Culture

Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, and Emerson Whitney Are Ready for Rebellion


—Brontez Purnell

Brontez Purnell: How is everyone doing?

Ocean Vuong: I just feel really sad. I’m still in the impact of everything and still trying to get up off the floor, metaphorically, not physically. I don’t have any organized thoughts around it, but I’m very sad.

Danez Smith: Personally, I’m not well. It’s a balance between being encouraged and hopeful and moved by what is going on amongst the citizens in Minneapolis, where I live and I’m from. Some of the best shit I’ve seen as a human is just the way people have shown up for each other. But we’re depleted. Folks are sleep-deprived. The nights here are weird. Not trusting silence, mistrusting every sound, folks are starting to look at each other in different ways. I won’t pretend like everybody in the city is on the same side. And while you love seeing everyone showing up for each other, it’s difficult to be out there every day demanding justice, knowing how hard it comes, how hard it is to ungrip it from the hands of those who think they control it.

Emerson Whitney: I’m just so appreciative to hear from you both, Ocean and Danez. As I’m listening, I feel both slow and frenzied. I’m pacing around in a large circle and I can’t seem to slow my body or my mind. There’s so much work to do. It’s endless, and I am open to the work. I am available to the work.

Brontez Purnell: I guess I should just chime in really quick. On my end, I was looting Target because I needed a duvet cover, but they didn’t have any I liked, so I just took a microwave. And the microwave is silver and so fucking ugly. So I think once Target opens up, I’m going to try to return it. And that’s literally the most I can do with any of it. So, now I want to ask a super broad, vague, and loaded question about process, and I want you to entertain me anyway. So, as near as you can calculate, where is that place from which you write?

Danez Smith: I think Ocean actually helped me out a lot with this. One time we were talking about that unknown, automatic self and how to access that more quickly and authentically, so that we’re not making premeditated art, but rather really trying to live in that space of surprise and of divinity. Like, being able to merge that surprise-self that is a channel with the actual-self that is living and experiencing. And I find that over time and over time and over time again… Oh my God, why is the Army walking down my street right now?

[Pause]

Danez Smith: They are literally driving tanks down my street in the middle of the day. Wow. And that’s the US Army, not the National Guard. Why do they have fucking AKs? Here’s a fucking poem right here marching up under my fucking window right now. I’m sorry — I’m going to call you back.

[The roundtable participants break. After 10 minutes, the conversation resumes.]

Brontez Purnell: Do we want to continue with a new question, or do we want to circle back to that question?

Danez Smith: I want to circle back to it because, for me, that was the fucking work. That moment of the surrealness of reality is what I learned from Ocean: getting that unknown automatic mystical-self to align with the real-self that sees and experiences the world, and to have those two selves collaborate. The process is how to tie reality and the surreality of the army walking down your street.

Brontez Purnell: Everything exists in such tight clips and bites these days that longform writing can seem archaic. What keeps you here? Why books?

Ocean Vuong: I think the short form is a condition of technology, as is a lot of our social condition. But we still hunger for an immersive experience. I think people come to books now more as a refuge from this barrage of the interception, the scrolling, the radio waves, constantly bombarded with horror. This is how media works: they gain clicks through fear. They get into our primal fight-or-flight emotions. The more our heart rate goes up, the more we participate in it. At some point, we have to relieve ourselves, we have to calm ourselves. Opening a book and having the privilege of a deep hour or two to spend with your own life, the way you’ve chosen it, is a refuge.



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