I have two book recommendations this week. They come out later this summer, so really I'm just putting them on your radar for now. In Marcy Domanski's Hurricane Girl, Allison has just bought a home on a beach in North Carolina. She is in many ways running away from her previous relationship to a high powered studio executive in Los Angeles who had really bad habits behind closed doors. And she's enjoying that home in North Carolina when a hurricane blows it all the way. She's featured on the news, and later she encounters the cameraman at a bar and from there, well, things take a turn. I don't want to give away the novel, but she suffers a traumatic brain injury and returns to her hometown in New Jersey to recuperate, and it's just one hell of a novel. Jermanski is one of my favorite writers. I first encountered her work with her novel Bad Marie, and in this her fifth, she continues to write some of the sharpest, most irreverent women on the page. They make terrible decisions but look so very good while doing it. I also recently read The Crane Wife by C. J. Houser. The title of this memoir and essays went viral a few years ago, and you can read it online at the Paris Review. I'll definitely be including a link in the show notes so you can read the essay for yourself. C. Jiant Houser has a very appealing narrative voice. It's right, but it's also warm and generous. The essays often end in really elegant and unexpected places, and rarely do they give you the finitude that you crave. There's not much certainty to be found in those pages, but there is a lot of reflection. In an essay about a home of her own, there is this incredible description of a perfect house in Tallahassee where a young woman can live happily and alone. There's a lot of intellectual wandering in these essays and also self examination as a whole. This is a book about a woman and affirming her place in the world and the complicated journey she's on to get there. There are some repetitive themes, like girl, we get it you who have broken up with some men, But still the writing is so beautiful that it is very easy to forgive a minor obsession. You will not regret either of these books, which in many ways are two sides of a similar coin. They are out in June and July, and I hope you enjoy them. From Luminary. This is the Roxanne Gay Agenda, the Bad Feminist podcast of your Dreams. I'm Roxanne Gay, your favorite bad feminist. On the Roxanne Gay Agenda, I talked about something that's on my mind, and then I talked with someone interesting to find out what's on theirs. On this week's agenda, How I met my wife. It started with her podcast Design Matters. She tried for quite some time to get me on her show. At first I sent her to a publicist, and then I demurred because honestly I was just in her peued out. Then she sent me a lovely and detailed email about how much she was moved by Hunger. And then much later she did an event with my dear friend and mentee, Ashley Ford. After that event, Debbie, Ashley, and some other folks from the event were in what is now our backyard having drinks enjoying a warm summer night. When Ashley mentioned me, and Debbie blurted out that she had a crush on me. Now she knew I was in a relationship, so she asked Ashley, you know, like, what's the deal there? And Ashley told Debbie, go ahead, shoot your shot. Listener she did. She emailed me again and asked me out, in her words, on a proper date. So I wrote back and I said yeah, and I literally just wrote back that one word, did not offer any other details, did not elaborate, and did not try to make a plan. It's a much longer story, but eventually we did go on that proper date in New York. After I launched Best American Short Stories. I didn't google her. I had no idea who she was, what she did, or what she looked like. And so when each person came up to the table from the signing line, I wondered, like, is this her? Is that her? With varying degrees of interest, and then finally it was her, and she was really hot, and so we went out for dinner and on the street afterwards she asked if she could kiss me. We have been together ever since, and in some ways it's kind of strange. I'm happy, and it's actually hard for me to say those words. I don't trust them. I'm always waiting for some shoe to fall, and of course we're living in a pandemic, and Rovie Wade is on the verge of being overturned in the supply chain, and it's another election year. How on earth do I embrace or claim happiness or some version of it while the world is falling apart? My guest today will hopefully give me some insight into that question, But first let me tell you a little bit about her. Debbie Millman is a designer, an artist, and educator, and an author. Most recent book available now is Why Design Matters Conversations with the World's Most Creative People, which is in many ways a retrospective of seventeen years of her award winning podcast, Design Matters. She started Design Matters back in two thousand four, when almost no one really knew what a podcast was. Now, eighteen years later and hundreds of interviews under her belt, she's still doing the damn thing with long form interviews of not only designers, but writers, actors, playwrights, artists, entrepreneurs, really anyone who is out there leading a creative and often wildly successful professional life. Debbie has also written six other books, mostly about design and branding, and she's a great dresser. Deborah Millman, Welcome to the Roxanne Gay Agenda. Thank you, Roxanne Gay. It's great to see you today. It's been so long now. Debbie, you are a co owner of Print Magazine. Your very first magazine, though, was an incredible publication called Debutante that you created with your best friend, also named Debbie. The year was nineteen seventy three, you were twelve. Tell us a little bit about Debutante. Um. Well, my friend Debbie, Debbie carp she lived a few houses around the corner from me, and we both loved magazines, and one summer we decided we were going to make our own magazine. We wrote all the articles, we drew, all the illustrations, made pretend photographs. Just a magazine named Debutante. A plus on that name. Thank you, and I think we both know Debbie and I both regret neither of us having kept it. I didn't have it. I didn't know if she had it, and she was like, no, I don't have it either. So you have been making your podcast design Matters for quite some time. I would love for you, though, to tell me about the television pilot that you shot onto some or seventh two thousand nine. I see you're picking up some of my research techniques. I am. Indeed, we did two episodes. We did one with Milton Glazer and one with Stefan Sagmeister, and UM, I hated it. Really, what did you hate about it? I felt like somehow I had sucked the oxygen out of the room in doing this live interview. I was very nervous um and so I decided that I liked audio much more, mostly so I didn't have to think about how I looked when I was doing my interviews. I could really just concentrate fully, totally obsessively on my guests and not myself in any way, shape or form. Has your opinion on that change. Do you ever aspire to television and maybe trying again with design matters especially, I think in the vein of like a Charlie Rose or James Lipton on inside the actor's studio, I think if I had a really good director that could navigate that space for me and help me find a television voice, I'd be open to it. In that I'm kind of open to almost anything at this point in my life. And why are you open to almost anything at this point in your life? Like, what is it about this moment in your life that has you thinking, you know what, let me try something different. I don't know if it's being well into my middle age or or just a sense of freedom that I'm experiencing now being happily married. UM, let's say it's the ladder just for ships and giggles. Um. I think that. Um. Certainly, the last three or four years have have shown me that the most unexpected things could happen in ways that you never anticipated and fundamentally change everything that you think about the trajectory of your life. And I think when that happens in the best possible way that it has, it makes you feel ever so slightly more are hopeful that other things might do that too. Interesting. Yeah, you know, I had never previously thought of marriage as a sort of gateway to adventure, and yet I have found myself where we are on all kinds of adventures over the past four years. And I blame you. Well, Yeah, I think anybody that dregs you to Antarctica to try to see the solar eclipse of the Sun, you know, can have that that title pointed at them quite emphatically. Indeed, now many of my listeners will also be familiar with your podcast, Design Matters, which you started in two thousand four, and at the time you exclusively interviewed designers. So why was that and really what what is the origin story of Design Matters? Well, Design Matters happened because I was forwarded a cold call in my office from somebody that was interested in inviting me to work on a show for a then fledgling online internet radio network called Voice America, just different than Voice of America. And this lovely man called me up. I thought he was offering me a job. I was sort of fancying myself, sort of Charlotte ronson type DJ, you know, with the headphones and the groovy turntable. Um thought they were offering me a paid position, when in fact that was not the case at all. They were actually offering me an opportunity to pay them to produce a radio show. But at the time, I was experiencing a real sort of barren period in my in my creative life, everything I was doing was corporate. It was all about shelf presence and marketplace and shareholder value. And so when this opportunity came up to do something creative, I sort of convinced myself that it could still sort of help my business because I could interview designers and clients that AM affiliated with, and it would also be something that could be ever so slightly experimental and different and unique and challenge me in a creative way that I hadn't been challenged before. And so I signed on to do thirteen episodes. I had to pay Voice Amrick about five thousand dollars and and that was a lot of money. But I also, you know, I wasn't married and didn't have kids, and so I had some disposable income and thought, well, why not invested in myself and do this silly thing, totally vanity project paying someone to produce a radio show for me. But I decided to do it, and in February of two thousand and five, the show aired for the first time, and I've been doing it ever since. When you first started, did you ever imagine that you would still be doing it now? No? No, I did not. I thought I would do thirteen episodes and and maybe another thirteen. I fell in love with podcasting. I fell in love with re connecting with my creativity in a way that I never experienced in this brand new discipline, and so it's evolved from a show primarily about design and designers to really show about any kind of creative persons. As you said in the intro, the reason it was designers at the beginning was because that was really my circle of friends, and nobody had heard of podcasting before, and an internet radio show wasn't all that glamorous. So it wasn't like I was reaching out to celebrities and well known artists beyond the design business, because they no one else would have known who I was, and certainly wouldn't have agreed to do something that they've never heard of before. One of the things I've noticed about episodes of Design Matters is that there's this narrative arc, and in many ways you really trace the arc of a creative life. And every interview begins much in the same way I began this interview, where you share some factoid or interesting piece of information about someone that lets them know I know what I'm doing here, I've done my research, and now let's go what are some of the things that keep you so interested in that arc of someone's life instead of, for example, just focusing on whatever their latest project is. Well, chances are if it's somebody that has accomplished great things, A lot of people know what that most recent project is. That's why they're in the news as much as they are. I'm much more interested in what led them to this moment in time, What propels someone on a path, How do they overcome obstacles, self doubt, insecurity, trauma, rejection. Those are the questions that I am fundamentally interested in understanding and and helping other people that are listening understand that this is just a very human way that we all live. We just don't always talk about those conditions that lead to us having this Award winning novel or Tony winning play or Grammy winning album or whatever it is. What are the conditions that have led you to where you are in your career right now? Well, I wish that they were more intentional. I tend to stay in things a very long time. I'm very scared of change. As a result, I've probably stayed in a lot of things too long, jobs, past relationships, all sorts of things, apartments, um. But because I'm older and am now really afraid that I'm running out of time, I'm being more intentional with what I'm doing, only because I like doing so many things, and I don't want to leave this earth regretting what I didn't do. Is there anything you haven't done that is on sort of I don't like the word bucket list. The phrase bucket list, Oh, I hate it, so just makes you feel like gross, like, oh, you're going to pick something out of a bucket? No, thank you. But is there anything sort of on your list of ambitions that you have not yet done that you would like to accomplish and the many years you have left well, I definitely would like to work on a memoir. I would definitely like to make more art. I'd like to write a one woman show, not that I'm in, but for somebody else to perform in. Wouldn't mind singing in a little cabaret band, a pub maybe. I think you'd be great in I think intimate, in a slinky dress with a jazz trio. I know which stress you would wear. I don't, so we'll have to discuss. I would have to talk a little bit about your career because you're one of the most creative people I know, and you have astounding output. Why did you first know you were creative and what did creativity look like? For you as a child other than debutante, I can't ever remember a time in my life where I wasn't making something. Now I'm I'm a bit lucky in that I was always encouraged to make things. My mother was very artistic. She was a seamstress, and so I learned how to sew from a very young age. I was always making my own clothes and doing kinds of embroidery, and making pillows and curtains. And I remember the summer after college when I was staying back home, I moved into the basement and wallpapered the basement with blue astronomy sheets so that I felt like I was living in outer space. You were an English major, So what were you thinking you were going to do with that English degree. Well, I thought that I might go into journalism. I had a degree in English with a minor in Russian literature. So now I joke that I have a degree in reading. And so when I graduated, I I ended up getting a job at a magazine doing the only thing I had a marketable skill four, which was old school layout and paste up of the magazine. I learned how to do that working at the student newspaper. You know, one of the things that always amazes me when you talk about your job history is the varied number of jobs and just across different genres fields. It's just amazing. For example, this and this was one of the first things you ever told me that shocked the shift out of me. You became the creative director of Hot ninety seven as they were transitioning into a hip hop station, and so listeners, once in a while, we'll be listening to hip hop, especially from the eighties and nineties, and she knows every single word. She knows the cadences. She you know, like, she just knows these songs. And I'm like, hell the hell do you know these songs? You're like a Jewish lady from Long Island, And she reminds me, excuse me. I was a creative director of Hot ninety seven and I designed their logo. What was that experience like working at Hot ninety seven during those days? It was amazing. It was one of the great great experiences of my life, you know, it was. It was an extraordinary time in hip hop. It was first getting the recognition it deserved. Um, it was a viable market for the first time. People understood that and began to craft and reposition Hot ninety seven from the dance music radio station that it was to the world's first hip hop radio station, and that I was able to be part of that very first attempt at doing this is was really and it remains one of the greatest experiences of my career. One of the things that you do in your career is working brand strategy. And what's always interesting is that you are able, you know, with the incredible team of people that you work with, two convince people that something is viable. How do you start to think about the ways in which we position, you know, whether it's a radio station or a brand, like, how do you get people to believe in these things that we probably inherently distrust. Well, it's not about persuasion as much as it is about inspiration. You have to give people a way of seeing the future in a different way that feels viable and rich and satisfying. And you're able to help ignite a potential future that they can see and feel can be manifested. And if it's something that's good for them, and it's something that's good for society and you can show how, then it becomes almost a no brainer. I mean, there's no brand repositioning project I've worked on or redesign I've ever worked on that's been easy, not one. Some have been way more inspired than others. Certainly Hot ninety seven was one, But they're all difficult because people don't like change. So it's it's about being able to envision a future where the circumstances are better than the current and if you can do that, then you can create consensus among the group of people that you're working with that then propels change forward. That was a sexy sentence. You know what, when Barack Obama was talking about Hope, he was trying to reposition how we saw the future with him at the Helm, Martin Luther King did the same thing. And I have a dream. I have a dream about the future, and if people can believe in that future, if we can see how that future is better than today, then that we create that consensus, that buy in that propels us to be able to create that future. You have me thinking about the current political climate and like the world feels like, you know, as I said at the top of the show, like in many ways, like things are falling apart. Do you have the ability, given the way things are right now, to envision that future that is better than the present. Well, I can envision it, and I can articulate why I think it's better. The problem is, at least from where I'm sitting, I don't see domestic or national consensus. That's the big problem right now. Now. If it's true that of the population of the United States believes in in report active freedom, then the thirty percent that seemed to be winning that argument have a better way of eliciting consensus than the majority. I can't think of another time in our society where the majority have so little say in consensus building, And so right now I feel rather hopeless about where things seem to be going and don't fully understand how we can thwart that. That's what I'm struggling with as well. I just don't know sort of how do we begin to get something like consensus when you know there's an entire population that doesn't believe, for example, that women are people or that black lives matter, Like, are those people that with whom consensus is even possible? And right now my answer is now absolutely not. Well, you know, I wonder is it because we've somehow always felt that the arc is going to bend towards justice. Do we depend on that too much? Do we somehow think that if it is that somehow, because it is a majority, that will eke it out at the end. I think people rely on that. I mean, what I can tell you is that from my own experiences in market research, people expect that other people are going to show up even when they don't. Yeah, you know, you've touched on something that I've been thinking about quite a lot lately, and it it's that idea that if Americans believe in reproductive freedom, like, are we really all sitting around waiting for like one of or you know, a thousand of those like do something like or that surely the majority will prevail when the past several elections have shown us that the majority doesn't prevail, especially in a system in an electoral college system. I think a lot of us are trying to balance that sort of hope and belief that perhaps we all can do something with the overwhelming sense that it doesn't matter what we do, the system is rigged against us. Yeah. And I think that the way in which these conditions are reported has a lot to do with how people show up in the election when it was it seemed all but certain that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I mean, I remember that morning, you know, doing like a little fun checklist like white pant suit check, campaign, buttons check, and you know, I was I had ordered Chinese food that night. I was going to my friend Susan Milligan was at the convention center where she was going to come home. We were going to celebrate, and then the sort of world changed right in front of us. I think that humans respond better to showing up when they feel like there's a chance they're gonna lose. So if it had been a squeaker till the end, if it was like everybody has to show up, is if we don't show up, we're gonna lose, more people would have shown up. So I think from now on, we have to position every election as a squeaker. Yes, especially this forthcoming election. The next two elections in fact, are desperate squeakers, and so like, let us all get on it. Yeah, I mean you're already seeing it. Yeah. In two thousand nine, with Stephen Heller, you started a graduate program in branding at the School of Visual Arts. You're still doing this, You're still running the program thirteen years later. What is the most interesting thing you have learned about teaching over the years. You know, one of the things that I've really learned during COVID, when I had to pivot and start teaching online was how much space people take up in a classroom correlates with how vocal they are. Interesting. I mean, this is not kind of that feel good answer that I think maybe listeners would want. Although I think that there's something really interesting about the democratization of space online where everyone is the same exact size, And I think that democratization of space is really interesting for the introverts, for the shy people, for the insecure people, and it changes the dynamic in a really, really profound way. So that's something I've been thinking about a lot, as as I'm teaching now in this hybrid scenario. But I think the most interesting thing that I learned from watching the great teachers in my life teach me was how extraordinary it is to imbuse someone with the sense that they're smart. When you give the sense to someone that they're smart, it gives them so much hope about what they're capable. I absolutely agree, and that to me is the great miracle of teaching is seeing how feeling smart or feeling proud of an idea could impact the course of someone's life. I have found that in teaching writing, and for me, what I try to teach every student from day one in my classroom is that you're a good writer, because so many students come into the creative writing classroom and frankly any writing classroom believing that they're bad writers because someone has told them that and someone or they're comparing themselves to us. Yes, but in this case, it's a lot of the time it's that faculty have told them this, and I find that so depressing because that's not our job. That should be against the law. The way that their approach to the class just lightens and lifts when you tell them, I believe you're a good writer already, and this class is just going to help you to become better on your own terms, not in comparison to anyone else in class or to the books that we're reading, but in comparison to you. It seems to just empower them in ways that are so gratifying to watch, especially over the course of a semester. I always wonder, like, why doesn't everyone teach this way, this sort of idea that you have to break someone down to build something back up. I don't find that it's terribly um useful, And in any educational experience where a teacher has done that biology freshman year college, I have found it to be an entirely dispiriting and defeating experience that did not serve me in the long run. But I want to switch tracks just a little bit, well not just a little bit, a lot. I know that you're fascinated by type and texts, like you love words, and that one of your superpowers is the ability to write mirror backwards. And I'm not sure you know this about me, but I spent an entire year in high school speaking bad words, and people just seemed to go with it, maybe because it was a private school. Like so I would mean like Missy Elliott and working more like I. You know, I'm like, literally that's that's that's what she has, Just like say everything backwards and I would write everything backwards. But I'm curious, how do you even do? I was not well, but I also had a lot of free time and a big imagination, and so like one day I was just like, I'm going to talk backwards. Wow, that is like the coolest thing, isn't it. Yes, I felt very cool, and I still frankly feel cool about it now many years later. But I was curious, how did you develop that skill? Oh, this is not a happy story. So my parents got divorced when I was about eight years old, and my mom got remarried a year later, and she married a man who was very strict, very severe, disciplinarian, and as one of his punishments, aside from being physical, really abusive, he would force me to write like five times I will not do whatever it was that I was being punished for. And so I get bored doing this, and so I just started to improvise and started to figure out new ways to entertain myself. As as I was doing this and started writing backwards. You know, it's amazing what the mind will do to cope with just about anything. Because I know, I started talking backwards because I was in a bad place, not because I was in a good place. Well, yeah, you were talking backwards because you couldn't speak about the things that had happened to you. Yes, And it was like a coping mechanism. And I just thought if I can't tell anyone, then I'm going to just be incomprehensible correct at all times, which you gotta wonder, like, girl, what well, I had a speech impediment as well. If this was I think in fifth grade. Um, I think that my world had collapsed so fundamentally that I really lost track of what was real and what wasn't. And as a result, I felt incapable of stating anything definitively because at any moment it might change or shift. So even something like hey, Dad, you know what the weather is going to be like today, I'd be like, well, maybe I do, but maybe I don't. And so everything I said, even are you hungry, Well maybe I am, but maybe I'm not. And everybody thought that I was nuts, like completely bonkers. And the only reason I think I ever stopped doing it was one of the other things that my stuff mother did. Every night we had what was called inspection. He went around the house and looked in our rooms and inspected our bedrooms to make sure that they were pristinely clean, you know, hospital corners on our beds and so forth. And one night he looked into my closet and I guess a skirt had fallen off a hangar and was in a heap on the floor, And so of course I got in trouble for that, and I insisted that I didn't know that that had happened. I didn't leave it like that, I didn't throw it like that. It must have fallen off the hangar. I remember my mother screaming at me, saying, how could you be so sure that the that the skirt fell by itself when you can't even tell us what the weather's like outside. That's how adamant was about the fact that the skirt must have fallen by itself. And after that I stopped with my my double talk as my parents called it. Wow, you contain multitudes every moment. You really do. Well. My last question for you is what brings you joy right now in your life? Oh? Roxy, And you know what brings me joy? You do our dog Maximus, Touretto, Blueberry Milman, Gay are kiddies, THEO and lou Just being with you that gives me joy. Oh well, that's not what I thought you were going to say, but that makes me very happy. Do you see our dog? I do? I wish that our listeners could ye little fluffy muffin for our listeners. My dog came in, so I'm in my office upstairs and he came up about half an hour ago and he's just very cuddly and he had a hot dog for lunch. He's laying in Roxanne's arm and he's just here and he's very cute. But Debbie Melman, I want to thank you so much for joining me on the Roxanne Gay Agenda. Every time I talked to you, I learned something a little new about you, and so I hope our listeners enjoy this too. Thank you, Roxanne. It's been an honor in a privilege. You can keep up with me and the podcast on social media on Twitter at our Gay and Instagram at Roxanne Gay seven four. Our email is Roxane Gay Agenda at gmail dot com from Luminary, The Rock Sande Gay Agenda is produced by Curtis fots our researchers Yes More. Production support is provided by Caitlin Adams and Meg Pillart. I am Roxanne Gay, your favorite bad feminliest. Thank you for listening, and Max says him

I have two book recommendations this week. They come out later this summer, so really I'm just putting them on your radar for now. In Marcy Domanski's Hurricane Girl, Allison has just bought a home on a beach in North Carolina. She is in many ways running away from her previous relationship to a high powered studio executive in Los Angeles who had really bad habits behind closed doors. And she's enjoying that home in North Carolina when a hurricane blows it all the way. She's featured on the news, and later she encounters the cameraman at a bar and from there, well, things take a turn. I don't want to give away the novel, but she suffers a traumatic brain injury and returns to her hometown in New Jersey to recuperate, and it's just one hell of a novel. Jermanski is one of my favorite writers. I first encountered her work with her novel Bad Marie, and in this her fifth, she continues to write some of the sharpest, most irreverent women on the page. They make terrible decisions but look so very good while doing it. I also recently read The Crane Wife by C. J. Houser. The title of this memoir and essays went viral a few years ago, and you can read it online at the Paris Review. I'll definitely be including a link in the show notes so you can read the essay for yourself. C. Jiant Houser has a very appealing narrative voice. It's right, but it's also warm and generous. The essays often end in really elegant and unexpected places, and rarely do they give you the finitude that you crave. There's not much certainty to be found in those pages, but there is a lot of reflection. In an essay about a home of her own, there is this incredible description of a perfect house in Tallahassee where a young woman can live happily and alone. There's a lot of intellectual wandering in these essays and also self examination as a whole. This is a book about a woman and affirming her place in the world and the complicated journey she's on to get there. There are some repetitive themes, like girl, we get it you who have broken up with some men, But still the writing is so beautiful that it is very easy to forgive a minor obsession. You will not regret either of these books, which in many ways are two sides of a similar coin. They are out in June and July, and I hope you enjoy them. From Luminary. This is the Roxanne Gay Agenda, the Bad Feminist podcast of your Dreams. I'm Roxanne Gay, your favorite bad feminist. On the Roxanne Gay Agenda, I talked about something that's on my mind, and then I talked with someone interesting to find out what's on theirs. On this week's agenda, How I met my wife. It started with her podcast Design Matters. She tried for quite some time to get me on her show. At first I sent her to a publicist, and then I demurred because honestly I was just in her peued out. Then she sent me a lovely and detailed email about how much she was moved by Hunger. And then much later she did an event with my dear friend and mentee, Ashley Ford. After that event, Debbie, Ashley, and some other folks from the event were in what is now our backyard having drinks enjoying a warm summer night. When Ashley mentioned me, and Debbie blurted out that she had a crush on me. Now she knew I was in a relationship, so she asked Ashley, you know, like, what's the deal there? And Ashley told Debbie, go ahead, shoot your shot. Listener she did. She emailed me again and asked me out, in her words, on a proper date. So I wrote back and I said yeah, and I literally just wrote back that one word, did not offer any other details, did not elaborate, and did not try to make a plan. It's a much longer story, but eventually we did go on that proper date in New York. After I launched Best American Short Stories. I didn't google her. I had no idea who she was, what she did, or what she looked like. And so when each person came up to the table from the signing line, I wondered, like, is this her? Is that her? With varying degrees of interest, and then finally it was her, and she was really hot, and so we went out for dinner and on the street afterwards she asked if she could kiss me. We have been together ever since, and in some ways it's kind of strange. I'm happy, and it's actually hard for me to say those words. I don't trust them. I'm always waiting for some shoe to fall, and of course we're living in a pandemic, and Rovie Wade is on the verge of being overturned in the supply chain, and it's another election year. How on earth do I embrace or claim happiness or some version of it while the world is falling apart? My guest today will hopefully give me some insight into that question, But first let me tell you a little bit about her. Debbie Millman is a designer, an artist, and educator, and an author. Most recent book available now is Why Design Matters Conversations with the World's Most Creative People, which is in many ways a retrospective of seventeen years of her award winning podcast, Design Matters. She started Design Matters back in two thousand four, when almost no one really knew what a podcast was. Now, eighteen years later and hundreds of interviews under her belt, she's still doing the damn thing with long form interviews of not only designers, but writers, actors, playwrights, artists, entrepreneurs, really anyone who is out there leading a creative and often wildly successful professional life. Debbie has also written six other books, mostly about design and branding, and she's a great dresser. Deborah Millman, Welcome to the Roxanne Gay Agenda. Thank you, Roxanne Gay. It's great to see you today. It's been so long now. Debbie, you are a co owner of Print Magazine. Your very first magazine, though, was an incredible publication called Debutante that you created with your best friend, also named Debbie. The year was nineteen seventy three, you were twelve. Tell us a little bit about Debutante. Um. Well, my friend Debbie, Debbie carp she lived a few houses around the corner from me, and we both loved magazines, and one summer we decided we were going to make our own magazine. We wrote all the articles, we drew, all the illustrations, made pretend photographs. Just a magazine named Debutante. A plus on that name. Thank you, and I think we both know Debbie and I both regret neither of us having kept it. I didn't have it. I didn't know if she had it, and she was like, no, I don't have it either. So you have been making your podcast design Matters for quite some time. I would love for you, though, to tell me about the television pilot that you shot onto some or seventh two thousand nine. I see you're picking up some of my research techniques. I am. Indeed, we did two episodes. We did one with Milton Glazer and one with Stefan Sagmeister, and UM, I hated it. Really, what did you hate about it? I felt like somehow I had sucked the oxygen out of the room in doing this live interview. I was very nervous um and so I decided that I liked audio much more, mostly so I didn't have to think about how I looked when I was doing my interviews. I could really just concentrate fully, totally obsessively on my guests and not myself in any way, shape or form. Has your opinion on that change. Do you ever aspire to television and maybe trying again with design matters especially, I think in the vein of like a Charlie Rose or James Lipton on inside the actor's studio, I think if I had a really good director that could navigate that space for me and help me find a television voice, I'd be open to it. In that I'm kind of open to almost anything at this point in my life. And why are you open to almost anything at this point in your life? Like, what is it about this moment in your life that has you thinking, you know what, let me try something different. I don't know if it's being well into my middle age or or just a sense of freedom that I'm experiencing now being happily married. UM, let's say it's the ladder just for ships and giggles. Um. I think that. Um. Certainly, the last three or four years have have shown me that the most unexpected things could happen in ways that you never anticipated and fundamentally change everything that you think about the trajectory of your life. And I think when that happens in the best possible way that it has, it makes you feel ever so slightly more are hopeful that other things might do that too. Interesting. Yeah, you know, I had never previously thought of marriage as a sort of gateway to adventure, and yet I have found myself where we are on all kinds of adventures over the past four years. And I blame you. Well, Yeah, I think anybody that dregs you to Antarctica to try to see the solar eclipse of the Sun, you know, can have that that title pointed at them quite emphatically. Indeed, now many of my listeners will also be familiar with your podcast, Design Matters, which you started in two thousand four, and at the time you exclusively interviewed designers. So why was that and really what what is the origin story of Design Matters? Well, Design Matters happened because I was forwarded a cold call in my office from somebody that was interested in inviting me to work on a show for a then fledgling online internet radio network called Voice America, just different than Voice of America. And this lovely man called me up. I thought he was offering me a job. I was sort of fancying myself, sort of Charlotte ronson type DJ, you know, with the headphones and the groovy turntable. Um thought they were offering me a paid position, when in fact that was not the case at all. They were actually offering me an opportunity to pay them to produce a radio show. But at the time, I was experiencing a real sort of barren period in my in my creative life, everything I was doing was corporate. It was all about shelf presence and marketplace and shareholder value. And so when this opportunity came up to do something creative, I sort of convinced myself that it could still sort of help my business because I could interview designers and clients that AM affiliated with, and it would also be something that could be ever so slightly experimental and different and unique and challenge me in a creative way that I hadn't been challenged before. And so I signed on to do thirteen episodes. I had to pay Voice Amrick about five thousand dollars and and that was a lot of money. But I also, you know, I wasn't married and didn't have kids, and so I had some disposable income and thought, well, why not invested in myself and do this silly thing, totally vanity project paying someone to produce a radio show for me. But I decided to do it, and in February of two thousand and five, the show aired for the first time, and I've been doing it ever since. When you first started, did you ever imagine that you would still be doing it now? No? No, I did not. I thought I would do thirteen episodes and and maybe another thirteen. I fell in love with podcasting. I fell in love with re connecting with my creativity in a way that I never experienced in this brand new discipline, and so it's evolved from a show primarily about design and designers to really show about any kind of creative persons. As you said in the intro, the reason it was designers at the beginning was because that was really my circle of friends, and nobody had heard of podcasting before, and an internet radio show wasn't all that glamorous. So it wasn't like I was reaching out to celebrities and well known artists beyond the design business, because they no one else would have known who I was, and certainly wouldn't have agreed to do something that they've never heard of before. One of the things I've noticed about episodes of Design Matters is that there's this narrative arc, and in many ways you really trace the arc of a creative life. And every interview begins much in the same way I began this interview, where you share some factoid or interesting piece of information about someone that lets them know I know what I'm doing here, I've done my research, and now let's go what are some of the things that keep you so interested in that arc of someone's life instead of, for example, just focusing on whatever their latest project is. Well, chances are if it's somebody that has accomplished great things, A lot of people know what that most recent project is. That's why they're in the news as much as they are. I'm much more interested in what led them to this moment in time, What propels someone on a path, How do they overcome obstacles, self doubt, insecurity, trauma, rejection. Those are the questions that I am fundamentally interested in understanding and and helping other people that are listening understand that this is just a very human way that we all live. We just don't always talk about those conditions that lead to us having this Award winning novel or Tony winning play or Grammy winning album or whatever it is. What are the conditions that have led you to where you are in your career right now? Well, I wish that they were more intentional. I tend to stay in things a very long time. I'm very scared of change. As a result, I've probably stayed in a lot of things too long, jobs, past relationships, all sorts of things, apartments, um. But because I'm older and am now really afraid that I'm running out of time, I'm being more intentional with what I'm doing, only because I like doing so many things, and I don't want to leave this earth regretting what I didn't do. Is there anything you haven't done that is on sort of I don't like the word bucket list. The phrase bucket list, Oh, I hate it, so just makes you feel like gross, like, oh, you're going to pick something out of a bucket? No, thank you. But is there anything sort of on your list of ambitions that you have not yet done that you would like to accomplish and the many years you have left well, I definitely would like to work on a memoir. I would definitely like to make more art. I'd like to write a one woman show, not that I'm in, but for somebody else to perform in. Wouldn't mind singing in a little cabaret band, a pub maybe. I think you'd be great in I think intimate, in a slinky dress with a jazz trio. I know which stress you would wear. I don't, so we'll have to discuss. I would have to talk a little bit about your career because you're one of the most creative people I know, and you have astounding output. Why did you first know you were creative and what did creativity look like? For you as a child other than debutante, I can't ever remember a time in my life where I wasn't making something. Now I'm I'm a bit lucky in that I was always encouraged to make things. My mother was very artistic. She was a seamstress, and so I learned how to sew from a very young age. I was always making my own clothes and doing kinds of embroidery, and making pillows and curtains. And I remember the summer after college when I was staying back home, I moved into the basement and wallpapered the basement with blue astronomy sheets so that I felt like I was living in outer space. You were an English major, So what were you thinking you were going to do with that English degree. Well, I thought that I might go into journalism. I had a degree in English with a minor in Russian literature. So now I joke that I have a degree in reading. And so when I graduated, I I ended up getting a job at a magazine doing the only thing I had a marketable skill four, which was old school layout and paste up of the magazine. I learned how to do that working at the student newspaper. You know, one of the things that always amazes me when you talk about your job history is the varied number of jobs and just across different genres fields. It's just amazing. For example, this and this was one of the first things you ever told me that shocked the shift out of me. You became the creative director of Hot ninety seven as they were transitioning into a hip hop station, and so listeners, once in a while, we'll be listening to hip hop, especially from the eighties and nineties, and she knows every single word. She knows the cadences. She you know, like, she just knows these songs. And I'm like, hell the hell do you know these songs? You're like a Jewish lady from Long Island, And she reminds me, excuse me. I was a creative director of Hot ninety seven and I designed their logo. What was that experience like working at Hot ninety seven during those days? It was amazing. It was one of the great great experiences of my life, you know, it was. It was an extraordinary time in hip hop. It was first getting the recognition it deserved. Um, it was a viable market for the first time. People understood that and began to craft and reposition Hot ninety seven from the dance music radio station that it was to the world's first hip hop radio station, and that I was able to be part of that very first attempt at doing this is was really and it remains one of the greatest experiences of my career. One of the things that you do in your career is working brand strategy. And what's always interesting is that you are able, you know, with the incredible team of people that you work with, two convince people that something is viable. How do you start to think about the ways in which we position, you know, whether it's a radio station or a brand, like, how do you get people to believe in these things that we probably inherently distrust. Well, it's not about persuasion as much as it is about inspiration. You have to give people a way of seeing the future in a different way that feels viable and rich and satisfying. And you're able to help ignite a potential future that they can see and feel can be manifested. And if it's something that's good for them, and it's something that's good for society and you can show how, then it becomes almost a no brainer. I mean, there's no brand repositioning project I've worked on or redesign I've ever worked on that's been easy, not one. Some have been way more inspired than others. Certainly Hot ninety seven was one, But they're all difficult because people don't like change. So it's it's about being able to envision a future where the circumstances are better than the current and if you can do that, then you can create consensus among the group of people that you're working with that then propels change forward. That was a sexy sentence. You know what, when Barack Obama was talking about Hope, he was trying to reposition how we saw the future with him at the Helm, Martin Luther King did the same thing. And I have a dream. I have a dream about the future, and if people can believe in that future, if we can see how that future is better than today, then that we create that consensus, that buy in that propels us to be able to create that future. You have me thinking about the current political climate and like the world feels like, you know, as I said at the top of the show, like in many ways, like things are falling apart. Do you have the ability, given the way things are right now, to envision that future that is better than the present. Well, I can envision it, and I can articulate why I think it's better. The problem is, at least from where I'm sitting, I don't see domestic or national consensus. That's the big problem right now. Now. If it's true that of the population of the United States believes in in report active freedom, then the thirty percent that seemed to be winning that argument have a better way of eliciting consensus than the majority. I can't think of another time in our society where the majority have so little say in consensus building, And so right now I feel rather hopeless about where things seem to be going and don't fully understand how we can thwart that. That's what I'm struggling with as well. I just don't know sort of how do we begin to get something like consensus when you know there's an entire population that doesn't believe, for example, that women are people or that black lives matter, Like, are those people that with whom consensus is even possible? And right now my answer is now absolutely not. Well, you know, I wonder is it because we've somehow always felt that the arc is going to bend towards justice. Do we depend on that too much? Do we somehow think that if it is that somehow, because it is a majority, that will eke it out at the end. I think people rely on that. I mean, what I can tell you is that from my own experiences in market research, people expect that other people are going to show up even when they don't. Yeah, you know, you've touched on something that I've been thinking about quite a lot lately, and it it's that idea that if Americans believe in reproductive freedom, like, are we really all sitting around waiting for like one of or you know, a thousand of those like do something like or that surely the majority will prevail when the past several elections have shown us that the majority doesn't prevail, especially in a system in an electoral college system. I think a lot of us are trying to balance that sort of hope and belief that perhaps we all can do something with the overwhelming sense that it doesn't matter what we do, the system is rigged against us. Yeah. And I think that the way in which these conditions are reported has a lot to do with how people show up in the election when it was it seemed all but certain that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I mean, I remember that morning, you know, doing like a little fun checklist like white pant suit check, campaign, buttons check, and you know, I was I had ordered Chinese food that night. I was going to my friend Susan Milligan was at the convention center where she was going to come home. We were going to celebrate, and then the sort of world changed right in front of us. I think that humans respond better to showing up when they feel like there's a chance they're gonna lose. So if it had been a squeaker till the end, if it was like everybody has to show up, is if we don't show up, we're gonna lose, more people would have shown up. So I think from now on, we have to position every election as a squeaker. Yes, especially this forthcoming election. The next two elections in fact, are desperate squeakers, and so like, let us all get on it. Yeah, I mean you're already seeing it. Yeah. In two thousand nine, with Stephen Heller, you started a graduate program in branding at the School of Visual Arts. You're still doing this, You're still running the program thirteen years later. What is the most interesting thing you have learned about teaching over the years. You know, one of the things that I've really learned during COVID, when I had to pivot and start teaching online was how much space people take up in a classroom correlates with how vocal they are. Interesting. I mean, this is not kind of that feel good answer that I think maybe listeners would want. Although I think that there's something really interesting about the democratization of space online where everyone is the same exact size, And I think that democratization of space is really interesting for the introverts, for the shy people, for the insecure people, and it changes the dynamic in a really, really profound way. So that's something I've been thinking about a lot, as as I'm teaching now in this hybrid scenario. But I think the most interesting thing that I learned from watching the great teachers in my life teach me was how extraordinary it is to imbuse someone with the sense that they're smart. When you give the sense to someone that they're smart, it gives them so much hope about what they're capable. I absolutely agree, and that to me is the great miracle of teaching is seeing how feeling smart or feeling proud of an idea could impact the course of someone's life. I have found that in teaching writing, and for me, what I try to teach every student from day one in my classroom is that you're a good writer, because so many students come into the creative writing classroom and frankly any writing classroom believing that they're bad writers because someone has told them that and someone or they're comparing themselves to us. Yes, but in this case, it's a lot of the time it's that faculty have told them this, and I find that so depressing because that's not our job. That should be against the law. The way that their approach to the class just lightens and lifts when you tell them, I believe you're a good writer already, and this class is just going to help you to become better on your own terms, not in comparison to anyone else in class or to the books that we're reading, but in comparison to you. It seems to just empower them in ways that are so gratifying to watch, especially over the course of a semester. I always wonder, like, why doesn't everyone teach this way, this sort of idea that you have to break someone down to build something back up. I don't find that it's terribly um useful, And in any educational experience where a teacher has done that biology freshman year college, I have found it to be an entirely dispiriting and defeating experience that did not serve me in the long run. But I want to switch tracks just a little bit, well not just a little bit, a lot. I know that you're fascinated by type and texts, like you love words, and that one of your superpowers is the ability to write mirror backwards. And I'm not sure you know this about me, but I spent an entire year in high school speaking bad words, and people just seemed to go with it, maybe because it was a private school. Like so I would mean like Missy Elliott and working more like I. You know, I'm like, literally that's that's that's what she has, Just like say everything backwards and I would write everything backwards. But I'm curious, how do you even do? I was not well, but I also had a lot of free time and a big imagination, and so like one day I was just like, I'm going to talk backwards. Wow, that is like the coolest thing, isn't it. Yes, I felt very cool, and I still frankly feel cool about it now many years later. But I was curious, how did you develop that skill? Oh, this is not a happy story. So my parents got divorced when I was about eight years old, and my mom got remarried a year later, and she married a man who was very strict, very severe, disciplinarian, and as one of his punishments, aside from being physical, really abusive, he would force me to write like five times I will not do whatever it was that I was being punished for. And so I get bored doing this, and so I just started to improvise and started to figure out new ways to entertain myself. As as I was doing this and started writing backwards. You know, it's amazing what the mind will do to cope with just about anything. Because I know, I started talking backwards because I was in a bad place, not because I was in a good place. Well, yeah, you were talking backwards because you couldn't speak about the things that had happened to you. Yes, And it was like a coping mechanism. And I just thought if I can't tell anyone, then I'm going to just be incomprehensible correct at all times, which you gotta wonder, like, girl, what well, I had a speech impediment as well. If this was I think in fifth grade. Um, I think that my world had collapsed so fundamentally that I really lost track of what was real and what wasn't. And as a result, I felt incapable of stating anything definitively because at any moment it might change or shift. So even something like hey, Dad, you know what the weather is going to be like today, I'd be like, well, maybe I do, but maybe I don't. And so everything I said, even are you hungry, Well maybe I am, but maybe I'm not. And everybody thought that I was nuts, like completely bonkers. And the only reason I think I ever stopped doing it was one of the other things that my stuff mother did. Every night we had what was called inspection. He went around the house and looked in our rooms and inspected our bedrooms to make sure that they were pristinely clean, you know, hospital corners on our beds and so forth. And one night he looked into my closet and I guess a skirt had fallen off a hangar and was in a heap on the floor, And so of course I got in trouble for that, and I insisted that I didn't know that that had happened. I didn't leave it like that, I didn't throw it like that. It must have fallen off the hangar. I remember my mother screaming at me, saying, how could you be so sure that the that the skirt fell by itself when you can't even tell us what the weather's like outside. That's how adamant was about the fact that the skirt must have fallen by itself. And after that I stopped with my my double talk as my parents called it. Wow, you contain multitudes every moment. You really do. Well. My last question for you is what brings you joy right now in your life? Oh? Roxy, And you know what brings me joy? You do our dog Maximus, Touretto, Blueberry Milman, Gay are kiddies, THEO and lou Just being with you that gives me joy. Oh well, that's not what I thought you were going to say, but that makes me very happy. Do you see our dog? I do? I wish that our listeners could ye little fluffy muffin for our listeners. My dog came in, so I'm in my office upstairs and he came up about half an hour ago and he's just very cuddly and he had a hot dog for lunch. He's laying in Roxanne's arm and he's just here and he's very cute. But Debbie Melman, I want to thank you so much for joining me on the Roxanne Gay Agenda. Every time I talked to you, I learned something a little new about you, and so I hope our listeners enjoy this too. Thank you, Roxanne. It's been an honor in a privilege. You can keep up with me and the podcast on social media on Twitter at our Gay and Instagram at Roxanne Gay seven four. Our email is Roxane Gay Agenda at gmail dot com from Luminary, The Rock Sande Gay Agenda is produced by Curtis fots our researchers Yes More. Production support is provided by Caitlin Adams and Meg Pillart. I am Roxanne Gay, your favorite bad feminliest. Thank you for listening, and Max says him