Gay ross

I could talk about the writer Rebecca Solnit.

Inscape: Oh! I’ve been working on it on and off for the last few years, but I kind of have a form set up for it, so I’m excited about that. My friend Patrick Rossell, a beautiful poet, talks about the local a lot. And if they don’t belong to me, then couldn’t they belong to everyone before me and after me?

RG: Exactly.

I can’t remember. He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin’, and an editor of the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press.

Gay’s honors include fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 

Gay served as the Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day in October 2018.

In 2022 she was awarded the Sandra Hutchins Humanities Symposium Writing award for her poem “Ripple.” She currently studies Songwriting and English at Belmont University. I find it’s easier that way, to separate myself from making it the “right” way. How did you develop your voice, and do you feel, based on our earlier discussion, that you are unbecoming something you were made to be, or do you feel like you’re discovering who you were meant to be?

RG: I definitely feel like every good bout of the thinking that is “writing,” is a process of unbecoming.

I worked on it, I worked on it, I put a lot of hours in, da-da-da-da,but it would take me about, oh, ten minutes to come up with a hundred things completely outside my control that were done on my behalf, in order for the amazing thing to happen. Some of those things might be like the sun shone. Writing can hold our unbecoming.

Can you talk a little bit about that and if that is also a part of your spiritual practice, a part of your writing practice, both?

RG: Yeah, it’s so neat that those Buddhist teachers would surely have been places where I would have been encouraged to think hard about coming to terms with impermanence, you know, to really think about it.

…I think love is everlasting.

RG: Yeah, that seems right.

Inscape: Maybe it’s the only thing that is.

RG: You’re right. In the midst of writing that is where I discovered that in my writing I’m actually the one writing and reading what I’m writing at the same time, so, you know, that’s been fun. I think of it like a bell telling you, it’s the orchard that might help you stay alive even.

So, my aspiration is a kind of unbecoming into something I can’t imagine. That doesn’t feel simple. And the thing about gratitude, I think, is that in acknowledging that, whatever you call it, the sort of ongoing, ever-changing, ever-replenishing oceans of care, it inclines us to join the care. Like a lot of people, I have been told, and have kind of believed in, making a thing that lasts forever as an aspiration.

I think we feel this because you’re allowing us to witness change.

I no longer want to wait sorrow out before feeling joy.

RG: That’s Beautiful.

Inscape: Is that a learned practice? It’s also useful to remember, as we’re having strong feelings about this stuff, that when we read those magazines we’re aspiring to get into, we don’t like everything or even half of what’s in them. I even want the future.” At the same time, I like to plant trees in part because I like the idea that trees will be around for a long time.

Whatever.