Interview With Ross Gay
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His new poem, Be Holding, was released from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September of 2020. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019.
Ross is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook "Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens," in addition to being co-author, with Rosechard Wehrenberg, of the chapbook, "River." He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin', in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He also works on The Tenderness Project with Shayla Lawson and Essence London. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.
Terry Horstman grew up in Minneapolis and is the all-time lowest scoring basketball player in the history of Minnesota high school hoops. His work has been published or forthcoming from HeadFake, Flagrant Magazine, The McNeese Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, A Wolf Among Wolves, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Hamline University and the executive editor of the Under Review. He is currently at work on his debut essay collection, which is shockingly about basketball. He lives and writes in Northeast Minneapolis. This interview was conducted virtually and originally aired as a podcast episode of Under Review Radio. It has been edited for publication. To listen to the entire interview check out the episode HERE.
Terry Horstman: Ross, thank you so much for doing this. We met briefly at your last reading at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, which feels like a million years ago at this point, but it's so good to talk with you again.
Ross Gay: Of course. Thank you for having me.
TH: Obviously, this is an interview in an issue and a podcast of a sports-themed literary journal and I've read much of your work that touches on sports and games and play and movement. So I just want to begin by asking you what roles did writing and also sports play in your childhood? Was there a moment when it dawned on you that these two passions were two passions that can be in conversation with each other?
RG: When I was little, I had nothing to do with writing. School was easy for me until I was probably 12 or 13 and then there was some moment in school where it was a click... I can't remember exactly when it was. Probably many things were going on. Some of it was probably actually my body changing and hormonal. I don't know, stuff happened at home. But there were moments in my relationship to school, and I still hold onto these moments, that I realized if people were telling me to do shit but they weren't explaining why I should want to learn a thing or do a thing, it did not convince me to do the thing or to have any interest in the thing.
So I can remember right at a certain point around that seventh, eighth grade when I had to start thinking a little bit in school in a different kind of way. It was easy for me, some of it, back in the day. But then I just started to be like, "Ah, I don't care." So it was also probably like fifth, six, seventh grade, around that same transition. That was maybe one of the heights of my reading life as a kid. I was reading Power Man and Iron Fist comic books. I liked comics. I think they came out weekly, but they could have come out monthly. I can't remember. But I collected them all.
When I turned around 12, 13, I got deep into skateboarding. So I was reading Thrasher Magazine and TransWorld Magazine pretty religiously. It's so fun to answer these questions because they [memories] always become fuller. The more you think of them, the fuller they become. But I wasn't reading what you would think. I wasn't reading books and I had no sort of interest in the idea of being a writer.
I was a sports guy. I wanted to be a professional football player. So I played basketball and football through high school. Then I played football in college and had designs on trying to figure out how to play pro football. After I graduated from college, I had what felt like an unsatisfactory college football career which is like 10,000 stories. Now that I'm twenty-five years past it, I'm like, "Ah, man, you're just working through stuff. Just working through stuff." But anyway, how did your question go? Did you say the sort of intersection of the two?
TH: Yeah. I actually can skip ahead a little bit, because I was going to touch on your career as a collegiate football player. I read in a previous interview that you did, that it was about sophomore year of college or so that you started discovering poetry or considering poetry. So, was Ross the football player and Ross the poet in conversation with each other right away, and what was the experience like of discovering that you were going to walk away from football dreams and pursue writing?
RG: That's right. I mean, the way that I think of it, and again, it's always more complicated, but one of the ways that I think of it is that in my second year of college, in a survey of 20th century American poetry class maybe, the professor, David Johnson, must have been able to tell I wasn't engaged at all. He assigned me a presentation on the poet Amiri Baraka. I mean, I was doing nothing in school. I mean, I was writing papers for other people, but I was doing nothing. I was doing nothing on my own behalf for school. I was just so blown away by this poet and there was a poem in particular, it's called An Agony. As Now.
There are many things that have meant so much to me about Baraka. Among them, his changes through his life. That he's just a writer who just changes, a writer and thinker and person who lets us watch him change. But he also is articulating a kind of relationship to [rage].
I went to college and it was like...a ton of money. It was free for me because I played football, but I'd never been around a bunch of people who had money like that. I'd never been around a bunch of people who all drove nice cars, that kind of thing. The football players at that place were, by and large, the poor kids on campus and all the black males on campus were football players and there were a few basketball players.
So there were all of these things that I was encountering that we were just making me full of rage. A really sort of not quite articulate rage, complicated rage that this poem to some extent sort of helped me with. It was the kind of rage that was percolating my whole life. But it was a little bit boiling over.
An Agony is Now is a kind of amazing poem. It's a dense, complicated poem. It's still profoundly mysterious to me. I feel like I'll read that poem for the rest of my life and it'll keep changing meanings to me. But then a poem like that would be the thing to turn on the engine of a kid and be like, "Oh, I want to try to do what he's doing it."
TH: I love that you're able to zero in on that moment. You mentioned the click earlier and maybe that wasn't a night and day difference, but I love that you're able to select one piece that pinpoints the moment where something changed in your mind and you were able to consider poetry.
I have to talk to you about another person who's had a lot of influence on you, one of the many subjects of your latest book Be Holding. That is, Dr. Jay Julius Erving. There’s so much I love about that book, but I also love that it starts with that quick note at the beginning, directed to readers of a particular age who may not know who Dr. Jay is. What role did Dr. Jay's status as a hero of your childhood play in your approach to this poem and is one of the intentions of the poem to preserve that superhero childhood-like awe that's really only possible to attach to sports figures or heroes when we are of that certain impressionable age?
RG: I love that question. Yeah. It's an interesting thing because I think the poem at the beginning really, I think, introduces us to this way of thinking, you know you're with someone who's a basketball guy because my favorite line in the poem might be, "Yo, remember Shawn Kemp?"
TH: Yes. I love that line so much.
RG: So it's sort of like a deep student and a door to the game. It's funny, though, because that kind of familiarity and that kind of parlance and that kind of ease with the thing, with the subject, I think that feels to me like the kind of, that, "Yo, remember Shawn Kemp," that's a little bit superhero-y. You know?
But it's funny because Dr. Jay, though he was a kind of super heroic figure in a certain way when I was a kid. I was born in 1974 and was coming to consciousness about things, say in like 1980, We moved to the Philadelphia area in '79. Then in '80, '81 I think they (76ers) went to the finals. I was aware. My dad was a basketball guy, so I was aware of Doc, very aware. I probably had a Dr. J t-shirt. Any kid would. It was just like that. It is not too much at all to say that he was very much like Michael Jordan would be later, though there was not the machinery of proliferating images in the way that Michael Jordan came up with. But he would be in commercials, those Converse commercials and Spalding commercials.
TH: Right.
RG: He was around and he was on. We watched basketball and so I got to see Dr. J and I have to say, if you watched any game that Dr. J plays in, it's funny. You can go watch any game. He will do three or four things that are like, "That's not right."
[Laughter]
TH: Yep.
RG: Yeah. It's just the way it is. Now you see Ja Morant, I've been looking at his highlights. It's a little bit like, "Man, that's not regular." Or a lot of these folks, but he was, it was weird. So to come up as a little kid, and to see this person as a magician on the court, there was a way that he holds, or held that kind of place in my brain. That being said, in the poem, I feel like he's not at all super-heroic. I feel like he's doing a move that is an actual impossibility.
He's doing something that's an actual impossibility, but the way the poem approaches his particular moment of impossible flight and impossible genius and visioning, it's something other than super-heroic. There's some way that, and I don't know, it's funny, the question is such a great question because it makes me think. Even when doing whatever you call it (promotion) for the book, people were like, it’s a “tribute to Dr. J," and I'm like, "Er, it's not a tribute to Dr. J."
It's a study. It's a study of this one move that he did. It's a study of this. Then it goes into his background a little bit, but really, to me, it's a study of this impossible move that Dr. J did. Like I said, people don't write books where an image of a basketball player is floating around throughout as a central guide of meditation. So, of course, I understand it, the feeling is like, wait a second, you're telling me this is not a book about Dr. J?
TH: Right.
RG: But to me, I'm like, it's not actually a book about Dr. J, although I'm looking so closely because Dr. J in a way is a guide through the book. We’re looking at this move as a guide.
TH: In this move, the “victim” of Dr. J’s impossible flight was/is Mark Landsberger, who you handle so well, so gently. It’s almost an ode or a tribute. Because today the culture of basketball suggests that when someone gets dunked on or embarrassed, we're not very gentle or expressing admiration to those people. I mean, whenever I see someone get dunked on, I'm like, "At least he tried."
RG: Totally.
TH: "And didn't just get out of the way." I love how it keeps coming back to Landsberger and how he did all of the correct things that a good defender would do and it still didn't matter.
RG: Totally. He did it all. He was totally admirable. There's also this thing that I keep doing, Because this is a poem that's thinking hard about America and race and all this stuff. Don't reduce Landsberger. This is about two dudes playing basketball. That's what this is. Landsburger is not an allegory, he is a dude, a six foot nine inch dude, trying his best, you know.
TH: Speaking of this being a study of Dr. J's move and him serving as the guide, are there any other iconic plays either from childhood or just elsewhere in sports that may inspire a book length poem slash study out of you?
RG: Yeah. Great question. You can tell from the book, I'm a big Iverson guy. I love Allen Iverson. Not everyone could tell from the book, but you probably can. I could easily see a book length study of him. Actually, speaking of Shawn Kemp, if you ever are like me and want to watch Shawn Kemp's hundred best dunks.
TH: I always want to watch Shawn Kemp’s best dunks.
RG: There's one where it's so neat. This guy was such a beautiful ball player and he dunked so hard on this dude and the dude falls and gets up immediately and they immediately dap each other up.
The dude's like, "Damn! Good move." And Kemp's like, "Man, thanks." And it's just this moment of such tenderness actually. It's the elevated moment where, to me, it's basketball. The beautiful move is made extra beautiful by the good contention, by the good defense. And this dude contended well but Shawn Kemp was just a little higher and it worked out for Shawn Kemp and they both bounced up together and almost embraced as a way of being like, "We just did that."
"We did that. I just made your thing more beautiful," and he's like, "Yo man, you just made my thing more beautiful."
TH: Anyone who's read interviews or is familiar with their work knows you mention tenderness and write about tenderness in moments that are either directly about sports or adjacent to sports. We’re talking about this right now with Kemp, but what is it about just the act of sports and competition and playing that make it such an effective storytelling medium for acts of tenderness?
RG: It's a great question. I feel like there's probably many reasons for that. I'm writing about this quite a bit right now. I'm writing a little bit about playing college football and how so often the tenderness was born of a training in against-ness. So often you had to make an enemy and the enemy (for me then) might be Holy Cross or the enemy might be Bucknell or Army.
And from that against-ness was grown this togetherness that sometimes looks like tenderness. For me, I want to raise the question of like, is it tenderness when it's born of against-ness? And so often also that capacity for tenderness is this thing, this enemy in say football. Where I grew up or how I grew up learning football, which is also to say learning a certain “masculinity,” there was this other thing, a persistent enemy and that enemy would be something like the female or the queer. There's a beautiful Eileen Myles essay that I'm trying to talk with and they say, the woman, the queer and the oddly behaving man…and that is a figure I keep returning to in this essay as a way, as a persistent thing that in certain kinds of homosocial, football locker rooms, for instance, as I experienced it, the togetherness could often be cultivated against those things.
I want to suggest that it needn't be. I want to suggest of course that there's a more sort of tenderness that is born of its own need, not of its need against anything. Born of its own need. All that being said, I suppose there is a way that we relate to competition and we think about competition as a kind of battle. There's probably something very seductive to us about the way that in the midst of battle, people do these soft things for each other. But I'm really suspicious of that actually. I'm really suspicious of that. Nothing moves me more than when I think of when I tore my MCL against Colgate. You know, mean Colgate.
I can picture, because I'm a tough guy, I jump up immediately and my leg's fucking flopping around. My buddy Glenn is on the sideline running out to the punt return team, and he's screaming to get people out there to help me. That whole thing of like, ah... It is so tender, it melts my heart and when I picture it, I picture in this, it's dusty and it's like, all the long history of battle is in my imagination, my historical imagination of this stupid fucking event of a little football. Yeah, but I think those stories maybe cultivate in us a certain kind of ability to be moved especially because it's so violent. And there are these glimmers, but like I said, I want to wonder about that.
Actually, I want to wonder about it in a way like this too. Those games where there's refs and there's coaches and there's a definitive winner and loser in a certain way, those aren't games that I'm actually interested in at all anymore. Look, I watch, probably later today, I'll watch a little House of Highlights, want to see what Ja did and what fucking Steph Curry did, I'm going to do that.
TH: Of course.
RG: Pickup basketball is a completely different phenomenon. And a game without refs and without coaches, which is to say, a game without the structures, the hierarchical structures, the policing structures, the legislative structures, but that are instead, if you were to talk about certain different kinds of governance that are horizontal, where every time a new five gets on the court, the rules actually change because not everyone calls a foul the same way.
TH: Right.
RG: For those of who don't know, in pickup basketball, there's five people on the side. You have to assemble that five, in any number of ways, in different places and they're going to say it maybe a little different. You know, you might say, “Who's next? Who's got next? Who's last next? My next.” And then that team gets on and the winner stays on the court and then that team gets on and then you play, and then the winner stays on the court, and it goes on forever. So among the things that you learn is that the process is different every time; every new gathering of players, every new assemblage of players constitutes a new game, a new set of rules.
It changes. The foul has changed. How hard you can hand check someone has changed. There are some things that are static, like out of bounds is pretty much out of bounds. If you're playing with ones and twos, that's pretty much static, but not always. But the real nuts and bolts of the game, which is the interpersonal dynamic, the shifty stuff changes every single time because there's not a God and there are no gods. You always have to practice being invited in, in pickup basketball because part of the way you get on that five that's on the sideline is you say, "Hey, can I play?"
Can I get on? Can I get in? You got a spot? Then if you're the one who has the team, you have to be a host, you have to learn how to invite people in. You know, there's all kinds of stuff that goes on, it's just human. All of these lessons are being learned in pickup basketball. We are the ones determining the flow and movement and organization of this game. In those moments, in that setting, I feel like I see the most astonishing tenderness that I believe in wholeheartedly. I don't believe that it's like a moment of reprieve from this other kind of brutality. I believe the whole thing is a kind of practice at tenderness.
One time, there was a breakaway. I was like, 26. I was coming back on defense and I was flying down the court and I went to block the shot, I flew, then BOOM right into this pole behind the basket and I hit myself right between my legs. I did not hit my testicles, thank God, or else I would not have gotten up. But I am who I am, and boom, I stood right up. And everyone on the court was like, "NO!"
And of course, they all thought I hit my nuts, but I didn't. Still, they wouldn't let the game go on until I had a few minutes to sort of be like, "Hang on. Just see. Just wait." This is like a full game. It was a busy game. And it was one of the best courts and all of that. There was a wait. And people were like, "No, hang on." And then they could tell, "Okay, he's okay." It might have been three or four minutes of people being like, "Nah, wait. Just wait. Just kind of shoot at the other end." They're like, "No, let's wait and check it. All right, he looks okay." That is one instance that I just love. It's so beautiful to me. One of the things with those courts is that they can be intergenerational. [Click here an anecdote from Ross’s younger days on the pick up courts}
TH: I love that. I want to segue this into asking you about your essay in Lit Hub. Have I Even Told You About the Courts I've loved? If I had to choose one piece of your work as my favorite, that would probably take the cake. But it's just so interesting because pickup basketball is just a totally different ecosystem from any other sort of structure of sports. You're talking about againstness and enemies, but in pickup, you can play against a team, lose, and make an enemy of who you're playing with, someone who calls like a bullshit foul or someone you argue with. But how the fives can shake out, it's not a consistent thing because the total number of people ebbs and flows. So that person you're against and making an enemy of could be your teammate two games from now.
RG: Boom. You nailed it. That's the thing that I wasn't even thinking about. That's it. It makes no sense. But you're right. In pickup, it's like you're not always playing against the same people. And the people that you think of as being like, "Oh, that's my nemesis." Your nemesis very well might be feeding you the ball next. [Click here for a narrative peek into Ross’s one-on-one workouts, where he invents ways to play hard, noncompetitively.]
TH: One of the courts you mention in the essay is the Old Gym at Carlow University. You describe it as like a greenhouse in your memory. And anyone familiar with your work, knows you also write about your gardening a lot. And basketball and gardening are two subjects that come up often. I just want to know what are the similarities between basketball and gardening for you? The reference to “the fig tree (by Palumbo) is growing back” also made me think of this. Are those two things that are often in conversation with you and in your work?
RG: I love that question. It's funny, because it's almost like the way that the meditation on Dr. J's move in that poem–it's a kind of patience. It's a kind of practice of patience and looking very slowly. Intensely and slowly and steadily and with curiosity. That's a kind of mode of witness I think that I'm trying to wonder about and practice in that poem. And in the garden, I think it is the case that gardening encourages a kind of non-impositional witness.
There's obviously modes of gardening where you just mow everything down and you blast the shit into the soil and you monocrop. You just grow one thing. Part of the destruction of the land is certain modes of relating to the land. But I think really good loving gardeners are really curious, are patient, are asking what wants to grow where and trying to pay attention. They might be paying attention by seeing how much light is in a place or if water gathers or what is growing there already. Like, "Oh, if there's a lot of this growing there, maybe it's already heavily calcified or a calcium area. Maybe this might work or this might not work." Or what things grow in tandem together, like all of these communities in a garden.
So that's one thing. I feel like that kind of very slow, patient witness is a way to be a gardener. That feels like a constant practice of being a gardener. And I just want to say that it feels like that's a little bit what I'm trying to do with that move, which is not about basketball. That's actually about looking and about writing maybe. Like basketball, being patient and curious with the garden, I feel like that's a practice. It's something that you have to cultivate by doing and doing again and doing again and doing again. And ideally, having other people show you how they do it and doing it with them again and again and again. And playing ball, for me anyway, is a thing that you practice. And you don't only practice your 15 footer, but you practice how to make the game as meaningful to you as possible.
So part of the practice might be after you shoot all of your warmup with 150 15-footers, it might be that part of the practice is thinking, "Well, how do we play this game and let this game help us cultivate what we really want to cultivate?" So maybe we should think differently about what we do with points. Maybe that's one of the things that we got to do. And that might be kind of analogous. Both endeavors require practice and repetition and study and all of that. But that kind of asking the court what it is that we're actually supposed to learn, it's very much like asking the garden very much what it is we're supposed to learn. And it's like you've got to listen to both things. You know?
TH: For sure. I love that. In this essay too, you write about Seger Court specifically, and that being sort of the first place you saw “a court as a site of care and a ball as a practice of care”. Was there something specific about that particular court that helped you realize this? Was it just maybe that was the right moment in time, but was also, I'm wondering if there's something in the setting like the surface, the rims, the backboard, the smell?
RG: That court was this little bastion. A lot of the courts where I'd grown up were a little bit tucked away. I grew up kind of just north of Philadelphia, so the courts wouldn't be like right in the middle of a city block, you'd drive to the court or something and there'd be a parking lot.
There was all of this profound tenderness going on that I wasn't yet quite aware of, or I didn't know to articulate it as such. But I think being 23 and 24 and really starting to sort of think hard about what it means, the very beginning of a lifelong endeavor to think hard about what it means to be a loving individual or a loving sort of participant in something. I saw that this court, which was busy as hell, smacked in the middle on Lombard and 10th, busy, always people walking by to the store, walking by to work, whatever. It had a kind of a theatrical element to it because there is a fence along the sidewalk so that people would stop and watch.
This was a court three or four blocks from the projects, and so folks would be coming up to play, it would be automatic that people were coming. And because the kids lived right nearby, I'll never forget Gerald telling me, he's the one who's banging on the doors and being like, “Come on! Time to go play,” with these kids who were like 14 or something, and it's 7:30 in the morning when we started. And it's hard for a 14-year old to wake up at 7:30 but Gerald, who's one of the elders, would be like, “Come on, let's go play, it's time to play.” And which is not like, “It's time to play,” it's like “I'm taking care of you now, I'm taking care of you, I'm showing you how to do this thing.”
And maybe I was at a certain age where I was able to witness these modes of care that I had also been because I always had that too. I always had some older dude being like, come on, this is how you do it. My eyes were sort of open to this method of pedagogy, I call it and it's kind of like come along pedagogy, come on, come on, I got this thing to show you, you might love it or maybe more to the point sometimes it might change your life, it might change your life. This might get you an education. Also this is like this really beautiful mode of being in a community that I want you to witness, I want you to participate in, and I want you to learn how to do so that you can do the same thing when you're my age.
And there's a 13-year old in your neighborhood to be like, “Come on, come on, I got to show you this beautiful thing,” whether it's a basketball court or whether it's a garden or whether it's like learning how to fix bikes or whatever. It became very evident to me that one of the sites of this kind of intergenerational teaching and care, basketball courts are really beautiful places to study it. And I had been brought up in them too, but I didn't know what was happening often. And looking back then, I'm like, oh, yeah, there's all those beloved teachers that I have.
TH: It kind of mirrors the writing community in that way. I feel like so many people I talked to there was, and it's a little bit different because writing is in itself an act a solitude, but it seems like I haven't thought of it in those terms before, but the come along pedagogy is sort of the best way to cure imposter syndrome which so many of us struggle with.
RG: That's right.TH: Yeah. I had so many people point out to me that you don't have to get an MFA or any certain degree or certificate to be able to do this, to get access and permission to do this. You just get to do it.
RG: That's right. And it's kind of the way that in our solitude, we're always kind of in the presence of those people who are with us. We're in our solitude, we're actually right in our minds or they're right in our mouths and they're ready to come out.
TH: I love that. Well, thank you so much for that. And thank you so much for your time, Ross, this was so fun. I could talk basketball and writing all day so this was a privilege. Thank you again for taking the time to be here.
RG: Thank you. Thank you, let's do it again.