pointing us to what we stand to gain from working from writing as happening in the commons or writing as resplendently citational. There is this communion that can happen [when we work together] that can feel really good.
When we were developing this series, we were really obsessed with this idea of having interviews in pairs — talking to people who are collaborators in some way and understanding the mechanics of how that collaboration happens. For the two of you, how did you initially come together, not just as colleagues or friends, but as creative partners? And what have you gained from that creative partnership?
ROSS: I want to say that we met in an MFA program. So, the way they do it: you teach Introduction to Creative Writing. It’s a big lecture class, and then you have several TAs. And so we taught together. There was something about the teaching through which I feel like our friendship and collaboration got deeper.
The lecture class is sort of a ridiculous class. I just give everyone As, and when you do that, people stop coming. I’ll never forget this: I think it was the last day of class and I was trying to teach how I believe, you know? And on the last day, there’s like 27 out of 105 people [who show up]. And I remember, janan, afterwards you were like, Are you okay? Because it kind of hurts your feelings a little bit if you let it. My feelings were hurt, but ultimately it was like we’re trying to practice this thing that you actually believe. We’re not here to compel people to do shit they don’t want to do. We’re here to try to investigate shit. And I mean, we did really cool shit in that class.
I think Rose Zinnia was also teaching in that class. All this beautiful stuff was happening in that class. I can remember sitting outside the class that you were teaching, in that terrible building, that terrible room, like a cell. But then we went outside. I remember that. I remember Rose spending half of the class or more on everyone talking about beautiful things. There was stuff with trees, looking at the clouds. So it was just all these people going hard on what it means to kind of be in a class together, but also what it means maybe to be trying to wonder about making beautiful shit together. That was big.
AMIRIO: janan, what’s your recollection of you and Ross coming together as collaborators, and what have you gained from the journey you’ve been on together?
JANAN: I think there’s a lot of different levels. I encountered Ross’s work when I was living in an A-frame in the middle of winter, in Maine, going through mid-twenties, difficult life stuff. The person whose property I lived on had a copy of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, which had just come out maybe that year.
I studied at Smith College and worked closely in the Poetry Center there. I worked with Aracelis Girmay at Hampshire, who’s a really beloved friend of Ross’s. I was entering into a net or a constellation that found me, that kind of brought me in. I feel like reading somebody’s work is collaborating with them. Loving somebody’s work, feeling like it’s singing to you in a specific way or that you need it in some way — that’s a really special collaboration. Even if it’s not this conscious act, we’re collaborators. And I think choosing to come out to Bloomington and spend time here as a student — and certainly teaching with you, Ross, and watching how you teach. You are really good at creating space for other people to learn deeply from themselves and each other without needing to be the boss or in charge. You’re really good. That’s a skill, that’s a skill.
That feels like a really important site of mentoring and connection and exchange — talking about what’s happening in the classroom. I think that same class that you visited when we were outside reading, I think we were reading collaborative love poems, which was one of the exercises I learned from you. I know that sometime during that semester, maybe after that visit, I called you on your cellphone and left a rambly voicemail about how well class went that day. A little, as my mom would say, maybe a bit much. But that feels like a really deep well of study and exchange and wonder and difficulty. I also just think about living in community and bringing each other persimmons and tomatoes — that feels like a collaboration, a way of being together.
I also think about email correspondence. There’s a trove of love letters that are going back and forth about something you’re working on, something I’m working on. You sending me that essay a few years ago because I was in a dark place; it’s an essay where you were like, Sometimes I don’t want to read something like this when I’m not feeling good. But sometimes I do. I have that essay printed out and it’s in one of those little folder things on my desk. We also had this sort of, not fixation, but we were excited about the phrase, Would that? And we kind of had this like, Oh yeah, let’s figure out something around “would that,” which might be a lifelong journey.
ROSS: I think you just remembered it!
And to bring it back to that resplendently citational thing, there’s a way that Aracelis [Girmay] — author of Green of All Heads — and also Ellen Doré Watson, who’s another poet who is important to both of us. Was she a kind of mentor to you, would you say?
JANAN: Yeah. I mean, she was the director of the Poetry Center, and I was one of the interns there for a couple years. She was also kind of a surrogate auntie. If she traveled, I would drive her to the airport and back. Or if she needed her cat to be fed up in North Conway in her beautiful little hobbit house. Have you ever been there?
ROSS: I’ve never been there.
JANAN: It’s so dreamy. I would stay at her house sometimes. We had a lot of rapport and she definitely opened the door in a way that was resplendent and capacious.
ROSS: I know her. We taught together for a few years at a low-residency program, but back then I knew her work mainly from her translations of the poet Adélia Prado. And so it keeps going, boom, boom, boom. But it does feel like when you talked about that net and that we’re all points in this net that are connected. It’s like there’s some way that our friendship doesn’t happen without Aracelis.
JANAN: And Kevin Quashie. Even people like Joan Larkin, with whom I took a workshop one semester at Smith, or Pat Rosal coming to the Poetry Center for a masterclass. It’s not like he and I worked closely together in a sustained way, but meeting him and being in a space with him sharpened my ears in this direction. Absolutely. If you’re awake to it, it’s in everything, whether writing or organizing or music, dance, cooking, whatever. There’s a million people, a million angels, that are all interwoven around you.
ROSS: Isn’t it beautiful — where you’re from or might be where people are like, Oh, are you so-and-so’s niece? I was recently in — Bobby, I don’t know if I told you this story. I was lost in Youngstown, Ohio, and I was trying to get to my Aunt Butter’s house, and I pulled up, and me and my brother were — because we have a family that’s kind of big-ish in Youngstown — under the impression that you could probably ask someone — not every single person, but maybe Black Youngstown would know our family.
Anyway, I was lost and I pulled into this driveway. I just pulled into this driveway with Black people. I pulled up and I said, Hey, I’m looking for this address. And I gave them the address and they weren’t quite sure where it was. There were two couples, and they seemed to be in their early ‘70s. And this one woman started trying to do Waze on her phone, and she didn’t know how to do it, and I wasn’t a lot of help. I was a little better than her, but I didn’t really do much better. So then eventually I said, Do you all know Percy Mae White or P Mae White? And they were thinking. I said, Butterball? And they said, Oh, she used to cut hair. Her mother had the barbershop. Yeah, that’s her. She’s 97.
So this guy who was in his seventies, when he was a little boy, had his head held by my aunt and her mother, my great-grandmother Biggie, whom I only met once, when she already had pretty advanced dementia. Biggie was also an incredible gardener. And they said, Okay, get in your car. Just follow us. They drove me there and just pointed: There she is. That’s one of those things. It’s like, Oh yeah, I know your people. Sometimes it’s how you look. And sometimes it’s like, I’m lost.
AMIRIO: As a Southerner, that’s huge. Whenever I go back down South where my mom and dad grew up, strangers are always like, You have that Freeman face. You’re definitely so-and-so’s grandchild.
KATE: I love so much of what you’ve been sharing around creative collaboration, and even as you were calling in friends of yours to the space, I felt a sense of nervous system regulation. Like Oh yeah, we’re really not alone. It was beautiful to experience that.
Amirio and I have been collaborating now for almost a decade. There’s so much that’s beautiful when we merge our creative capacities. And of course in any relationship there can be sticky and challenging moments that require negotiation and conversation. So we’re curious to know, how do you show up to sustain creative collaboration? Do you have guardrails or practices or rituals in place that you have found useful for working together?
ROSS: I can’t think of anything. We’re working on this Substack now, and I can be slow on shit, but I don’t know if we’ve had that quite. I don’t know if you’re thinking like, Oh, yes, we have!
JANAN: My experience with you, Ross, is that there’s a feeling of a lot of capacity. I don’t have any recollection of running into interpersonal difficulties together.
AMIRIO: Maybe we can dig in there: What are the conditions that make that possible? What conditions do you feel like are set either tacitly or explicitly that make your flow really natural and easy?
ROSS: I’m going to say we’re just friends. I think that’s it. It’s funny. Before we started talking, there was a question you all asked about collaboration. I was like, Oh, right. Oh yeah, we collaborate. Before you all said that I was just like, Yeah, we’re just doing shit together. It didn’t occur to me. There’s nothing formal. I think we just talk.
JANAN: I can talk a little bit about some of those conditions. I mean, you’re right, Ross. And also it is a compelling question for a lot of people because we do, in our connections with people, sometimes hurt and run into each other’s edges. And it’s not to say that you and I aren’t capable of that, we are, but when I think about the conditions that create such a friendliness and a sense of care, it’s laughing a lot and telling stories and bumping into each other and sharing books and going back to emails. Using syntax that is so kind and loving and sweet and lighthearted, which doesn’t mean that there’s not barrels and barrels trauma and grief that we all bring, but I think I feel an atmosphere of sweetness. When I write a little note to you, I don’t feel compelled to adhere to formal professional standards or conventions of language, that can be so hostile and guarded, where you don’t acknowledge that you’re a person in a body sitting by a window and it’s raining out.
I think writing is also a glue of care because we’re both describing and being precise and being vulnerable and honest as best we can in that moment. The writing and the living are connected practices of attention and care and wonder and curiosity. If you can bring that to your relationships, it’ll really help to cultivate that deep sense of trust and love as opposed to defensiveness or reactivity.
ROSS: Yeah, totally. I can think of a moment in the Substack that felt like such a beautiful moment, and you might not even remember this, but we were pulling together some ideas. And I had some idea; it was very regimented. Every week the exercise would get more challenging and there would be some structure, which was going to be a lot more work. But also, because only some of the exercises are free, only some people would be able to access them. And janan said, I’m going to kindly overrule this, or something. I could imagine in another setting where I would’ve been like uhhhhh, but I was like, I trust this person. I trust and care about this person who knows more than me about a lot of shit. Also, we’ve been around enough where I’m like, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s much better. I know that we care about the same shit. We have built — that word again — rapport. I hope you’re okay. I like your ideas. I’m curious about what you’re thinking.
AMIRIO: That resonates so much with me. I feel like in our relationship, so much of it is just being in conversation, actually hanging out, being really good friends, shooting the shit. Things just sort of happen and it feels like such a natural extension of our decade-long friendship.
KATE: Totally. I just moved closer to Amirio and it’s such a different level when you can share physical space together.
JANAN: I just wanted to share a little anecdote. Remember last year when I was reading One Long River of Song, a book I had brought home from the library? Ross was like, Can you return it to the library? That kind of intimacy of going to the same library and knowing that your friend who lives a block away has the book you want and they’re taking too long to finish.
KATE: No, I literally got to Amirio’s apartment today and immediately borrowed four books.
ROSS: We were planning an independent study with a kid here, and I was thinking, Okay, these are the books. I have these books. I think Bobby has that book. We could probably borrow them. And it wasn’t very hard for me. And that feels really sweet. That feels like sharing shit.
KATE: As we shared, one of the things we want to center with this project is that we’re always citing someone. Every written work, whether it’s a poem or an essay or a song, is truly a patchwork of other people’s love and care. So, who else do you cite in your work or your processes? And this can be an ancestor or an animal or even another artist.
ROSS: I am going to say Aracelis Girmay right now because I am thinking this new book of hers is just so astonishing. And I was thinking, we mentioned our friend Patrick Rosal as well. And, janan, I feel this way about your book and your work, too. There’s people whose work I read and I love their work. And one of the ways that I love their work is that it makes me want to make work. I don’t even know what that is. I mean, partly it feels like it’s that thing where the beautiful makes us want to make versions of it. It’s like, I want to join that song, and I’m reading this and I’m just like, Oh, things are possible that I didn’t know were possible before.
JANAN: I’ll say these are the two books in my bag, by the way: Green of All Heads — that book just came two days ago — and a copy of Door in the Mountain, which is like a compilation of Jean Valentine poems. These poems span Jean Valentine’s career from the ‘60s to the early 2000s. And I’m reading it in the morning, which feels like the time that Jean Valentine was probably writing them or feels like some space of communion. I think whoever I’m reading enters my work. I am such a — what’s the word? A crustacean note-taker. A scavenger note-taker! I’m always writing down what I love or images that I love. And I do think that I’m always citing whoever I’m reading. I really feel Jean Valentine’s spareness in some of my lines right now. And also looking through Aracelis’s book, she has this incredible poem. I think it’s called “Funeral.” She closes the poem talking about this green beetle.
It lands on her hand, I think, and then crosses over to her brother’s hand, and she understands that the beetle is their father. Somebody writes something that is an experience that you have as well. Just like that butterfly! All summer I’ve been consoling myself by understanding the butterflies who visit to be the presence of our cat who was hit by a car and killed in June. This is a long answer, but going back to what you said, Ross, even if you’re not actively writing and citing, there’s a way that what that person made possible in your imagination — and in your knowledge — it’s like a new window opened in your mind. And I think since receiving Aracelis’s book I’m thinking about her a lot and I’m writing to her in my head and I’m feeling deeply influenced, which is what citation and sampling and quoting is about.
It’s like, Wow, this incredible gift and influence of the world around me.
Gay, Ross. Inciting Joy. Algonquin Books, 2024. (132)
AWWW
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I love this so so so much.