Gay ross

I think we feel this because you’re allowing us to witness change. It feels like the words are coming in and coming through me and coming out. I think about all the literature that’s come before. 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.

In writing, it’s the same thing.
    Recently, I was going back to reading the writer John Edgar Weideman, who was one of my most important writers.

Inscape: Oh, that’s beautiful! You’re watching yourself unbecome yourself. But to think of offering my work to an actual permanent thing, which is called love, which I would also say trees are an eminence of, that feels right.

Kind of like being my own first reader. So that’s how I’m thinking about it these days.
    Gratitude, it’s funny, in my head I kind of have an overlap of gratitude, joy, and love—like a trinity. To me, even that moment of trying to redeem the experience by talking about how much I love Snoopy, in that setting, in that midst, I hear both how comical Snoopy is, but I also hear, yo, hey, Linus needs a drink.

Inscape: Your explication is, to me, another example of holding joy and sorrow, both in life and in writing.

RG: Yeah.

Inscape: I find in your work an awareness of impermanence.

Second, writing that way doesn’t just happen. Why don’t you just go to the right word?” And then they had the realization, they understood, “oh, you’re showing us that you think, you’re showing us that you have to work through things to arrive at the right word for the time being.” It’s so beautiful, because that person’s email then offered me what I was sort of offering.

But there have also been times where it feels like a flow from somewhere both inside and outside of me. If it happens that some connection goes beyond that, all right, great. Delight, and this is what this guy got me on, he is like, oh, delight is like the mushrooms, periodically popping up through the mycelium reminding us to remember, it’s all connected.

And it’s sort of like that. As we talked about earlier, you’re your first reader, so you’re changing in front of yourself, then you’re allowing other people to witness this change.
    When we talk about proximation, I think your way of showing up to the page is, perhaps, why we all have a feeling of “me too!” when we read your work. The writer Jeff Dyer, or David Shields, or June Jordan… There’s so many I could list and I sort of think, “oh I’m just gonna imitate some of that.

But like, the fact that we are connected, threaded together to one another is amazing. You’re allowing yourself to change on the page in front of the thing you are creating. Thinking about those things is very powerful, you know?

Inscape: Yes! What would a “mechanical” way of evading those

voices be?

RG: I feel like I’m fundamentally a coach.

Since then, trees are my friends and someone else did plant them. It doesn’t just come out the way you read it. As opposed to this other thing of like, I’m asserting myself, or I’m imposing myself. I’ve been writing a lot about this very intense book tour that I’ve been on and that’s feeling very interesting.