Am I suppose to ask for questions?
Do they normally ask the questions?
OK.
It's short though.
We're done, right?
Well, you can ask them questions.
God.
Is there any questions?
Really?
I'm like a nine-minute person.
But maybe if you ask a really bad question.
I'll read the last two minutes.
Yeah.
I knew you'd go there.
She went tautological on us.
OK.
Anyone else?
Yeah, great.
Hun?
Yeah.
That's a good one actually.
I mean, for me, it was weird because I started
writing really late like you meet those cats who were like,
I wanted to be a writer since I was six.
The fuck out of here.
What do you know?
So for me, it was like I didn't start
writing until I was around 20.
And I was like a historian before that.
That was the thing I really wanted to be.
What ended up happening was my friends
they kept remembering things wrong.
Every time we talked about our lives together,
they would remember things wildly out of sync.
But they would also just not remember the right things
at all.
And I'm sure I didn't remember the right things either.
But I felt part of the reason I was writing
was to create this physical document.
Again, it was me being the historian thinking
I would create this document.
And it would be a place where we could argue from.
So they could say, well, that's not correct.
And part of it was that.
I mean, I think that that's the real structural answer
you always have.
And most of us are looking for something.
Because I couldn't rhyme and I couldn't write.
And in my neighborhood that was like a serious blow.
And so I was looking also with some way to be artistic.
And I think that's one of the ways I found it.
Damn.
Where the teachers in here?
You're a mess.
There's someone in here, it's a good question
because I think it's one of the things about writing
is a pedagogical enterprise.
And so it's really weird, right?
I think it's really weird.
I know what the rest of you want.
I think it's very bizarre to sit-in a workshop
and have six people being nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.
And then like one professor being she or he.
And I don't know about the rest of you guys.
I didn't grow up with grammar school with anything like that.
So it's weird and it's alien.
But it can be really helpful.
And I think for me, there's someone here
who is in a workshop with me.
And he could tell you how badly received we were.
People would read our work, and they would just be next.
They didn't want to deal with us at all.
I mean, there was people who were telling--
I remember people telling, Irvin, just wild ass shit.
That any place else that you'd get beat up on the street.
But in a workshop, everybody's like, I don't like your work.
But without any context to it, I mean,
I had yet to meet maybe some of you have been better workshops.
But I've yet to ever been in a workshop
where someone says just goes, you know what?
I don't have the authority to speak on this story.
And it's amazing that that doesn't happen more often.
Because it's like what?
Everybody knows everything?
You all some wild motherfuckers if that's the way it is.
And that's one of the things you have
to watch out in a workshop is when everybody
knows everything, and everybody's
got an opinion on everything.
Because they can be very useful.
You can find people in them that can help you lie.
And I'm not going to lie.
Workshops help me shape my work a lot.
But at the same time, you've got to be smart enough
to avoid those pitfalls of the Renaissance people
who are like, oh, you're writing about 17th century
ink and practices under--
I don't know.
I'm just like, what do you know about that?
Go read a book.
That seem the last.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Yes.
They'll fire me soon.
Yeah, I mean, for real.
They'll fire me soon.
Part of it is just--
I mean, last time, I looked.
My students don't look like anybody from where I come from.
So I'm not relating to them.
It's just that you get after a while
and you get tired of putting on your white person mask,
where you're speaking in translatable speak.
And you come to a certain age, where you just
don't want to do it anymore.
Especially when you're trying to teach children.
No, you do.
That's what I mean.
There comes an age when you just don't want to do anymore.
When I crack out my friends will be up in their projects.
And they'll be talking.
And then they've got to make a phone call somewhere.
And they're like, yes, could you tell me?
And there does come a time where you don't feel.
I mean, there's always a performative aspect
to everything around us, the way we present ourselves.
But for me, it just became a time
where I was just sick and tired of going home and feeling
like a parody of myself.
I don't know.
You're working with young people a lot of times.
People who work in the English department,
critically, they're always talking
about empowering all sorts of voices and lots of us a lot.
But God forbid the voices are in the department.
I mean, they want them very much mitigated.
I mean, we were joking around earlier about how often.
You got to love when kids are here by the way.
It makes it feel like it's a normal reading.
But a lot of times, these voices,
they want to mitigate it.
They don't mind someone who comes from someplace poor.
But he's got to have all the codes down,
or she has to have all the codes down.
OK.
Enough meanness.
Let's see why my students are ready to run me out.