Mother Darling

On this episode of Articulate Experience—three writers explore how moms and motherhood have impacted their life and work. 

Chip Delany is considered a “Grandmaster” of science fiction– but he wasn’t born that way. Maternal influences shaped him at every turn.

Karen Russell is a Macarthur “genius” and a mother of two. Both roles changed the way she saw herself, and the world.

Elizabeth Acevedo dominated spoken word poetry competitions before becoming a best-selling young adult author. And though they haven’t always seen eye to eye, her mom has always been her biggest fan. 

• [01:19 ] Samuel "Chip" Delany https://www.samueldelany.com
• [11:18 ] Karen Russell https://karenrussellauthor.com
• [27:24 ] Elizabeth Acevedo http://www.acevedowrites.com

Articulate Experience examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today’s greatest writers.

Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.

More at articulateshow.org

Chapters

• 1:19 Samuel "Chip" Delaney
• 11:18 Karen Russell
• 27:24 Elizabeth Acevedo

Transcript

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER (00:00): Welcome to Articulate Experience, the show that examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today's greatest writers. I'm Jim Cotter. On this episode, three writers reflect on maternal influences in their life and work. Chip Delaney wrote openly about homosexual intimacy in a time before being gay was widely accepted, but he never told his own mom.
 
SAMUEL "CHIP" DELANY (00:22): And I thought, well, I'm going to have to come out to her. And that's when she had her stroke.  (00:26)

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER: Tori Marchiony reports and how becoming a mom has upended, novelist Karen Russell's worldview in the strangest, most delightful ways.

KAREN RUSSELL (00:34): It's sort of like wanting two contradictory things all the time. So there's a part of me that like kind of longs to me alone, if I'm honest, but equal and opposite desires all the time, which is sounds like some kind of mental illness, but actually

TORI MARCHIONY: feels like motherhood. <laugh>.

KAREN RUSSELL: Yeah. (00:47):

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER: And, Tori Marchiony delves into Mother-Daughter dynamics with the best-selling young adult author, Elizabeth Acevedo, who says her mom always loved seeing her in the spotlight.

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO (00:57): My mom also really wanted me to be famous. She put me in modeling classes and acting classes and singing classes. And like when I first got into Slam, she loved it. She was at every single event she was in the front row. There was always this joy that she had of seeing me speak up in public.

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER (01:15): That's all ahead on Articulate Experience.

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER: Samuel or "Chip" Delaney spent the past half century constructing worlds on the page. The New York Times has described him as one of America's foremost living science fiction writers for how his work reflects and explores the social truths of the world. Since putting out his first novel at 19, the prolific author has published more than 50 other books, including the first work of fiction about AIDS published on a major imprint.

SAMUEL "CHIP" DELANY (01:51): Writing is an addiction, but it's such an easy addiction to break. You have to feed the addiction.

JIM COTTER(01:57): You've succeeded in not losing it so far and not recovering.

SAMUEL "CHIP" DELANY: Yeah, and I don't write anywhere near as much now  (02:04)

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER: As a black gay man born in Harlem in 1942, Delany has lived through some of the United States' greatest social transformations. He was in his late twenties when a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in New York that is now a national historic monument set off confrontations that sparked an international gay rights movement and emboldened him to come out in professional circles.

SAMUEL "CHIP" DELANY (02:25): It's been well known that I was gay from 1968 on, although I didn't necessarily announce it. There was a program in Phoenix, Arizona at a science fiction conference, which was the first time there had been a program about gay science fiction. And I was invited to sit on the panel and I said, yes. They wanted to record it. And there was a young woman on the panel who said, "no, you cannot record it. If you record it, if it gets to my parents, they will kill me".

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER (02:54): Unlike the young woman on that panel, Samuel Delany unabashedly inhabits his sexuality. It infuses his writing to the point that he's been called a sex radical. But for many years, he was married to a woman. At 19, he wed his high school sweetheart, the poet Marilyn Hacker. She was pregnant when they took a Greyhound bus to Michigan, the closest state they could find that would allow them to marry, given their age in racial differences. But she miscarried shortly after. In the following months, Delany was motivated by what he has called "a set of obsessive vivid dreams" and began working on what would become his first published novel, The Jewels of Aptor.

“…what do you know of the Island of Aptor?”

“Nothing, ma’am.”

“This boat has been to Aptor once, and now will return again. Ask your ignorant friend the bear to tell you tales of Aptor; and blind wise poet, you will laugh, and probably he will too. But I will tell you: his tales, his legend, and his fantasies are not a tithe of the truth, not a tithe. Perhaps you will be no help after all. I am thinking of dismissing you.”

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER (04:10): Life with Marilyn helped Delany to write and also pushed him to grow up. In 1975, she gave birth to their only child, a daughter called Iva, who Delany adores. But even with all the usual trappings of family life, their marriage was never traditional; always, he says, an open arrangement. Hacker knew Delany was gay, and eventually she too would come out as lesbian.

SAMUEL "CHIP" DELANY (04:33): We had one wonderful period, I think of it as one of the happiest times in my life. It was only about three months long where we were living with another guy. We all slept in one big bed and had sex. And it was a lot of fun. And then of course he brought his wife. It was really strange, but it was, but the at the best, it was as nice as it could, things that had ever been, but we never could re reestablish something like that. And that's when we really broke up.

JIM COTTER: Did she or did you know that she was gay?

SAMUEL "CHIP" DELANY: No, I did not. That came as a total surprise to me.

JIM COTTER: It was a surprise to her or did she always know?

SAMUEL "CHIP" DELANY: I don't, we've never really discussed it. And then after we broke up, suddenly the next thing I knew sh she went through several women partners.

JIM COTTER  (05:17): When you were out carousing during the marriage, like what was her feeling about that? Having married a gay man, I'm guessing that she shouldn't have expected anything else.

SAMUEL "CHIP" DELANY: Well, she, no. Yeah, she didn't. Um, I had to learn how to do it too. I mean, I know it was pretty rough. We had an older friend who lived with us, another woman named Sue Shelly, who was wonderful, uh, who was an old, a graduate student at Columbia. I had worked with her as a, a book clerk at Barnes and Noble. And one very cold November night, she knocked on our door and said, "I have no place to stay". So we brought her in and, and Sue was gay, probably was probably a lesbian. She had very close women friends. And she became very close to Marilyn and she... liked Sue me, but I think she took, she was very motherly to Marilyn. And once I went off and and disappeared, I, I went off to buy one or the other. I never smoked, but I one went, went to buy one or the other of them a pack of cigarettes. And I stayed away for three days, uh, having a fairly good time. And when I came back, Sue said, "Chip, that's not acceptable. You can't go out and say, 'I'll be back in 20 minutes' and vanish for three days." You know, then, and it's true. I mean, you have to learn how to be responsible.

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER (06:24): Here's an excerpt from Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, read by the author.

SAMUEL "CHIP" DELANY (06:30): What is this part of me that lingers to overhear my own conversation? I lie rigid in the rigid circle. It regards me from diametric points without sex, and wise. We lie in a rigid city, anticipating winds. It circles me, intimating only by position that it knows more than I want to. There, it makes a gesture too masculine before ecstatic scenery. Here, it’s suggests femininity, pausing at gore and bone. It dithers and stammers, confronted by love. It bows a blunt, mumbling head before injustice, rage, or even it’s like ignorance. Still, I am convinced that at the proper shock, it would turn, and call me, using those Hermetic syllables I have abandoned on the crags of broken conscience, on the plains of charred consciousness, at the entrance to the ganglial city. And I would raise my head. “You,” he said, suddenly. It was dark. “Are you happy? I mean, living like this?”

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER: For someone who has been so open about desire, Delany never got a chance to discuss his sexuality with his own mother, who suffered a stroke in 1987. Still, he believes she intuited the truth.

SAMUEL "CHIP" DELANY (08:05): My mother liked the theater a lot and there was a period when my mother was constantly inviting me out to see this gay play and that gay play, and which we would talk about the play and we talk about what the play was out, but it was, there was never any coming out. And then I was writing The Motion of Light in Water , uh, which is my biographical book length essay. And I thought, "well, I'm going to have to come out to her." And that's when she had her stroke. And from then on, she was without language. And, and I, so I'd never got a chance to come out to my mother cuz I was all prepared. And if she had had the stroke three months later, I would have.

JIM COTTER: Did she know? Was she in denial?

SAMUEL "CHIP" DELANY: I don't know what I don't know. I mean, as I said, on the one hand, she sure acted like she knew

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER (08:48): After her stroke. The only phrase Delany's mother could say for the remaining eight years of her life was, "I know, I know, I know." It was a difficult period, particularly for Delany's sisters who bore the brunt of her caregiving while Chip continued building his life as a writer. Here's an excerpt from his autobiographical book length essay, the Motion of Light in Water  (09:09)

SAMUEL "CHIP" DELANY:That first night back in the city at my mother’s suggestion, we spent at my childhood Harlem home, which my mother still owned, up at 2250 Seventh Avenue, and where brothers sometimes lived above my father’s old funeral establishment. We slept on the couch, really a double-width day bed with a bolster along the back, on which, when I was not yet three, I’d been first allowed to hold my baby sister, newly returned from the hospital. I began to cry from seeing the furniture, among which I’d lived till I was 12, covered with dust and practically unmoved since my family had left the place, the hand-carved boat I’d been given for my 12th birthday askew in its stand before the fireplace, its sails torn and fallen over the jib. The same drapes, still at the back windows, heavy with the dirt of four years, while Marilyn tried to comfort me. We left before five in the morning.

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER: In 2013, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named Samuel Chip Delany, a Grand Master. But now in his eighties, Delany isn't so interested in contemplating his own legacy or even his own mortality. Joy comes from simple moments with his longtime partner, Dennis Rickett.
 
SAMUEL "CHIP" DELANY (10:35): Spinoza, who's another one of my great heroes. He says that a free man doesn't think about death and I still feel basically free. And so I don't spend a lot of time thinking about death. I'm close enough so that I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the future either, uh, more than and a couple hours from now. You know? And I don't know how long I will be able to do that, you know? And I'm perfectly happy. And I right now, I mean, Dennis and I, you know, lie around and hold hands most of the time, you know? And he likes that. And that's basically what we do.

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER (11:07): Over the past 60 years, Samuel Delany has managed to find contentment while never losing his drive to explore, to venture to improbable places.

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER: Off the page, Karen Russell's fiction contorts the rules of everyday life in bizarre, often fantastical ways. So that, as Tori Marchiony discovered, her worlds feel familiar, yet also profoundly unsettlingly, surreal

TORI MARCHIONY VOICEOVER (11:45): A child of 1980s Miami, Russel says that her home state played a big role in stoking her naturally vivid imagination.

KAREN RUSSELL: The literature I love to read often had that, that same quality of sort of Im impossible things being written about in a naturalistic register. You know, Marquez, I love discovering him. But a part of it was just, it felt kind of true to like what a Wednesday was like in Miami. Wild things would happen, really wild things. But I, you know, you don't receive them that way if you're just sort of in year to the strangeness of where you're growing up. I don't think it was until I left Florida that I was like, "huh," you know. In the side mirror, I perceive that like not every childhood is like that. I'm sure that happens to everybody to a certain extent. But I think also on some level, those blurred lines felt true to me of what it is like just to be alive on this planet where you don't necessarily sort of switch gears in your own mind and think, "well, I'm moving into a realm of fantasy and superstition" and "now I'm move, moving back to my abacus where I do my taxes." You know, <laugh>, it's just all sort of happening.

TORI MARCHIONY VOICEOVER (13:02): Florida made such an impression on Russell that she set her first two books in the Everglades. In 2009, her short story collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, landed Russell on the National Book Foundation's "five under 35" list. In 2012, her bestselling debut novel Swamplandia— the story of a family of alligator wrestlers and their decaying amusement park—put her in a three-way tie for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2013, Russell won a so-called MacArthur Genius Grant. And though it solidified her place in American fiction, it didn't cure he self-doubt.

TORI MARCHIONY: You've said that you, it felt embarrassing and fraudulent to self-identify as a writer, which is so hilarious to me.

KAREN RUSSELL: It's still true, still true.

TORI MARCHIONY: The MacArthur didn't fix it?!

KAREN RUSSELL: It didn't, it made it worse in some ways!

TORI MARCHIONY: Really!? Cause you're like, "oh, they've really made a mistake here?"

KAREN RUSSELL (13:52): Yeah, I do sort of think you're just always waiting for some kind of like secret police force to pull you aside and say like, "well, the jig is up <laugh>. You know, like, we've found you out. It's all over for you now". And maybe not everybody feels that way. I think one of the tricky things about being a fiction writer, it takes me anyway so long to write something new. These books in paraphrase sound totally insane. So if you hear academics talk about their work, which I often do, I'm always amazed they, they speak with such authority. They have sort of like a lineage behind them. They have a project that they can like describe and seek funding for. All the writers of my acquaintance will be like, "Hey, what are you working on?" And they'll be like, they'll get belligerent or defensive or totally embarrassed.
(14:35)
They'll be like, "I, it's set in Dubai, but I, I don't even know." You know? Or they'll be like, "I have 300 pages, but maybe negative pages". You know, there's just a lot of, it feels a little more tenuous cuz it's sort of like this dream in utero and you don't maybe know even what it is for a long time. So that probably feeds into the fraudulent feelings a little bit cuz it does this a little, like this Ponzi scheme or it's a little bit of, you know, if I was like, "Hey, will you put an offer on this house doesn't exist, but this is where the pool will be. Perhaps," you know, you <laugh>

TORI MARCHIONY: I feel like there's a lot of trust too because it's like every time you're, you've done something like it before, but it is so new.

KAREN RUSSELL (15:12): It is a speculative endeavor. Yeah, absolutely. In every sense. A really speculative endeavor. Speaker 5 (15:18):

TORI MARCHIONY VOICEOVER: In the decade since her explosive debut, Russell has penned two more short story collections and a novella—each project more dystopian than the last. In Vampires in the Lemon Grove mythical predators quench their thirst with citrus fruits. In Sleep Donation, rest becomes a commodity during an epidemic of insomnia. And in Orange World, a new mother agrees to nurse a demonn in exchange for her own child's life.

(Excerpt from Orange World)
“Orange World,” the New Parent’s Educator says, “is where most of us live.” She shows a slide, a smiling baby with a magenta birthmark hooping her eye. No, a burn mark. The slides jump back in time to the irreversible error. Here is the sleepy father holding a teapot. Orange World is a nest of tangled electrical cords and open drawers filled with steak knives. It’s a baby’s fat hand hovering over the blushing coils of a toaster oven. It’s a crib purchased used. “We all make certain compromises, of course. We do things we know to be unsafe. You take a shower with your baby and suddenly…” The educator knocks her fist on the table to mimic the gavel rap of an infant’s skull on marble. Her voice lowers to a whisper to relate the final crime. “You fall asleep together on the sofa. Only one of you wakes up.” Don’t fall asleep, Rae dutifully takes down. Orange World. 

TORI MARCHIONY VOICEOVER: Karen Russell wrote Orange World after surviving a difficult pregnancy with her first child. And it was published while she was pregnant with her second. Both babies were born healthy, but Russell quickly discovered that her maternal anxieties would not be so easily quelled.

KAREN RUSSELL (17:11): It's the old Pez dispenser <laugh>. There's the more are coming. Speaker 6 (17:15):

TORI MARCHIONY: What did you think it was gonna mean? Not just for you, but like about you

KAREN RUSSELL: mm-hmm. <affirmative>

TORI MARCHIONY: to become a mom and, and then what was it?

KAREN RUSSELL: Yeah, it's, it, it embarrasses me a little bit now in retrospect how I was just asking the wrong questions maybe. And, um, I was just this, I don't know that there's ever been anything in my lived experience like it where, it didn't matter what I read about this, it didn't matter how many people I talked to. It just was like going down a water slide into a new element. Everybody on the top can be like, "this is, we're gonna describe to you again what the water is like and how you'll feel like when you plunge into it." And you sort of some kind of fantasy understanding. And then I really did feel like it was the cold water shock and also really beautiful. But that's, that's such a goofy, that's a goofy Florida analogy. I'm like, it was like, "It was like at Wet and Wild. There you are under shtuka."

TORI MARCHIONY: [crosstalk 00:32:04] Mark Mothersbaugh described it as dropping acid.

KAREN RUSSELL: Yeah. You're dropping acid is a good one, right? Where you can read that Michael Pollan book, Ready Yourself, and you're still going to have some kind of ontological crisis as you realize that like all that you thought you knew was dissolving and remaking itself. So, it is like that. Dropping acid's a much better metaphor. So here, so one of the things I thought was "uhoh, I'm, I'm worried I'm not gonna have as much time to think to write", you know? And I mean, I definitely don't, I think that's, that's pretty par for the course, but time moves in such a different way now. It's really uncanny. And that was something that I was just thinking time would proceed as it always had, but I would just have this new person that I was responsible for and loved. Really, it's just I, and forgive me for being so fumbling trying to figure out how to talk about it.
(18:53)
But I, there are not as many rooms to go to. I just feel like I have to be present. And that's a real gift because not since my own childhood have I felt so kind of riveted to my skin and in my body and in this world. You know, I think a lot of my adult life, you know, obviously has been spent in sort of imaginary realms, but also just in like the boring places we all go. And it, and sometimes it can feel very claustrophobic not to have the space to kind of reminisce and daydream and whatever mm-hmm. <affirmative>. But, um, there's something about just like blowing bubbles on the floor in real time that reminds me so much of being a child myself when everything had that sort of heightened reality because that was it. This is like the first tree, you know, so you're really attending to it, you know? So something about the way time works, I couldn't have guessed. It's not as simple as like, oh, I just don't have as much time to write my stuff. And it's so much stranger than that. It's sort of like wanting to contradictory things all the time. So there's a part of me that like kind of longs to be alone, if I'm honest, but equal and opposite desires all the time. Which is, which is sounds like some kind of mental illness, but actually.

TORI MARCHIONY: Sounds like motherhood, <laugh>.

KAREN RUSSELL: Yeah.

TORI MARCHIONY: All right. So you've said that pockets of neglect are when interesting things really start to happen for kids. I think you meant that as in writing. Um, but now I'm just curious now that you have a kid that you wanna be with and watching all the time, even when you understand that like the baby monitor's a little creepy <laugh>. Like how do you reconcile those two things of like wanting to be there and then also understanding the value of not being there?

KARNE RUSSELL:I'm happy to talk about this with you cuz I really was just having a, an identical conversation with a friend of mine. Some of my happiest memories were just disappearing for most of the day, right? We would like ride our bikes to, you know, I don't know, Mathis and hammock or, you know, to these sort of kind of wild feeling spaces. You know, we would like go to like this mangrove estuary by our house and just like climb around in the mud most of the day and then come back for dinner mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And, um, I never felt badly about that. And I hope that I can disable the part of me that does feel still a little like, you know, "don't wander towards the electrical outlet" mm-hmm. <affirmative> and let some wandering happen a little later on. Because I feel like that is where you become a self.
(21:11)
You know, you, you do have to find some, some of these spandrels to weird out in <laugh>. I don't know who, I mean, I, I really treasure sort of like that kind of speaking of expansive time, that's another thing that, I mean that, I know it's a little cliche to talk about, but everybody sort of feels like so scheduled. Everybody's starting it now. Right. You know, there's a lot that's sort of like passively handed to you. You don't really have to participate in, in the same way that you do with the book where you're supplying all of the magic yourself. Right. It's like, here's the, the score, but you are the composer and the conductor and the, you know, you're the whole orchestra. It's all you.

TORI MARCHIONY (21:53): I'm still in the decision making stage about my like, biological future.

KAREN RUSSELL: Yeah. <laugh>.

TORI MARCHIONY: And it is so amazing and scary to me that you are knowingly signing up for this thing that's gonna be this like, as much new love and expansiveness as you get to feel the, the backend of it is sounds just as mm-hmm. <affirmative> horrible <laugh> like stressful and scary and like, you're gonna mess it up. And like, so going into it <laugh>, did you think about that at all or were you like, you can't think about that

KAREN RUSSELL (22:26): <laugh>? Oh, I've probably thought about it too much. My, a friend told me that you just have to crab walk in that direction. You can't really like approach it. It's sort of like the noon day sun totally blinding. And it is so audacious to think about inviting a new being to the planet. Like you would never probably sign up to sponsor an alien on the same plan and explain everything to them, have all the answers for them. But weirdly, that does feel like analogous to me. Like, here's this like extraterrestrial intelligence that is gonna just get acclimated to rules of the planet Earth. And, um, it makes me feel like a child still to think about it. You know, I, I have no answers really, but I think what felt exciting to me about just deciding that this was something that we wanted to do, everybody is so aware that this is a realm of incredible suffering.
(23:18)
You know, if you've been alive for a minute, you know that, I mean whatever, people have such different backgrounds, but I think the whole setup is pretty unfair. There's this amazing Lydia Peel story, I think about it, I swear daily. And the ending of it, it's these girls who they, they sort of dig up a skull, you know, like a, a pony skull and they're not afraid. They're not, they're kids, they're not afraid of death. It can't touch them. And then she says, and even later, you know, we spun out on the highway in these cars and we said, do it again. And it didn't, it didn't frighten us then. And it would be years before we realized that death had our names and worse the names of everything we loved. And I just think every one we love, you know, and I mean, that is another powerful thing to have in, in common here.
(24:05)
It's the most powerful one. Right? And so, you know that going into this, which is what makes it, if you think about that too hard. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend <laugh> if you're, if you're making this decision, you don't need to read that paragraph 500 times. But, but to think about all the people that are still like, you know what, we're gonna just make this leap. And implicitly we're arguing that it's better to be here than not. It's better to be alive than not for all of the, for knowing going into it that you're gonna have to lose everything like that foreknowledge of, of death. But, you know, that that's what always gets me that bigger up the part where she says, worse it cuz it is so much worse. Right? Just like, oh no, everyone we love. And still many people come down on the side of Yeah. But it's, it is, it's beautiful. It's better to be here than not. And it sounds, it sounds kind of silly out, or it sounds obvious out loud, but I, it didn't feel that way to me. I was just like, oh my God, that is how I must feel then.

TORI MARCHIONY (24:59):That's a very good answer. That makes me feel less terrified about it.

KAREN RUSSELL: Yeah. It's terrify it's terrifying because

TORI MARCHIONY: That's the thing, it's that like you have to just embrace the good part of it. Yeah. Because the bad part of it doesn't move  And you can't really get around it. <laugh> Yeah.

KAREN RUSSELL: you I, but I know what you mean. You know, it's almost like when you do the math that way, you just wanna like, lay down on the floor. Yeah.

TORI MARCHIONY (25:21):

Um, but it's such an amazing act of, of hope to then really put your flag in the sand. Yeah. And say, "I'm on the side of, life"  (25:29)

KAREN RUSSELL: Yeah, I'm on the side of life. It's worth it. And it is incredible actually, that somehow you're doing this strange calculus, cosmic calculus. I think that people have, have good reason to feel frightened or, you know, maybe cynical, that our species is gonna be able to redraw the lines, restructure things in time to save this planet, you know, to protect human life and, and non-human life. So I I also think it, it makes sense that if those concerns are up for you, I mean they, Of course, yeah. How could, how could it be otherwise? When I was a younger writer, I wrote so much about childhood and adolescence and that time felt so green to me. It felt so fresh still. And it still does, which is strange that I still on some level will feel like I'm like eight and 14 and, you know, like that in that matryoshka doll way.

TORI MARCHIONY: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>,

Karen Russell: but sort of seeing like how much like love of this place this tiny child has just brought to the project. (26:24) And that seems to be pretty par for the chorus with these little beings that sort of like radiance and just like, I mean, we have been taking birds for granted, for example. We have to like greet every bird in the sky. <laugh>, you know, it does restore kind of a kind of wonder you have permission again or something to Yeah. You, you remember a little bit. And that is, that's just been really exciting to recover some of that. And so it, it also gives me hope. I'm like, this lives in people too. It can get paved over with some other stuff. By the time you're our age, this is how you show up. It's still in there.

TORI MARCHIONY VOICEOVER: Motherhood has given Karen Russell a new vantage point. One in which all the strangeness, the anxieties and the delights of existence are amplified even as they stride alongside the seemingly mundane Russell chooses to see what so many of us habitually ignore. And in her stories, she invites the rest of us to see the world that way too.

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER: It was in high school that Elizabeth Acevedo fully embraced her own voice and for the following decade, she made a name for herself as a poet, winning prestigious spoken work competitions in building a fan base. But poetry alone wasn't enough. While teaching English at a D.C. middle school and a juvenile detention center, she realized that the books or students were assigned didn't reflect their lived experiences. And so, as Tori Marchiony reports, she worked hard to become part of the solution.

TORI MARCHIONY VOICEOVER (28:10): Elizabeth Acevedo is a National Book Award winner and the author of Bestselling young adult novels like The Poet X and Clap When you Land— made up stories that depict the real lives of young women of color. (28:23)

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO:: There's a difference between like the pursuit and display of truth as like, here is fact versus here is honesty. Here's an honest emotion. Here is an honest conflict. Here is a character who is not sure and you are not going to be sure about her because sometimes we are not sure about people that, that feels a little bit different. There's a way that, that we can say, this is the best form that I can depict this emotion. And it might not be true, but it is honest <laugh>, Speaker 5 (29:00):

TORI MARCHIONY VOICEOVER : This honesty is part of what’s made Acevedo a literary sensation. The author is celebrated for her skillful and sensitive stories that center latina protagonists —young women who haven’t always seen themselves on the page, and who are hungry for relatable representation. By fulfilling this need, Acevedo has established herself as a trailblazer at the top of her game. But, Acevedo says, finding her own path involved studying a lot of other people’s footsteps along the way.
 
ELIZABETH ACEVEDO:: I've been a big reader my whole life, and I think there's a lot of writers who allowed me to, to see my story reflected in such a way that felt like, "oh, I can, I can do that". And I've, I've been the kind of person who's always looking for blueprints. Can someone just tell me how to be an Afro Dominican writer in the world? <laugh> like, and I just want that. And so I, I looked at Julia Alvares and thought about, okay, how does she write Dominican? I looked at Sandra Cisneros and House on Mango Street and thought about how do you write a young Latina in an urban setting? That's, that's really clear. You know, Jacqueline Woodson, who I love and, and think is so smart about how she depicts, um, black girls. And so there are all these writers and then there are things that I stole from like, you know, Laina across the way who, who was so sure of herself who would walk through the world with her rollers and her Baha, but like you couldn't tell her anything.
(30:16)
You know, like that there was a, a surety of who she was that I didn't know if I could necessarily reflect that I I was too doubtful. But there are moments like that. There are my aunts, there's my mom, right? There are all these women who were not perfect examples who I could not, let me just walk in your steps, but I can borrow this and I can borrow this. And I've had amazing mentors. I've had women in my life who were just one or two steps beyond me who were maybe in grad school or maybe, you know, teaching. But right before I was, who kind of led the way. And I think I've always looked outward at like, who are the women doing this work? How are they facing difficult truths in ways that feel freeing? And can I do that? And what does it mean to try and attempt to do that same thing?

TORI MARCHIONY VOICEOVER: Here’s an excerpt from The Poet X, read by the author.

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO:We are not here to save lives. We are all just working on our own mosaic of aches. So when the girl at the detention center asks you again, “Why we gotta write these damn poems anyways?” Tell her we write to remind ourselves we are still here and that we can still heal.

TORI MARCHIONY VOICEOVER: The Poet X was named for its main character, Xiomara— a Dominican teenager growing up in a strict Catholic home in Harlem, who finds solace and self-actualization in writing. And though Acevedo is clear that her novels are informed by, but not based on her own life— Xiomara does, in many ways, resemble a young Liz.

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO:If you look at the autobiography of like My Childhood and then map it on, you can see some similarities. My mom wanted to be a nun.

TORI MARCHIONY: Oh! I didn't, I wouldn't have picked that one. As one of the,

Elizabeth Acevedo: My mom wanted to be a nun. My mom is extremely Catholic. My father was someone who was present in the household, but we didn't necessarily have the strongest relationship. These things map onto each other. My mom also really wanted me to be famous. She put me in modeling classes and acting classes and singing classes and like everything but poetry classes, which I ended up doing. But when I first got into Slam, she loved it. She was at every single event she was in the front row. Um, to this day, anything I do, she shows up with her cell phone and like ruins most events cuz she doesn't realize like the play button versus the record button.
(32:47)
So it's just a playback of me while I'm on stage. It's horrible. But there was always this joy that she had of, of seeing me speak up in public and she didn't always know what I was saying. My parents speak English, they'll say "well enough to defend themselves," but, but not, you know, enough to get every metaphor or, or the subject matter. But there was still so much pride in she's telling a story and she's not afraid. And I think that that's one of this distinctions between the poet, Xiomara and and myself, that when you come into the world, knowing that you have this champion who believes you are brilliant and cannot wait for the world to realize that there is a different sense of self that you have. And I think what Xiomara was trying to do was show her mother, "there's this thing you don't know, and if I could just convince you that, that I'm good at it and that it's helpful, like maybe I could get you on my side". She was fighting to get her mom, you know, to sit on the bench and watch her versus I was fighting to get my mom. So like, you don't have to go to this one. It's actually okay if you sit this one out. <laugh>.

TORI MARCHIONY (33:56): That's awesome. And was there stubbornness in your parents not fully mastering English? And, and how did their relationship with English then shape your relationship with English?

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO34:10): Yeah, I don't know if it was stubbornness. I don't know how to, I don't know that that is what I would call it. And I, I don't wanna speak to them. And like, the experiences that they had when they first got here, they had studied English in the Dominican Republic. My father was an accountant, my mother was studying accounting. Um, and my mom was the first one in her family to come here. She's one of 15. She had all of her siblings relying on, on her getting citizenship and, and, and being the one who was here who could send money back, et cetera. When she got here, she was a nanny. She's a nanny in Puerto Rico. And then she worked at a button factory in Queens, New York. My mother, I remember one of my earliest memories is going with her to English school at a little like elementary school nearby.
(34:54)
That's my youngest memory that I have, is sitting in this auditorium with my mom after work trying to learn English that I learned English because my mom sat me down and was like, we're gonna read this book together in a language she barely spoke that I think the attempt was there, but it was, you know, how do you practice? When do you practice? We lived in a community that was mostly, you know, Latinx, where you didn't have to. And I think over time it just became the kind of thing of, I'm not sure if we can do this with all of the weight of the different things we have to do. But they tried. And so I, I don't know. I don't know that I, the word stubborn feels precise or accurate to me.

TORI MARCHIONY (35:37): I apologize. I read it somewhere. I just wanted to like check in.

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO:No, no, no. I mean, maybe I, I might have used that and I don't know if they would, if they would say that as you asking me that. I'm like, I don't think that's the word they would use, although maybe I might have used it in the past. But that direct lineage of my relationship with English was one, it was the outside language because we always spoke Spanish in the house. And so there is this thing that is the intimate language of what I consider, like my people that I don't speak often outside of this space. There's the language between myself and my parents that is the one that we speak at home that if I wanted to eat growing up, that's what you're gonna ask for food in or you're not gonna eat. Right? But then there's this moment and this early moment of my mother pushing me to acquire English and reading, even though it was hard for her, right? Even though she had done all of this work all day and then still sat down and it's like, this is an important thing for you to learn. So that English is directly correlated for me with writing and with reading and with literature, because that was how I began acquiring it was through school. And so I think there's a lot of, English is my educational tongue, English is my expressive tongue, English is my storytelling tongue. Um, and I think it's because of that moment.

TORI MARCHIONY: That you learned it very deliberately. And so you use Speaker 4 (36:59) It very deliberately as,

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO:As a way to understand story and then as a way to create story and that that's directly connected. Speaker 5 (37:08):

TORI MARCHIONY: That makes a ton of sense. Did you feel heard growing up because your mom was then supportive of the, the poetry stuff, but not necessarily absorbing all of it? So did you have the flexibility to be like, "mom, this is what I think and it means you need to change something?"

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO:(37:24): Yeah. Did I feel heard? No. Does any kid feel heard? Maybe some kids do. I don't know. But no, I, I think my mom was resisting a lot of parenting that was telling her kids should be seen and not heard. And she attempted the best that she could to listen when I said I didn't like something or, or I was frustrated or I didn't wanna do something, but I, she was still pushing back against certain doctrines, right? There were certain things that she was really afraid of and so she couldn't hear it, right? Like, by the time my mom wanted to talk about sex, I'm like, "you're late. Like, like my friends have been talking about this for years". Like my brother explained, you know, menstruation to me and then she's like, "okay, let's talk about pads". I'm like, "I learned about this four years ago," right?
(38:12)
Like, so like by the time she got the gumption to have the conversations, I had already asked the questions elsewhere because I was afraid if I asked her I would get in trouble or she would be upset or I would be shut down. And so I don't know that I felt heard all of the time, but I don't think it was because of like a malicious intent. I, I really want to go away to, and she was very adamant that I should stay home for college and then ultimately came around, right? Like I, I talked to her enough, I really wanted to study abroad in high school, and she was so fearful of, "how are you gonna go away by yourself and I can't call you and, and how will I know you're okay?" And yet she's still let me travel to Venezuela and Cuba and Thailand and Spain without her.
(38:57)
And so there were moments where I think against her self-interest <laugh>, she said, okay. And heard that there was something I wanted to do that I thought would enrich my life. And even though she couldn't see how or why, she's like, all right, I'm gonna lean back. Which is big it, it's big for a woman who had me at 37. I'm the only girl, I'm the youngest. There were so many expectations about what that meant. All of her sisters, she hasn't, you know, eight of them are raising their children in completely different ways that she's now comparing herself to. And yet, you know, she has this American kid who's like, I think that's how this is done over there, but what if we did this here and kind of had to do a lot of, you know, re-imagining.

TORI MARCHIONY (39:45): That's really cool. <laugh>,

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO:She's lovely.

TORI MARCHIONY (39:48): Was there a point when you had to accept, or was there a point when you consciously accepted that your parents are human? That all of the teaching wasn't necessarily gonna be from them to you?

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO: Yes. I think especially when you're the child of immigrants who are navigating a country in ways that makes them afraid, that happens early. And part of my frustration growing up with my parents was probably because I didn't know how to be a teacher and a translator and the one that navigated certain spaces because I wielded the best English or, or had information because of the books that I read and what it means to, to want to turn to someone and say, you should know, you should know you're the adult. But then also knowing like that, that would be hurtful. And when you're a kid moving through all of these feelings and, and wanting to lash out, but this person is relying on you, then it's this also sense of like guilt and like, I owe you, I owe you at least this to be able to communicate on your be behalf.
(40:52)
And so I knew young that like my parents weren't always gonna be the teacher, that sometimes I was the one who had to convey information and explain things and read the letters and then say, this is what it's saying. And, and in terms of values, I think especially in high school, there was this moment where I realized that my parents had very traditional, my mom, especially when it comes to religious teachings. Like there's conservative values that she's learned from that, that were different than the values that I was learning and wanting to, to deploy in my everyday life. And, and, and learning. Like I don't have to convince her I can try, but it's okay to just live in what I know to be true and not needing her approval about what I know to be true and that that's okay. And I think high school is where that began happening and little baby steps. So I think I'm still doing that work of like, although you may try to pass a lesson, I don't have to to take it

TORI MARCHIONY:  And that'll be the work forever, I'm sure.

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO:: Right? I I think that's the work of, yeah, this whole human thing. <laugh>.

TORI MARCHIONY VOICEOVER: Today Elizabeth Acevedo lives in Washington D.C. with her husband, Shakir. In 2022, she released an illustrated poetry collection called Inheritance, a visual poem. And 2023 will bring a much anticipated new novel Family Lore, which traces magical secrets across generations living in the Dominican Republic and the U.S. And though Acevedo doesn't have a daughter of her own, she does already have some thoughts about what she might teach one.

TORI MARCHIONY: Why won't you raise your theoretical future daughter to be polite?

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO (42:30): <laugh>? I think politeness is a trap. I think it's a trap for women. I think it's a trap for women of color, for black women to smile in the face of your pain, to smile in the face of your discomfort, to smile in the face of, of harm. You know, I you're taught that a good girl is polite, a good girl is nice. I don't know how for the majority of the women in the world, that has been helpful. I think sometimes, right? You catch more bees with honey, is that the same? Or flies? You catch more flies with honey, but that's a shallow catch and it feels like women are pushed into boxes of politeness almost as a pat pat or they're there, um, that men are never pushed into. And so I don't know that having that be a pillar of what I want my child to be is helpful.
(43:23)
It would make me sacrifice, I think in some ways. The other things I would want, I would prefer fierceness. I would prefer brilliance. I would prefer if something is right, let it be said right. Um, and not in a way that is arrogant, but you stand in your what you believe and politeness doesn't always allow that. And so I hope that we live in a world where any future child I have can do that without coming to harm. But yeah, I have no utility for politeness, at least in this kid. I think it's too late for me. I've already <laugh>, I've been indoctrinated. But I hope my kiddos, if I have kids, will, will move through the world differently.

TORI MARCHIONY VOICEOVER: Whether or not she winds up raising children of her own, Acevedo's creations have already had a hand in shaping the millions of young people they've touched, nurturing those who've read her words, felt seen by them, found comfort in them, or maybe even found themselves.

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER: That was Articulate producer Tori Marchiony. On the next Articulate Experience, three writers discuss how their work reflects their worldview. The British author Marina Benjamin is a writer of memoir with the soul of a journalist. Self-reflection, she believes shouldn't lead to naval gazing.

MARINA BENJAMIN: I'm incredibly aware of the reader. In fact, the older I get, the more aware I become. All I care about is the reader now.

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER: Before his 2020 novel Shuggie Bain  turned Scottish writer Douglas Stuart into a bestselling Man Booker Prize-winning author, he spent 20 years working in fashion, an experience that turned out to be surprisingly relevant to his writing.

DOUGLAS STUART (45:05): And so I began to just re-approach the book in that way and think about it as an immersive experience for the reader and really lean into my visual skills. And, and that's when things started to hum for me. And I felt more confident in the book, started to come together.

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER (45:17): And, Susan Orlean is a bestselling author of 12 books and a staff writer at The New Yorker, known for explorations of the world that are both clear-eyed and curious.

SUSAN ORLEAN: I believe entirely in the idea that learning about the world is in and of itself existentially valuable. You learn about some things that you like, you learn about some you don't like, you learn about things that you were uncomfortable with. You learn about things that are funny and surprising and engaging. But the bottom line is there's an an intrinsic value in learning. And so in that sense, I have a wildly optimistic worldview because how could that not be optimistic?

JIM COTTER VOICEOVER: I'm Jim Cotter. Join us for the next Articulate Experience.

Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation, more@articulateshow.org. Our show is produced by Tori Marchiony, with help from Christine Walden, Mark Miller, Tom Contino, Eva Roben, Matt Hoish, Gabby Bing, Paula Butler, and Mary Morilla. Our fact checker is Christopher Munden with Original Music and Sound Design by John Avarese. I'm Jim Cotter.