The One You FeedThe Power of Intentionality in Life with Quan Barry
Eric and Quan Barry discuss the power of intentionality in life and art and some of the important themes that show up in her writing. Quan shares her insights on the importance of consciously feeding our thoughts and actions in positive ways. The conversation delves into the importance of creativity, the role of gratitude in personal growth, and the challenges of staying open to new experiences, as well as...
- How attention is a form of deep listening
- The importance of living a deliberate life
- How we can be satisfied and content AND still desire more
- The distinction between intention and ambition
- The importance of setting and keeping intentions for the path you are on
- Differentiating between setting intentions and setting goals
- Learning to trust your own voice and remaining open to other’s feedback
- Finding the nuance in labeling and defining oneself
- How a common fear is uncertainty and losing control
- The value in not being afraid to make mistakes
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When you go into a situation, then it's true of less things will resonate with you because you already are sort of in a closed off space.
Wow, welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Kwan Berry, the Lorraine Hansbury Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the author of seven books of fiction and poetry, including the recent novel When I'm Gone Look for Me in the East, which The New York Times described as mesmerizing and delicate, a dazzling achievement. Kwan is one of a select group of writers to receive the Neea Fellowships in both poetry and fiction, and in twenty twenty one was awarded the American Library Association's Alex Award. She currently serves as Forward Theater's inaugural Writer in Residence. The world premiere of her first play, The My Delenian Debate, was part of Forward Theaters twenty twenty one twenty twenty two season.
Hi Kawan, welcome to the show.
Hi, thanks for having me.
To have you on. I was telling you before we got started that it was sometime I don't remember when. I'm terrible with time, but I picked up your book from a local bookstore. It just looked great. It's called When I'm Gone look for Me in the East and started reading it for pleasure, which I don't get a ton of time to do, and about one chapter, two chapters in, I was like, all right, I've got to talk to Kwan. So I'm so excited that we're having you on. I've thus gone on to read another of your novels, and I really enjoy your writing. So we'll be talking about all that in a moment. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandparent talking with a grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well, which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
That's a great question. I love this parable because on the surface it seems really simple, and yet there's so much to unpack. So I have to admit that I bring a little bit of my English professor, you know, close reading skills to this, so on the most superficial level, on the surface level, and then just thinking about it with respect to my life. You know, it's the idea of you reap what you sew. You know, if you're pumping negativity into the world, it's hard to get positivity back. And so I think that that's the first reading that most people would have in hearing this parable, right, But if we dig a little deeper, there's like so much more going on. One of the things that I'm really interested in is are the wolves themselves and of thinking about them in terms of nuance. Right. So it's true that for me, and thinking about how the world has shifted in the last particularly the last five six years, I'm really interested in this idea of nuance rather than dichotomies and binaries. Right. So we have these two wolves on good one's bad, and again for the sake of parable it makes sense that it's fairly simplistic. But again, I think the world oftentimes, you know, we're not looking at things in terms of just black and white. It really is a world in which we're working along a spectrum and in which things, you know, very easily move from one space into another. So when thinking about these wolves and in thinking about the idea of nuance and spectrum. You know, many of your listeners, I'm sure, are familiar with the Buddhist idea of near enemies, the idea of how compassion can morph into pity, and conversely, how sometimes things sort of perceived as being bad can morph into being good. So when I hear this parable, like I said, it makes sense to me that it would be a fairly simple teaching in order for us to take in. But if we look at it a little bit more closely, we can think in terms of our own wolves and when they begin to shift along that spectrum. You know, when does what I do here? When is it a good thing? And when does it become a bad thing over here? So that's something that I'm really interested in. Two other things that also come up when I think about it is this idea of the question of how we actually feed them. Right, there's like the active feeding of quote unquote wolves, and then there's like the passive feeding of them. And so for many of us, obviously the active feeding of a wolf would be you know, our time, our energy, our attention, our money. And we can oftentimes think of the ways in which we feed things, particularly like online social media. You know, it's obvious to us the things that we're feeding in those particular realms. But something that we sometimes don't think about as much, again is the Buddhist idea of aversion right or resistance, and that sometimes you can actually feed things again through that more passive channel by resisting it. And oftentimes actually those passive channels are actually the ones that are stronger because we're not as aware of them in many ways.
Right.
So that's something else that I'm interested in. And then the last thing, and just unpacking this seemingly simplistic parable, which has a lot going on, is I'm really interested in that idea of the word win, Like what does it mean to win? So you know, when the child says, so, which one wins? If you think about it, it's such an interesting word because if you take that word out, it completely destabilizes the entire parable, Like if it's not about winning, So what would you have then, if it wasn't a question of these two wolves in competition, what would you be left with? Right? And So in my own life, I don't necessarily think in terms of the word win. But a similar kind of word that I think many of us struggle with is the word like succeed. For the word you know, success, like what does that mean?
Right?
And so that idea that if you take that word out of an equation, So if you're in your life and you're feeling like something's not going with, well, what does success mean? Like, what would success look like if I take that word out? How might this situation then look much different? How might it not be as daunting? You know, if I take that particular word out, So in many ways, by using the word win, like I said, it sets up a struggle already, and so you're already in conflict, right, And so those are just some things that come to mind, just again and hearing this, like I said, very simplistic parable, which again, if you dive a little bit deeper into it, there's just a lot going on. I'm sure there's many other things too that I haven't mentioned.
Yeah, I love that, and I don't think anybody has as systematically unpacked it as that, all the different levels, and I love it. I love the way that often writers and poets know how to look at things at multiple different levels. I always admire that as a skill, as you call it, your close reading skills, you know, to be able to read something and go, Okay, well that's what I got the first time. What happens if I look a little bit closer. I talk a lot about attention because I think attention is one of the most important resources we have at our disposal. And I always admire artists because that is one of the things that artists seem to be able to wield, is they seem to be able to use their attention in deeper ways than we do in our ordinary day to day life. And I guess I'd like to start, maybe from there with a question about that, because you've mentioned that your novels have come from you made a joke I think once somewhere that you get all your ideas from NPR. You know, they come from places you've been, places you've traveled, And I'm just kind of curious. Is there a way in which you are moving through the world that you feel like you have your artist hat on and other times you don't. Is it a default way of being.
For you now?
Like that level of attention. Do you feel like you have to sort of turn it on and remember to turn it on? What does it feel like a default stance to you at this point?
Going back to you know, my earlier comment when I was talking about the idea of the parable and this idea of nuance, right, So it's true that so oftentimes in life, you know, we put on caps or we wear labels and we only think of ourselves in terms of those labels. So one label that I'm interested actually in extending to the entire world, not just to a subset of humanity, is the label of poet. Right. So the word poet actually comes from the Greek poeo, So literally from the Greek, the word poet, literally as a verb, just means to make. So a poet is simply a maker. Like that is all a poet is, right, And so if you use that as your definition, then we're all poets, right, And so I think sometimes, particularly in the West, though we can think, oh no, there's a special group of people who are artistic, who have these sensitivities, who see these things that the rest of us don't see. But again, to me, it's all about like I said, it's all about that spectrum. It's all about the idea of putting that hat on for yourself and thinking of yourself in those kinds of terms. So for me at this point, you know what I've been doing, been a professor at the University of Wisconsin and Madison for the last twenty two twenty three years. At this point it is sort of second hat for me to just sort of see and observe. But I think it's always been sure. You know, I'm the youngest of five children. In some ways, as the youngest of five children, I very much learned to observe, to observe people, to observe the world, to take things in, and to learn from those observations. As an adult, I sometimes, you know, as we all do, have a tendency to be judgmental in those observations. But again, the more I can simply be observant and not judgmental, then the more I can actually learn. And so for me, you know, now, when I'm traveling or when I'm hearing stories or things like that, I'm always interested in the story behind the story. There's one ways in which in thinking about you know, Buddhist teachings, the way in which things are what they are and what's happening is what's happening, and what is is what is. But on another level, I think that because we have this relative world and we have this absolute world, but there's more going on than we know, and I'm interested in thinking again beyond just the surface level of things. I feel fortunate that as of right now in my life, I actually, for whatever reason, have a pretty good memory. And so it's true that when I travel to various places, I don't do any kind of specific documentation in order to help me remember it later for a book or what have you. But usually it's the kind of thing I'll be in a space. It could be even potentially years later that I realize what I want to do with that space and how it might work in my writing. For example, I was in Antarctica in two thousand and four, and it's only now almost twenty years later that I'm actually writing a story to set in Antarctica. But when I go back and I think about it, I look at pictures and many, many memories come back to me, and I feel fortunate about that. So the last thing I'll say to answer your question, though, is that, yes, attention for me is everything, and I often think of attention, you know, as a form of deep listening right and to be present in our world. There's so many forces at work that do not want us to be conscious and fully present, and I know that for me, I don't call myself a Buddhist. I've obviously studied Buddhism. It's important to me. I was raised as a Unitarian, and I still in some way sick of myself as Unitarian. But when I first came to Buddhism and began taking classes in it, you know, a teacher asked like, why are you here? What do you want? And I realized, I said at the time, as I wrote this out, I said, I want to live a deliberate life. You know, I don't want to just have things just sort of happen. And I look back on it and wonder why I made those decisions. So say, idea that I want to delive a deliberate life. But again, it's also a paradox because in some ways I also am a believer in the fact that the more you can give up control to life, to the universe, and the happier our So it's a paradox living the deliberate life, but then also recognizing the limits of one's control.
Yeah, that absolutely is a paradox, and I think that we are awash in them in life, and the more that we can recognize that, the better. I mean, it's one of the things you mentioned this about the story, you know, the Wolf story as it is, is fairly douistic in life. Just isn't that clean and simple? I mean, anytime anybody tries to make anything clean and simple, I generally rebel against it because I'm like, well, there's more to this. You know, there's there is nuance, There's lots of different perspectives there, and often when you look, there's that paradox. And I was going to ask you a question about the idea of being satisfied and content with where you are and what you have, which is a key sort of Buddhist slash spiritual tenant. It's just a good way to try and live life, and also that desire to do more and be more, have more. I mean, you're a I'm going to use this term, and I don't mean it in the way it's going to sound ambitious person. And what I mean is you create a lot of stuff. You know, you're a poet, You've written multiple novels. It sounds like you're writing stories. You're a playwright, you're a teacher. There's a lot going on there, and I'm curious for yourself, how do you balance that desire to be happy with what is and what's here and the desire to continue to do more.
Yeah, it's a great question. I've been thinking about it quite a bit now as I slowly move into a playwriting space. More. Playwriting is a very different world than the world of literature that I've inhabited it, and I'm learning a lot about it from what I've seen playwriting world. I'm not disparaging it in any way, but you need to have from what I've seen is just my observation a little bit more quote unquote hustle. I'm not really a hustler. I respect hustlers right in the arts, Hustling is a major part of things. When I'm talking to graduate students, I often talk about the idea of luck. You need luck to be in these professions. Like obviously skill is involved. At the end of the day, there is an element of luck and you have to be prepared for when you're fortunate enough to have that door open, right. And so from what I'm seeing, as I've mentioning with this idea of hustle, which I recognize in certain ways, I'm kind of grandfathered in and I don't have to participate in hustle culture as much as younger writers do because I came of age before the intern and all those kinds of things, and I built my career before Twitter and before all that kind of fun stuff which I've anticipated. Right, What I'm understanding is I moved slowly into this playwriting world, like, oh, I might have to be a hustler here, Like what does that mean for me? How would I maintain kinds of things that I'm interested in? You know, Hustling for me is not fun. It does not make me happy, it doesn't bring me joy. And so that's something that I've really been struggling with. And I thought that I had recently come to a place where I understood that, potentially for me, that success in the playwriting world would be writing plays that I think are smart and are working on many levels, and getting to work with actors and directors, mostly locally here in Wisconsin, because there's some great theater happening here in the state which a lot of people don't know about, And seeing my work produced and brought to an audience, but again doing that mostly here in Wisconsin, and not thinking more broadly nationally, you know. And so I thought that I arrived in a place where I was okay with that without okay, maybe I'm going to be a Wisconsin play right, my work will maybe not be done on the coasts or what have you, And like I said, I thought I was alright with that. In chatting with other people who are in this world, you know, some of who had said to me, and again I say this all humility, They had said that the idea of me being like quote unquote, I don't want to say, justinis constant play right, but actually made them a little sad because they felt like my work deserved to be seen more broadly. Right. And so I moved again back in this space of having to think about, well, what does that mean then for me to be ambitious, you know, and yet to also have this balance of the kinds of things that I want, right, And so I think at the end of the day, the way I'm sort of figuring that is a I'm not in any rush, right, I'm not in a rush. I think a lot of hustle culture is about like right now, and about trends and things like that. And if I have a mindset like I'm not in a rush, you know, if the playwriting world opens up for me in twenty years, great, and if it doesn't, great, So that sort of helps me. I also think to the way in which I define success can still you know, have a lot of what I was talking about before, the idea of writing something that pleases me, and ultimately the end of the day, you know, sometimes my students will want to talk about audiences and how writers think in terms of audiences. I have to admit again, this is not a path for everybody, but for me, I rarely think in terms of audience, because really the audience is me. And I say that again with all humility, is that I write because I want to see what somebody like me would write. That's how I sort of began writing in the nineteen nineties when I was an undergraduate. Back then, this is like what thirty years ago, forty years ago, there weren't as many writers of color, you know, creative work, and so I'm somebody, I'm biracial, I'm transracially adopted. I recognized as I was coming up that I saw this hole in the literature, like, Okay, what would it look like for somebody like me to write books, or to write poetry, or to do these things? And so I began writing because of that. I wanted to see, like, yeah, what does somebody like me produce? And that hopefully still is my main impetus for creating these books and for writing and doing the things that I do, And so the more I can steer my ambition towards that and remembering like why I began doing this in the first place, and the less I game my ambition out towards the larger world and wanting things and wanting glory or whatever that might look like, than the happier I am.
There's so many great things you just said in there that I'm going to circle back on here. But there's a line in the new book that the distance between heaven and Earth is no greater than one's intention. And you know, I think as we talk about these ideas of what success is and you know, what our ambition is, that intention becomes really really important. And at least for me, I know that I have really good intentions and reasons that I do what I do and I do this show, and I try and stay close to those. And when you're talking about audience and the size of your audience being how much money you make and all those factors start to come in, I find it really important to have to sort of keep redirecting myself back to sort of what you said, more of the intrinsic stuff, because it can always be more. Like you said, you think I'm going to be satisfied if I get my plays just produced at all, And then you're like, I'll be satisfied if I'm just known well locally.
You know.
It's the mind always can want more. That's a pretty core Buddhist teaching. And so I find for me that recognizing like, yeah, of course I have multiple intentions and impulses going on here. Can I try to the best of my ability to keep reorienting back to the ones that are most meaningful and the ones that are actually under my control.
Yeah, No, absolutely, anything.
Else you'd like to say about intention.
Yeah, I think, you know, until I was about forty, I don't think I had a sense of intention, which sounds really weird. You know, I was building my career, learning how to teach, you know, building my life here in the Midwest, and it wasn't that I was unconscious. And again, I feel like I was raised to be a contrarian a little bit. So for example, like I don't have a smartphone, you know, I'm not on any kind of social media, I don't have a TV. And again I don't say those things with pride. And I also recognize that in many ways those choices are actually a privilege. It's actually a privilege not to have like a cell phone, right because I recognize a lot of people have to have those for jobs or for family or things like that. So again, it's a privilege, and I don't say it like in a glib kind of way. In many ways, like intention, I had a path, and the path was there, and I knew what I needed to do to get tenure, to get these books done, to do whatever, and I just sort of followed that path. It was right about when I termed forty, and not because consciously I thought that forty was any kind of demarcation in any kind of way. It was A friend of mine asked me if I wanted to start taking these meditation classes. He's also an artist and I've done some collaborations with him, and I was like yeah, and so we kind of came to Buddhism as artists. Whereas I think a lot of people and again, I think it's great that it works for a lot of people for a lot of different reasons, but I think a lot of people come to Buddhism more out of a sense of suffering or of a sense that things not being right, whereas again, we had creative interest in it and that was why we were sort of there. And so when I sort of landed in that space and the idea of intentionality as a sort of tool became much more interesting to me, I think because creatively, I'd always thought that too much intention you know, Robert Frost has this famous line, no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. Right, So if you're not surprising yourself as you're creating, then what you come out with is silted. And so I think that because I thought of that almost like as a life matra, you know, like the more you're planning things out, the less spontaneous your life is and the more stale it is. But I began to realize that intentionality doesn't necessarily equate with staleness, right, that there can still be a vibrancy to setting intentions and things like that. All I would add to all this is that my intentions, I find they're not goals. Again, there's a difference, right, And so I've actually started in the last year or so with my graduate students having them set an intention on the first day of class, like what are your intentions for this class, right, as opposed to what are your goals or objectives? And I thought it was really interesting to see the kinds of answers that they came up with as far as intentions, and usually again that you're talking about it's like the internals, right, intentions are about the internals and not about the externals with respecta goals and objectives.
In that exercise asking students to write down their intentions, did you used to ask them to write down their goals? Or this was just a whole new line of thinking.
I used to ask for goals. Yeah, I think I still do. I think I asked for both, so I.
Make it okay. Yeah, And so you could see some real differences in what they write when they're looking at and an intention versus a goal.
Yeah, I would say that Again, their goals were about professional kinds of things, right, their intentions from what I saw, which was really interesting to me. And I don't think they thought this consciously. It was just just what they put down, but it was much more. I could see they were interested in thinking through ways to help them achieve life balance, you know, work, how to take criticism, especially in an art space, How to receive criticism and not have it, you know, internally damage you. How to give criticism and a way again thinking about loving kindness or what have you? Right, So, like I said, their intentions were much more for their inner lives than they were about again like the externals of goals and things like that.
For me, an intention is generally about like who do I want to be? How do I want to be? You know? It's like it's how am I showing up in the world, you know, and what's important to me? You just said about how to take criticism without it crushing you. I think I'm sort of paraphrasing how do you do that? I think as an artist there's an element to it, but I think that applies broadly and generally to being human. What are some of the things you've learned about that?
So, if anybody knows what a writing workshop is traditionally, it's true that pedagogically this is changing, particularly since twenty twenty, there are more people of color, more women in certain spaces, and thinking that the traditional model of a writing workshop perhaps needs to be rethought. So the traditional model that I came up with through the nineteen nineties was you write something, you bring it into your workshop, the class discusses it. As you sit there in what's called the cone of silence, so you don't say anything, you're not defensive about it. The class discusses it, you know, sometimes they rip it to pieces, you know, hopefully they also have positive things to say. And then at the end of that discussion you simply say thank you and you move on. Right, there's something to be said about that as a tool for learning about your craft. But there's also ways in which you can imagine. It's incredibly disempowering. Right, It's disempowering. You had intentions in that work and here are people talking about it and you can't express to them and explain things and etc.
Etc.
So that was the traditional model. Now students are being more and more empowered to share their voices during the process with respect to intention and those kinds of things. For me, coming up in the traditional way of running a workshop, I actually feel it was a gift. I can understand the negatives about the process when I teach. Now I try and teach a combination of things. I think that that traditional process, when done with care, can be an extremely loving situation. As I try and tell my students, when else in life do you have like twelve or fifteen people sitting around and giving you their total attention for something that you have created. Right, the idea of coming at that and realizing that that is a gift. Their attention is a gift. Listening is a gift, right. And the more that you can inhabit that space of realizing, Okay, these things are here to make me better and not to tear me down, it's my job as the workshop facilitator to help that space remain positive and constructive and not to have it just become a free fall. And so, like I said, those particular spaces for me were they've also helped me in my playwriting because in many ways, as I've learned, is that in playwriting you have a whole bunch of people who have many, many opinions about things. Whereas when I write a novel, when I write poetry, it's really between me and my editor in many ways and anybody else. But the obviously in the playwriting world there are a lot of cooks in that kitchen. And so learning how to listen just it comes down to certain things resonate. You know, you'll hear a criticism, and the question will be does that resonate with you or does it not? And the more you can be open to it, the more you can let go of your defenses. If you have a lot of defense when you go into a situation, then it's true, the less things will resonate with you because you already are sort of in a closed off space. So the more you can open yourself to hearing anything, no matter how painful or what have you. Again, it shouldn't be painful, but even if things you know at times do feel painful, then, like I said, you hear those resonances and they ultimately help you hopefully take the work into a stronger space.
And as part of what you are teaching students is how to hear criticism and make it only about their work and not about themselves. Because we become very attached to our creation. We often identify ourselves as a creator, and so when people are sort of taking that apart, I think it's very easy to feel all kinds of different emotions that may not be wonderful. And so is that part of what you as you're teaching writers, you're teaching them how to do.
That absolutely, so you know on the first day when we're having workshop, I talk through some things with them. You know, we talk about that we never assume that the character and a poem or story is the writer. You always make a space when we're talking about it, like, well, the narrator says here or it said here, but again we never say you said x y racy. I'm always having to help students and remember that, like, no, we're creating that space or that distance, right. Sometimes they don't want that distance, which again, then you can complicate things and they're like no, I thought that. No, you know, it's like okay, but you know, for the spakes sake of us in this space talking about this work, what happens if we maintain that distance?
Right?
So, yes, a lot of it is helping them be able to understand. Again, like I said that, there's a different and the ways that people talk about their work. It's the kind of thing that for me in certain ways, because I've been doing it for so long, it's hard for me to remember those first workshops. But I recently had a student who asked a visitor to my class this question, like, how do you know, not personalize the kinds of things that were said, and the visitor to my class was actually the same age I am, and he was like, again, because we've been doing this so long, we've kind of forgotten, like, ah, gosh, I don't know, it's just there. I think for me one of the hardest things to teach my students because they get that, they understand that, okay, because I think they understand it because they're doing it for other people as well. So you're receiving homework and you're doing it to other people's work as well, and you know hopefully that when you're doing it for other people's work that you're not being personal hopefully, right. I think the most difficult thing for me to teach students is to believe in their own voices and to believe in their inner thing that tells them when something's working when something is not. You know, this is particularly true for what I hate to say it, but for my female students, but really helping them understand, you know, because there's so many ways in which is particularly for women, that we're taught to second guests ourselves. So part of my job is helping them realize now, you know, you know what the answer is to this. Interestingly, last night I was just listening to a live broadcast with Adjashanti, the obviously not dualist teacher, and you know, and he was talking about this idea of like, you know, I don't know if it's called sak guru, but it's the idea of your internal guru, that that actually is who the alt teacher is, it's not an external teacher. And so that's something that I like, I said that I'm always trying to inculcate in my students.
I love Adiya Ashanti. We've had him on multiple times. He's always a pleasure to talk to when you're getting feedback like that. We're talking about getting feedback on writing, and this isn't a show for writers necessarily, but I think this speaks broadly to the human condition. How do you encourage your people to think about what you just said, because again we're kind of back to paradoxical ideas. On one hand, you trust your own voice, you know your own voice. On the other hand, you are open to what other people have to say about that and feedback. And you know, I find that it's very easy to go, well, you know what, I know what I'm doing, So here's my voice. Everybody else is wrong and block it out or just simply lose yourself in everybody else's opinion. How do you encourage people to think about, like, let's take what's useful from what's being said, but you also know when like that feedback isn't useful to you, that feedback isn't pointing you in the right direction.
A great question. It's tough. If I if I could bottle it, you know, be the easiest thing. You know, My answer is is it's a very writerly answer. Like I wish that my answer was something that could apply to life like in a broader way. I'm not sure it can. But it has to do with how I've set up the space in which we're in. Right. So one of the things that I talk about is I talk about this idea of a smorgas board. Right, So I'm like, we're in here and we're creating a smortgage board for the writer. So we are piling as many different ideas and suggestions on this mortgage board for them to then come and decide which those things they want to take. So it's like a supermarket right of ideas and comments and thoughts. And I think that something about phrasing it like that it empowers people because ultimately they're the shopper. They're the one who's going around and deciding what to take and what not to take in those kinds of things. So it's it's not prescriptive, it's not you have to do X to make this better. It's the idea of again, you're in this space, if IBA's trying and expand that to like life and how that works. I think in some ways, yeah, maybe the supermarket you know metaphor sort of works. I mean, obviously there are ways in less people talk about, you know, cafeteria Catholics or cafeteria bits, you know. But again going back to that idea of the sak guru, you know that, like, yeah, ultimately it is your inner voice that's guiding you through these things. And I think the last thing I'll say about it is the idea of not being afraid to make mistakes. So I know that when I was a younger writer, that was something that was hard for me. It was hard to write things that were quote unquote ugly. It was hard to like see myself fail on the page. And if you let that overwhelm you, then you don't end up writing anything right, So that idea, they're like, Okay, maybe sometimes you buy the wrong thing. You know, it happens. Like I said, I think that that's empowering in many ways. And so, like I said, at the end of the day, I'm just always trying to empower my students.
Let's change directions a little bit. Do you want to give us a brief summary of what your latest novel is kind of about? I mean, I could take a stab at it, but it's probably going to be better from you, just to sort of as we go a little bit further into it so listeners have some context for it.
Yeah. So, When I'm Gone look for Me in the East is set in contemporary Mongolia and it follows two identical twin brothers who are tasked with going out into the vast Mongolian countryside in the search for a Buddhist reincarnation. So basically the story opens, we have these two twins who are estranged. So one is actually a novice Buddhist monk and again he's been asked by the abbot of his monastery to go out and searching for this reincarnation, and so he asks his twin brother, who had as a child been discovered to be the reincarnation of an important lama, but who has since left the tradition. He asks his twin brother to help him on this quest, and basically, like I said, they go out into the bass Mongolian countryside, which Mongol is an amazing country that has many different spaces in it which are very different. It has mountains and snow, it has the Gobi Desert. So these two brothers go along with a few other folks from Tibetan India to go search for this reincarnation.
And the two brothers also are sort of psychically linked in a way.
They are. Yes, so they're twin brothers. And you know, were they born with a call over their face? Do they have the ability to read each other's minds, share memories. Yeah, that's definitely a part of it as well.
So I wanted to just start with the two characters. You've got one who is still very deep in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and is planning to ordain I believe you know, is getting to that point. And then the other who is considered sort of a celebrated figure in that tradition. Right, he was a reincarnation of a previous master who has left it and is living in more of a modern, westernized way. The two of them certainly represent these two ideas, one of a monastic and the other of a modern life person. And for those of us that are on some sort of spiritual journey, I think we have this call and tension between us all the time between going deeper in and pursuing our spiritual path and being more of the world. Do you find that those characters represent different parts of you in a sense?
I feel like they represent different parts of exactly what you're talking about, just like the human condition, right, and from that whole idea that the spiritual versus the material, right. And so I was very much thinking about them, going back to our earlier conversation about the parable and the idea of nuance and how things slide in and out. The beginning of the story, they seemingly would appear to be diametrically opposed as far as they're objectives and wants out of life. But hopefully by the end of the book, you know they've gone on a journey. They both come and had self realizations, and maybe they realize that they're actually not all that different after all.
What I thought we would do is I would just continue to pull a couple lines out of the book and just see if they spark any sort of conversation. I mean, the chapter titles. I just love, love, love the chapter titles of this book.
There.
I mean, I could just flip it open and see, like, this is a title of a chapter. The constant arising of uncertainty is the only aspect of life of which we can be certain.
Yeah, So a couple of things about the book. The chapter titles were a late addition to it. So when I was in the book, I I'm not sure at what point, because I write it over many years, I'm not sure at what point I realized that these would all be very short chapters. I can't remember if again in earlier permutations, if they had been longer. I actually think that maybe they actually were short chapters even when I first started writing it. And so I had all these short little chapters, and originally they didn't have any titles at all, and then something about the shortness of the chapters. The entire book is written in present tense, regardless of time, so even when they go back in time, it's present tense. Even if somebody has a future thought. It's in present tense. The entire book's written in presentents. It's very fluid, right, and there are certain kinds of ways in which it moves slow, but it also moves fast. And so I realized that I need to sort of chapter titles to sort of like make each one kind of a snapshot in certain kinds of ways. And so I went through each chapter and I just simply pulled out a phrase or aligned. So almost all of the chapter titles actually are a phrase or aligned from that actual chapter, right. And so in thinking about the one that you just read, you know, I don't have any kind of like personal matras or anything like that, but if I were too, it probably is just the idea that, to me, the only absolute, that there are no absolutes. Yeah, yeah, And so the idea of uncertainty, particularly for us in the West, uncertainty is many people, you know have a hard time living in uncertainty, myself included. Right, I'm actually writing a book right now, which, as I had mentioned, I was in Antarctica in two thousand and four. All of my books are very different, you know. One of my books is a comedy. This book is obviously meditative and spiritual. I have another book about Vietnam which is very lyrical and almost like a ghost story. The book that I'm writing that's set in Antarctica is actually I describe it as a horror book, but we'll see what happens. And so because of that, I've actually been asking people about what scares them. And I'm not interested in like spiders and that kind of stuff. I'm actually interested in existential things that scare them. And the number one thing that people keep mentioning is just the idea of a loss of control and uncertainty. Right that those are like they're number one fears, and so it's interesting if you really unpack that, like why that is, Like why is it that we fear uncertainty? I can understand why we fear loss of control because it's that feeling like if not in control, then anything could happen, which obviously is the truth. But the idea of uncertainty, again, it's one of those things where if you slide, you know, thinking about it along the spectrum, uncertainty can also be like really exciting. You know, there's a freshness to it. Anything is possible in a positive way, right The glass is half full, and yet it's something that we really really super fear and like I said, myself included, right, And so I don't remember the specifics of that particular chapter that you too. As an idea and thinking about this book, one of the things that the brother who's the Monk is dealing with is that he's on the cusp in a few months of actually taking his final vows, and he knows that when he takes these final vows, he will be giving up, for example, the idea of you know, having a love and committed relationship that he's basically vowing to be celibate, and the uncertainty of that, and I'm not knowing if that's something that he can actually live, you know, is really it's tearing him up inside, and it's something that he's really struggling with. So yeah, so just been thinking about our lives in all the different kinds of ways in which uncertainty presents itself each and every day. Is definitely a major theme in the book and something that I think about a lot.
Yeah, It's interesting to see his struggles as he thinks about taking his final vows. Because most young people are driven to some degree by what is normal in that period of life, which is, you know, attraction to who you're attracted to and those desires that come along with it. And so he has all that, and on top of it, since he's sort of telepathically connected with his brother, his brother, after having left the tradition, has gone out and experienced what it's like to be with a woman, and so he actually has that window into it, and it's really interesting to watch him sort of struggle with those ideas. And you know, it's back to that sort of between our spiritual quest and the material. You know, I'm not saying that. I actually am not one of those people who believe at all that like physical desire is an unspiritual thing at all, but in his tradition it actually is. You know, in the Tibetan tradition, he's considered, you know, to be a monk. He has to give that up, and the way you write about his struggles are really helpful. I wanted to ask a question about something you said a second ago about writing the whole novel in present tense. I've heard you say that you like to give yourself a little bit of a challenge in writing, as if writing isn't challenging enough, you like to step it up a notch. You'll take on a task like writing and making everything in present tense. Was there any underpinning to why you chose that besides the fact that it was challenging. Did you feel like it spoke to this core idea of always being present that permeates the Buddhist tradition?
Yeah. Usually when I pick a challenge for myselfware a constraints. Sometimes writers will call them constraints. Generally speaking, is not arbitrary, but it somehow serves the story.
Yep.
So for example, my second novel, We Write Upon Sticks. In that book, the entire book is written from a collective we point of view, so it's first person plural is opposed to like first person singular. And again the purpose there is that it's a story about a teen girl group of field hockey players. So it made sense to me that collectively that they would tell like their own stories. So again that's why I did that, And thinking about this book, when I realized that I needed to, like, what was the constraint going to be? Again, to me, the constraint needs to serve the story, and so I'm thinking about the idea of Buddhism and thinking about the idea of one of its major tenants is, you know, the idea of the power of now Cartole that this is, this is what is, you know, this is all it is. It made sense to me that the story would be told in present tense and present tense only the other thing that it does. And it's true, you know, because I'm the poets originally, that's my training was in poetry, and my first books for all poems. There is a part of me that I like my readers to have to slow down a bit, you know, I'm not writing page turners. There's some be said about that, but that's just not what I'm interested in. And so you would think that maybe by writing an entire book and present tense, that would have it go really fast in a certain kind of way. But there's actually a way in which I think it slows it down. So yes, it was very much intentional and thinking about like the themes that I was interested in exploring in this book, and that was the reason why I chose that.
Did it give you any insight into living in the present tense? By having to think about everything in that sense? Did anything come to you in your own spiritual life that came out of that.
As I mentioned, you know, I don't consider myself to be a Buddhist, and it's true that John duality is uh is that out there, it's in the world. What does it means? Many different things to many different people, But it's the teaching that does resonate the most with me, and it's something that I think about like all the time, even as a practice, the idea of like now and coming back to now, coming back to now, coming back to now and again, the recognition that what does it even mean to say coming back to like where were you? Like no, you were right here right So exactly, it's really at the heart of my practice in many ways. And so I wish I could say that writing the book Like helped me understand more about it, but it didn't.
Enough.
It is sort of what I strive and where I strive to be is to be here.
It is interesting to think about when you're writing the book about a character's memories, you're writing them in the present tense, as if they're happening now, and in a very real sense we know that to be sort of what is happening with memory, right, I mean, we are having the memory right now like that, that experience is all still incredibly present.
Yeah, you know, in my own meditation practice, you know, I've experienced moments. I'm sure many people have, you know, experienced moments of what feels like like a very deep of being very very deeply present and recognizing certain things, right and so so yes, the idea that everything happens here there is nowhere else, there is one moment can't be cut up or divided like this is it.
Similarly, you mentioned writing in the first person plural for we write upon sticks. As you were talking about that, it also occurred to me that when I'm going to look for me in the East and we write upon sticks have one thing in common, which is that there is some degree of mind melding that has happening between characters. Is that just sort of coincidental?
I don't think so so. As I mentioned in, my first four published books were poetry books. And then for some reason I was like, I'm going to write a novel.
Why not?
Right?
And my first novel is called She Weeps Each Time You're Born, and it's set in Vietnam, and it follows a woman who is born towards the end of the Vietnam more up through contemporary times, and in that particular book, the quote unquote power that she has is that she has the power to hear the voices of the dead, which in Vietnam is a space in which there's obviously many missing and many dead. And so when I was first writing that novel, I realized it was set in Vietnam but had a very different theme and very different story, and I had to scrap it. And I had to really think, like, what are my strengths as a writer? Like what am I doing? And I thought, I say this, you know, humbly, I think, because I'm a poet, that one of my strengths is actually language. I can put words together in interesting patterns, I think. But then I realized that another strength of mind which I had never realized as a poet. I think it's going back to being the youngest of five children for whatever reason, like I have the ability to just make stuff up, like when it comes to plot. Some writers have a hard time with plot. I don't know why. Plot for me is very easy. And then I also realized that if I added one magical element to a plot, it's almost like taking something from three D and taking it into four D, because then you can just go one again. You don't want to get too crazy with it. So in that first novel, it's the idea that she can hear the voices of the dead, and that was the extra four D thing. And the second novel was the idea that this team can kind of collectively mind wise share thoughts. Yeah and so, and in this book it's the idea that it happens just between these two twins, right, and so it's true that each one of those magic elements, going back to when we were talking about constraints that I set for myself, they're not just arbitrary, but hopefully they also enhance the story as well.
Yeah, and they all have something to do with being able to understand what's happening with other people. There is an empathetic element to all of those three things.
Yeah, yeah, I hadn't thought of that, But yes.
I'm curious whether when you were trying to write in the first person plural, whether that gave you any insights into how to think about us collectively or as people, or how to be more empathetic or I mean, I think as a novelist of a certain type. You have to be very empathetic because you were basically putting yourself in the minds of all these people. But there is a way in which doing it in the way you did is a different type of empathy. You're putting yourself in each of their minds individually, and then there's a collective element to it.
The collective element of that book for me, wasn't the challenge, and it didn't necessarily broaden my views of how we think about ourselves as a community, but the individual stories of those characters certainly did so. For example, there's a trans character in there, and I really had to think, I am not LGBTQ, you know, I had to think long and hard about how I was going to portray that character, how I was going to have their story be sympathetic and yet true and honest and reflect you know, the experiences of LGBTQ people coming up in the nineteen eighties particularly. I thought long and hard, like, well, if I don't have this character and I had something else, like, what would that mean? And for me personally, I came to realization that if I didn't include that voice and that character, that that would be a kind of a reachure, and I didn't want to meet. The community of women includes all kinds of folks, right yeah, and so, like I said, the writing of the book in first person didn't necessarily broaden my thoughts about community, but the individual character stories did.
One of the things you said about writing this book was you didn't have to go anywhere or do much research on it because you kind of lived it, meaning you grew up in that area in that time frame. And I did not grow up in the Boston area or the New England area. I'm Ohioan, but I grew up right in that timeframe, so all the cultural references are spot on. It did feel very much. There have been a few moments where I was like, I have not thought of that idea, that name, that whatever for a long time. So it was fun in that way for me. Near the very end of the book, I don't even know how to say what's happening in this section because I don't fully understand exactly. Maybe you can tell me what you know.
I'm guessing he's in the sand. Is that what it's saying.
It's the very last section, and it has a section heading, which is another great one. I was going to ask about, do not seek an easy victory, but always prefer a defeat that advances your learning. Which we could talk about that one for sure, if you want, you want to have a little motto, that's a very good one. But the character is giving a thesis. It's a little bit like a PhD world where you're giving a thesis and defending. In the Zen world, we would call it sort of dharma combat. Right, you're saying something and then the teacher is sort of poking at it. What's happening in that scene?
Yeah, so a couple of things. It is. It's the very it's the very end of the book. The poet in me, when I ask these kinds of questions, I oftentimes you know, mangle paraphrase Hemingway, you know, when he was asked about the old man the sea, you know, is the old man to see a Christian Aligordon? And he would say, you know, if I've written it, well, it means many things to many people. Yes, And so there's a part of me that doesn't like there to be like one definitive interpretation of what's happening at that moment. You know, your physical description of the idea of debate within the Buddhist community is spot on. So again not to be overly serious about it, but I'm going to beg off from answering that question. But like I said, I feel like you know a lot of what you've said. That's basically the setting of what is happening in that final passage, and for me, the one thing that I would say in which I love and again if I had a personal mantra, I feel like I've said like ten personal luntras. But the last line of the entire book is again obviously in translation from the poly but are allegedly the Buddhist dying words, make of yourself a light that is unwavering. You know which that line that phrased to me, I just like when I hear it, I feel it, you know, make of yourself a light that is unwavering. I can't say that I set out knowing that that was gonna be a last And it's a spoiler alert. Sorry if anyboe who has read the book, but it's just it's such a great line you have to give the boot of the last word.
Yeah, well, it is a book that has a Buddhism featured very heavily in that last section. There is a line that one of the characters is talking about. They're talking about permanence and impermanence, and the character is basically making a state that love is not impermanent. The line is love is not a product like a jar or a sound. Love is a force. And elsewhere very shortly after, love is not something we create. It is something that wells up in us, like sap in a tree. Did you pull that somewhere in Buddhist tradition or was that a feeling that came over you or a belief that you have.
So, just to elaborate a little bit more again, when you would mention this idea that this particular section feels like a thesis debate in many ways. So it's true that I read actual transcripts of Buddhist debate. So in the Tibetan world, it's true that there's a lot of debate that happens. You'll see monks in courtyards debating each other where they have all these sort of scripted moves and they're actually like it almost looks like they're dancing. There's ways in which like they clap their hands and they stamp the earth and one person says something and then you know, they clap and stamp and the other person responds, right. And it's very formulaic linguistically. So, for example, I don't remember what the opening lines are in that particular section, but there's a formula to how they speak to each other, right. And there's also the idea of jars. There's a way in which when they talk about material things, you know, they'll talk about like a jar or a vessel or so a lot of the language, a lot of just the structure of that particular scene does come from the idea of these debates. With respect to the argument that he's making about love, I mean, that's like I wrote that, that's just you know, what I'm thinking about. So, I mean I wrote all of it obviously, but those kinds of things I was trying to think through. Okay, So here's this person who is debating this topic to show their knowledge about Buddhism. What would the ultimate topic for them be to debate? And then how would they make their arguments? You know, what would the person who's debating against them say, you know, what would this look like? And in many ways, Tibetan Buddhism, I think, and again I am no expert by a long shot. So the idea of a paradox that everything is impermanent, and yet Tibetan Buddhism does believe in this kind of like this luminosity, which seems that is all right, and so to me thinking about that and wanting to be true to bet in tradition, you know, I just sort of turned that into the idea. It's it's love, right, even in the face of this impermanence, the only permanence is love, you know. So again if we go back to the only you know, the only absolute is that there are no absolutes. Again, but the paradox of it, it's like, yeah, but the only absolute maybe is this idea of love. Right. So yeah, so that's kind of where those ideas came from.
Yeah, it's a beautifully written section, and I just really do love that line. Love is not something we create, it is something that wells up in this like sap in a tree is definitely a very beautiful and poetic line. Thank you. I think that's a great place for us to wrap up on that thought. Quwan, thank you so much. Like I said, I really loved when I'm gone look for me in the East. I have been having a blast reading we ride upon sticks, and I've really enjoyed talking with you, so thank you so much for taking the time.
Gotlus, thank you for having me.
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