Ross Gay Reminds us that the World Deserves Humanity

I first read The Book of Delights by Ross Gay during a rather grim time in my life. It seemed I couldn’t find joy in the things I once did: a ripe tomato on a hot summer day, the way a baby stares at you like they have never seen a “you” before, the way a candle flickers at the end of its wax. I was surprised by the journey to explore the delights of each and every day, a journey we all have so much to learn from. Before The Book of Delights, I was introduced to Gay in my high school poetry classroom. We read “The Bullet in its Hunger,” a beautiful poem that starts with “the bullet, it its hunger, craves the womb of the body. The warm thrum there.”  I remember sitting in that classroom twirling my pencil, mesmerized by Gay’s ability to humanize the bullet, the object that has caused so much pain - by humanizing the bullet we begin to ask questions that remind us that all pain, all violence start somewhere, somewhere deeper than what we know. The ability to humanize is the real magic found in Gay’s works - he shared many with us during his reading. “Coco Baby” or “An Abundance of Public Toilets” show us the beauty in being human, beauty in our everyday routine. That even when placing lotion on our bodies or searching for a place to pee, there is something to be said, something to delight in.

Gay was beyond gracious with his time. Before he began reading, he said, “If you want to wait on people, I’m patient.” He gave us backstory when it was needed and read intimate pieces without hesitation. He went on to say “The writing I want to do is the 'oh I can’t do that!' kind of writing.” And he reminded us of his belief in “inspiration.” Gay embodies the “I can’t do that kind of writing.” He makes topics like delight, that could so easily be cliché, anything but. He shows us joy in the real, and pain in the joy, and always stays away from the superficial, the joy we hear about but can’t access. A favorite of mine is “Feet.” When I was done reading, I turned to my own ugly toes and saw that even they have been lost. Even they have a story to tell. 

Ross Gay reminds us about the need for humanity in our world. That even the strangest or most difficult of times have something to offer us. He never disguises the pain in these moments but tells us in a way that reminds us it’s good to see the good. To value our friends, our families, our communities. To live in a world of togetherness. A world where I remember the delight in a tomato warmed by the sun.



Mary Feimi is a current MFA student at Florida Atlantic University. She is the winner of the 2019 Amy Wainright Award for Poetry. She was the previous poetry editor for the University of North Florida’s literary magazine The Talon Review. In her free time, she enjoys spending time outdoors with her dog, reading, and cooking. 

 

Writing in Coldfoot, Alaska

I write in Coldfoot’s TV room. I sit on a seat that belongs in a tour van. Sometimes I strap the seat-belt over my waist and pretend I’m a passenger. Coworkers enter and ask why I do this. 

"Better safe than sorry," I might say.

“I am heading north,” I might say.

When sports are on, the TV room fills up quickly. Somebody drills a white board to the wall. The daily spreads are written in erasable blue marker. Coworkers cheer and lose cash and I go to the camp office, above the restaurant, in a chair with rusty springs and unhinged armrests that dangle at the sides. There, you can hear John Prine playing in the kitchen, or Mac Miller, or Earth Wind and Fire, or the breakfast cook belching--the Hobart kneading bun dough. You can hear the morning host, Duffy, tell pipeline workers he’s going to buy a truck soon, and that when he does, he’s not doing jackshit for a while.

You hear Dalton Highway truckers at the trucker table. They talk engine failure in onomatopoeia. They eat biscuits and gravy with scrambled eggs mixed in. They work each other up over George Soros funding Antifa, about nose swabs in Prudhoe—about everything coming to an end. 

Coworkers sit in the office also. They check email, browse the web, talk to one another. They look at things they hope to buy. Will Kuruz wants a printing press, but “shipping is mad expensive.”  Rebecca needs an apartment in town because she’s “over kitchen work.” Duffy needs insulin, but nobody delivers, so he has to go to town. 

‘I have to go to town,’ he’ll sometimes say to me.

‘Yeah?’

‘I gotta get insulin.’

‘Dang.’

‘I gotta get a truck, too.”

I write in the Coldfoot library. I sit in a purple chair beside the book shelves, surrounded by Christmas lights, coworker artwork, various decks of cards, and framed drawings of the mountain Sukakpak. Will’s master prints are hung up too--detailed collages of vans lit on fire, men with grocery bags over their head, people in banana suits, and frogs—lots of frogs. Sometimes I write from a giant bean bag chair beneath a bobbing, glittery, star mobile. Coworkers in Carhart overalls and bunny boots pass to get to tent village. At night they gather here and drink whiskey and spill their guts. I do this too, but not when I’m writing. When I’m writing I don’t say anything. I probably have a mean look on my face. But I’m not mad.

I write in a bathroom that has never had running water. It’s a small space, historic for past co-worker productivity. One once taught English to Chinese kids for a winter. Another wrote a poetry collection that got published. Another got her masters. Me, I sit on the toilet seat until my legs are tingly, and the walls seem to be tipping over. The shower has blue stains that orbit the drain. Before I leave, I always flush, and check myself in the mirror, and wonder if I'm handsome. 

Sometimes, when cooking crew specials, I write haikus on the back of a server’s pad, or, when nobody’s looking, I post rhymes on the camp white board. In the summer, I go to an abandoned bus in the boneyard, and lie on an old raggedy mattress. I write in a spiral notebook the thoughts I have. If the mosquitoes are bad I lock myself in the driver seat of a broken down tundra tank. When it gets too hot I go to Big Tent, where there’s a stove and a homemade craps table. I sit on an old, dusty recliner and write amid the smell of campfire.

A lot of times I write leaning against my bedroom wall. It's wood-paneled and flimsy. I often hear Duffy groan in his sleep, or struggle to get up in the morning. Imagine a king sized bed and a skinny wall down the middle. That’s Duffy and me sleeping. 

I write propped up on pillows, or old brown blankets, or dirty clothes. Green LED lights snake around my ceiling border. I can change the color with a remote. I can make them blink, or fade in and out. 

Outside in the hall doors open and shut. Coworkers walk to the bathroom or the exit, or another room. I know who they are by their footsteps, by thud on the carpet and the space between each step. I know who is at the door before they arrive. 

Sometimes I’m up really late, or really early, and I can write anywhere I want. I might grab a coffee from the restaurant and take it up to the office before the pipeline rush. Or head to the broken bathroom and pretend I am the only person alive. Maybe it’s winter and the Aurora is out. Maybe it’s summer and breezy. And so I don’t write. Instead I go outside and do things there. Like hike up a mountain, or fall into a creek, or sit somewhere with a coworker, talking. I suppose writing in Coldfoot is like writing anywhere else, so long as you are writing. 

Jacob Hibbard is a writer, cook, and MFA candidate at FAU. He currently lives in Coldfoot, Alaska. 

Breaking Form

Last fall, I wrote an essay entitled “25 Fragments.” In short, it’s 25 micro-essays that consolidated to a larger narrative, based on my tumultuous relationship with mental health and SSRI medications. Although this will sound impossible from the synopsis I just gave, I enjoyed writing it.

I got the idea for the essay after we read, and I presented on, 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso in Dr. Schmitt’s creative nonfiction workshop. To that point in my career I’d mostly read and written essays using a traditional time progression and form. However, after years of doing this, I was bored and I felt welcomed by the community of the classroom to try something new, to possibly fail, so I went for it. Specifically, I wrote the “fragments” in no particular order, printed them out, cut them up, and laid them flat on my floor. I spent hours, days, weeks—forever— positioning and repositioning them while my cats continually attempted to ruin the whole process by stepping and sleeping on them. The physicality of printing out and placing the piece gave me a deeper understanding of craft, why I write, and why I needed to write this essay. Specifically, seeing all of my bouts with mental health in fragments allowed me to push the narrative outward, to a greater meaning than just myself, something I said was my goal when starting the MFA. Because it was so different from anything I’d done, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go over, but in workshop Dr. Schmitt and my peers encouraged me to revise and submit. And, if anyone knows my writing better than me, it’s my workshop peers. So, I revised it a few more times and sent it out.

Months later, after the holidays and AWP and the start of pandemic and the completion of the spring semester, I felt stuck in everything and I was in the middle of a mid-day nap, waiting for the world to end or to get going again, when I got an email from The Southampton Review telling me the essay had won their annual nonfiction contest. I was surprised, because it had been rejected fourteen times before this. I immediately got up, emailed them back, and then started on the next essay in my collection.

Professor Bucak emailed me as soon as the award was announced. She suggested I use some of the money to buy something, an object, something responsible but tangible, she said, that could embody the accomplishment. I still haven’t gotten around to doing this, but I thought about it a few weeks ago when I was in a Zoom meeting with Dr. McKay and she asked about the paintings of two ravens behind my head. I told her that the art was my partners and that I didn’t know anything about it. However, what I didn’t tell her is that nothing in my home belongs to me, it’s all his, because the same mental health issues I wrote about in the essay have caused me to throw away all of my things too many times; that I have lived so many lives unrecognizable to this one; that I have been so many different people; that everything has felt like multiple fragments until this very moment.

As I wrote this, emails poured in from my undergraduate students, my thesis advisor, and seemingly everyone else. However, I can currently hear parrots chirping in the tree outside the window behind my laptop, and I can see lizards slinking around the branches, and can feel my anxiety rise over the amount of time I’ve spent on this instead of my thesis, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to use some of the contest money to buy something, anything, I can look at that will remind me of my time here. I’m not sure what I’ll do, or where I will go, but I know I want to carry some part of my experience at FAU forward.

Matthew Hawkins is a queer writer from West Virginia, Ohio, and Chicago. He is currently an MFA candidate at Florida Atlantic University and the Co-EIC of Alien Magazine. Recent work of his is featured or forthcoming in Fugue, The Normal School, and The Southampton Review. You can find him on Twitter: @catdad667.