Whew! It’s been a minute since we last checked in with you all.
Thanks for bearing with us as Kate spent the spring and early summer preparing for and embarking on a whirlwind, coast-to-coast tour to celebrate the release of Compassion in Crisis — Kate’s new book co-written with Kailea Loften that recently became an indie best-seller!
Right before Juneteenth, we got to spend some luscious time together before co-hosting a book talk and mini community fair with Bitter Kalli for the Philadelphia stop of the Compassion in Crisis tour. Surrounded by greenery, we talked about what it means to reimagine disaster preparedness outside of the archetype of the atomized doomsday prepper, toward a model of crisis response that’s community-powered and grounded in neighborism. Alongside new friends from Juntos, Indigo in Green, Fishadelphia, and the LandHealth Institute, we swapped strategies and knowledge on how to organize our communities against ICE and become more intimate with local waterways. After the event formally ended, a group of us braved the heat and walked a few blocks to a nearby restaurant, where we stuffed our faces with ramen and rice and belly-laughed for hours.
At the heart of our time together was a critical question: What are our responsibilities to each other — both human and more-than-human? We were reminded of our interdependence, of how our flourishing is mutual and enmeshed. Flash forward to now, in mid-July, and that question feels especially important following a recent microburst of storm activity that shook pockets of Philadelphia. Moments like these keep us returning to this newsletter and our broader study of citationality. We’re so glad to be back.
At the peak of summer, we’re here with our fourth conversation, featuring comedian and writer Kendall Allison and poet MaKshya Tolbert.
Now and then, you have an interview that collapses time and space; this conversation felt like that. Thanks to their tenderness, generosity, and openness, Kendall and MaKshya created space for us to share the same room. And in that room, we came back to that question of responsibility.
Kendall Allison is a comedian and writer based in Brooklyn. They perform throughout New York City and occasionally beyond. They see humor as a political and spiritual resource that helps us ease up on ourselves and each other. Their Breath-Door Show gathers comedians to joke about the absurdity of capitalism and direct energy toward cooperative economic formations in New York City. They’ve written it’s because it’s on, a newsletter about enthusiasm, since 2022.
MaKshya Tolbert practices poetry and placekeeping in Virginia, where her grandmother raised her. Her debut poetry collection, Shade is a place, meanders east–west along Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, seeking “a Black sense of place” at the pace of stressed shade and street trees, the mall’s architectural history, and the speaker’s fragile and ever-fluctuating inner life. She is currently a Fireline Fellow with the Long-Term Ecological Reflections Program (2024-2027), and is the Associate Editor in Poetry for Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE). In her free time, she is elsewhere.
In this conversation, Kendall and MaKshya share reflections on resourcing ourselves enough so that we might stay curious rather than reactive, offer their thinking on how we bridge and respond to fault lines of difference, and meditate on the porosity that humor and play create within and between us. It was such a gift to be in conversation with them both, and we hope their wisdom can be medicine for this moment. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
AMIRIO: I’d love to learn more about how the two of you first met. And I’m also curious to know, over the years that you two have known each other, what are three of the values that have ground your creative kinship?
KENDALL: We met where all great creative collaborations start (laughs) — on Bumble/Tinder. This might be an unnecessary detail, but I think MaKshya was logged out of Tinder, and I had messaged her on there. And then one of us messaged the other on Bumble in the summer of 2020, trying to date in the global pandemic, which was interesting. So we started dating in 2020 and were together for several years, and have been friends and thought partners since.
And the three values I would say are regard — we both care a lot about paying close attention — so regard, or curiosity, and repair. I think we’re both thinking a lot about what it means to have strong relationships that can hold conflict and rupture at the scale of individuals, but also at the scale of the social. And what it means to practice repair as individuals in a context where there’s so much refusal to acknowledge violence.
And hopefully this is different from regard, but I think wonder and awe would be the third value. I’m also curious what you would say.
MAKSHYA: The only thing I would add about 2020 is that pretty early on, we also had critical texts, if you will. I’m thinking about the novel Luster, for example, and how early on, intimacy and study seemed to share the tone or the pace of some of the early time we had together. I was just thinking about when we began building shared documents.
The three first things that came to mind that I wrote were “curiosity,” “sharp looking,” and “practicing on ourselves.” Maybe what keeps being dynamic is how sharp or how soft the attention is, but there’s always a really clear commitment to trying to look at ourselves, at each other, at the laughter, at the forest — just thinking about how earnest the attention is and then, the practicing on ourselves.
AMIRIO: I love how this idea of regard and attention came up in both of your responses. And I’m really curious to know what that looks like. What does it mean to develop a deep attention or observational practice with another person?
KENDALL: Part of practicing attention is being real about how much gets in the way of it, and how many directions we’re being pulled in all the time. And also how often insecurity or past experiences distort what is actually happening. In the spirit of Resplendently Citational, coming out of Ross Gay’s work, we both love his book of poems Be Holding so much; the intentional practice of beholding feels really instructive. And I think Christina Sharpe’s work also comes to mind, such as Ordinary Notes, and also her historical rigor around what is in the atmosphere at all times.
At the relational scale, can you bring curiosity? Is it possible? And a lot of times, no. Especially in moments of conflict or tension, I will shut down before I can muster the generosity to ask a question. And I think about all the ways we’re taught to vilify and punish each other. I’m like, Whoa, it actually takes a lot of stamina and breath. I think a lot about this interview adrienne maree brown did, about how deep the well within yourself has to be to engage with other people, and that phrasing haunts me. But what happens when I’m responsible for resourcing myself enough to meet others with curiosity and grace instead of reactivity?
MAKSHYA: Kendall is curating spaces for laughter and for breath for me, even before I was ready to receive them. Four or five years ago, that kind of open-heartedness was hard for me. Your actual practice and ethic around laughter was far more embodied than where I was in my own body: you were writing about breath and openness, and I was struggling with feeding myself and taking care of myself, and there was no room for laughter. The integrity of your everyday work has pushed at the edges of what I am or am not able to hold — such that there might be a year or more where, Kendall, you’re writing about breath, and I’m writing about duress.
One of the things that has always stuck with me is the real stakes of the work that either of us is doing, and what it’s like to have someone — even if it has some misadventure — really take you seriously. I’ve been trying to figure out my own fear of humor, my own fear of gathering — and watching those fears direct some of my own inquiries. I’ve also been thinking about how I contend with writing through duress and relief. And I think some of that contention was coming from watching the ways that Kendall’s practice would push mine.
There’s a question that you brought up around how deep does one’s well have to be, and I’ve been watching that play out both in our autonomous practices. I’m thinking about trying to be, on my end, in conversation in an embodied, ecological sense, knowing that I didn’t actually have the capacity or maybe stamina for the kind of engagement that I was hoping to have. Both in my own work and in our relational work, I’m basically having to be more honest about what’s getting in the way of the practice or not. And trying to take some of these questions seriously got me to figure out what’s for the writing, what’s for the relationship, and what can I actually look at honestly and what can I not.
I rely a lot on the way that our brains and hearts meet to help me stay honest about what I can actually look at and what I can’t quite take a look at, which feels important, in terms of how much my writing attempts to say that it is trying to look openly and honestly. There were times where I couldn’t, but I think you realize what you can or can’t hold often by having someone reflect back to you, and that feels very present. And generous.
AMIRIO: I’m thinking about how one’s own attunement can become sharpened by bumping up against someone else’s attunement. So I love that that’s what’s happening between you two.
KATE: I want to come back to this idea of you two developing intimacy over text. I loved what you were sharing about having this ongoing text now between you two for six years and how it builds. And so this is actually a two-part question. The first is: What books, music, practices have you exchanged over the course of your relationship? What citations have you gifted one another? And then also, MaKshya, when you were sharing about the open-heartedness, seeing that modeled and what that inspired in you, I would also love to hear from you both about if there’s a characteristic that you cite from one another, a way of being you see in each other that has inspired your own creative practices.
MAKYSHA: June Jordan came up right away to me. Watching us both reach for her and pull her toward us in some ways and watching how many years we’ve gone to her work for so many things and with such a range of stakes, whether it’s just the literal wonder or tenderness of experiencing poetics, or going there and needing something, looking for something else. But before I get too deep into June Jordan, what was your first thought?
KENDALL: Well, I was thinking when you were asking us about our early text exchange how pretty early on a friend of mine was doing a reading group in 2020 on A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. I had no business talking about that text because I still barely understand it, but I think we talked about that pretty early on. I mean, I think about Taylor Johnson’s poems and our shared love of James Baldwin. We were talking the other day actually about how rare it is to find such overlapping taste, whether it’s poetry, essays, spiritual texts. A lot of times, our feelings are hurt by the same people. June Jordan for sure. I mean, there’s so many: G.E. Patterson, Christopher Gilbert, another poet. I finally just finished Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson III, who you were reading a long time ago. Elizabeth Metzger.
MAKSHYA: It wasn’t the most convivial experience where we’re reading and smiling. I think maybe this is where the practicing on oneself comes up. I feel like we’d engage so deeply in Nothing Personal by James Baldwin, and then I’d watch us try to figure out how does what he’s writing through show up or not in my own life. I think that there was so much trying, on my end, to watch the reading and the writing and the thinking also work on us, or work on me. I’m thinking of June Jordan and her all-caps poem “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.,” and trying to work through a kind of love in the poem that feels like one is being yelled at, and trying to figure out what to do with that. I wonder, Kendall, what you think you or both of us were looking for or doing with some of the back-and-forth, because I know that it wasn’t the most leisurely engagement.
In Jordan’s “Resolution #1,003,” she writes, “I will love who loves me” and “I will hate who hates me.” It’s a very bewildering way of thinking about relationship. I think about how much of June Jordan’s work was often troubling — or G.E. Patterson’s work — troubling this question of, How responsible am I about loving people? Am I able to take the kind of look that he’s taking, or that she’s taking? I wonder if I was looking for more ways to rehearse being in relationship with you, being in relationship with myself, and watching the art that we’re engaging with just bewilder us both creatively and relationally.
KENDALL: You’re reminding me also that a shared text is James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street. I think one of the shadows of white supremacy that I hope there can be more conversation about is the way that white people think we can avoid suffering or optimize our way out of pain. There’s a way that white American imagination is like, Oh yeah, there’s a way to get through life and not experience pain and suffering. I feel like that leads to so much delusion and isolation. And for me, it’s meant, Oh, it’s hard for me to be real about what is difficult or what hurts. I don’t think it’s only a white thing, but I think it is connected to the unwillingness to be with our history. At a relational scale, it’s like it’s been harder for me to admit when something is hard or when there’s tension or when there’s difficulty.
A lot of the thinkers and writers who we both have been drawn to are modeling a kind of unflinching regard or willingness to wrestle with their own suffering, which has been a kind of godsend, for lack of a better word. It feels like a thicket we have to cut through to be with yourself, be with anyone else.
MAKSHYA: Jordan comes up again because my experience of her is that her dignity was also quite consequential. Her relationships and her professional and political life seemed to have to absorb so much consequence. And I’ve noticed that we’re not drawn to the easiest relationships. I’m thinking about watching June Jordan write through all of those love poems, most of which are breakup poems, and being like, What is that? I’m curious about finding other places to watch what entanglement also looks like, which isn’t really the way that I was thinking through what we read together or sought out.
And for Kate and Amirio, one of the poems that Kendall and I have made contact with a lot is G.E Patterson’s “The Responsibility of Love.” I’m just moved by this question of, What do we need from that piece? And then curious, Kendall, what you think about the traits we value in each other. Is that how you said it, Kate?
KATE: Exactly. The trait that you see in one another that’s inspired your practice.
KENDALL: I have a tie. One is, I feel like MaKshya has a sheer friendliness. People often will describe you as “the mayor.” You’re talking to people, you’re asking a question, you’re striking up a conversation, and that feels kind of like a life-teeming or just a very friendly, open stance to the beings around us at any given time, human or non-human. And the other one, which has informed my life more — it’s hard to know where the life ends and where the creative focus begins — but it’s a deep responsibility, meaning I feel like they can uniquely hear through all the excuses we’re all making at any given time and hear desire versus cop-outs in the way that people talk. And that has made me want to be more rigorous in how I express myself.
Am I doing what I want to be doing or not? And how do I close the gap between just doing what’s easy or convenient and doing what actually matters to me? I feel like I can’t pull one over on you, which, I mean, part of that comes from just having a close relationship, but there’s you being more sensitive to disingenuousness. Does that make sense? It’s not a one-word trait necessarily, but maybe “bullshit detector” or something. (laughs) But not to be ruthless, but in the name of, No, actually how we direct our time and attention, our life actually depends on that drama. Those are my two.
MAKSHYA: I’ve made this comment to you so many times, Kendall, and I don’t know if you always know what I mean by it, but I have always said that I learned from you how to actually practice and how to be rigorous and serious about what it takes. I think five years ago was the first time when we were doing The Artist’s Way together, and there was a practice in it that I couldn’t do. And Kendall did it. And five years ago, I wasn’t like, Oh wow, this is really moving. How do I let this be a lesson? I was like, Why are they doing this and not me? I had a much more reactive stance to it.
I think that’s because it’s because it’s on and the shows that you do and the pace that you’re at demonstrate what it’s like to actually commit to putting aside — this sounds stern — the distractions. At least for the time that it takes to — If I’m not going to read for a week, I’m not going to read for a week. And letting there be the imagination that you can go a week doing this experiment with yourself. And I think I’m serious, but I’m not that disciplined. It takes a lot for me to actually do what I say I will do and practice. And so having someone who I can watch actually be able to get up and do the thing is critical.
Kendall’s sleeping and I’m reading Rest is Resistance and thinking about sleeping. It’s been moving to watch you embody the work — as someone who spent years not taking care of myself yet hoping to embody the work, too. It’s been important to have you reflect back to me the capacity to live in my body, be able to get up and do the pages, or get up and have an inquiry and actually follow it. I’m much more inclined to sit and think and pray that things come together.
AMIRIO: Something coming up for me that I’m hearing is that you both have such a dedication and commitment to doing “hard” work and having hard conversations, which I think is so special and something that I don’t hear about too often. And I feel like one thing I appreciate about you, Kendall, is that you have such a deep regard around what does it mean to be a white person in certain spaces at this time. I’m now thinking about the hard work of having regard for difference, which is so critical to really embody this idea of citationality.
When I think about me and Kate’s relationship, there’s been so much back-and-forth and friendship and creativity — which has all been happening across fault lines of race, gender, sexual orientation. I’m wondering how that shows up for the two of you. How do you approach that work in the spirit of embodying citationality, of regarding difference between you two? So often, there’s a rhetoric of either you ignore difference or you allow difference to be isolating and alienating, but I feel like there’s a completely different alternative regarding difference.
However you want to take that, I wonder what that looks like for the two of you and how you approach difference and having a reverence for it and seeing what can come out of it.
MAKSHYA: The thing that comes up right away is that, especially because I’ve had to repair what it means to attend to anybody, coming out of grad school, which was regressive for me — learning how to be part of a writing machine and then trying to come home and watch myself bring that home. But I was just thinking about the time — because Kendall’s in Brooklyn and I’m in Virginia — I was thinking about what it’s meant for me to send you something, or you to send me something, and to really be able to sit with it. Long enough to hear what Kendall is trying to do, having enough time to actually engage with each other, which feels really different from the kind of professional and social writing that I’ve been doing, where we’re trying to do so much in so little time.
You know that I have taken things like one of Kendall’s poems: I’ve spent last year and even this season, when I’m at Monticello, will just fold it up and take it up there with me. I might still be trying to practice some aspiration that might be in your work, or might be trying to find the words still to say something about the work. But because we’re not in the same place, I get to take your thinking with me and get to think about something you said. And I feel like there’s a feedback loop or some circulation that I really need the space and time for.
KENDALL: Ecologically, I think about what biodiversity does for protection from diseases. So, I think about difference in that sense. But also, in conversations about difference, if we’re really just talking about racism, just say that, number one. Number two, we’re often talking about people’s experiences without talking about power. It feels generative when normally invisible or avoided dynamics and relationships can be part of a conversation about difference.
Something that feels tricky is that I resonate with a lot of Black artists and thinkers, and there’s always the specter of extraction, and, Well, how do I take this stuff to make myself a better person? There is sincere resonance, and then there’s also the shadow of, Oh, I’m just going to take this and use it for my own purposes, and all the historical dynamics are there. I’m drawn toward people who are fusing many different perspectives, whether it’s across discipline or across identity or across location. And I think there’s no how-to, necessarily; it’s a willingness to be uncomfortable and be pushed and have your palms be sweating. And okay, you’re probably going to say something tone-deaf and stupid, but hopefully you’ll wake up the next morning and try again.
MAKSHYA: That difference, that tension, is a sign of wanting different things. And Kendall knows this, it’s so core to our relationship, but to need to touch or acknowledge that you want something, at all, let alone something different…and so I think there’s a real commitment between us, even if it didn’t start on purpose, to being like, What is it that you want? What is it that you want from me? Tell me. Or being asked, What is it that you want from the poem? I think it’s crucial that I take responsibility for my own desires and am responsible or as caring as I can be with yours; without them being there, I don’t really know what to talk about.
And so I’m drawn to the difference because I don’t think anything’s wrong with it. And actually, half of what I spend my time doing is probably arguing that it’s okay. I don’t want what you want.
There aren’t that many relationships that are safe enough, I think, for the kind of back-and-forth that I’m talking about. And half of the time, I’m not helping. And I think I’ve learned about not trying to resolve the difference and just trying to figure out how to be as open-hearted and present as I can, and having a relationship where I get to practice that.
KATE: I love and appreciate you both bringing the value of asking such a direct question: What is it you want from the work, from each other? I’m also appreciating the reminder that none of this creative practice relationship-building is a checklist; it’s felt and it’s emergent, and it’s something that we’re practicing together. Throughout this conversation, it’s been so beautiful to hear you two talk about rigor in your work — and both of you have such a gift for play, too, whether it’s playing with words in a poem or creating spaces for people to laugh. In terms of a closing question, we’d really love to hear how play informs your relationship and what ways it shows up both in your creative practice and in how you work together.
KENDALL: I want to add onto the last question: humor is so important because, God damn, I feel like so many of these conversations are just so heartbreaking and difficult. And also when I’m taking myself way too seriously, it’s like, Okay, well, now all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room and it feels like the end of the world. How do I, I don’t know, keep air within reach or something?
I want to shout out Morgan Bassichis — I know you interviewed them recently — who said this really amazing thing about balancing. If they’re thinking about their work as an instrument, the string being taut between reverence and irreverence and balancing those two pieces — if you have too much of one or the other, it doesn’t work. That is a balance I aspire to.
I feel so amazed by humor and dependent on it — hopefully not in a toxic way. But there’ve been so many times when I felt just so down bad, and humor has the force behind it that can cut through a mood or knock me off balance in a way that I need. I feel like laughter offers such a profound, embodied relief. It’s a literal pushing out of whatever was in there before. (laughs) Sometimes it feels almost inappropriate, given the times that we’re living in, to be like, Actually it matters to have fun. It can feel like toxic positivity or something. But I’m like, No, it really has to be fun. Especially with repair work or change work or “trying to imagine how we survive” work. If it’s not fun, people won’t stay in it. And also it just feels like a way to not put too much pressure on things.
If you can stick the landing and it’s funny, that feels like a much more potent form of communication than like, Okay, read this 20-page document and we’re going to have a meeting and there’s not going to be any food there and everyone has to wear a suit. We need ways of being together that have humor in them.
Also, there are two things that I want to cite, and then I’ll stop talking. One is that MaKshya’s collaborator and friend, brontë velez, talks about how humor and laughter collapse the finite and the infinite, which I really love and think about. And I feel like there’s a way that humor can accommodate paradox, because it is so much about truth.
The other thing I want to cite is this book that I found about how to use humor in business, written by this humor coach and neuroscientist. In it, the author talks about how when people were shown a funny thing before they were asked to solve a puzzle, they were way better at solving it. So I think that humor offers a kind of ease and relaxation that actually lets our natural brilliance come online more, or it can help soften fear in a way that brings more of us to the fold. And it just feels better. Not that everything has to feel better, but it feels good.
MAKSHYA: I’ve never been good at taking a joke. You know that, Kendall. So honestly, for me, one of the things that is happening is that I have had a delayed relationship with play. I didn’t really get it, to be honest. I truly, five years ago, was like, People are not serious. And so, taking more responsibility for my own fear has been important, because I think that’s what gets in the way of play and of humor for me. I’ve asked myself, What am I afraid of? Do I think they’re going to trick me? Do I think they’re trying to manipulate me? Do I think people can’t touch what’s underneath? Can I? I don’t know what hill I was dying on, but I think some of what our relationship has opened up in me is being like, Whoa, I want to be part of that. I want to be part of the levity. I want to laugh.
And also, I want to do it on my terms. I don’t sometimes seem to want to do it the way that people are inviting me into. I even think about you having your jokes and being part of a public, whether virtual or in person, and me practicing very quietly, being like, Maybe I can juggle. Watching you do something more openly and then trying to see if I could laugh a little, smile a little, joke a little — but alone. I was learning how to play by watching you do it somewhere else or with other people and being like, Maybe I’ll go over there soon. And also we had hundreds of miles of physical distance between us. I think that Kendall’s relationship to laughter is one that I had to first be sad about. I was like, Wait, if that’s possible, that means that there’s something I’m missing or something that I’m not really talking about.
That’s all very much ongoing for me. Watching myself write a book about duress and being afraid to do something different than that, but trying anyway — even if it’s not in the public realm…I’ve thought to myself, How can it’s because it’s on and how can our relationship just keep pushing me to not have the need for the armor, not have the guardedness that I used to think was virtuous. Kendall shakes that up a lot. So now I’m more able than I was before, and I think that might just be the pace.
